In birds and many other animals, there are large interspecific differences in the magnitude of annual variation in population size. Using time-series data on populations of solitary bird species, we found that fluctuations in population size of solitary birds were affected by the deterministic characteristics of the population dynamics as well as the stochastic factors. In species with highly v...

Given the considerable challenges to the rapid development of an effective vaccine against influenza, antiviral agents will play an important role as a first-line defense if a new pandemic occurs. The large-scale use of drugs for chemoprophylaxis and treatment will impose strong selection for the evolution of drug-resistant strains. The ensuing transmission of those strains could substantially ...

A body of recent work in modeling neural activity focuses on recovering lowdimensional latent features that capture the statistical structure of large-scale neural populations. Most such approaches have focused on linear generative models, where inference is computationally tractable. Here, we propose fLDS, a general class of nonlinear generative models that permits the firing rate of each neur...

Simultaneous recordings of many neurons embedded within a recurrentlyconnected cortical network may provide concurrent views into the dynamical processes of that network, and thus its computational function. In principle, these dynamics might be identified by purely unsupervised, statistical means. Here, we show that a Hidden Switching Linear Dynamical Systems (HSLDS) model— in which multiple l...