Alianna J. Maren

When students run neural networks code, one of the first things that gets their attention is the summed-squared-error (SSE) – at the beginning of the run (before training), and then again after training has been done for several thousands of iterations. There are usually three basic questions that people ask about SSE, with regard to a particular neural network: I’ve got an SSE value taken before my neural network starts training. Does this value make sense? My neural network has…

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2D CVM Free Energy Minimization Applied to a Large Scale Free-Like Pattern: New experimental results show that a scale free-like pattern undergoing 2D CVM-type free energy minimization undergoes substantial topology changes; this is the first time that free energy has been used to influence a 2D topography. While specific topographies would differ, depending on the both starting pattern as well as the (random) selection of flipped-nodes (for free energy reduction), the resulting topographies will likely have similar patterns for given…

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Tracing the 2008-2009 Financial Meltdown Through a Metastable Phase Space We can trace a path through the phase space shown in Figure 1 that shows the same kind of behavior as the financial world went through during the 2008-2009 meltdown. Figure 1 shows a “path” going from a low-active state to a high-active state (3) back to low-active state (7) again. (To be continued)

Modeling the 2008-2009 Financial Meltdown Using Metastable State Phase Transitions Now that we’ve weathered the crisis of 2008-2009, we can prudently ask ourselves: “What are the warning signs of imminent meltdown? How can we predict – and act prior to – a major market collapse?” This post continues the theme begun in the previous post, of playing with a not-quite Gedanken experiment; looking for a useful model that explains what happened with the U.S. financial system at the end of…

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A disclaimer. Before you (or I) go any further with this, an upfront and blanket disclaimer. This is not a real, true, serious modeling effort. It is not even a true gedanken-experiment (German for “mental experiment,” or mental walk-through.) If anything, this is a little warm-up exercise. An attempt to stretch and flex some “modeling muscles” that have not been used for a couple of years. (And in good cause, I might add – I’ve just completed a book, see…

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Core References for Non-Equilibrium Theory, and Initial Discussion on Financial Meltdown of 2008-2009, Lehman Brothers, Examples of Webposts Increasing over Time Gathering up two of the most classic sources: Prigogine’s Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes , and Kubicek and Marek’s Computational Methods in Bifurcation Theory and Dissipative Structures. So here’s an interesting little do-at-home experiment: Study the meltdown of the Lehman Brothers, which started the whole stock market runoff in September / October of 2008. Using Google (which is a horrible…

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