What do dancing honeybees and stock markets have in common?
The work has numerous potential applications, from enabling oil companies to get a clearer picture of where oil might be located underground to allowing port operators to spot suspicious behaviors. Graduate student Emily Fox, of MITs Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, will present her new model at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference on Dec. 10. The methodology is designed to build models for complicated systems whose behavior is characterized by abrupt changes. These complex dynamic systems include stock markets and dancing bees: Honeybees switch between several dances in seemingly random fashion, and stock markets are notoriously unpredictable. While modeling of dynamic systems is a subject that has received considerable attention from researchers in many disciplines, most require constraining assumptions such as a single, consistent mode of dynamic behavior, and possibly prior information regarding the structure of the underlying dynamics. Its quite exc
