id
stringlengths
9
16
title
stringlengths
4
278
categories
stringlengths
5
104
abstract
stringlengths
6
4.09k
1111.6372
Nested Inequalities Among Divergence Measures
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper we have considered a single inequality having 11 known divergence measures. This inequality include measures like: Jeffryes-Kullback-Leiber J-divergence, Jensen-Shannon divergence (Burbea-Rao, 1982), arithmetic-geometric mean divergence (Taneja, 1995), Hellinger discrimination, symmetric chi-square divergence, triangular discrimination, etc. All these measures are well-known in the literature on Information theory and Statistics. This sequence of 11 measures also include measures due to Kumar and Johnson (2005) and Jain and Srivastava (2007). Three measures arising due to some mean divergences also appears in this inequality. Based on non-negative differences arising due to this single inequality of 11 measures, we have put more than 40 divergence measures in nested or sequential form. Idea of reverse inequalities is also introduced.
1111.6387
3D Model Retrieval Based on Semantic and Shape Indexes
cs.IR cs.AI cs.CV
The size of 3D models used on the web or stored in databases is becoming increasingly high. Then, an efficient method that allows users to find similar 3D objects for a given 3D model query has become necessary. Keywords and the geometry of a 3D model cannot meet the needs of users' retrieval because they do not include the semantic information. In this paper, a new method has been proposed to 3D models retrieval using semantic concepts combined with shape indexes. To obtain these concepts, we use the machine learning methods to label 3D models by k-means algorithm in measures and shape indexes space. Moreover, semantic concepts have been organized and represented by ontology language OWL and spatial relationships are used to disambiguate among models of similar appearance. The SPARQL query language has been used to question the information displayed in this language and to compute the similarity between two 3D models. We interpret our results using the Princeton Shape Benchmark Database and the results show the performance of the proposed new approach to retrieval 3D models. Keywords: 3D Model, 3D retrieval, measures, shape indexes, semantic, ontology
1111.6401
Graph based E-Government web service composition
cs.AI
Nowadays, e-government has emerged as a government policy to improve the quality and efficiency of public administrations. By exploiting the potential of new information and communication technologies, government agencies are providing a wide spectrum of online services. These services are composed of several web services that comply with well defined processes. One of the big challenges is the need to optimize the composition of the elementary web services. In this paper, we present a solution for optimizing the computation effort in web service composition. Our method is based on Graph Theory. We model the semantic relationship between the involved web services through a directed graph. Then, we compute all shortest paths using for the first time, an extended version of the Floyd-Warshall algorithm.
1111.6414
Capacity-Approaching Signal Constellations for the Additive Exponential Noise Channel
cs.IT math.IT
We present a new family of signal constellations, called log constellations, that can be used to design near-capacity coded modulation schemes over additive exponential noise (AEN) channels. Log constellations are designed by geometrically approximating the input distribution that maximizes the AEN channel capacity. The mutual information achievable over AEN channels with both coded modulation (CM) and bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) approaches is evaluated for various signal sets. In the case of CM, the proposed log constellations outperform, sometimes by over half a decibel, the best existing signal sets available from the literature, and can display error performance within only 0.12 dB of the AEN channel capacity. In the context of BICM, log constellations do not offer significant performance advantages over the best existing constellations. As the potential performance degradation resulting from the use of BICM instead of CM is larger than 1 dB, BICM may however not be a suitable design approach over AEN channels.
1111.6453
Learning with Submodular Functions: A Convex Optimization Perspective
cs.LG math.OC
Submodular functions are relevant to machine learning for at least two reasons: (1) some problems may be expressed directly as the optimization of submodular functions and (2) the lovasz extension of submodular functions provides a useful set of regularization functions for supervised and unsupervised learning. In this monograph, we present the theory of submodular functions from a convex analysis perspective, presenting tight links between certain polyhedra, combinatorial optimization and convex optimization problems. In particular, we show how submodular function minimization is equivalent to solving a wide variety of convex optimization problems. This allows the derivation of new efficient algorithms for approximate and exact submodular function minimization with theoretical guarantees and good practical performance. By listing many examples of submodular functions, we review various applications to machine learning, such as clustering, experimental design, sensor placement, graphical model structure learning or subset selection, as well as a family of structured sparsity-inducing norms that can be derived and used from submodular functions.
1111.6473
A kernel-based framework for learning graded relations from data
stat.ML cs.LG
Driven by a large number of potential applications in areas like bioinformatics, information retrieval and social network analysis, the problem setting of inferring relations between pairs of data objects has recently been investigated quite intensively in the machine learning community. To this end, current approaches typically consider datasets containing crisp relations, so that standard classification methods can be adopted. However, relations between objects like similarities and preferences are often expressed in a graded manner in real-world applications. A general kernel-based framework for learning relations from data is introduced here. It extends existing approaches because both crisp and graded relations are considered, and it unifies existing approaches because different types of graded relations can be modeled, including symmetric and reciprocal relations. This framework establishes important links between recent developments in fuzzy set theory and machine learning. Its usefulness is demonstrated through various experiments on synthetic and real-world data.
1111.6502
Optimal Offline Broadcast Scheduling with an Energy Harvesting Transmitter
cs.IT math.IT
We consider an energy harvesting transmitter broadcasting data to two receivers. Energy and data arrivals are assumed to occur at arbitrary but known instants. The goal is to minimize the total transmission time of the packets arriving within a certain time window, using the energy that becomes available during this time. An achievable rate region with structural properties satisfied by the two-user AWGN BC capacity region is assumed. Structural properties of power and rate allocation in an optimal policy are established, as well as the uniqueness of the optimal policy under the condition that all the data of the "weaker" user are available at the beginning. An iterative algorithm, DuOpt, based on block coordinate descent that achieves the same structural properties as the optimal is described. Investigating the ways to have the optimal schedule of two consecutive epochs in terms of energy efficiency and minimum transmission duration, it has been shown that DuOpt achieves best performance under the same special condition of uniqueness.
1111.6552
Nouvelle repr\'esentation concise exacte des motifs corr\'el\'es rares : Application \`a la d\'etection d'intrusions
cs.DB
Correlated rare pattern mining is an interesting issue in Data mining. In this respect, the set of correlated rare patterns w.r.t. to the bond correlation measure was studied in a recent work, in which the RCPR concise exact representation of the set of correlated rare patterns was proposed. However, none algorithm was proposed in order to mine this representation and none experiment was carried out to evaluate it. In this paper, we introduce the new RcprMiner algorithm allowing an efficient extraction of RCPR. We also present the IsRCP algorithm allowing the query of the RCPR representation in addition to the RCPRegeneration algorithm allowing the regeneration of the whole set RCP of rare correlated patterns starting from this representation. The carried out experiments highlight interesting compactness rates offered by RCPR. The effectiveness of the proposed classification method, based on generic rare correlated association rules derived from RCPR, has also been proved in the context of intrusion detection.
1111.6553
Exploring Twitter Hashtags
cs.CL
Twitter messages often contain so-called hashtags to denote keywords related to them. Using a dataset of 29 million messages, I explore relations among these hashtags with respect to co-occurrences. Furthermore, I present an attempt to classify hashtags into five intuitive classes, using a machine-learning approach. The overall outcome is an interactive Web application to explore Twitter hashtags.
1111.6563
Perception of Motion and Architectural Form: Computational Relationships between Optical Flow and Perspective
q-bio.NC cs.NE
Perceptual geometry refers to the interdisciplinary research whose objectives focuses on study of geometry from the perspective of visual perception, and in turn, applies such geometric findings to the ecological study of vision. Perceptual geometry attempts to answer fundamental questions in perception of form and representation of space through synthesis of cognitive and biological theories of visual perception with geometric theories of the physical world. Perception of form, space and motion are among fundamental problems in vision science. In cognitive and computational models of human perception, the theories for modeling motion are treated separately from models for perception of form.
1111.6631
Mathematical Analysis and Computational Integration of Massive Heterogeneous Data from the Human Retina
q-bio.QM cs.IR math.SP
Modern epidemiology integrates knowledge from heterogeneous collections of data consisting of numerical, descriptive and imaging. Large-scale epidemiological studies use sophisticated statistical analysis, mathematical models using differential equations and versatile analytic tools that handle numerical data. In contrast, knowledge extraction from images and descriptive information in the form of text and diagrams remain a challenge for most fields, in particular, for diseases of the eye. In this article we provide a roadmap towards extraction of knowledge from text and images with focus on forthcoming applications to epidemiological investigation of retinal diseases, especially from existing massive heterogeneous collections of data distributed around the globe.
1111.6640
A Markov Random Field Topic Space Model for Document Retrieval
cs.IR
This paper proposes a novel statistical approach to intelligent document retrieval. It seeks to offer a more structured and extensible mathematical approach to the term generalization done in the popular Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) approach to document indexing. A Markov Random Field (MRF) is presented that captures relationships between terms and documents as probabilistic dependence assumptions between random variables. From there, it uses the MRF-Gibbs equivalence to derive joint probabilities as well as local probabilities for document variables. A parameter learning method is proposed that utilizes rank reduction with singular value decomposition in a matter similar to LSA to reduce dimensionality of document-term relationships to that of a latent topic space. Experimental results confirm the ability of this approach to effectively and efficiently retrieve documents from substantial data sets.
1111.6664
Generalized Orthogonal Matching Pursuit
cs.IT math.IT
As a greedy algorithm to recover sparse signals from compressed measurements, orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm has received much attention in recent years. In this paper, we introduce an extension of the OMP for pursuing efficiency in reconstructing sparse signals. Our approach, henceforth referred to as generalized OMP (gOMP), is literally a generalization of the OMP in the sense that multiple $N$ indices are identified per iteration. Owing to the selection of multiple ''correct'' indices, the gOMP algorithm is finished with much smaller number of iterations when compared to the OMP. We show that the gOMP can perfectly reconstruct any $K$-sparse signals ($K > 1$), provided that the sensing matrix satisfies the RIP with $\delta_{NK} < \frac{\sqrt{N}}{\sqrt{K} + 3 \sqrt{N}}$. We also demonstrate by empirical simulations that the gOMP has excellent recovery performance comparable to $\ell_1$-minimization technique with fast processing speed and competitive computational complexity.
1111.6677
Publishing Location Dataset Differential Privately with Isotonic Regression
cs.CR cs.DB
We consider the problem of publishing location datasets, in particular 2D spatial pointsets, in a differentially private manner. Many existing mechanisms focus on frequency counts of the points in some a priori partition of the domain that is difficult to determine. We propose an approach that adds noise directly to the point, or to a group of neighboring points. Our approach is based on the observation that, the sensitivity of sorting, as a function on sets of real numbers, can be bounded. Together with isotonic regression, the dataset can be accurately reconstructed. To extend the mechanism to higher dimension, we employ locality preserving function to map the dataset to a bounded interval. Although there are fundamental limits on the performance of locality preserving functions, fortunately, our problem only requires distance preservation in the "easier" direction, and the well-known Hilbert space-filling curve suffices to provide high accuracy. The publishing process is simple from the publisher's point of view: the publisher just needs to map the data, sort them, group them, add Laplace noise and publish the dataset. The only parameter to determine is the group size which can be chosen based on predicted generalization errors. Empirical study shows that the published dataset can also exploited to answer other queries, for example, range query and median query, accurately.
1111.6682
A General Robust Linear Transceiver Design for Multi-Hop Amplify-and-Forward MIMO Relaying Systems
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, linear transceiver design for multi-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) multiple-input multiple-out (MIMO) relaying systems with Gaussian distributed channel estimation errors is investigated. Commonly used transceiver design criteria including weighted mean-square-error (MSE) minimization, capacity maximization, worst-MSE/MAX-MSE minimization and weighted sum-rate maximization, are considered and unified into a single matrix-variate optimization problem. A general robust design algorithm is proposed to solve the unified problem. Specifically, by exploiting majorization theory and properties of matrix-variate functions, the optimal structure of the robust transceiver is derived when either the covariance matrix of channel estimation errors seen from the transmitter side or the corresponding covariance matrix seen from the receiver side is proportional to an identity matrix. Based on the optimal structure, the original transceiver design problems are reduced to much simpler problems with only scalar variables whose solutions are readily obtained by iterative water-filling algorithm. A number of existing transceiver design algorithms are found to be special cases of the proposed solution. The differences between our work and the existing related work are also discussed in detail. The performance advantages of the proposed robust designs are demonstrated by simulation results.
1111.6685
Some Results on the Target Set Selection Problem
math.CO cs.CC cs.DM cs.DS cs.SI
In this paper we consider a fundamental problem in the area of viral marketing, called T{\scriptsize ARGET} S{\scriptsize ET} S{\scriptsize ELECTION} problem. We study the problem when the underlying graph is a block-cactus graph, a chordal graph or a Hamming graph. We show that if $G$ is a block-cactus graph, then the T{\scriptsize ARGET} S{\scriptsize ET} S{\scriptsize ELECTION} problem can be solved in linear time, which generalizes Chen's result \cite{chen2009} for trees, and the time complexity is much better than the algorithm in \cite{treewidth} (for bounded treewidth graphs) when restricted to block-cactus graphs. We show that if the underlying graph $G$ is a chordal graph with thresholds $\theta(v)\leq 2$ for each vertex $v$ in $G$, then the problem can be solved in linear time. For a Hamming graph $G$ having thresholds $\theta(v)=2$ for each vertex $v$ of $G$, we precisely determine an optimal target set $S$ for $(G,\theta)$. These results partially answer an open problem raised by Dreyer and Roberts \cite{Dreyer2009}.
1111.6695
Optimal Shape-Gain Quantization for Multiuser MIMO Systems with Linear Precoding
cs.IT math.IT
This paper studies the optimal bit allocation for shape-gain vector quantization of wireless channels in multiuser (MU) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) downlink systems based on linear precoding. Our design minimizes the mean squared-error between the original and quantized channels through optimal bit allocation across shape (direction) and gain (magnitude) for a fixed feedback overhead per user. This is shown to significantly reduce the quantization error, which in turn, decreases the MU interference. This paper makes three main contributions: first, we focus on channel gain quantization and derive the quantization distortion, based on a Euclidean distance measure, corresponding to singular values of a MIMO channel. Second, we show that the Euclidean distance-based distortion of a unit norm complex channel, due to shape quantization, is proportional to \frac{2^{-2Bs}}{2M-1}, where, Bs is the number of shape quantization bits and M is the number of transmit antennas. Finally, we show that for channels in complex space and allowing for a large feedback overhead, the number of direction quantization bits should be approximately (2M - 1) times the number of channel magnitude quantization bits.
1111.6713
An Enhanced Indexing And Ranking Technique On The Semantic Web
cs.AI
With the fast growth of the Internet, more and more information is available on the Web. The Semantic Web has many features which cannot be handled by using the traditional search engines. It extracts metadata for each discovered Web documents in RDF or OWL formats, and computes relations between documents. We proposed a hybrid indexing and ranking technique for the Semantic Web which finds relevant documents and computes the similarity among a set of documents. First, it returns with the most related document from the repository of Semantic Web Documents (SWDs) by using a modified version of the ObjectRank technique. Then, it creates a sub-graph for the most related SWDs. Finally, It returns the hubs and authorities of these document by using the HITS algorithm. Our technique increases the quality of the results and decreases the execution time of processing the user's query.
1111.6771
Autonomic Management for Multi-agent Systems
cs.MA
Autonomic computing is a computing system that can manage itself by self-configuration, self-healing, self-optimizing and self-protection. Researchers have been emphasizing the strong role that multi agent systems can play progressively towards the design and implementation of complex autonomic systems. The important of autonomic computing is to create computing systems capable of managing themselves to a far greater extent than they do today. With the nature of autonomy, reactivity, sociality and pro-activity, software agents are promising to make autonomic computing system a reality. This paper mixed multi-agent system with autonomic feature that completely hides its complexity from users/services. Mentioned Java Application Development Framework as platform example of this environment, could applied to web services as front end to users. With multi agent support it also provides adaptability, intelligence, collaboration, goal oriented interactions, flexibility, mobility and persistence in software systems
1111.6790
Constraining the Size Growth of the Task Space with Socially Guided Intrinsic Motivation using Demonstrations
cs.AI
This paper presents an algorithm for learning a highly redundant inverse model in continuous and non-preset environments. Our Socially Guided Intrinsic Motivation by Demonstrations (SGIM-D) algorithm combines the advantages of both social learning and intrinsic motivation, to specialise in a wide range of skills, while lessening its dependence on the teacher. SGIM-D is evaluated on a fishing skill learning experiment.
1111.6804
Betweenness Centrality as a Driver of Preferential Attachment in the Evolution of Research Collaboration Networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We analyze whether preferential attachment in scientific coauthorship networks is different for authors with different forms of centrality. Using a complete database for the scientific specialty of research about "steel structures," we show that betweenness centrality of an existing node is a significantly better predictor of preferential attachment by new entrants than degree or closeness centrality. During the growth of a network, preferential attachment shifts from (local) degree centrality to betweenness centrality as a global measure. An interpretation is that supervisors of PhD projects and postdocs broker between new entrants and the already existing network, and thus become focal to preferential attachment. Because of this mediation, scholarly networks can be expected to develop differently from networks which are predicated on preferential attachment to nodes with high degree centrality.
1111.6807
On the problem of reversibility of the entropy power inequality
math.FA cs.IT math.IT math.PR
As was shown recently by the authors, the entropy power inequality can be reversed for independent summands with sufficiently concave densities, when the distributions of the summands are put in a special position. In this note it is proved that reversibility is impossible over the whole class of convex probability distributions. Related phenomena for identically distributed summands are also discussed.
1111.6822
Optimal Phase Transitions in Compressed Sensing
cs.IT math.IT math.ST stat.TH
Compressed sensing deals with efficient recovery of analog signals from linear encodings. This paper presents a statistical study of compressed sensing by modeling the input signal as an i.i.d. process with known distribution. Three classes of encoders are considered, namely optimal nonlinear, optimal linear and random linear encoders. Focusing on optimal decoders, we investigate the fundamental tradeoff between measurement rate and reconstruction fidelity gauged by error probability and noise sensitivity in the absence and presence of measurement noise, respectively. The optimal phase transition threshold is determined as a functional of the input distribution and compared to suboptimal thresholds achieved by popular reconstruction algorithms. In particular, we show that Gaussian sensing matrices incur no penalty on the phase transition threshold with respect to optimal nonlinear encoding. Our results also provide a rigorous justification of previous results based on replica heuristics in the weak-noise regime.
1111.6825
A Fuzzy Realistic Mobility Model For Ad hoc Networks
cs.AI cs.NI
Realistic mobility models can demonstrate more precise evaluation results because their parameters are closer to the reality. In this paper a realistic Fuzzy Mobility Model has been proposed. This model has rules which is changeable depending on nodes and environment conditions. This model is more complete and precise than the other mobility models and this is the advantage of this model. After simulation, it was found out that not only considering nodes movement as being imprecise (fuzzy) has a positive effects on most of ad hoc network parameters, but also, more importantly as they are closer to the real world condition, they can have a more positive effect on the implementation of ad hoc network protocols.
1111.6828
Bayesian Estimation of a Gaussian source in Middleton's Class-A Impulsive Noise
cs.IT math.IT stat.AP
The paper focuses on minimum mean square error (MMSE) Bayesian estimation for a Gaussian source impaired by additive Middleton's Class-A impulsive noise. In addition to the optimal Bayesian estimator, the paper considers also the soft-limiter and the blanker, which are two popular suboptimal estimators characterized by very low complexity. The MMSE-optimum thresholds for such suboptimal estimators are obtained by practical iterative algorithms with fast convergence. The paper derives also the optimal thresholds according to a maximum-SNR (MSNR) criterion, and establishes connections with the MMSE criterion. Furthermore, closed form analytic expressions are derived for the MSE and the SNR of all the suboptimal estimators, which perfectly match simulation results. Noteworthy, these results can be applied to characterize the receiving performance of any multicarrier system impaired by a Gaussian-mixture noise, such as asymmetric digital subscriber lines (ADSL) and power-line communications (PLC).
1111.6842
Fast Private Data Release Algorithms for Sparse Queries
cs.DS cs.CR cs.LG
We revisit the problem of accurately answering large classes of statistical queries while preserving differential privacy. Previous approaches to this problem have either been very general but have not had run-time polynomial in the size of the database, have applied only to very limited classes of queries, or have relaxed the notion of worst-case error guarantees. In this paper we consider the large class of sparse queries, which take non-zero values on only polynomially many universe elements. We give efficient query release algorithms for this class, in both the interactive and the non-interactive setting. Our algorithms also achieve better accuracy bounds than previous general techniques do when applied to sparse queries: our bounds are independent of the universe size. In fact, even the runtime of our interactive mechanism is independent of the universe size, and so can be implemented in the "infinite universe" model in which no finite universe need be specified by the data curator.
1111.6843
Understanding the Social Cascading of Geekspeak and the Upshots for Social Cognitive Systems
cs.AI cs.MA
Barring swarm robotics, a substantial share of current machine-human and machine-machine learning and interaction mechanisms are being developed and fed by results of agent-based computer simulations, game-theoretic models, or robotic experiments based on a dyadic communication pattern. Yet, in real life, humans no less frequently communicate in groups, and gain knowledge and take decisions basing on information cumulatively gleaned from more than one single source. These properties should be taken into consideration in the design of autonomous artificial cognitive systems construed to interact with learn from more than one contact or 'neighbour'. To this end, significant practical import can be gleaned from research applying strict science methodology to human and social phenomena, e.g. to discovery of realistic creativity potential spans, or the 'exposure thresholds' after which new information could be accepted by a cognitive agent. The results will be presented of a project analysing the social propagation of neologisms in a microblogging service. From local, low-level interactions and information flows between agents inventing and imitating discrete lexemes we aim to describe the processes of the emergence of more global systemic order and dynamics, using the latest methods of complexity science. Whether in order to mimic them, or to 'enhance' them, parameters gleaned from complexity science approaches to humans' social and humanistic behaviour should subsequently be incorporated as points of reference in the field of robotics and human-machine interaction.
1111.6849
Neuropsychological constraints to human data production on a global scale
cs.SI cs.CC
Which are the factors underlying human information production on a global level? In order to gain an insight into this question we study a corpus of 252-633 Million publicly available data files on the Internet corresponding to an overall storage volume of 284-675 Terabytes. Analyzing the file size distribution for several distinct data types we find indications that the neuropsychological capacity of the human brain to process and record information may constitute the dominant limiting factor for the overall growth of globally stored information, with real-world economic constraints having only a negligible influence. This supposition draws support from the observation that the files size distributions follow a power law for data without a time component, like images, and a log-normal distribution for multimedia files, for which time is a defining qualia.
1111.6857
Multivariate information measures: an experimentalist's perspective
cs.IT cs.LG math.IT physics.data-an stat.AP
Information theory is widely accepted as a powerful tool for analyzing complex systems and it has been applied in many disciplines. Recently, some central components of information theory - multivariate information measures - have found expanded use in the study of several phenomena. These information measures differ in subtle yet significant ways. Here, we will review the information theory behind each measure, as well as examine the differences between these measures by applying them to several simple model systems. In addition to these systems, we will illustrate the usefulness of the information measures by analyzing neural spiking data from a dissociated culture through early stages of its development. We hope that this work will aid other researchers as they seek the best multivariate information measure for their specific research goals and system. Finally, we have made software available online which allows the user to calculate all of the information measures discussed within this paper.
1111.6883
Dynamics of Knowledge in DeLP through Argument Theory Change
cs.AI cs.LO
This article is devoted to the study of methods to change defeasible logic programs (de.l.p.s) which are the knowledge bases used by the Defeasible Logic Programming (DeLP) interpreter. DeLP is an argumentation formalism that allows to reason over potentially inconsistent de.l.p.s. Argument Theory Change (ATC) studies certain aspects of belief revision in order to make them suitable for abstract argumentation systems. In this article, abstract arguments are rendered concrete by using the particular rule-based defeasible logic adopted by DeLP. The objective of our proposal is to define prioritized argument revision operators \`a la ATC for de.l.p.s, in such a way that the newly inserted argument ends up undefeated after the revision, thus warranting its conclusion. In order to ensure this warrant, the de.l.p. has to be changed in concordance with a minimal change principle. To this end, we discuss different minimal change criteria that could be adopted. Finally, an algorithm is presented, implementing the argument revision operations.
1111.6923
Efficient Adaptive Compressive Sensing Using Sparse Hierarchical Learned Dictionaries
stat.ML cs.CV cs.IT math.IT math.PR stat.AP
Recent breakthrough results in compressed sensing (CS) have established that many high dimensional objects can be accurately recovered from a relatively small number of non- adaptive linear projection observations, provided that the objects possess a sparse representation in some basis. Subsequent efforts have shown that the performance of CS can be improved by exploiting the structure in the location of the non-zero signal coefficients (structured sparsity) or using some form of online measurement focusing (adaptivity) in the sensing process. In this paper we examine a powerful hybrid of these two techniques. First, we describe a simple adaptive sensing procedure and show that it is a provably effective method for acquiring sparse signals that exhibit structured sparsity characterized by tree-based coefficient dependencies. Next, employing techniques from sparse hierarchical dictionary learning, we show that representations exhibiting the appropriate form of structured sparsity can be learned from collections of training data. The combination of these techniques results in an effective and efficient adaptive compressive acquisition procedure.
1111.6925
Structure Learning of Probabilistic Graphical Models: A Comprehensive Survey
stat.ML cs.LG
Probabilistic graphical models combine the graph theory and probability theory to give a multivariate statistical modeling. They provide a unified description of uncertainty using probability and complexity using the graphical model. Especially, graphical models provide the following several useful properties: - Graphical models provide a simple and intuitive interpretation of the structures of probabilistic models. On the other hand, they can be used to design and motivate new models. - Graphical models provide additional insights into the properties of the model, including the conditional independence properties. - Complex computations which are required to perform inference and learning in sophisticated models can be expressed in terms of graphical manipulations, in which the underlying mathematical expressions are carried along implicitly. The graphical models have been applied to a large number of fields, including bioinformatics, social science, control theory, image processing, marketing analysis, among others. However, structure learning for graphical models remains an open challenge, since one must cope with a combinatorial search over the space of all possible structures. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the existing structure learning algorithms.
1111.6937
Efficient Discovery of Association Rules and Frequent Itemsets through Sampling with Tight Performance Guarantees
cs.DS cs.DB cs.LG
The tasks of extracting (top-$K$) Frequent Itemsets (FI's) and Association Rules (AR's) are fundamental primitives in data mining and database applications. Exact algorithms for these problems exist and are widely used, but their running time is hindered by the need of scanning the entire dataset, possibly multiple times. High quality approximations of FI's and AR's are sufficient for most practical uses, and a number of recent works explored the application of sampling for fast discovery of approximate solutions to the problems. However, these works do not provide satisfactory performance guarantees on the quality of the approximation, due to the difficulty of bounding the probability of under- or over-sampling any one of an unknown number of frequent itemsets. In this work we circumvent this issue by applying the statistical concept of \emph{Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension} to develop a novel technique for providing tight bounds on the sample size that guarantees approximation within user-specified parameters. Our technique applies both to absolute and to relative approximations of (top-$K$) FI's and AR's. The resulting sample size is linearly dependent on the VC-dimension of a range space associated with the dataset to be mined. The main theoretical contribution of this work is a proof that the VC-dimension of this range space is upper bounded by an easy-to-compute characteristic quantity of the dataset which we call \emph{d-index}, and is the maximum integer $d$ such that the dataset contains at least $d$ transactions of length at least $d$ such that no one of them is a superset of or equal to another. We show that this bound is strict for a large class of datasets.
1111.6983
Aggregation of Composite Solutions: strategies, models, examples
cs.SE cs.AI math.OC
The paper addresses aggregation issues for composite (modular) solutions. A systemic view point is suggested for various aggregation problems. Several solution structures are considered: sets, set morphologies, trees, etc. Mainly, the aggregation approach is targeted to set morphologies. The aggregation problems are based on basic structures as substructure, superstructure, median/consensus, and extended median/consensus. In the last case, preliminary structure is built (e.g., substructure, median/consensus) and addition of solution elements is considered while taking into account profit of the additional elements and total resource constraint. Four aggregation strategies are examined: (i) extension strategy (designing a substructure of initial solutions as "system kernel" and extension of the substructure by additional elements); (ii) compression strategy (designing a superstructure of initial solutions and deletion of some its elements); (iii) combined strategy; and (iv) new design strategy to build a new solution over an extended domain of solution elements. Numerical real-world examples (e.g., telemetry system, communication protocol, student plan, security system, Web-based information system, investment, educational courses) illustrate the suggested aggregation approach.
1111.7025
Task Interaction in an HTN Planner
cs.AI cs.DC
Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning uses task decomposition to plan for an executable sequence of actions as a solution to a problem. In order to reason effectively, an HTN planner needs expressive domain knowledge. For instance, a simplified HTN planning system such as JSHOP2 uses such expressivity and avoids some task interactions due to the increased complexity of the planning process. We address the possibility of simplifying the domain representation needed for an HTN planner to find good solutions, especially in real-world domains describing home and building automation environments. We extend the JSHOP2 planner to reason about task interaction that happens when task's effects are already achieved by other tasks. The planner then prunes some of the redundant searches that can occur due to the planning process's interleaving nature. We evaluate the original and our improved planner on two benchmark domains. We show that our planner behaves better by using simplified domain knowledge and outperforms JSHOP2 in a number of relevant cases.
1111.7033
Stability of Evolving Multi-Agent Systems
cs.MA cs.NE
A Multi-Agent System is a distributed system where the agents or nodes perform complex functions that cannot be written down in analytic form. Multi-Agent Systems are highly connected, and the information they contain is mostly stored in the connections. When agents update their state, they take into account the state of the other agents, and they have access to those states via the connections. There is also external, user-generated input into the Multi-Agent System. As so much information is stored in the connections, agents are often memory-less. This memory-less property, together with the randomness of the external input, has allowed us to model Multi-Agent Systems using Markov chains. In this paper, we look at Multi-Agent Systems that evolve, i.e. the number of agents varies according to the fitness of the individual agents. We extend our Markov chain model, and define stability. This is the start of a methodology to control Multi-Agent Systems. We then build upon this to construct an entropy-based definition for the degree of instability (entropy of the limit probabilities), which we used to perform a stability analysis. We then investigated the stability of evolving agent populations through simulation, and show that the results are consistent with the original definition of stability in non-evolving Multi-Agent Systems, proposed by Chli and De Wilde. This paper forms the theoretical basis for the construction of Digital Business Ecosystems, and applications have been reported elsewhere.
1111.7069
Differential Modulation for Bi-directional Relaying with Analog Network Coding
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we propose an analog network coding scheme with differential modulation (ANC-DM) using amplify-and-forward protocol for bidirectional relay networks when neither the source nodes nor the relay knows the channel state information (CSI). The performance of the proposed ANC-DM scheme is analyzed and a simple asymptotic bit error rate (BER) expression is derived. The analytical results are verified through simulations. It is shown that the BER performance of the proposed differential scheme is about 3 dB away from that of the coherent detection scheme. To improve the system performance, the optimum power allocation between the sources and the relay is determined based on the simplified BER. Simulation results indicate that the proposed differential scheme with optimum power allocation yields 1-2 dB performance improvement over an equal power allocation scheme.
1111.7076
Relay Selection for Two-way Relaying with Amplify-and-Forward Protocols
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we propose a relay selection amplify-and-forward (RS-AF) protocol in general bi-directional relay networks with two sources and $N$ relays. In the proposed scheme, the two sources first transmit to all the relays simultaneously, and then a single relay with a minimum sum symbol error rate (SER) will be selected to broadcast the received signals back to both sources. To facilitate the selection process, we propose a simple sub-optimal Min-Max criterion for relay selection, where a single relay which minimizes the maximum SER of two source nodes will be selected. Simulation results show that the proposed Min-Max selection has almost the same performance as the optimal selection with lower complexity. We also present a simple asymptotic SER expression and make comparison with the conventional all-participate amplify-and-forward (AP-AF) relaying scheme. The analytical results are verified through simulations. To improve the system performance, optimum power allocation (OPA) between the sources and the relay is determined based on the asymptotic SER. Simulation results indicate that the proposed RS-AF scheme with OPA yields considerable performance improvement over an equal power allocation (EPA) scheme, specially with large number of relay nodes.
1111.7078
Joint Relay Selection and Analog Network Coding using Differential Modulation in Two-Way Relay Channels
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we consider a general bi-directional relay network with two sources and N relays when neither the source nodes nor the relays know the channel state information (CSI). A joint relay selection and analog network coding using differential modulation (RS-ANC-DM) is proposed. In the proposed scheme, the two sources employ differential modulations and transmit the differential modulated symbols to all relays at the same time. The signals received at the relay is a superposition of two transmitted symbols, which we call the analog network coded symbols. Then a single relay which has minimum sum SER is selected out of N relays to forward the ANC signals to both sources. To facilitate the selection process, in this paper we also propose a simple sub-optimal Min-Max criterion for relay selection, where a single relay which minimizes the maximum SER of two source nodes is selected. Simulation results show that the proposed Min-Max selection has almost the same performance as the optimal selection, but is much simpler. The performance of the proposed RS-ANC-DM scheme is analyzed, and a simple asymptotic SER expression is derived. The analytical results are verified through simulations.
1111.7088
Uniqueness Analysis of Non-Unitary Matrix Joint Diagonalization
cs.IT math.IT
Matrix Joint Diagonalization (MJD) is a powerful approach for solving the Blind Source Separation (BSS) problem. It relies on the construction of matrices which are diagonalized by the unknown demixing matrix. Their joint diagonalizer serves as a correct estimate of this demixing matrix only if it is uniquely determined. Thus, a critical question is under what conditions a joint diagonalizer is unique. In the present work we fully answer this question about the identifiability of MJD based BSS approaches and provide a general result on uniqueness conditions of matrix joint diagonalization. It unifies all existing results which exploit the concepts of non-circularity, non-stationarity, non-whiteness, and non-Gaussianity. As a corollary, we propose a solution for complex BSS, which can be formulated in a closed form in terms of an eigenvalue and a singular value decomposition of two matrices.
1111.7094
Multi-Gateway Cooperation in Multibeam Satellite Systems
cs.IT math.IT
Multibeam systems with hundreds of beams have been recently deployed in order to provide higher capacities by employing fractional frequency reuse. Furthermore, employing full frequency reuse and precoding over multiple beams has shown great throughput potential in literature. However, feeding all this data from a single gateway is not feasible based on the current frequency allocations. In this context, we investigate a range of scenarios involving beam clusters where each cluster is managed by a single gateway. More specifically, the following cases are considered for handling intercluster interference: a) conventional frequency colouring, b) joint processing within cluster, c) partial CSI sharing among clusters, d) partial CSI and data sharing among clusters. CSI sharing does not provide considerable performance gains with respect to b) but combined with data sharing offers roughly a 40% improvement over a) and a 15% over b).
1111.7100
Determining a rotation of a tetrahedron from a projection
math.MG cs.CG cs.CV
The following problem, arising from medical imaging, is addressed: Suppose that $T$ is a known tetrahedron in $\R^3$ with centroid at the origin. Also known is the orthogonal projection $U$ of the vertices of the image $\phi T$ of $T$ under an unknown rotation $\phi$ about the origin. Under what circumstances can $\phi$ be determined from $T$ and $U$?
1111.7104
On the Minimum Differential Feedback for Time-Correlated MIMO Rayleigh Block-Fading Channels
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we consider a general multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system with channel state information (CSI) feedback over time-correlated Rayleigh block-fading channels. Specifically, we first derive the closed-form expression of the minimum differential feedback rate to achieve the maximum erdodic capacity in the presence of channel estimation errors and quantization distortion at the receiver. With the feedback-channel transmission rate constraint, in the periodic feedback system, we further investigate the relationship of the ergodic capacity and the differential feedback interval, and we find by theoretical analysis that there exists an optimal differential feedback interval to maximize ergodic capacity. Finally, analytical results are verified through simulations in a practical periodic differential feedback system using Lloyd's quantization algorithm.
1111.7108
Joint Relay and Jammer Selection for Secure Two-Way Relay Networks
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we investigate joint relay and jammer selection in two-way cooperative networks, consisting of two sources, a number of intermediate nodes, and one eavesdropper, with the constraints of physical layer security. Specifically, the proposed algorithms select two or three intermediate nodes to enhance security against the malicious eavesdropper. The first selected node operates in the conventional relay mode and assists the sources to deliver their data to the corresponding destinations using an amplify-and-forward protocol. The second and third nodes are used in different communication phases as jammers in order to create intentional interference upon the eavesdropper node. Firstly, we find that in a topology where the intermediate nodes are randomly and sparsely distributed, the proposed schemes with cooperative jamming outperform the conventional non-jamming schemes within a certain transmitted power regime. We also find that, in the scenario in which the intermediate nodes gather as a close cluster, the jamming schemes may be less effective than their non-jamming counterparts. Therefore, we introduce a hybrid scheme to switch between jamming and non-jamming modes. Simulation results validate our theoretical analysis and show that the hybrid switching scheme further improves the secrecy rate.
1111.7164
PARIS: Probabilistic Alignment of Relations, Instances, and Schema
cs.DB
One of the main challenges that the Semantic Web faces is the integration of a growing number of independently designed ontologies. In this work, we present PARIS, an approach for the automatic alignment of ontologies. PARIS aligns not only instances, but also relations and classes. Alignments at the instance level cross-fertilize with alignments at the schema level. Thereby, our system provides a truly holistic solution to the problem of ontology alignment. The heart of the approach is probabilistic, i.e., we measure degrees of matchings based on probability estimates. This allows PARIS to run without any parameter tuning. We demonstrate the efficiency of the algorithm and its precision through extensive experiments. In particular, we obtain a precision of around 90% in experiments with some of the world's largest ontologies.
1111.7165
Answering Top-k Queries Over a Mixture of Attractive and Repulsive Dimensions
cs.DB
In this paper, we formulate a top-k query that compares objects in a database to a user-provided query object on a novel scoring function. The proposed scoring function combines the idea of attractive and repulsive dimensions into a general framework to overcome the weakness of traditional distance or similarity measures. We study the properties of the proposed class of scoring functions and develop efficient and scalable index structures that index the isolines of the function. We demonstrate various scenarios where the query finds application. Empirical evaluation demonstrates a performance gain of one to two orders of magnitude on querying time over existing state-of-the-art top-k techniques. Further, a qualitative analysis is performed on a real dataset to highlight the potential of the proposed query in discovering hidden data characteristics.
1111.7166
PIQL: Success-Tolerant Query Processing in the Cloud
cs.DB
Newly-released web applications often succumb to a "Success Disaster," where overloaded database machines and resulting high response times destroy a previously good user experience. Unfortunately, the data independence provided by a traditional relational database system, while useful for agile development, only exacerbates the problem by hiding potentially expensive queries under simple declarative expressions. As a result, developers of these applications are increasingly abandoning relational databases in favor of imperative code written against distributed key/value stores, losing the many benefits of data independence in the process. Instead, we propose PIQL, a declarative language that also provides scale independence by calculating an upper bound on the number of key/value store operations that will be performed for any query. Coupled with a service level objective (SLO) compliance prediction model and PIQL's scalable database architecture, these bounds make it easy for developers to write success-tolerant applications that support an arbitrarily large number of users while still providing acceptable performance. In this paper, we present the PIQL query processing system and evaluate its scale independence on hundreds of machines using two benchmarks, TPC-W and SCADr.
1111.7167
gSketch: On Query Estimation in Graph Streams
cs.DB
Many dynamic applications are built upon large network infrastructures, such as social networks, communication networks, biological networks and the Web. Such applications create data that can be naturally modeled as graph streams, in which edges of the underlying graph are received and updated sequentially in a form of a stream. It is often necessary and important to summarize the behavior of graph streams in order to enable effective query processing. However, the sheer size and dynamic nature of graph streams present an enormous challenge to existing graph management techniques. In this paper, we propose a new graph sketch method, gSketch, which combines well studied synopses for traditional data streams with a sketch partitioning technique, to estimate and optimize the responses to basic queries on graph streams. We consider two different scenarios for query estimation: (1) A graph stream sample is available; (2) Both a graph stream sample and a query workload sample are available. Algorithms for different scenarios are designed respectively by partitioning a global sketch to a group of localized sketches in order to optimize the query estimation accuracy. We perform extensive experimental studies on both real and synthetic data sets and demonstrate the power and robustness of gSketch in comparison with the state-of-the-art global sketch method.
1111.7168
Indexing the Earth Mover's Distance Using Normal Distributions
cs.DB
Querying uncertain data sets (represented as probability distributions) presents many challenges due to the large amount of data involved and the difficulties comparing uncertainty between distributions. The Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) has increasingly been employed to compare uncertain data due to its ability to effectively capture the differences between two distributions. Computing the EMD entails finding a solution to the transportation problem, which is computationally intensive. In this paper, we propose a new lower bound to the EMD and an index structure to significantly improve the performance of EMD based K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) queries on uncertain databases. We propose a new lower bound to the EMD that approximates the EMD on a projection vector. Each distribution is projected onto a vector and approximated by a normal distribution, as well as an accompanying error term. We then represent each normal as a point in a Hough transformed space. We then use the concept of stochastic dominance to implement an efficient index structure in the transformed space. We show that our method significantly decreases K-NN query time on uncertain databases. The index structure also scales well with database cardinality. It is well suited for heterogeneous data sets, helping to keep EMD based queries tractable as uncertain data sets become larger and more complex.
1111.7169
Size-l Object Summaries for Relational Keyword Search
cs.DB
A previously proposed keyword search paradigm produces, as a query result, a ranked list of Object Summaries (OSs). An OS is a tree structure of related tuples that summarizes all data held in a relational database about a particular Data Subject (DS). However, some of these OSs are very large in size and therefore unfriendly to users that initially prefer synoptic information before proceeding to more comprehensive information about a particular DS. In this paper, we investigate the effective and efficient retrieval of concise and informative OSs. We argue that a good size-l OS should be a stand-alone and meaningful synopsis of the most important information about the particular DS. More precisely, we define a size-l OS as a partial OS composed of l important tuples. We propose three algorithms for the efficient generation of size-l OSs (in addition to the optimal approach which requires exponential time). Experimental evaluation on DBLP and TPC-H databases verifies the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.
1111.7170
REX: Explaining Relationships between Entity Pairs
cs.DB
Knowledge bases of entities and relations (either constructed manually or automatically) are behind many real world search engines, including those at Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google. Those knowledge bases can be viewed as graphs with nodes representing entities and edges representing (primary) relationships, and various studies have been conducted on how to leverage them to answer entity seeking queries. Meanwhile, in a complementary direction, analyses over the query logs have enabled researchers to identify entity pairs that are statistically correlated. Such entity relationships are then presented to search users through the "related searches" feature in modern search engines. However, entity relationships thus discovered can often be "puzzling" to the users because why the entities are connected is often indescribable. In this paper, we propose a novel problem called "entity relationship explanation", which seeks to explain why a pair of entities are connected, and solve this challenging problem by integrating the above two complementary approaches, i.e., we leverage the knowledge base to "explain" the connections discovered between entity pairs. More specifically, we present REX, a system that takes a pair of entities in a given knowledge base as input and efficiently identifies a ranked list of relationship explanations. We formally define relationship explanations and analyze their desirable properties. Furthermore, we design and implement algorithms to efficiently enumerate and rank all relationship explanations based on multiple measures of "interestingness." We perform extensive experiments over real web-scale data gathered from DBpedia and a commercial search engine, demonstrating the efficiency and scalability of REX. We also perform user studies to corroborate the effectiveness of explanations generated by REX.
1111.7171
PASS-JOIN: A Partition-based Method for Similarity Joins
cs.DB
As an essential operation in data cleaning, the similarity join has attracted considerable attention from the database community. In this paper, we study string similarity joins with edit-distance constraints, which find similar string pairs from two large sets of strings whose edit distance is within a given threshold. Existing algorithms are efficient either for short strings or for long strings, and there is no algorithm that can efficiently and adaptively support both short strings and long strings. To address this problem, we propose a partition-based method called Pass-Join. Pass-Join partitions a string into a set of segments and creates inverted indices for the segments. Then for each string, Pass-Join selects some of its substrings and uses the selected substrings to find candidate pairs using the inverted indices. We devise efficient techniques to select the substrings and prove that our method can minimize the number of selected substrings. We develop novel pruning techniques to efficiently verify the candidate pairs. Experimental results show that our algorithms are efficient for both short strings and long strings, and outperform state-of-the-art methods on real datasets.
1111.7190
Developing Embodied Multisensory Dialogue Agents
cs.AI cs.CL
A few decades of work in the AI field have focused efforts on developing a new generation of systems which can acquire knowledge via interaction with the world. Yet, until very recently, most such attempts were underpinned by research which predominantly regarded linguistic phenomena as separated from the brain and body. This could lead one into believing that to emulate linguistic behaviour, it suffices to develop 'software' operating on abstract representations that will work on any computational machine. This picture is inaccurate for several reasons, which are elucidated in this paper and extend beyond sensorimotor and semantic resonance. Beginning with a review of research, I list several heterogeneous arguments against disembodied language, in an attempt to draw conclusions for developing embodied multisensory agents which communicate verbally and non-verbally with their environment. Without taking into account both the architecture of the human brain, and embodiment, it is unrealistic to replicate accurately the processes which take place during language acquisition, comprehension, production, or during non-linguistic actions. While robots are far from isomorphic with humans, they could benefit from strengthened associative connections in the optimization of their processes and their reactivity and sensitivity to environmental stimuli, and in situated human-machine interaction. The concept of multisensory integration should be extended to cover linguistic input and the complementary information combined from temporally coincident sensory impressions.
1111.7219
Optoelectronic Reservoir Computing
cs.ET cs.LG cs.NE nlin.CD physics.optics
Reservoir computing is a recently introduced, highly efficient bio-inspired approach for processing time dependent data. The basic scheme of reservoir computing consists of a non linear recurrent dynamical system coupled to a single input layer and a single output layer. Within these constraints many implementations are possible. Here we report an opto-electronic implementation of reservoir computing based on a recently proposed architecture consisting of a single non linear node and a delay line. Our implementation is sufficiently fast for real time information processing. We illustrate its performance on tasks of practical importance such as nonlinear channel equalization and speech recognition, and obtain results comparable to state of the art digital implementations.
1111.7221
An Optimal Controller Architecture for Poset-Causal Systems
math.OC cs.SY
We propose a novel and natural architecture for decentralized control that is applicable whenever the underlying system has the structure of a partially ordered set (poset). This controller architecture is based on the concept of Moebius inversion for posets, and enjoys simple and appealing separation properties, since the closed-loop dynamics can be analyzed in terms of decoupled subsystems. The controller structure provides rich and interesting connections between concepts from order theory such as Moebius inversion and control-theoretic concepts such as state prediction, correction, and separability. In addition, using our earlier results on H_2-optimal decentralized control for arbitrary posets, we prove that the H_2-optimal controller in fact possesses the proposed structure, thereby establishing the optimality of the new controller architecture.
1111.7224
Generating Exact- and Ranked Partially-Matched Answers to Questions in Advertisements
cs.DB
Taking advantage of the Web, many advertisements (ads for short) websites, which aspire to increase client's transactions and thus profits, offer searching tools which allow users to (i) post keyword queries to capture their information needs or (ii) invoke form-based interfaces to create queries by selecting search options, such as a price range, filled-in entries, check boxes, or drop-down menus. These search mechanisms, however, are inadequate, since they cannot be used to specify a natural-language query with rich syntactic and semantic content, which can only be handled by a question answering (QA) system. Furthermore, existing ads websites are incapable of evaluating arbitrary Boolean queries or retrieving partiallymatched answers that might be of interest to the user whenever a user's search yields only a few or no results at all. In solving these problems, we present a QA system for ads, called CQAds, which (i) allows users to post a natural-language question Q for retrieving relevant ads, if they exist, (ii) identifies ads as answers that partially-match the requested information expressed in Q, if insufficient or no answers to Q can be retrieved, which are ordered using a similarity-ranking approach, and (iii) analyzes incomplete or ambiguous questions to perform the "best guess" in retrieving answers that "best match" the selection criteria specified in Q. CQAds is also equipped with a Boolean model to evaluate Boolean operators that are either explicitly or implicitly specified in Q, i.e., with or without Boolean operators specified by the users, respectively. CQAds is easy to use, scalable to all ads domains, and more powerful than search tools provided by existing ads websites, since its query-processing strategy retrieves relevant ads of higher quality and quantity. We have verified the accuracy of CQAds in retrieving ads on eight ads domains and compared it...[truncated].
1111.7265
Linear Correction of Mismatched L-values in BICM receivers
cs.IT math.IT
In this work we analyze the problem of linear correction of the reliability metrics (L-values) in BICM receivers. We want to find the correction factors that minimize the probability of error of a maximum likelihood decoder that uses the corrected L-values. To this end, we use the efficient approximation of the pairwise error probability in the domain of the cumulant generating functions (CGF) of the L-values and conclude that the optimal correction factors are equal to the twice of the saddlepoint of the CGF. We provide a simple numerical example of transmission in the presence of interference where we demonstrate a notable improvement attainable with the proposed method. The proposed method is compared with the one based on the maximization of generalized mutual information.
1111.7271
Invariant texture analysis through Local Binary Patterns
cs.CV
In many image processing applications, such as segmentation and classification, the selection of robust features descriptors is crucial to improve the discrimination capabilities in real world scenarios. In particular, it is well known that image textures constitute power visual cues for feature extraction and classification. In the past few years the local binary pattern (LBP) approach, a texture descriptor method proposed by Ojala et al., has gained increased acceptance due to its computational simplicity and more importantly for encoding a powerful signature for describing textures. However, the original algorithm presents some limitations such as noise sensitivity and its lack of rotational invariance which have led to many proposals or extensions in order to overcome such limitations. In this paper we performed a quantitative study of the Ojala's original LBP proposal together with other recently proposed LBP extensions in the presence of rotational, illumination and noisy changes. In the experiments we have considered two different databases: Brodatz and CUReT for different sizes of LBP masks. Experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of the described texture descriptors for images that are subjected to geometric or radiometric changes.
1111.7295
A Learning Framework for Self-Tuning Histograms
cs.DB cs.LG
In this paper, we consider the problem of estimating self-tuning histograms using query workloads. To this end, we propose a general learning theoretic formulation. Specifically, we use query feedback from a workload as training data to estimate a histogram with a small memory footprint that minimizes the expected error on future queries. Our formulation provides a framework in which different approaches can be studied and developed. We first study the simple class of equi-width histograms and present a learning algorithm, EquiHist, that is competitive in many settings. We also provide formal guarantees for equi-width histograms that highlight scenarios in which equi-width histograms can be expected to succeed or fail. We then go beyond equi-width histograms and present a novel learning algorithm, SpHist, for estimating general histograms. Here we use Haar wavelets to reduce the problem of learning histograms to that of learning a sparse vector. Both algorithms have multiple advantages over existing methods: 1) simple and scalable extensions to multi-dimensional data, 2) scalability with number of histogram buckets and size of query feedback, 3) natural extensions to incorporate new feedback and handle database updates. We demonstrate these advantages over the current state-of-the-art, ISOMER, through detailed experiments on real and synthetic data. In particular, we show that SpHist obtains up to 50% less error than ISOMER on real-world multi-dimensional datasets.
1112.0031
Neighborhoods are good communities
cs.SI cs.DM cs.DS physics.soc-ph
The communities of a social network are sets of vertices with more connections inside the set than outside. We theoretically demonstrate that two commonly observed properties of social networks, heavy-tailed degree distributions and large clustering coefficients, imply the existence of vertex neighborhoods (also known as egonets) that are themselves good communities. We evaluate these neighborhood communities on a range of graphs. What we find is that the neighborhood communities often exhibit conductance scores that are as good as the Fiedler cut. Also, the conductance of neighborhood communities shows similar behavior as the network community profile computed with a personalized PageRank community detection method. The latter requires sweeping over a great many starting vertices, which can be expensive. By using a small and easy-to-compute set of neighborhood communities as seeds for these PageRank communities, however, we find communities that precisely capture the behavior of the network community profile when seeded everywhere in the graph, and at a significant reduction in total work.
1112.0032
A model of Cross Language Retrieval for IT domain papers through a map of ACM Computing Classification System
cs.DL cs.HC cs.IR
This article presents a concept model, and the associated tool to help advanced learners to find adapted bibliography. The purpose is the use of an IT representation as educational research software for newcomers in research. We use an ontology based on the ACM's Computing Classification System in order to find scientific articles directly related to the new researcher's domain without any formal request. An ontology translation in French is automatically proposed and can be based on Web 2.0 enhanced by a community of users. A visualization and navigation model is proposed to make it more accessible and examples are given to show the interface of our tool: Ontology Navigator.
1112.0038
Information Theoretic Authentication and Secrecy Codes in the Splitting Model
cs.CR cs.IT math.IT
In the splitting model, information theoretic authentication codes allow non-deterministic encoding, that is, several messages can be used to communicate a particular plaintext. Certain applications require that the aspect of secrecy should hold simultaneously. Ogata-Kurosawa-Stinson-Saido (2004) have constructed optimal splitting authentication codes achieving perfect secrecy for the special case when the number of keys equals the number of messages. In this paper, we establish a construction method for optimal splitting authentication codes with perfect secrecy in the more general case when the number of keys may differ from the number of messages. To the best knowledge, this is the first result of this type.
1112.0045
CytoITMprobe: a network information flow plugin for Cytoscape
q-bio.QM cs.DB q-bio.MN
To provide the Cytoscape users the possibility of integrating ITM Probe into their workflows, we developed CytoITMprobe, a new Cytoscape plugin. CytoITMprobe maintains all the desirable features of ITM Probe and adds additional flexibility not achievable through its web service version. It provides access to ITM Probe either through a web server or locally. The input, consisting of a Cytoscape network, together with the desired origins and/or destinations of information and a dissipation coefficient, is specified through a query form. The results are shown as a subnetwork of significant nodes and several summary tables. Users can control the composition and appearance of the subnetwork and interchange their ITM Probe results with other software tools through tab-delimited files. The main strength of CytoITMprobe is its flexibility. It allows the user to specify as input any Cytoscape network, rather than being restricted to the pre-compiled protein-protein interaction networks available through the ITM Probe web service. Users may supply their own edge weights and directionalities. Consequently, as opposed to ITM Probe web service, CytoITMprobe can be applied to many other domains of network-based research beyond protein-networks. It also enables seamless integration of ITM Probe results with other Cytoscape plugins having complementary functionality for data analysis.
1112.0049
Popularity-Driven Networking
cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI math.PR physics.soc-ph
We investigate the growth of connectivity in a network. In our model, starting with a set of disjoint nodes, links are added sequentially. Each link connects two nodes, and the connection rate governing this random process is proportional to the degrees of the two nodes. Interestingly, this network exhibits two abrupt transitions, both occurring at finite times. The first is a percolation transition in which a giant component, containing a finite fraction of all nodes, is born. The second is a condensation transition in which the entire system condenses into a single, fully connected, component. We derive the size distribution of connected components as well as the degree distribution, which is purely exponential throughout the evolution. Furthermore, we present a criterion for the emergence of sudden condensation for general homogeneous connection rates.
1112.0052
Query Optimization Using Genetic Algorithms in the Vector Space Model
cs.IR
In information retrieval research; Genetic Algorithms (GA) can be used to find global solutions in many difficult problems. This study used different similarity measures (Dice, Inner Product) in the VSM, for each similarity measure we compared ten different GA approaches based on different fitness functions, different mutations and different crossover strategies to find the best strategy and fitness function that can be used when the data collection is the Arabic language. Our results shows that the GA approach which uses one-point crossover operator, point mutation and Inner Product similarity as a fitness function is the best IR system in VSM.
1112.0054
Improving the User Query for the Boolean Model Using Genetic Algorithms
cs.IR
The Use of genetic algorithms in the Information retrieval (IR) area, especially in optimizing a user query in Arabic data collections is presented in this paper. Very little research has been carried out on Arabic text collections. Boolean model have been used in this research. To optimize the query using GA we used different fitness functions, different mutation strategies to find which is the best strategy and fitness function that can be used with Boolean model when the data collection is the Arabic language. Our results show that the best GA strategy for the Boolean model is the GA (M2, Precision) method.
1112.0057
Flip-OFDM for Unipolar Communication Systems
cs.IT math.IT
Unipolar communications systems can transmit information using only real and positive signals. This includes a variety of physical channels ranging from optical (fiber or free-space), to RF wireless using amplitude modulation with non-coherent reception, to baseband single wire communications. Unipolar OFDM techniques enable to efficiently compensate frequency selective distortion in the unipolar communication systems. One of the leading examples of unipolar OFDM is asymmetric clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) originally proposed for optical communications. Flip-OFDM is an alternative approach that was proposed in a patent, but its performance and full potentials have never been investigated in the literature. In this paper, we first compare Flip-OFDM and ACO-OFDM, and show that both techniques have the same performance but different complexities (Flip-OFDM offers 50% saving). We then propose a new detection scheme, which enables to reduce the noise at the Flip-OFDM receiver by almost 3dB. The analytical performance of the noise filtering schemes is supported by the simulation results.
1112.0059
Local Naive Bayes Nearest Neighbor for Image Classification
cs.CV
We present Local Naive Bayes Nearest Neighbor, an improvement to the NBNN image classification algorithm that increases classification accuracy and improves its ability to scale to large numbers of object classes. The key observation is that only the classes represented in the local neighborhood of a descriptor contribute significantly and reliably to their posterior probability estimates. Instead of maintaining a separate search structure for each class, we merge all of the reference data together into one search structure, allowing quick identification of a descriptor's local neighborhood. We show an increase in classification accuracy when we ignore adjustments to the more distant classes and show that the run time grows with the log of the number of classes rather than linearly in the number of classes as did the original. This gives a 100 times speed-up over the original method on the Caltech 256 dataset. We also provide the first head-to-head comparison of NBNN against spatial pyramid methods using a common set of input features. We show that local NBNN outperforms all previous NBNN based methods and the original spatial pyramid model. However, we find that local NBNN, while competitive with, does not beat state-of-the-art spatial pyramid methods that use local soft assignment and max-pooling.
1112.0061
On the Entropy Region of Gaussian Random Variables
cs.IT math.IT
Given n (discrete or continuous) random variables X_i, the (2^n-1)-dimensional vector obtained by evaluating the joint entropy of all non-empty subsets of {X_1,...,X_n} is called an entropic vector. Determining the region of entropic vectors is an important open problem with many applications in information theory. Recently, it has been shown that the entropy regions for discrete and continuous random variables, though different, can be determined from one another. An important class of continuous random variables are those that are vector-valued and jointly Gaussian. In this paper we give a full characterization of the convex cone of the entropy region of three jointly Gaussian vector-valued random variables and prove that it is the same as the convex cone of three scalar-valued Gaussian random variables and further that it yields the entire entropy region of 3 arbitrary random variables. We further determine the actual entropy region of 3 vector-valued jointly Gaussian random variables through a conjecture. For n>=4 number of random variables, we point out a set of 2^n-1-n(n+1)/2 minimal necessary and sufficient conditions that 2^n-1 numbers must satisfy in order to correspond to the entropy vector of n scalar jointly Gaussian random variables. This improves on a result of Holtz and Sturmfels which gave a nonminimal set of conditions. These constraints are related to Cayley's hyperdeterminant and hence with an eye towards characterizing the entropy region of jointly Gaussian random variables, we also present some new results in this area. We obtain a new (determinant) formula for the 2*2*2 hyperdeterminant and we also give a new (transparent) proof of the fact that the principal minors of an n*n symmetric matrix satisfy the 2*2*...*2 (up to n times) hyperdeterminant relations.
1112.0062
A new class of hyper-bent Boolean functions in binomial forms
cs.IT math.IT
Bent functions, which are maximally nonlinear Boolean functions with even numbers of variables and whose Hamming distance to the set of all affine functions equals $2^{n-1}\pm 2^{\frac{n}{2}-1}$, were introduced by Rothaus in 1976 when he considered problems in combinatorics. Bent functions have been extensively studied due to their applications in cryptography, such as S-box, block cipher and stream cipher. Further, they have been applied to coding theory, spread spectrum and combinatorial design. Hyper-bent functions, as a special class of bent functions, were introduced by Youssef and Gong in 2001, which have stronger properties and rarer elements. Many research focus on the construction of bent and hyper-bent functions. In this paper, we consider functions defined over $\mathbb{F}_{2^n}$ by $f_{a,b}:=\mathrm{Tr}_{1}^{n}(ax^{(2^m-1)})+\mathrm{Tr}_{1}^{4}(bx^{\frac{2^n-1}{5}})$, where $n=2m$, $m\equiv 2\pmod 4$, $a\in \mathbb{F}_{2^m}$ and $b\in\mathbb{F}_{16}$. When $a\in \mathbb{F}_{2^m}$ and $(b+1)(b^4+b+1)=0$, with the help of Kloosterman sums and the factorization of $x^5+x+a^{-1}$, we present a characterization of hyper-bentness of $f_{a,b}$. Further, we use generalized Ramanujan-Nagell equations to characterize hyper-bent functions of $f_{a,b}$ in the case $a\in\mathbb{F}_{2^{\frac{m}{2}}}$.
1112.0071
Robustly Stable Signal Recovery in Compressed Sensing with Structured Matrix Perturbation
cs.IT math.IT
The sparse signal recovery in the standard compressed sensing (CS) problem requires that the sensing matrix be known a priori. Such an ideal assumption may not be met in practical applications where various errors and fluctuations exist in the sensing instruments. This paper considers the problem of compressed sensing subject to a structured perturbation in the sensing matrix. Under mild conditions, it is shown that a sparse signal can be recovered by $\ell_1$ minimization and the recovery error is at most proportional to the measurement noise level, which is similar to the standard CS result. In the special noise free case, the recovery is exact provided that the signal is sufficiently sparse with respect to the perturbation level. The formulated structured sensing matrix perturbation is applicable to the direction of arrival estimation problem, so has practical relevance. Algorithms are proposed to implement the $\ell_1$ minimization problem and numerical simulations are carried out to verify the result obtained.
1112.0077
Immunization for complex network based on the effective degree of vertex
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
The basic idea of many effective immunization strategies is first to rank the importance of vertices according to the degrees of vertices and then remove the vertices from highest importance to lowest until the network becomes disconnected. Here we define the effective degrees of vertex, i.e., the number of its connections linking to un-immunized nodes in current network during the immunization procedure, to rank the importance of vertex, and modify these strategies by using the effective degrees of vertices. Simulations on both the scale-free network models with various degree correlations and two real networks have revealed that the immunization strategies based on the effective degrees are often more effective than those based on the degrees in the initial network.
1112.0101
Dynamic Intrusion Detection in Resource-Constrained Cyber Networks
cs.SY math.DS math.OC
We consider a large-scale cyber network with N components (e.g., paths, servers, subnets). Each component is either in a healthy state (0) or an abnormal state (1). Due to random intrusions, the state of each component transits from 0 to 1 over time according to certain stochastic process. At each time, a subset of K (K < N) components are checked and those observed in abnormal states are fixed. The objective is to design the optimal scheduling for intrusion detection such that the long-term network cost incurred by all abnormal components is minimized. We formulate the problem as a special class of Restless Multi-Armed Bandit (RMAB) process. A general RMAB suffers from the curse of dimensionality (PSPACE-hard) and numerical methods are often inapplicable. We show that, for this class of RMAB, Whittle index exists and can be obtained in closed form, leading to a low-complexity implementation of Whittle index policy with a strong performance. For homogeneous components, Whittle index policy is shown to have a simple structure that does not require any prior knowledge on the intrusion processes. Based on this structure, Whittle index policy is further shown to be optimal over a finite time horizon with an arbitrary length. Beyond intrusion detection, these results also find applications in queuing networks with finite-size buffers.
1112.0126
An automaton approach for waiting times in DNA evolution
cs.DM cs.CE cs.FL q-bio.PE
In a recent article, Behrens and Vingron (JCB 17, 12, 2010) compute waiting times for k-mers to appear during DNA evolution under the assumption that the considered k-mers do not occur in the initial DNA sequence, an issue arising when studying the evolution of regulatory DNA sequences with regard to transcription factor (TF) binding site emergence. The mathematical analysis underlying their computation assumes that occurrences of words under interest do not overlap. We relax here this assumption by use of an automata approach. In an alphabet of size 4 like the DNA alphabet, most words have no or a low autocorrelation; therefore, globally, our results confirm those of Behrens and Vingron. The outcome is quite different when considering highly autocorrelated k-mers; in this case, the autocorrelation pushes down the probability of occurrence of these k-mers at generation 1 and, consequently, increases the waiting time for apparition of these k-mers up to 40%. An analysis of existing TF binding sites unveils a significant proportion of k-mers exhibiting autocorrelation. Thus, our computations based on automata greatly improve the accuracy of predicting waiting times for the emergence of TF binding sites to appear during DNA evolution. We do the computation in the Bernoulli or M0 model; computations in the M1 model, a Markov model of order 1, are more costly in terms of time and memory but should produce similar results. While Behrens and Vingron considered specifically promoters of length 1000, we extend the results to promoters of any size; we exhibit the property that the probability that a k-mer occurs at generation time 1 while being absent at time 0 behaves linearly with respect to the length of the promoter, which induces a hyperbolic behaviour of the waiting time of any k-mer with respect to the length of the promoter.
1112.0136
Sampling High-Dimensional Bandlimited Fields on Low-Dimensional Manifolds
cs.IT math.IT
Consider the task of sampling and reconstructing a bandlimited spatial field in $\Re^2$ using moving sensors that take measurements along their path. It is inexpensive to increase the sampling rate along the paths of the sensors but more expensive to increase the total distance traveled by the sensors per unit area, which we call the \emph{path density}. In this paper we introduce the problem of designing sensor trajectories that are minimal in path density subject to the condition that the measurements of the field on these trajectories admit perfect reconstruction of bandlimited fields. We study various possible designs of sampling trajectories. Generalizing some ideas from the classical theory of sampling on lattices, we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions on the trajectories for perfect reconstruction. We show that a single set of equispaced parallel lines has the lowest path density from certain restricted classes of trajectories that admit perfect reconstruction. We then generalize some of our results to higher dimensions. We first obtain results on designing sampling trajectories in higher dimensional fields. Further, interpreting trajectories as 1-dimensional manifolds, we extend some of our ideas to higher dimensional sampling manifolds. We formulate the problem of designing $\kappa$-dimensional sampling manifolds for $d$-dimensional spatial fields that are minimal in \emph{manifold density}, a natural generalization of the path density. We show that our results on sampling trajectories for fields in $\Re^2$ can be generalized to analogous results on $d-1$-dimensional sampling manifolds for $d$-dimensional spatial fields.
1112.0147
Q-Adapted Quantum Stochastic Integrals and Differentials in Fock Scale
math-ph cs.IT math.IT math.MP math.QA quant-ph
In this paper we first introduce the Fock-Guichardet formalism for the quantum stochastic integration, then the four fundamental processes of the dynamics are introduced in the canonical basis as the operator-valued measures of the QS integration over a space-time. Then rigorous analysis of the QS integrals is carried out, and continuity of the QS derivative is proved. Finally, Q-adapted dynamics is discussed, including Bosonic Q=1, Fermionic Q=-1, and monotone Q=0 quantum dynamics. These may be of particular interest to quantum field theory, quantum open systems, and quantum theory of stochastic processes.
1112.0168
Statistical Sign Language Machine Translation: from English written text to American Sign Language Gloss
cs.CL
This works aims to design a statistical machine translation from English text to American Sign Language (ASL). The system is based on Moses tool with some modifications and the results are synthesized through a 3D avatar for interpretation. First, we translate the input text to gloss, a written form of ASL. Second, we pass the output to the WebSign Plug-in to play the sign. Contributions of this work are the use of a new couple of language English/ASL and an improvement of statistical machine translation based on string matching thanks to Jaro-distance.
1112.0195
Cooperative Beamforming for Dual-Hop Amplify-and-Forward Multi-Antenna Relaying Cellular Networks
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, linear beamforming design for amplify-and-forward relaying cellular networks is considered, in which base station, relay station and mobile terminals are all equipped with multiple antennas. The design is based on minimum mean-square-error criterion, and both uplink and downlink scenarios are considered. It is found that the downlink and uplink beamforming design problems are in the same form, and iterative algorithms with the same structure can be used to solve the design problems. For the specific cases of fully loaded or overloaded uplink systems, a novel algorithm is derived and its relationships with several existing beamforming design algorithms for conventional MIMO or multiuser systems are revealed. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the performance advantage of the proposed design algorithms.
1112.0204
Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures
cs.NI cs.MA cs.NE
We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems, where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity). Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a metaphor.
1112.0210
Mesoscopic approach to minority games in herd regime
nlin.AO cs.MA math.DS q-fin.TR stat.AP
We study minority games in efficient regime. By incorporating the utility function and aggregating agents with similar strategies we develop an effective mesoscale notion of state of the game. Using this approach, the game can be represented as a Markov process with substantially reduced number of states with explicitly computable probabilities. For any payoff, the finiteness of the number of states is proved. Interesting features of an extensive random variable, called aggregated demand, viz. its strong inhomogeneity and presence of patterns in time, can be easily interpreted. Using Markov theory and quenched disorder approach, we can explain important macroscopic characteristics of the game: behavior of variance per capita and predictability of the aggregated demand. We prove that in case of linear payoff many attractors in the state space are possible.
1112.0213
Supervised Learning of Logical Operations in Layered Spiking Neural Networks with Spike Train Encoding
cs.NE q-bio.NC
Few algorithms for supervised training of spiking neural networks exist that can deal with patterns of multiple spikes, and their computational properties are largely unexplored. We demonstrate in a set of simulations that the ReSuMe learning algorithm can be successfully applied to layered neural networks. Input and output patterns are encoded as spike trains of multiple precisely timed spikes, and the network learns to transform the input trains into target output trains. This is done by combining the ReSuMe learning algorithm with multiplicative scaling of the connections of downstream neurons. We show in particular that layered networks with one hidden layer can learn the basic logical operations, including Exclusive-Or, while networks without hidden layer cannot, mirroring an analogous result for layered networks of rate neurons. While supervised learning in spiking neural networks is not yet fit for technical purposes, exploring computational properties of spiking neural networks advances our understanding of how computations can be done with spike trains.
1112.0241
Degree heterogeneity in spatial networks with total cost constraint
physics.soc-ph cs.SI stat.CO
Recently, In [Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 018701 (2010)] the authors studied a spatial network which is constructed from a regular lattice by adding long-range edges (shortcuts) with probability $P_{ij}\sim r_{ij}^{-\alpha}$, where $r_{ij}$ is the Manhattan length of the long-range edges. The total length of the additional edges is subject to a cost constraint ($\sum r=C$). These networks have fixed optimal exponent $\alpha$ for transportation (measured by the average shortest-path length). However, we observe that the degree in such spatial networks is homogenously distributed, which is far different from real networks such as airline systems. In this paper, we propose a method to introduce degree heterogeneity in spatial networks with total cost constraint. Results show that with degree heterogeneity the optimal exponent shifts to a smaller value and the average shortest-path length can further decrease. Moreover, we consider the synchronization on the spatial networks and related results are discussed. Our new model may better reproduce the features of many real transportation systems.
1112.0253
Singularities and global stability of decentralized formations in the plane
math.OC cs.SY
Formation control is concerned with the design of control laws that stabilize agents at given distances from each other, with the constraint that an agent's dynamics can depend only on a subset of other agents. When the information flow graph of the system, which encodes this dependency, is acyclic, simple control laws are known to globally stabilize the system, save for a set of measure zero of initial conditions. The situation has proven to be more complex when the graph contains cycles; in fact, with the exception of the cyclic formation with three agents, which is stabilized with laws similar to the ones of the acyclic case, very little is known about formations with cycles. Moreover, all of the control laws used in the acyclic case fail at stabilizing more complex cyclic formations. In this paper, we explain why this is the case and show that a large class of planar formations with cycles cannot be globally stabilized, even up to sets of measure zero of initial conditions. The approach rests on relating the information flow to singularities in the dynamics of formations. These singularities are in turn shown to make the existence of stable configurations that do not satisfy the prescribed edge lengths generic.
1112.0262
Fairness in society
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Models that explain the economical and political realities of nowadays societies should help all the world's citizens. Yet, the last four years showed that the current models are missing. Here we develop a dynamical society-deciders model showing that the long lasting economical stress can be solved when increasing fairness in nations. fairness is computed for each nation using indicators from economy and politics. Rather than austerity versus spending, the dynamical model suggests that solving crises in western societies is possible with regulations that reduce the stability of the deciders, while shifting wealth in the direction of the people. This shall increase the dynamics among socio-economic classes, further increasing fairness.
1112.0296
AWGN Channel under Time-Varying Amplitude Constraints with Causal Information at the Transmitter
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
We consider the classical AWGN channel where the channel input is constrained to an amplitude constraint that stochastically varies at each channel use, independent of the message. This is an abstraction of an energy harvesting transmitter where the code symbol energy at each channel use is determined by an exogenous energy arrival process and there is no battery for energy storage. At each channel use, an independent realization of the amplitude constraint process is observed by the transmitter causally. This scenario is a state-dependent channel with perfect causal state information at the transmitter. We derive the capacity of this channel using Shannon's coding scheme with causal state information. We prove that the code symbols must be selected from a finite set in the capacity achieving scheme, as in the case of Smith. We numerically study the binary on-off energy arrivals where the amplitude constraint is either zero or a non-zero constant.
1112.0311
Anisotropic Nonlocal Means Denoising
math.ST cs.IT math.IT stat.TH
It has recently been proved that the popular nonlocal means (NLM) denoising algorithm does not optimally denoise images with sharp edges. Its weakness lies in the isotropic nature of the neighborhoods it uses to set its smoothing weights. In response, in this paper we introduce several theoretical and practical anisotropic nonlocal means (ANLM) algorithms and prove that they are near minimax optimal for edge-dominated images from the Horizon class. On real-world test images, an ANLM algorithm that adapts to the underlying image gradients outperforms NLM by a significant margin.
1112.0343
Ontological Queries: Rewriting and Optimization (Extended Version)
cs.DB cs.LO
Ontological queries are evaluated against an ontology rather than directly on a database. The evaluation and optimization of such queries is an intriguing new problem for database research. In this paper we discuss two important aspects of this problem: query rewriting and query optimization. Query rewriting consists of the compilation of an ontological query into an equivalent query against the underlying relational database. The focus here is on soundness and completeness. We review previous results and present a new rewriting algorithm for rather general types of ontological constraints. In particular, we show how a conjunctive query against an ontology can be compiled into a union of conjunctive queries against the underlying database. Ontological query optimization, in this context, attempts to improve this process so to produce possibly small and cost-effective UCQ rewritings for an input query. We review existing optimization methods, and propose an effective new method that works for linear Datalog+/-, a class of Datalog-based rules that encompasses well-known description logics of the DL-Lite family.
1112.0348
Explicit Characterization of Stability Region for Stationary Multi-Queue Multi-Server Systems
math.OC cs.IT cs.SY math.IT
In this paper, we characterize the network stability region (capacity region) of multi-queue multi-server (MQMS) queueing systems with stationary channel distribution and stationary arrival processes. The stability region is specified by a finite set of linear inequalities. We first show that the stability region is a polytope characterized by the finite set of its facet defining hyperplanes. We explicitly determine the coefficients of the linear inequalities describing the facet defining hyperplanes of the stability region polytope. We further derive the necessary and sufficient conditions for the stability of the system for general arrival processes with finite first and second moments. For the case of stationary arrival processes, the derived conditions characterize the system stability region. Furthermore, we obtain an upper bound for the average queueing delay of Maximum Weight (MW) server allocation policy which has been shown in the literature to be a throughput optimal policy for MQMS systems. Using a similar approach, we can characterize the stability region for a fluid model MQMS system. However, the stability region of the fluid model system is described by an infinite number of linear inequalities since in this case the stability region is a convex surface. We present an example where we show that in some cases depending on the channel distribution, the stability region can be characterized by a finite set of non-linear inequalities instead of an infinite number of linear inequalities.
1112.0371
Zigzag Codes: MDS Array Codes with Optimal Rebuilding
cs.IT math.IT
MDS array codes are widely used in storage systems to protect data against erasures. We address the \emph{rebuilding ratio} problem, namely, in the case of erasures, what is the fraction of the remaining information that needs to be accessed in order to rebuild \emph{exactly} the lost information? It is clear that when the number of erasures equals the maximum number of erasures that an MDS code can correct then the rebuilding ratio is 1 (access all the remaining information). However, the interesting and more practical case is when the number of erasures is smaller than the erasure correcting capability of the code. For example, consider an MDS code that can correct two erasures: What is the smallest amount of information that one needs to access in order to correct a single erasure? Previous work showed that the rebuilding ratio is bounded between 1/2 and 3/4, however, the exact value was left as an open problem. In this paper, we solve this open problem and prove that for the case of a single erasure with a 2-erasure correcting code, the rebuilding ratio is 1/2. In general, we construct a new family of $r$-erasure correcting MDS array codes that has optimal rebuilding ratio of $\frac{e}{r}$ in the case of $e$ erasures, $1 \le e \le r$. Our array codes have efficient encoding and decoding algorithms (for the case $r=2$ they use a finite field of size 3) and an optimal update property.
1112.0383
Bounds on and Constructions of Unit Time-Phase Signal Sets
cs.IT math.IT
Digital signals are complex-valued functions on $\Z_n$. Signal sets with certain properties are required in various communication systems. Traditional signal sets consider only the time distortion during transmission. Recently, signal sets against both the time and phase distortion have been studied, and are called {\em time-phase} signal sets. Several constructions of time-phase signal sets are available in the literature. There are a number of bounds on time signal sets (also called codebooks). They are automatically bounds on time-phase signal sets, but are bad bounds. The first objective of this paper is to develop better bounds on time-phase signal sets from known bounds on time signal sets. The second objective of this paper is to construct two series of time-phase signal sets, one of which is optimal.
1112.0391
Robust Lasso with missing and grossly corrupted observations
math.ST cs.IT math.IT stat.TH
This paper studies the problem of accurately recovering a sparse vector $\beta^{\star}$ from highly corrupted linear measurements $y = X \beta^{\star} + e^{\star} + w$ where $e^{\star}$ is a sparse error vector whose nonzero entries may be unbounded and $w$ is a bounded noise. We propose a so-called extended Lasso optimization which takes into consideration sparse prior information of both $\beta^{\star}$ and $e^{\star}$. Our first result shows that the extended Lasso can faithfully recover both the regression as well as the corruption vector. Our analysis relies on the notion of extended restricted eigenvalue for the design matrix $X$. Our second set of results applies to a general class of Gaussian design matrix $X$ with i.i.d rows $\oper N(0, \Sigma)$, for which we can establish a surprising result: the extended Lasso can recover exact signed supports of both $\beta^{\star}$ and $e^{\star}$ from only $\Omega(k \log p \log n)$ observations, even when the fraction of corruption is arbitrarily close to one. Our analysis also shows that this amount of observations required to achieve exact signed support is indeed optimal.
1112.0396
Grammatical Relations of Myanmar Sentences Augmented by Transformation-Based Learning of Function Tagging
cs.CL
In this paper we describe function tagging using Transformation Based Learning (TBL) for Myanmar that is a method of extensions to the previous statistics-based function tagger. Contextual and lexical rules (developed using TBL) were critical in achieving good results. First, we describe a method for expressing lexical relations in function tagging that statistical function tagging are currently unable to express. Function tagging is the preprocessing step to show grammatical relations of the sentences. Then we use the context free grammar technique to clarify the grammatical relations in Myanmar sentences or to output the parse trees. The grammatical relations are the functional structure of a language. They rely very much on the function tag of the tokens. We augment the grammatical relations of Myanmar sentences with transformation-based learning of function tagging.
1112.0404
A Cyclic Representation of Discrete Coordination Procedures
cs.MA cs.DM cs.SY math.OC
We show that any discrete opinion pooling procedure with positive weights can be asymptotically approximated by DeGroot's procedure whose communication digraph is a Hamiltonian cycle with loops. In this cycle, the weight of each arc (which is not a loop) is inversely proportional to the influence of the agent the arc leads to.
1112.0463
Mask Iterative Hard Thresholding Algorithms for Sparse Image Reconstruction of Objects with Known Contour
stat.ML cs.IT math.IT
We develop mask iterative hard thresholding algorithms (mask IHT and mask DORE) for sparse image reconstruction of objects with known contour. The measurements follow a noisy underdetermined linear model common in the compressive sampling literature. Assuming that the contour of the object that we wish to reconstruct is known and that the signal outside the contour is zero, we formulate a constrained residual squared error minimization problem that incorporates both the geometric information (i.e. the knowledge of the object's contour) and the signal sparsity constraint. We first introduce a mask IHT method that aims at solving this minimization problem and guarantees monotonically non-increasing residual squared error for a given signal sparsity level. We then propose a double overrelaxation scheme for accelerating the convergence of the mask IHT algorithm. We also apply convex mask reconstruction approaches that employ a convex relaxation of the signal sparsity constraint. In X-ray computed tomography (CT), we propose an automatic scheme for extracting the convex hull of the inspected object from the measured sinograms; the obtained convex hull is used to capture the object contour information. We compare the proposed mask reconstruction schemes with the existing large-scale sparse signal reconstruction methods via numerical simulations and demonstrate that, by exploiting both the geometric contour information of the underlying image and sparsity of its wavelet coefficients, we can reconstruct this image using a significantly smaller number of measurements than the existing methods.
1112.0467
Merging Belief Propagation and the Mean Field Approximation: A Free Energy Approach
cs.IT math.IT stat.ML
We present a joint message passing approach that combines belief propagation and the mean field approximation. Our analysis is based on the region-based free energy approximation method proposed by Yedidia et al. We show that the message passing fixed-point equations obtained with this combination correspond to stationary points of a constrained region-based free energy approximation. Moreover, we present a convergent implementation of these message passing fixedpoint equations provided that the underlying factor graph fulfills certain technical conditions. In addition, we show how to include hard constraints in the part of the factor graph corresponding to belief propagation. Finally, we demonstrate an application of our method to iterative channel estimation and decoding in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system.
1112.0508
Label Ranking with Abstention: Predicting Partial Orders by Thresholding Probability Distributions (Extended Abstract)
cs.AI
We consider an extension of the setting of label ranking, in which the learner is allowed to make predictions in the form of partial instead of total orders. Predictions of that kind are interpreted as a partial abstention: If the learner is not sufficiently certain regarding the relative order of two alternatives, it may abstain from this decision and instead declare these alternatives as being incomparable. We propose a new method for learning to predict partial orders that improves on an existing approach, both theoretically and empirically. Our method is based on the idea of thresholding the probabilities of pairwise preferences between labels as induced by a predicted (parameterized) probability distribution on the set of all rankings.
1112.0539
Maximal Scheduling in Wireless Networks with Priorities
cs.IT math.IT
We consider a general class of low complexity distributed scheduling algorithms in wireless networks, maximal scheduling with priorities, where a maximal set of transmitting links in each time slot are selected according to certain pre-specified static priorities. The proposed scheduling scheme is simple, which is easily amendable for distributed implementation in practice, such as using inter-frame space (IFS) parameters under the ubiquitous 802.11 protocols. To obtain throughput guarantees, we first analyze the case of maximal scheduling with a fixed priority vector, and formulate a lower bound on its stability region and scheduling efficiency. We further propose a low complexity priority assignment algorithm, which can stabilize any arrival rate that is in the union of the lower bound regions of all priorities. The stability result is proved using fluid limits, and can be applied to very general stochastic arrival processes. Finally, the performance of the proposed prioritized maximal scheduling scheme is verified by simulation results.
1112.0617
Quantum social networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI quant-ph
We introduce a physical approach to social networks (SNs) in which each actor is characterized by a yes-no test on a physical system. This allows us to consider SNs beyond those originated by interactions based on pre-existing properties, as in a classical SN (CSN). As an example of SNs beyond CSNs, we introduce quantum SNs (QSNs) in which actor is characterized by a test of whether or not the system is in a quantum state. We show that QSNs outperform CSNs for a certain task and some graphs. We identify the simplest of these graphs and show that graphs in which QSNs outperform CSNs are increasingly frequent as the number of vertices increases. We also discuss more general SNs and identify the simplest graphs in which QSNs cannot be outperformed.
1112.0655
A Biomimetic Model of the Outer Plexiform Layer by Incorporating Memristive Devices
cs.CV
In this paper we present a biorealistic model for the first part of the early vision processing by incorporating memristive nanodevices. The architecture of the proposed network is based on the organisation and functioning of the outer plexiform layer (OPL) in the vertebrate retina. We demonstrate that memristive devices are indeed a valuable building block for neuromorphic architectures, as their highly non-linear and adaptive response could be exploited for establishing ultra-dense networks with similar dynamics to their biological counterparts. We particularly show that hexagonal memristive grids can be employed for faithfully emulating the smoothing-effect occurring at the OPL for enhancing the dynamic range of the system. In addition, we employ a memristor-based thresholding scheme for detecting the edges of grayscale images, while the proposed system is also evaluated for its adaptation and fault tolerance capacity against different light or noise conditions as well as distinct device yields.
1112.0665
Generalized Thresholding and Online Sparsity-Aware Learning in a Union of Subspaces
cs.IT math.IT
This paper studies a sparse signal recovery task in time-varying (time-adaptive) environments. The contribution of the paper to sparsity-aware online learning is threefold; first, a Generalized Thresholding (GT) operator, which relates to both convex and non-convex penalty functions, is introduced. This operator embodies, in a unified way, the majority of well-known thresholding rules which promote sparsity. Second, a non-convexly constrained, sparsity-promoting, online learning scheme, namely the Adaptive Projection-based Generalized Thresholding (APGT), is developed that incorporates the GT operator with a computational complexity that scales linearly to the number of unknowns. Third, the novel family of partially quasi-nonexpansive mappings is introduced as a functional analytic tool for treating the GT operator. By building upon the rich fixed point theory, the previous class of mappings helps us, also, to establish a link between the GT operator and a union of linear subspaces; a non-convex object which lies at the heart of any sparsity promoting technique, batch or online. Based on such a functional analytic framework, a convergence analysis of the APGT is provided. Furthermore, extensive experiments suggest that the APGT exhibits competitive performance when compared to computationally more demanding alternatives, such as the sparsity-promoting Affine Projection Algorithm (APA)- and Recursive Least Squares (RLS)-based techniques.