Emanuela Merelli, Marco Pettini, Mario Rasetti – Natural Computing
DOI 10.1007/s11047-014-9436-7

In order to define a new method for analyzing the immune system within the realm of Big Data, we bear on the metaphor provided by an extension of Parisi’s model, based on a mean field approach. The novelty is the multilinearity of the couplings in the configurational variables. This peculiarity allows us to compare the partition function Z with a particular functor of topological field theory—the generating function of the Betti numbers of the state manifold of the system—which contains the same global information of the system configurations and of the data set representing them. The comparison between the Betti numbers of the model and the real Betti numbers obtained from the topological analysis of phenomenological data, is expected to discover hidden n-ary relations among idiotypes and anti-idiotypes. The data topological analysis will select global features, reducible neither to a mere subgraph nor to a metric or vector space. How the immune system reacts, how it evolves, how it responds to stimuli is the result of an interaction that took place among many entities constrained in specific configurations which are relational. Within this metaphor, the proposed method turns out to be a global topological application of the S[B] paradigm for modeling complex systems.

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