The variational principles called maximum entropy (MaxEnt) and maximum caliber (MaxCal) are reviewed. MaxEnt originated in the statistical physics of Boltzmann and Gibbs, as a theoretical tool for predicting the equilibrium states of thermal systems. Later, entropy maximization was also applied to matters of information, signal transmission, and image reconstruction. Recently, since the work of...

MaxEnt grammar is a probabilistic version of Harmonic Grammar in which the harmony scores candidates are mapped onto probabilities. It has become tool choice for analyzing phonological phenomena involving variation or gradient acceptability, but there competing proposal making probabilistic, Noisy Grammar, derived by adding random ‘noise’ to constraint weights. In this paper these frameworks, a...

ix CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Thesis Organization 7 CHAPTER 2: RELATED WORK 8 2.1 Types of Species Distribution Models 8 2.2 The MAXENT Model and Applications 10 CHAPTER 3: METHODS AND DATA 15 3.1 Typical Species Distribution Model Workflow 15 3.2 Presence Data 17 3.3 Explanatory Variables 17 3.4 MAXENT Model Runs 22 3.5 Assessment of Model and Variable Performance 23 CHAPTER 4: RESULTS 25 4...

The Maximum Entropy maxent principle has been successfully applied in classi cation and tagging tasks Compared with other statistical learning method it allows convenient integration of di erent knowledge sources However it is restricted by the size of the training corpus in that not all knowledge can be incorporated For instance events observed with low counts can be either a particular patter...

A Bayesian/Maximum entropy (MaxEnt) method is applied to quantify the broadening of Xray line profiles in terms of the nanocrystallite size effects in ceria. The analysis is in general agreement with transmission electron microscopy results, while demonstrating the importance of appropriate a priori information needed in the method. The analysis also identifies other microstructural effects, su...

The asymptotic convergence of probability density function (pdf) and convergence of differential entropy are examined for the non-stationary processes that follow the maximum entropy principle (MaxEnt) and maximum entropy production principle (MEPP). Asymptotic convergence of pdf provides new justification of MEPP while convergence of differential entropy is important in asymptotic analysis of ...

In many practical situations, the Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) approach leads to reasonable distributions. However, in an important case when all we know is that the value of a random variable is somewhere within the interval, this approach leads to a uniform distribution on this interval – while our intuition says that we should have a distribution whose probability density tends to 0 when we appr...