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Showing posts with the label cross-entropy

Metastability and Eye Movements: A Dynamical‑Systems Interpretation

  1. Why metastability is a natural language for gaze behavior The idea that perception, attention, and neural activity evolve through transiently stable states has deep roots in cognitive science and neuroscience. Concepts such as attractors , basins , noise‑induced transitions , and escape times appear in work on perceptual switching, decision‑making, and neural population dynamics (Kelso, 1995; Rabinovich et al., 2008; Deco & Jirsa, 2012). Eye movements, especially the alternation between fixations and saccades ,   fit remarkably well into this metastable picture. The Freidlin–Wentzell theory of rare events (Freidlin & Wentzell, 2012) provides a rigorous mathematical language for these intuitions. 2. Fixations as metastable states  Consider the gaze position X t as the state of a stochastic dynamical system. During a fixation the  gaze remains confined to a small region, microsaccades and noise generate small fluctuations, and the gaze tends to return...

The Kullback-Leibler Divergence: a bridge between Probability Theory and Information Theory

1. Introduction Evaluating the difference between two probability distributions is an important task in many fields of statistics, machine learning, and data science. For example, we may want to compare the performance of different models, test hypotheses about the underlying data-generating process, or measure the divergence or similarity between two populations or groups. There are different ways to evaluate the difference between two probability distributions, depending on the type and nature of the data, the assumptions we make about the distributions, and the goal of the analysis. Some common methods are: ·          The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test : This is a non-parametric test that compares the empirical cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) of two samples and measures the maximum vertical distance between them. The test can be used to check if two samples come from the same distribution or if one distribution is stochastically larger th...

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