Category: Uncategorized

Abstract  Many recent advances have been made in understanding the functional implications of the global topological properties of biological
networks through the application of complex network theory, particularly in the area of small-world and scale-free topologies.
Computational studies which attempt to understand the structure–function relationship usually proceed by defining a representation
of cells and an affinity measure to describe their interactions. We show that this necessarily restricts the topology of the
networks that can arise—furthermore, we show that although simple topologies can be produced via representation and affinity
measures common in the literature, it is unclear how to select measures which result in complex topologies, for example, exhibiting
scale-free functionality. In this paper, we introduce the concept of the potential network as a method in which abstract network topologies can be directly studied, bypassing any definition of shape-space and affinity
function. We illustrate the benefit of the approach by studying the evolution of idiotypic networks on a selection of scale-free
and regular topologies, finding that a key immunological property—tolerance—is promoted by bi-partite and heterogeneous topologies.
The approach, however, is applicable to the study of any network and thus has implications for both immunology and artificial
immune systems.

Abstract  In recent years evolutionary and immune-inspired approaches have been applied to content-based and collaborative filtering.
These biologically inspired approaches are well suited to problems like profile adaptation in content-based filtering and
rating sparsity in collaborative filtering, due to their distributed and dynamic characteristics. In this paper we introduce
the relevant concepts and algorithms and review the state of the art in evolutionary and immune-inspired information filtering.
Our intention is to promote the interplay between information filtering and biologically inspired computing and boost developments
in this emerging interdisciplinary field.