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Description
There are multiple mathematical models for alignment of individuals moving within a group. In a first class of models, individuals tend to relax their velocity toward the average velocity of other nearby neighbors. These types of models are motivated by the flocking behavior exhibited by birds. Another class of models

There are multiple mathematical models for alignment of individuals moving within a group. In a first class of models, individuals tend to relax their velocity toward the average velocity of other nearby neighbors. These types of models are motivated by the flocking behavior exhibited by birds. Another class of models have been introduced to describe rapid changes of individual velocity, referred to as jump, which better describes behavior of smaller agents (e.g. locusts, ants). In the second class of model, individuals will randomly choose to align with another nearby individual, matching velocities. There are several open questions concerning these two type of behavior: which behavior is the most efficient to create a flock (i.e. to converge toward the same velocity)? Will flocking still emerge when the number of individuals approach infinity? Analysis of these models show that, in the homogeneous case where all individuals are capable of interacting with each other, the variance of the velocities in both the jump model and the relaxation model decays to 0 exponentially for any nonzero number of individuals. This implies the individuals in the system converge to an absorbing state where all individuals share the same velocity, therefore individuals converge to a flock even as the number of individuals approach infinity. Further analysis focused on the case where interactions between individuals were determined by an adjacency matrix. The second eigenvalues of the Laplacian of this adjacency matrix (denoted ƛ2) provided a lower bound on the rate of decay of the variance. When ƛ2 is nonzero, the system is said to converge to a flock almost surely. Furthermore, when the adjacency matrix is generated by a random graph, such that connections between individuals are formed with probability p (where 0

1/N. ƛ2 is a good estimator of the rate of convergence of the system, in comparison to the value of p used to generate the adjacency matrix..

ContributorsTrent, Austin L. (Author) / Motsch, Sebastien (Thesis director) / Lanchier, Nicolas (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Cancer modeling has brought a lot of attention in recent years. It had been proven to be a difficult task to model the behavior of cancer cells, since little about the "rules" a cell follows has been known. Existing models for cancer cells can be generalized into two categories: macroscopic

Cancer modeling has brought a lot of attention in recent years. It had been proven to be a difficult task to model the behavior of cancer cells, since little about the "rules" a cell follows has been known. Existing models for cancer cells can be generalized into two categories: macroscopic models which studies the tumor structure as a whole, and microscopic models which focus on the behavior of individual cells. Both modeling strategies strive the same goal of creating a model that can be validated with experimental data, and is reliable for predicting tumor growth. In order to achieve this goal, models must be developed based on certain rules that tumor structures follow. This paper will introduce how such rules can be implemented in a mathematical model, with the example of individual based modeling.
ContributorsHan, Zimo (Author) / Motsch, Sebastien (Thesis director) / Moustaoui, Mohamed (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12