@article{ZonkerPadillaIglesiasDjurdjevacConrad2023, author = {Zonker, Johannes and Padilla-Iglesias, Cecilia and Djurdjevac Conrad, Natasa}, title = {Insights into drivers of mobility and cultural dynamics of African hunter-gatherers over the past 120 000 years}, volume = {10}, journal = {Royal Society Open Science}, number = {11}, doi = {10.1098/rsos.230495}, year = {2023}, abstract = {Humans have a unique capacity to innovate, transmit and rely on complex, cumulative culture for survival. While an important body of work has attempted to explore the role of changes in the size and interconnectedness of populations in determining the persistence, diversity and complexity of material culture, results have achieved limited success in explaining the emergence and spatial distribution of cumulative culture over our evolutionary trajectory. Here, we develop a spatio-temporally explicit agent-based model to explore the role of environmentally driven changes in the population dynamics of hunter-gatherer communities in allowing the development, transmission and accumulation of complex culture. By modelling separately demography- and mobility-driven changes in interaction networks, we can assess the extent to which cultural change is driven by different types of population dynamics. We create and validate our model using empirical data from Central Africa spanning 120 000 years. We find that populations would have been able to maintain diverse and elaborate cultural repertoires despite abrupt environmental changes and demographic collapses by preventing isolation through mobility. However, we also reveal that the function of cultural features was also an essential determinant of the effects of environmental or demographic changes on their dynamics. Our work can therefore offer important insights into the role of a foraging lifestyle on the evolution of cumulative culture.}, language = {en} } @article{DjurdjevacConradChemnitzKostreetal.2024, author = {Djurdjevac Conrad, Natasa and Chemnitz, Robin and Kostre, Margarita and Schweigart, Fleur and Fless, Friederike and Sch{\"u}tte, Christof and Ducke, Benjamin}, title = {A Mathematical perspective on Romanisation: Modelling the Roman road activation process in ancient Tunisia}, volume = {19}, journal = {PLoS ONE}, number = {9}, doi = {10.1371/journal.pone.0309752}, year = {2024}, abstract = {Romanisation is a multi-faceted historical phenomenon with profound and lasting cultural impact on the ancient world. In the modern-day territory of Tunisia, this is particularly manifest during the first four centuries AD, under the reign of the Roman Empire. We derive a reduced, operational concept of Romanisation as a cultural diffusion process that is observable in the archaeological remains of the Roman era settlement system. We then introduce a novel mathematical model that computes spatio-temporal approximations for the Romanisation of the settlement system. The model is based on the concept of temporal road activation and makes minimal assumptions regarding input data quality. The results of our study contribute to the understanding of the time dynamics of the region's road network, under the influence of Romanisation. Our model can be applied in similar archaeological research scenarios, to generate spatio-temporal backbones for the analysis of otherwise intractably complex social processes.}, language = {en} } @inproceedings{ChaukairSchuetteSunkara2023, author = {Chaukair, Mustafa and Sch{\"u}tte, Christof and Sunkara, Vikram}, title = {On the Activation Space of ReLU Equipped Deep Neural Networks}, volume = {222}, booktitle = {Procedia Computer Science}, doi = {10.1016/j.procs.2023.08.200}, pages = {624 -- 635}, year = {2023}, abstract = {Modern Deep Neural Networks are getting wider and deeper in their architecture design. However, with an increasing number of parameters the decision mechanisms becomes more opaque. Therefore, there is a need for understanding the structures arising in the hidden layers of deep neural networks. In this work, we present a new mathematical framework for describing the canonical polyhedral decomposition in the input space, and in addition, we introduce the notions of collapsing- and preserving patches, pertinent to understanding the forward map and the activation space they induce. The activation space can be seen as the output of a layer and, in the particular case of ReLU activations, we prove that this output has the structure of a polyhedral complex.}, language = {en} } @article{PlockHammerschmidtBurgeretal.2023, author = {Plock, Matthias and Hammerschmidt, Martin and Burger, Sven and Schneider, Philipp-Immanuel and Sch{\"u}tte, Christof}, title = {Impact Study of Numerical Discretization Accuracy on Parameter Reconstructions and Model Parameter Distributions}, volume = {60}, journal = {Metrologia}, arxiv = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2305.02663}, doi = {10.1088/1681-7575/ace4cd}, pages = {054001}, year = {2023}, abstract = {In optical nano metrology numerical models are used widely for parameter reconstructions. Using the Bayesian target vector optimization method we fit a finite element numerical model to a Grazing Incidence x-ray fluorescence data set in order to obtain the geometrical parameters of a nano structured line grating. Gaussian process, stochastic machine learning surrogate models, were trained during the reconstruction and afterwards sampled with a Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler to determine the distribution of the reconstructed model parameters. The numerical discretization parameters of the used finite element model impact the numerical discretization error of the forward model. We investigated the impact of the polynomial order of the finite element ansatz functions on the reconstructed parameters as well as on the model parameter distributions. We showed that such a convergence study allows to determine numerical parameters which allows for efficient and accurate reconstruction results.}, language = {en} } @article{DonatiWeberKeller2021, author = {Donati, Luca and Weber, Marcus and Keller, Bettina G.}, title = {Markov models from the square root approximation of the Fokker-Planck equation: calculating the grid-dependent flux}, volume = {33}, journal = {Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter}, number = {11}, doi = {10.1088/1361-648X/abd5f7}, pages = {115902}, year = {2021}, abstract = {Molecular dynamics (MD) are extremely complex, yet understanding the slow components of their dynamics is essential to understanding their macroscopic properties. To achieve this, one models the MD as a stochastic process and analyses the dominant eigenfunctions of the associated Fokker-Planck operator, or of closely related transfer operators. So far, the calculation of the discretized operators requires extensive MD simulations. The square-root approximation of the Fokker-Planck equation is a method to calculate transition rates as a ratio of the Boltzmann densities of neighboring grid cells times a flux, and can in principle be calculated without a simulation. In a previous work we still used MD simulations to determine the flux. Here, we propose several methods to calculate the exact or approximate flux for various grid types, and thus estimate the rate matrix without a simulation. Using model potentials we test computational efficiency of the methods, and the accuracy with which they reproduce the dominant eigenfunctions and eigenvalues. For these model potentials, rate matrices with up to \$\mathcal{O}\left(1{0}^{6}\right)\$ states can be obtained within seconds on a single high-performance compute server if regular grids are used.}, language = {en} } @article{KieningerDonatiKeller2020, author = {Kieninger, Stefanie and Donati, Luca and Keller, Bettina G.}, title = {Dynamical reweighting methods for Markov models}, volume = {61}, journal = {Current Opinion in Structural Biology}, doi = {10.1016/j.sbi.2019.12.018}, pages = {124 -- 131}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Conformational dynamics is essential to biomolecular processes. Markov State Models (MSMs) are widely used to elucidate dynamic properties of molecular systems from unbiased Molecular Dynamics (MD). However, the implementation of reweighting schemes for MSMs to analyze biased simulations is still at an early stage of development. Several dynamical reweighing approaches have been proposed, which can be classified as approaches based on (i) Kramers rate theory, (ii) rescaling of the probability density flux, (iii) reweighting by formulating a likelihood function, (iv) path reweighting. We present the state-of-the-art and discuss the methodological differences of these methods, their limitations and recent applications.}, language = {en} } @article{DonatiKeller2018, author = {Donati, Luca and Keller, Bettina G.}, title = {Girsanov reweighting for metadynamics simulations}, volume = {149}, journal = {The Journal of Chemical Physics}, number = {7}, doi = {10.1063/1.5027728}, pages = {072335}, year = {2018}, abstract = {Metadynamics is a computational method to explore the phase space of a molecular system. Gaussian functions are added along relevant coordinates on the fly during a molecular-dynamics simulation to force the system to escape from minima in the potential energy function. The dynamics in the resulting trajectory are however unphysical and cannot be used directly to estimate dynamical properties of the system. Girsanov reweighting is a recent method used to construct the Markov State Model (MSM) of a system subjected to an external perturbation. With the combination of these two techniques—metadynamics/Girsanov-reweighting—the unphysical dynamics in a metadynamics simulation can be reweighted to obtain the MSM of the unbiased system. We demonstrate the method on a one-dimensional diffusion process, alanine dipeptide, and the hexapeptide Val-Gly-Val-Ala-Pro-Gly (VGVAPG). The results are in excellent agreement with the MSMs obtained from direct unbiased simulations of these systems. We also apply metadynamics/Girsanov-reweighting to a β-hairpin peptide, whose dynamics is too slow to efficiently explore its phase space by direct simulation}, language = {en} } @article{DonatiHartmannKeller2017, author = {Donati, Luca and Hartmann, Carsten and Keller, Bettina G.}, title = {Girsanov reweighting for path ensembles and Markov state models}, volume = {146}, journal = {The Journal of Chemical Physics}, number = {24}, doi = {10.1063/1.4989474}, pages = {244112}, year = {2017}, abstract = {The sensitivity of molecular dynamics on changes in the potential energy function plays an important role in understanding the dynamics and function of complex molecules. We present a method to obtain path ensemble averages of a perturbed dynamics from a set of paths generated by a reference dynamics. It is based on the concept of path probability measure and the Girsanov theorem, a result from stochastic analysis to estimate a change of measure of a path ensemble. Since Markov state models (MSMs) of the molecular dynamics can be formulated as a combined phase-space and path ensemble average, the method can be extended to reweight MSMs by combining it with a reweighting of the Boltzmann distribution. We demonstrate how to efficiently implement the Girsanov reweighting in a molecular dynamics simulation program by calculating parts of the reweighting factor "on the fly" during the simulation, and we benchmark the method on test systems ranging from a two-dimensional diffusion process and an artificial many-body system to alanine dipeptide and valine dipeptide in implicit and explicit water. The method can be used to study the sensitivity of molecular dynamics on external perturbations as well as to reweight trajectories generated by enhanced sampling schemes to the original dynamics.}, language = {en} } @incollection{KellerAleksićDonati2018, author = {Keller, Bettina G. and Aleksić, Stevan and Donati, Luca}, title = {Markov State Models in Drug Design}, booktitle = {Biomolecular Simulations in Structure-Based Drug Discovery}, publisher = {Wiley-Interscience, Weinheim}, isbn = {1865-0562}, doi = {10.1002/9783527806836.ch4}, pages = {67 -- 86}, year = {2018}, abstract = {This chapter explains the different ways in which Markov State Models (MSMs) can be helpful in structure-based drug design. MSMs are constructed from the time series of molecular dynamics (MD), which can be generated by classical MD simulations. Several features of the MSMs can be utilized for rational drug design. The discretization of a validated MSM is particularly suited to extract meaningful representatives from the conformational ensemble, because the discretization yields a small number of microstates and mirrors the features of the free energy landscape. Long-lived conformations consist of a set of microstates which show high transition rates within the set and low transition rates to microstates outside of the set. The Bayesian agglomerative clustering engine (BACE) algorithm uses the observed transition counts to extract long-lived conformations from an MSM. By iteratively merging microstates according to the Bayes factor and recalculating the Bayes-factor matrix, the algorithm yields an aggregation of the microstates into long-lived conformations.}, language = {en} } @article{HassanDonatiStensitzkietal.2018, author = {Hassan, Irtaza and Donati, Luca and Stensitzki, Till and Keller, Bettina G and Heyne, Karsten and Imhof, Petra}, title = {The vibrational spectrum of the hydrated alanine-leucine peptide in the amide region from IR experiments and first principles calculations}, volume = {698}, journal = {Chemical Physics Letters}, doi = {10.1016/j.cplett.2018.03.026}, pages = {227 -- 233}, year = {2018}, abstract = {We have combined infrared (IR) experiments with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations in solution at finite temperature to analyse the vibrational signature of the small floppy peptide Alanine-Leucine. IR spectra computed from first-principles MD simulations exhibit no distinct differences between conformational clusters of -helix or -sheet-like folds with different orientations of the bulky leucine side chain. All computed spectra show two prominent bands, in good agreement with the experiment, that are assigned to the stretch vibrations of the carbonyl and carboxyl group, respectively. Variations in band widths and exact maxima are likely due to small fluctuations in the backbone torsion angles.}, language = {en} }