Mean-Field Theory for the Inverse Ising Problem at Low Temperatures

The large amounts of data from molecular biology and neuroscience have lead to a renewed interest in the inverse Ising problem: how to reconstruct parameters of the Ising model (couplings between spins and external fields) from a number of spin configurations sampled from the Boltzmann measure. To invert the relationship between model parameters and observables (magnetizations and correlations), mean-field approximations are often used, allowing the determination of model parameters from data. However, all known mean-field methods fail at low temperatures with the emergence of multiple thermodynamic states. Here, we show how clustering spin configurations can approximate these thermodynamic states and how mean-field methods applied to thermodynamic states allow an efficient reconstruction of Ising models also at low temperatures.