Variation among individuals is an ubiquitous feature of natural populations. However, the relative roles of intrinsic individual differences and stochastic processes in generating variation remain poorly understood. For somatic growth, identifying the contribution of individual and stochastic processes to observed variation in size has important implications both for basic and applied biology. ...

Stochastic OT is a set of specific assumptions about the mechanism of interaction between universal linguistic constraints: the choice of optimal candidates is determined by the rankings of constraint weights, but the rankings can be “perturbed” by a normally distributed “evaluation noise” (Boersma and Hayes 2001); the combined weight of a set of cooperating constraints is thus assumed to equal...

Structural equation modeling (SEM) is a comprehensive statistical modeling tool for analyzing multivariate data involving complex relationships between and among variables (Hoyle, 1995). SEM surpasses traditional regression models by including multiple independent and dependent variables to test associated hypothesizes about relationships among observed and latent variables. SEM explain why res...

Total Variation (TV) is an effective method of removing noise in digital image processing while preserving edges [23]. The choice of scaling or regularization parameter in the TV process defines the amount of denoising, with value of zero giving a result equivalent to the input signal. Here we explore three algorithms for specifying this parameter based on the statistics of the signal in the to...