Tom McGrath says an Ising model can represent both positive and negative coupling strengths, enabling his team to fit a spline through the data.

“um to fit we we uh we fit an icing model to it which is rather a surprise to me when the team came back with that i was like cool um and the reason this is like a good model is that you can have both sort of positive and negative coupling strengths and fitting this allows us to like fit a spline through the through the data”