2026-07-21T14:19:36Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:18966 2024-03-06T11:03:05Z ddc:004 open_access

Inferring the History of Spatial Diffusion Processes (Short Paper) Takahashi, Takuya Hannes, Geneviève Neureiter, Nico Ranacher, Peter Bayesian inference geographic diffusion language evolution Indo-European colonisation of the Americas When studying the spatial diffusion of a phenomenon, we often know its geographic distribution at one or more snapshots in time, while the complete history of the diffusion process is unknown. For example, we know when and where the first Indo-European languages arrived in South America and their current distribution. However, we do not know the history of how these languages spread, displacing the indigenous languages from their original habitat. We present a Bayesian model to interpolate the history of a diffusion process between two points in time with known geographical distributions. We apply the model to recover the spread of the Indo-European languages in South America and infer a posterior distribution of possible evolutionary histories of how they expanded their areas since the time of the first invasion by Europeans. Our model is more generally applicable to infer the evolutionary history of geographic diffusion phenomena from incomplete data. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Takuya Takahashi and Geneviève Hannes and Nico Neureiter and Peter Ranacher 2023 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 277, 12th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2023) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2023.71 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-189662 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2023.71 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode