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Z. Dezso

Publications and source records attributed to Z. Dezso.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Elucidation of differential response networks from toxicogenomics data

We describe a novel approach to the analysis of toxicogenomics data and elucidation of biological networks affected by drug treatments. In this method approximately 15,000 linear pathway modules were generated from manually assembled pathway maps from MetaCore (GeneGo, Inc.). Microarray expression data from livers of rat exposed to phenobarbital, mestranol and tamoxifen were mapped onto these modules. Using different analytical techniques we have identified sets of "differential" pathways featuring highly correlated expression among multiple repeats of the same treatment while showing strong anti-correlation across different treatments. Network modules distinguishing chemical treatments were re-assembled based on these pathways. Unlike traditional statistical and clustering procedures in expression profiling, our method takes into account both network connectivity and gene expression in the course of the analysis. We demonstrate that it enables identification of important cellular mechanisms involved in drug response that would have been missed by the analysis based on individual gene expression profiles.

q-bio.MN

Modeling bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics

Current models of human dynamics, used from risk assessment to communications, assume that human actions are randomly distributed in time and thus well approximated by Poisson processes. We provide direct evidence that for five human activity patterns the timing of individual human actions follow non-Poisson statistics, characterized by bursts of rapidly occurring events separated by long periods of inactivity. We show that the bursty nature of human behavior is a consequence of a decision based queuing process: when individuals execute tasks based on some perceived priority, the timing of the tasks will be heavy tailed, most tasks being rapidly executed, while a few experiencing very long waiting times. We discuss two queueing models that capture human activity. The first model assumes that there are no limitations on the number of tasks an individual can hadle at any time, predicting that the waiting time of the individual tasks follow a heavy tailed distribution with exponent alpha=3/2. The second model imposes limitations on the queue length, resulting in alpha=1. We provide empirical evidence supporting the relevance of these two models to human activity patterns. Finally, we discuss possible extension of the proposed queueing models and outline some future challenges in exploring the statistical mechanisms of human dynamics.

physics.soc-ph

Fifteen Minutes of Fame: The Dynamics of Information Access on the Web

While current studies on complex networks focus on systems that change relatively slowly in time, the structure of the most visited regions of the Web is altered at the timescale from hours to days. Here we investigate the dynamics of visitation of a major news portal, representing the prototype for such a rapidly evolving network. The nodes of the network can be classified into stable nodes, that form the time independent skeleton of the portal, and news documents. The visitation of the two node classes are markedly different, the skeleton acquiring visits at a constant rate, while a news document's visitation peaking after a few hours. We find that the visitation pattern of a news document decays as a power law, in contrast with the exponential prediction provided by simple models of site visitation. This is rooted in the inhomogeneous nature of the browsing pattern characterizing individual users: the time interval between consecutive visits by the same user to the site follows a power law distribution, in contrast with the exponential expected for Poisson processes. We show that the exponent characterizing the individual user's browsing patterns determines the power-law decay in a document's visitation. Finally, our results document the fleeting quality of news and events: while fifteen minutes of fame is still an exaggeration in the online media, we find that access to most news items significantly decays after 36 hours of posting.

physics.soc-ph

Limits of the Quantum Monte Carlo method

We consider the one-dimensional quantum-statistical problem of interacting spin-less particles in an infinite deep potential valley and on a ring. Several limits for the applicability of the Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods were revealed and discussed. We show the inapplicability of the QMC method for ring-like geometries, realize an unphysical frustration for interacting fermions and a minus-sign problem for interacting bosons.

cond-mat.stat-mech