{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/avoiding-subtraction-and-division-of","title":"Avoiding subtraction and division of stochastic signals using normalizing flows: NFdeconvolve","arxiv_id":"2501.08288","date":"2025-01-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Pedro Pessoa","Max Schweiger","Lance W. Q. Xu","Tristan Manha","Ayush Saurabh","Julian Antolin Camarena","Steve Pressé"],"abstract":"Across the scientific realm, we find ourselves subtracting or dividing stochastic signals. For instance, consider a stochastic realization, $x$, generated from the addition or multiplication of two stochastic signals $a$ and $b$, namely $x=a+b$ or $x = ab$. For the $x=a+b$ example, $a$ can be fluorescence background and $b$ the signal of interest whose statistics are to be learned from the measured $x$. Similarly, when writing $x=ab$, $a$ can be thought of as the illumination intensity and $b$ the density of fluorescent molecules of interest. Yet dividing or subtracting stochastic signals amplifies noise, and we ask instead whether, using the statistics of $a$ and the measurement of $x$ as input, we can recover the statistics of $b$. Here, we show how normalizing flows can generate an approximation of the probability distribution over $b$, thereby avoiding subtraction or division altogether. This method is implemented in our software package, NFdeconvolve, available on GitHub with a tutorial linked in the main text.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.08288v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08288v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"avoiding-subtraction-and-division-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/pessoap/nfdeconvolve","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":"normalizing-flows","method_name":"Normalizing Flows"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}