Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Ultrametricity increases the predictability of cultural dynamics   A quantitative understanding of societies requires useful combinations of
empirical data and mathematical models. Models of cultural dynamics aim at
explaining the emergence of culturally homogeneous groups through social
influence. Traditionally, the initial cultural traits of individuals are chosen
uniformly at random, the emphasis being on characterizing the model outcomes
that are independent of these (`annealed') initial conditions. Here, motivated
by an increasing interest in forecasting social behavior in the real world, we
reverse the point of view and focus on the effect of specific (`quenched')
initial conditions, including those obtained from real data, on the final
cultural state. We study the predictability, rigorously defined in an
information-theoretic sense, of the \emph{social content} of the final cultural
groups (i.e. who ends up in which group) from the knowledge of the initial
cultural traits. We find that, as compared to random and shuffled initial
conditions, the hierarchical ultrametric-like organization of empirical
cultural states significantly increases the predictability of the final social
content by largely confining cultural convergence within the lower levels of
the hierarchy. Moreover, predictability correlates with the compatibility of
short-term social coordination and long-term cultural diversity, a property
that has been recently found to be strong and robust in empirical data. We also
introduce a null model generating initial conditions that retain the
ultrametric representation of real data. Using this ultrametric model,
predictability is highly enhanced with respect to the random and shuffled
cases, confirming the usefulness of the empirical hierarchical organization of
culture for forecasting the outcome of social influence models.

15
The categories of this paper are: nucl-ex
36
The categories of this paper are: cmp-lg
37
The categories of this paper are: supr-con
0
The categories of this paper are: hep-ph
16
The categories of this paper are: stat
25
The categories of this paper are: patt-sol
6
The categories of this paper are: astro-ph
21
The categories of this paper are: adap-org
20
The categories of this paper are: acc-phys
22
The categories of this paper are: chao-dyn
23
The categories of this paper are: solv-int
18
The categories of this paper are: econ
34
The categories of this paper are: chem-ph
31
The categories of this paper are: ao-sci
12
The categories of this paper are: nucl-th
28
The categories of this paper are: alg-geom