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1112.6098
Your browsing behavior for a Big Mac: Economics of Personal Information Online
cs.HC cs.CY cs.SI
Most online services (Google, Facebook etc.) operate by providing a service to users for free, and in return they collect and monetize personal information (PI) of the users. This operational model is inherently economic, as the "good" being traded and monetized is PI. This model is coming under increased scrutiny as online services are moving to capture more PI of users, raising serious privacy concerns. However, little is known on how users valuate different types of PI while being online, as well as the perceptions of users with regards to exploitation of their PI by online service providers. In this paper, we study how users valuate different types of PI while being online, while capturing the context by relying on Experience Sampling. We were able to extract the monetary value that 168 participants put on different pieces of PI. We find that users value their PI related to their offline identities more (3 times) than their browsing behavior. Users also value information pertaining to financial transactions and social network interactions more than activities like search and shopping. We also found that while users are overwhelmingly in favor of exchanging their PI in return for improved online services, they are uncomfortable if these same providers monetize their PI.
1112.6108
Competition among reputations in the 2D Sznajd model: Spontaneous emergence of democratic states
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI
We propose a modification in the Sznajd sociophysics model defined on the square lattice. For this purpose, we consider reputation-a mechanism limiting the agents' persuasive power. The reputation is introduced as a time-dependent score, which can be positive or negative. This mechanism avoids dictatorship (full consensus, all spins parallel) for a wide range of model parameters. We consider two different situations: case 1, in which the agents' reputation increases for each persuaded neighbor, and case 2, in which the agents' reputation increases for each persuasion and decreases when a neighbor keeps his opinion. Our results show that the introduction of reputation avoids full consensus even for initial densities of up spins greater than 1/2. The relaxation times follow a log-normal-like distribution in both cases, but they are larger in case 2 due to the competition among reputations. In addition, we show that the usual phase transition occurs and depends on the initial concentration $d$ of individuals with the same opinion, but the critical points $d_{c}$ in the two cases are different.
1112.6117
On the optimal frequency selectivity to maximize multiuser diversity in an OFDMA scheduling system
cs.IT math.IT
We consider an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) scheduling system. A scheduling unit block consists of contiguous multiple subcarriers. Users are scheduled based on their block average throughput in a proportional fair way. The multiuser diversity gain increases with the degree and dynamic range of channel fluctuations. %Lack of diversity in a limited frequency selective channel may decrease the sum rate. However, a decrease of the block average throughput in a too much selective channel may lessen the sum rate as well. In this paper, we first study optimal channel selectivity in view of maximizing the maximum of the block average throughput of an arbitrary user. Based on this study, we then propose a method to determine a per-user optimal cyclic delay when cyclic delay diversity (CDD) is used to enhance the sum rate by increasing channel selectivity for a limited fluctuating channel. We show that the proposed technique achieves better performance than a conventional fixed cyclic delay scheme and that the throughput is very close to the optimal sum rate possible with CDD.
1112.6209
Building high-level features using large scale unsupervised learning
cs.LG
We consider the problem of building high-level, class-specific feature detectors from only unlabeled data. For example, is it possible to learn a face detector using only unlabeled images? To answer this, we train a 9-layered locally connected sparse autoencoder with pooling and local contrast normalization on a large dataset of images (the model has 1 billion connections, the dataset has 10 million 200x200 pixel images downloaded from the Internet). We train this network using model parallelism and asynchronous SGD on a cluster with 1,000 machines (16,000 cores) for three days. Contrary to what appears to be a widely-held intuition, our experimental results reveal that it is possible to train a face detector without having to label images as containing a face or not. Control experiments show that this feature detector is robust not only to translation but also to scaling and out-of-plane rotation. We also find that the same network is sensitive to other high-level concepts such as cat faces and human bodies. Starting with these learned features, we trained our network to obtain 15.8% accuracy in recognizing 20,000 object categories from ImageNet, a leap of 70% relative improvement over the previous state-of-the-art.
1112.6210
Vectorial FCSR constructed on totally ramified extension of the p-adic numbers
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
In this paper, we introduce a vectorial conception of d-FCSRs to build these registers over any finite field. We describe the structure of d-vectorial FCSRs and we develop an analysis to obtain basic properties like periodicity and the existence of maximal length sequences. To illustrate these vectorial d-FCSRs, we present simple examples and we compare with those of Goresky, Klapper and Xu. Keywords: LFSR, FCSR, vectorial FCSR, d-FCSR, sequences, periodicity, p-adic, ?-adic, maximal period.
1112.6212
Diffusion Adaptation over Networks under Imperfect Information Exchange and Non-stationary Data
math.OC cs.SI physics.soc-ph stat.CO
Adaptive networks rely on in-network and collaborative processing among distributed agents to deliver enhanced performance in estimation and inference tasks. Information is exchanged among the nodes, usually over noisy links. The combination weights that are used by the nodes to fuse information from their neighbors play a critical role in influencing the adaptation and tracking abilities of the network. This paper first investigates the mean-square performance of general adaptive diffusion algorithms in the presence of various sources of imperfect information exchanges, quantization errors, and model non-stationarities. Among other results, the analysis reveals that link noise over the regression data modifies the dynamics of the network evolution in a distinct way, and leads to biased estimates in steady-state. The analysis also reveals how the network mean-square performance is dependent on the combination weights. We use these observations to show how the combination weights can be optimized and adapted. Simulation results illustrate the theoretical findings and match well with theory.
1112.6219
Document Clustering based on Topic Maps
cs.IR cs.AI
Importance of document clustering is now widely acknowledged by researchers for better management, smart navigation, efficient filtering, and concise summarization of large collection of documents like World Wide Web (WWW). The next challenge lies in semantically performing clustering based on the semantic contents of the document. The problem of document clustering has two main components: (1) to represent the document in such a form that inherently captures semantics of the text. This may also help to reduce dimensionality of the document, and (2) to define a similarity measure based on the semantic representation such that it assigns higher numerical values to document pairs which have higher semantic relationship. Feature space of the documents can be very challenging for document clustering. A document may contain multiple topics, it may contain a large set of class-independent general-words, and a handful class-specific core-words. With these features in mind, traditional agglomerative clustering algorithms, which are based on either Document Vector model (DVM) or Suffix Tree model (STC), are less efficient in producing results with high cluster quality. This paper introduces a new approach for document clustering based on the Topic Map representation of the documents. The document is being transformed into a compact form. A similarity measure is proposed based upon the inferred information through topic maps data and structures. The suggested method is implemented using agglomerative hierarchal clustering and tested on standard Information retrieval (IR) datasets. The comparative experiment reveals that the proposed approach is effective in improving the cluster quality.
1112.6220
Optimal decentralized control of coupled subsystems with control sharing
cs.SY math.OC
Subsystems that are coupled due to dynamics and costs arise naturally in various communication applications. In many such applications the control actions are shared between different control stations giving rise to a \emph{control sharing} information structure. Previous studies of control-sharing have concentrated on the linear quadratic Gaussian setup and a solution approach tailored to continuous valued control actions. In this paper a three step solution approach for finite valued control actions is presented. In the first step, a person-by-person approach is used to identify redundant data or a sufficient statistic for local information at each control station. In the second step, the common-information based approach of Nayyar et al.\ (2011) is used to find a sufficient statistic for the common information shared between all control stations and to obtain a dynamic programming decomposition. In the third step, the specifics of the model are used to simplify the sufficient statistic and the dynamic program. As an example, an exact solution of a two-user multiple access broadcast system is presented.
1112.6222
A comparison of two suffix tree-based document clustering algorithms
cs.IR cs.AI
Document clustering as an unsupervised approach extensively used to navigate, filter, summarize and manage large collection of document repositories like the World Wide Web (WWW). Recently, focuses in this domain shifted from traditional vector based document similarity for clustering to suffix tree based document similarity, as it offers more semantic representation of the text present in the document. In this paper, we compare and contrast two recently introduced approaches to document clustering based on suffix tree data model. The first is an Efficient Phrase based document clustering, which extracts phrases from documents to form compact document representation and uses a similarity measure based on common suffix tree to cluster the documents. The second approach is a frequent word/word meaning sequence based document clustering, it similarly extracts the common word sequence from the document and uses the common sequence/ common word meaning sequence to perform the compact representation, and finally, it uses document clustering approach to cluster the compact documents. These algorithms are using agglomerative hierarchical document clustering to perform the actual clustering step, the difference in these approaches are mainly based on extraction of phrases, model representation as a compact document, and the similarity measures used for clustering. This paper investigates the computational aspect of the two algorithms, and the quality of results they produced.
1112.6231
Low and Upper Bound of Approximate Sequence for the Entropy Rate of Binary Hidden Markov Processes
cs.IT math.IT
In the paper, the approximate sequence for entropy of some binary hidden Markov models has been found to have two bound sequences, the low bound sequence and the upper bound sequence. The error bias of the approximate sequence is bound by a geometric sequence with a scale factor less than 1 which decreases quickly to zero. It helps to understand the convergence of entropy rate of generic hidden Markov models, and it provides a theoretical base for estimating the entropy rate of some hidden Markov models at any accuracy.
1112.6234
Sparse Recovery from Nonlinear Measurements with Applications in Bad Data Detection for Power Networks
cs.IT cs.LG cs.SY math.IT
In this paper, we consider the problem of sparse recovery from nonlinear measurements, which has applications in state estimation and bad data detection for power networks. An iterative mixed $\ell_1$ and $\ell_2$ convex program is used to estimate the true state by locally linearizing the nonlinear measurements. When the measurements are linear, through using the almost Euclidean property for a linear subspace, we derive a new performance bound for the state estimation error under sparse bad data and additive observation noise. As a byproduct, in this paper we provide sharp bounds on the almost Euclidean property of a linear subspace, using the "escape-through-the-mesh" theorem from geometric functional analysis. When the measurements are nonlinear, we give conditions under which the solution of the iterative algorithm converges to the true state even though the locally linearized measurements may not be the actual nonlinear measurements. We numerically evaluate our iterative convex programming approach to perform bad data detections in nonlinear electrical power networks problems. We are able to use semidefinite programming to verify the conditions for convergence of the proposed iterative sparse recovery algorithms from nonlinear measurements.
1112.6235
Detecting a Vector Based on Linear Measurements
math.ST cs.IT math.IT stat.TH
We consider a situation where the state of a system is represented by a real-valued vector. Under normal circumstances, the vector is zero, while an event manifests as non-zero entries in this vector, possibly few. Our interest is in the design of algorithms that can reliably detect events (i.e., test whether the vector is zero or not) with the least amount of information. We place ourselves in a situation, now common in the signal processing literature, where information about the vector comes in the form of noisy linear measurements. We derive information bounds in an active learning setup and exhibit some simple near-optimal algorithms. In particular, our results show that the task of detection within this setting is at once much easier, simpler and different than the tasks of estimation and support recovery.
1112.6269
Automated PolyU Palmprint sample Registration and Coarse Classification
cs.CV
Biometric based authentication for secured access to resources has gained importance, due to their reliable, invariant and discriminating features. Palmprint is one such biometric entity. Prior to classification and identification registering a sample palmprint is an important activity. In this paper we propose a computationally effective method for automated registration of samples from PlolyU palmprint database. In our approach we preprocess the sample and trace the border to find the nearest point from center of sample. Angle between vector representing the nearest point and vector passing through the center is used for automated palm sample registration. The angle of inclination between start and end point of heart line and life line is used for basic classification of palmprint samples in left class and right class.
1112.6275
Reasoning About Strategies: On the Model-Checking Problem
cs.LO cs.MA math.LO
In open systems verification, to formally check for reliability, one needs an appropriate formalism to model the interaction between agents and express the correctness of the system no matter how the environment behaves. An important contribution in this context is given by modal logics for strategic ability, in the setting of multi-agent games, such as ATL, ATL\star, and the like. Recently, Chatterjee, Henzinger, and Piterman introduced Strategy Logic, which we denote here by CHP-SL, with the aim of getting a powerful framework for reasoning explicitly about strategies. CHP-SL is obtained by using first-order quantifications over strategies and has been investigated in the very specific setting of two-agents turned-based games, where a non-elementary model-checking algorithm has been provided. While CHP-SL is a very expressive logic, we claim that it does not fully capture the strategic aspects of multi-agent systems. In this paper, we introduce and study a more general strategy logic, denoted SL, for reasoning about strategies in multi-agent concurrent games. We prove that SL includes CHP-SL, while maintaining a decidable model-checking problem. In particular, the algorithm we propose is computationally not harder than the best one known for CHP-SL. Moreover, we prove that such a problem for SL is NonElementarySpace-hard. This negative result has spurred us to investigate here syntactic fragments of SL, strictly subsuming ATL\star, with the hope of obtaining an elementary model-checking problem. Among the others, we study the sublogics SL[NG], SL[BG], and SL[1G]. They encompass formulas in a special prenex normal form having, respectively, nested temporal goals, Boolean combinations of goals and, a single goal at a time. About these logics, we prove that the model-checking problem for SL[1G] is 2ExpTime-complete, thus not harder than the one for ATL\star.
1112.6286
Visualization and Analysis of Frames in Collections of Messages: Content Analysis and the Measurement of Meaning
cs.CL
A step-to-step introduction is provided on how to generate a semantic map from a collection of messages (full texts, paragraphs or statements) using freely available software and/or SPSS for the relevant statistics and the visualization. The techniques are discussed in the various theoretical contexts of (i) linguistics (e.g., Latent Semantic Analysis), (ii) sociocybernetics and social systems theory (e.g., the communication of meaning), and (iii) communication studies (e.g., framing and agenda-setting). We distinguish between the communication of information in the network space (social network analysis) and the communication of meaning in the vector space. The vector space can be considered a generated as an architecture by the network of relations in the network space; words are then not only related, but also positioned. These positions are expected rather than observed and therefore one can communicate meaning. Knowledge can be generated when these meanings can recursively be communicated and therefore also further codified.
1112.6291
Descriptor learning for omnidirectional image matching
cs.CV cs.NE
Feature matching in omnidirectional vision systems is a challenging problem, mainly because complicated optical systems make the theoretical modelling of invariance and construction of invariant feature descriptors hard or even impossible. In this paper, we propose learning invariant descriptors using a training set of similar and dissimilar descriptor pairs. We use the similarity-preserving hashing framework, in which we are trying to map the descriptor data to the Hamming space preserving the descriptor similarity on the training set. A neural network is used to solve the underlying optimization problem. Our approach outperforms not only straightforward descriptor matching, but also state-of-the-art similarity-preserving hashing methods.
1112.6320
Threshold Saturation in Spatially Coupled Constraint Satisfaction Problems
cs.CC cond-mat.stat-mech cs.IT math.IT
We consider chains of random constraint satisfaction models that are spatially coupled across a finite window along the chain direction. We investigate their phase diagram at zero temperature using the survey propagation formalism and the interpolation method. We prove that the SAT-UNSAT phase transition threshold of an infinite chain is identical to the one of the individual standard model, and is therefore not affected by spatial coupling. We compute the survey propagation complexity using population dynamics as well as large degree approximations, and determine the survey propagation threshold. We find that a clustering phase survives coupling. However, as one increases the range of the coupling window, the survey propagation threshold increases and saturates towards the phase transition threshold. We also briefly discuss other aspects of the problem. Namely, the condensation threshold is not affected by coupling, but the dynamic threshold displays saturation towards the condensation one. All these features may provide a new avenue for obtaining better provable algorithmic lower bounds on phase transition thresholds of the individual standard model.
1112.6344
On the Impact of Energy Dissipation Model on Characteristic Distance in Wireless Networks
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper we investigate the dependency of characteristic distance on energy dissipation model. Both the many-to-one and any-to-any communication paradigm have been presented for performance analysis. Characteristic distance has been derived for three different cases. This study will be useful for designing an energy-efficient wireless network where nodes are energy-constrained.
1112.6367
Rate Region of the Vector Gaussian One-Helper Source-Coding Problem
cs.IT math.IT
We determine the rate region of the vector Gaussian one-helper source-coding problem under a covariance matrix distortion constraint. The rate region is achieved by a simple scheme that separates the lossy vector quantization from the lossless spatial compression. The converse is established by extending and combining three analysis techniques that have been employed in the past to obtain partial results for the problem.
1112.6371
Multi-q Analysis of Image Patterns
physics.data-an cs.AI cs.CV physics.comp-ph
This paper studies the use of the Tsallis Entropy versus the classic Boltzmann-Gibbs-Shannon entropy for classifying image patterns. Given a database of 40 pattern classes, the goal is to determine the class of a given image sample. Our experiments show that the Tsallis entropy encoded in a feature vector for different $q$ indices has great advantage over the Boltzmann-Gibbs-Shannon entropy for pattern classification, boosting recognition rates by a factor of 3. We discuss the reasons behind this success, shedding light on the usefulness of the Tsallis entropy.
1112.6382
SDPTools: High Precision SDP Solver in Maple
math.OC cs.SY
Semidefinite programs are an important class of convex optimization problems. It can be solved efficiently by SDP solvers in Matlab, such as SeDuMi, SDPT3, DSDP. However, since we are running fixed precision SDP solvers in Matlab, for some applications, due to the numerical error, we can not get good results. SDPTools is a Maple package to solve SDP in high precision. We apply SDPTools to the certification of the global optimum of rational functions. For the Rumps Model Problem, we obtain the best numerical results so far.
1112.6384
Proof nets for the Lambek-Grishin calculus
cs.CL
Grishin's generalization of Lambek's Syntactic Calculus combines a non-commutative multiplicative conjunction and its residuals (product, left and right division) with a dual family: multiplicative disjunction, right and left difference. Interaction between these two families takes the form of linear distributivity principles. We study proof nets for the Lambek-Grishin calculus and the correspondence between these nets and unfocused and focused versions of its sequent calculus.
1112.6399
Two-Manifold Problems
cs.LG
Recently, there has been much interest in spectral approaches to learning manifolds---so-called kernel eigenmap methods. These methods have had some successes, but their applicability is limited because they are not robust to noise. To address this limitation, we look at two-manifold problems, in which we simultaneously reconstruct two related manifolds, each representing a different view of the same data. By solving these interconnected learning problems together and allowing information to flow between them, two-manifold algorithms are able to succeed where a non-integrated approach would fail: each view allows us to suppress noise in the other, reducing bias in the same way that an instrumental variable allows us to remove bias in a {linear} dimensionality reduction problem. We propose a class of algorithms for two-manifold problems, based on spectral decomposition of cross-covariance operators in Hilbert space. Finally, we discuss situations where two-manifold problems are useful, and demonstrate that solving a two-manifold problem can aid in learning a nonlinear dynamical system from limited data.
1112.6411
High-dimensional Sparse Inverse Covariance Estimation using Greedy Methods
cs.LG math.ST stat.ML stat.TH
In this paper we consider the task of estimating the non-zero pattern of the sparse inverse covariance matrix of a zero-mean Gaussian random vector from a set of iid samples. Note that this is also equivalent to recovering the underlying graph structure of a sparse Gaussian Markov Random Field (GMRF). We present two novel greedy approaches to solving this problem. The first estimates the non-zero covariates of the overall inverse covariance matrix using a series of global forward and backward greedy steps. The second estimates the neighborhood of each node in the graph separately, again using greedy forward and backward steps, and combines the intermediate neighborhoods to form an overall estimate. The principal contribution of this paper is a rigorous analysis of the sparsistency, or consistency in recovering the sparsity pattern of the inverse covariance matrix. Surprisingly, we show that both the local and global greedy methods learn the full structure of the model with high probability given just $O(d\log(p))$ samples, which is a \emph{significant} improvement over state of the art $\ell_1$-regularized Gaussian MLE (Graphical Lasso) that requires $O(d^2\log(p))$ samples. Moreover, the restricted eigenvalue and smoothness conditions imposed by our greedy methods are much weaker than the strong irrepresentable conditions required by the $\ell_1$-regularization based methods. We corroborate our results with extensive simulations and examples, comparing our local and global greedy methods to the $\ell_1$-regularized Gaussian MLE as well as the Neighborhood Greedy method to that of nodewise $\ell_1$-regularized linear regression (Neighborhood Lasso).
1112.6414
Evolution of opinions on social networks in the presence of competing committed groups
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI
Public opinion is often affected by the presence of committed groups of individuals dedicated to competing points of view. Using a model of pairwise social influence, we study how the presence of such groups within social networks affects the outcome and the speed of evolution of the overall opinion on the network. Earlier work indicated that a single committed group within a dense social network can cause the entire network to quickly adopt the group's opinion (in times scaling logarithmically with the network size), so long as the committed group constitutes more than about 10% of the population (with the findings being qualitatively similar for sparse networks as well). Here we study the more general case of opinion evolution when two groups committed to distinct, competing opinions $A$ and $B$, and constituting fractions $p_A$ and $p_B$ of the total population respectively, are present in the network. We show for stylized social networks (including Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi random graphs and Barab\'asi-Albert scale-free networks) that the phase diagram of this system in parameter space $(p_A,p_B)$ consists of two regions, one where two stable steady-states coexist, and the remaining where only a single stable steady-state exists. These two regions are separated by two fold-bifurcation (spinodal) lines which meet tangentially and terminate at a cusp (critical point). We provide further insights to the phase diagram and to the nature of the underlying phase transitions by investigating the model on infinite (mean-field limit), finite complete graphs and finite sparse networks. For the latter case, we also derive the scaling exponent associated with the exponential growth of switching times as a function of the distance from the critical point.
1201.0011
Partial decode-forward for quantum relay channels
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
A relay channel is one in which a Source and Destination use an intermediate Relay station in order to improve communication rates. We propose the study of relay channels with classical inputs and quantum outputs and prove that a "partial decode and forward" strategy is achievable. We divide the channel uses into many blocks and build codes in a randomized, block-Markov manner within each block. The Relay performs a standard Holevo-Schumacher-Westmoreland quantum measurement on each block in order to decode part of the Source's message and then forwards this partial message in the next block. The Destination performs a novel "sliding-window" quantum measurement on two adjacent blocks in order to decode the Source's message. This strategy achieves non-trivial rates for classical communication over a quantum relay channel.
1201.0022
Spatio-temporal wavelet regularization for parallel MRI reconstruction: application to functional MRI
stat.AP cs.CV physics.med-ph
Parallel MRI is a fast imaging technique that enables the acquisition of highly resolved images in space or/and in time. The performance of parallel imaging strongly depends on the reconstruction algorithm, which can proceed either in the original k-space (GRAPPA, SMASH) or in the image domain (SENSE-like methods). To improve the performance of the widely used SENSE algorithm, 2D- or slice-specific regularization in the wavelet domain has been deeply investigated. In this paper, we extend this approach using 3D-wavelet representations in order to handle all slices together and address reconstruction artifacts which propagate across adjacent slices. The gain induced by such extension (3D-Unconstrained Wavelet Regularized -SENSE: 3D-UWR-SENSE) is validated on anatomical image reconstruction where no temporal acquisition is considered. Another important extension accounts for temporal correlations that exist between successive scans in functional MRI (fMRI). In addition to the case of 2D+t acquisition schemes addressed by some other methods like kt-FOCUSS, our approach allows us to deal with 3D+t acquisition schemes which are widely used in neuroimaging. The resulting 3D-UWR-SENSE and 4D-UWR-SENSE reconstruction schemes are fully unsupervised in the sense that all regularization parameters are estimated in the maximum likelihood sense on a reference scan. The gain induced by such extensions is illustrated on both anatomical and functional image reconstruction, and also measured in terms of statistical sensitivity for the 4D-UWR-SENSE approach during a fast event-related fMRI protocol. Our 4D-UWR-SENSE algorithm outperforms the SENSE reconstruction at the subject and group levels (15 subjects) for different contrasts of interest (eg, motor or computation tasks) and using different parallel acceleration factors (R=2 and R=4) on 2x2x3mm3 EPI images.
1201.0035
The information path functional approach for solution of a controllable stochastic problem
cs.SY cs.IT math.DS math.IT nlin.AO
We study a stochastic control system, described by Ito controllable equation, and evaluate the solutions by an entropy functional (EF), defined by the equation functions of controllable drift and diffusion. Considering a control problem for this functional, we solve the EF control variation problem (VP), which leads to both a dynamic approximation of the process entropy functional by an information path functional (IPF) and information dynamic model (IDM) of the stochastic process. The IPF variation equations allow finding the optimal control functions, applied to both stochastic system and the IDM for joint solution of the identification and optimal control problems, combined with state consolidation. In this optimal dual strategy, the IPF optimum predicts each current control action not only in terms of total functional path goal, but also by setting for each following control action the renovated values of this functional controllable drift and diffusion, identified during the optimal movement, which concurrently correct this goal. The VP information invariants allow optimal encoding of the identified dynamic model operator and control. The introduced method of cutting off the process by applying an impulse control estimates the cutoff information, accumulated by the process inner connections between its states. It has shown that such a functional information measure contains more information than the sum of Shannon entropies counted for all process separated states, and provides information measure of Feller kernel. Examples illustrate the procedure of solving these problems, which has been implemented in practice. Key words: Entropy and information path functionals, variation equations, information invariants, controllable dynamics, impulse controls, cutting off the diffusion process, identification, cooperation, encoding.
1201.0040
Spam filtering by quantitative profiles
cs.IR stat.AP
Instead of the 'bag-of-words' representation, in the quantitative profile approach to spam filtering and email categorization, an email is represented by an m-dimensional vector of numbers, with m fixed in advance. Inspired by Sroufe et al. [Sroufe, P., Phithakkitnukoon, S., Dantu, R., and Cangussu, J. (2010). Email shape analysis. In \emph{LNCS}, 5935, pp. 18-29] two instances of quantitative profiles are considered: line profile and character profile. Performance of these profiles is studied on the TREC 2007, CEAS 2008 and a private corpuses. At low computational costs, the two quantitative profiles achieve performance that is at least comparable to that of heuristic rules and naive Bayes.
1201.0041
An Amendment of Fast Subspace Tracking Methods
math.NA cs.NE
Tuning stepsize between convergence rate and steady state error level or stability is a problem in some subspace tracking schemes. Methods in DPM and OJA class may show sparks in their steady state error sometimes, even with a rather small stepsize. By a study on the schemes' updating formula, it is found that the update only happens in a specific plane but not all the subspace basis. Through an analysis on relationship between the vectors in that plane, an amendment as needed is made on the algorithm routine to fix the problem by constricting the stepsize at every update step. The simulation confirms elimination of the sparks.
1201.0067
Topologies and Price of Stability of Complex Strategic Networks with Localized Payoffs : Analytical and Simulation Studies
cs.SI cs.DM physics.soc-ph
We analyze a network formation game in a strategic setting where payoffs of individuals depend only on their immediate neighbourhood. We call these payoffs as localized payoffs. In this game, the payoff of each individual captures (1) the gain from immediate neighbors, (2) the bridging benefits, and (3) the cost to form links. This implies that the payoff of each individual can be computed using only its single-hop neighbourhood information. Based on this simple model of network formation, our study explores the structure of networks that form, satisfying one or both of the properties, namely, pairwise stability and efficiency. We analytically prove the pairwise stability of several interesting network structures, notably, the complete bi-partite network, complete equi-k-partite network, complete network and cycle network, under various configurations of the model. We validate and extend these results through extensive simulations. We characterize topologies of efficient networks by drawing upon classical results from extremal graph theory and discover that the Turan graph (or the complete equi-bi-partite network) is the unique efficient network under many configurations of parameters. We examine the tradeoffs between topologies of pairwise stable networks and efficient networks using the notion of price of stability, which is the ratio of the sum of payoffs of the players in an optimal pairwise stable network to that of an efficient network. Interestingly, we find that price of stability is equal to 1 for almost all configurations of parameters in the proposed model; and for the rest of the configurations of the parameters, we obtain a lower bound of 0.5 on the price of stability. This leads to another key insight of this paper: under mild conditions, efficient networks will form when strategic individuals choose to add or delete links based on only localized payoffs.
1201.0081
Resource Allocation with Subcarrier Pairing in OFDMA Two-Way Relay Networks
cs.IT math.IT
This study considers an orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA)-based multi-user two-way relay network where multiple mobile stations (MSs) communicate with a common base station (BS) via multiple relay stations (RSs). We study the joint optimization problem of subcarrier-pairing based relay-power allocation, relay selection, and subcarrier assignment. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming problem. By using the dual method, we propose an efficient algorithm to solve the problem in an asymptotically optimal manner. Simulation results show that the proposed method can improve system performance significantly over the conventional methods.
1201.0110
Weighted-Sum-Rate-Maximizing Linear Transceiver Filters for the K-User MIMO Interference Channel
cs.IT math.IT
This letter is concerned with transmit and receive filter optimization for the K-user MIMO interference channel. Specifically, linear transmit and receive filter sets are designed which maximize the weighted sum rate while allowing each transmitter to utilize only the local channel state information. Our approach is based on extending the existing method of minimizing the weighted mean squared error (MSE) for the MIMO broadcast channel to the K-user interference channel at hand. For the case of the individual transmitter power constraint, however, a straightforward generalization of the existing method does not reveal a viable solution. It is in fact shown that there exists no closed-form solution for the transmit filter but simple one-dimensional parameter search yields the desired solution. Compared to the direct filter optimization using gradient-based search, our solution requires considerably less computational complexity and a smaller amount of feedback resources while achieving essentially the same level of weighted sum rate. A modified filter design is also presented which provides desired robustness in the presence of channel uncertainty
1201.0148
An Upper Bound to the Marginal PDF of the Ordered Eigenvalues of Wishart Matrices
cs.IT math.IT
Diversity analysis of a number of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) applications requires the calculation of the expectation of a function whose variables are the ordered multiple eigenvalues of a Wishart matrix. In order to carry out this calculation, we need the marginal pdf of an arbitrary subset of the ordered eigenvalues. In this letter, we derive an upper bound to the marginal pdf of the eigenvalues. The derivation is based on the multiple integration of the well-known joint pdf, which is very complicated due to the exponential factors of the joint pdf. We suggest an alternative function that provides simpler calculation of the multiple integration. As a result, the marginal pdf is shown to be bounded by a multivariate polynomial with a given degree. After a standard bounding procedure in a Pairwise Error Probability (PEP) analysis, by applying the marginal pdf to the calculation of the expectation, the diversity order for a number of MIMO systems can be obtained in a simple manner. Simulation results that support the analysis are presented.
1201.0178
Distributed Data Collection and Storage Algorithms for Collaborative Learning Vision Sensor Devices with Applications to Pilgrimage
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT
This work presents novel distributed data collection systems and storage algorithms for collaborative learning wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In a large WSN, consider $n$ collaborative sensor devices distributed randomly to acquire information and learn about a certain field. Such sensors have less power, small bandwidth, and short memory, and they might disappear from the network after certain time of operations. The goal of this work is to design efficient strategies to learn about the field by collecting sensed data from these $n$ sensors with less computational overhead and efficient storage encoding operations. In this data collection system, we propose two distributed data storage algorithms (DSA's) to solve this problem with the means of network flooding and connectivity among sensor devices. In the first algorithm denoted, DSA-I, it's assumed that the total number of nodes is known for each node in the network. We show that this algorithm is efficient in terms of the encoding/decoding operations. Furthermore, every node uses network flooding to disseminate its data throughout the network using mixing time approximately O(n). In the second algorithm denoted, DSA-II, it's assumed that the total number of nodes is not known for each learning sensor, hence dissemination of the data does not depend on the value of $n$. In this case we show that the encoding operations take $O(C\mu^2)$, where $\mu$ is the mean degree of the network graph and $C$ is a system parameter. Performance of these two algorithms match the derived theoretical results. Finally, we show how to deploy these algorithms for monitoring and measuring certain phenomenons in American-made camp tents located in Minna field in south-east side of Makkah.
1201.0216
Building Smart Communities with Cyber-Physical Systems
cs.SI cs.AI cs.CY
There is a growing trend towards the convergence of cyber-physical systems (CPS) and social computing, which will lead to the emergence of smart communities composed of various objects (including both human individuals and physical things) that interact and cooperate with each other. These smart communities promise to enable a number of innovative applications and services that will improve the quality of life. This position paper addresses some opportunities and challenges of building smart communities characterized by cyber-physical and social intelligence.
1201.0226
Towards Cost-Effective Storage Provisioning for DBMSs
cs.DB
Data center operators face a bewildering set of choices when considering how to provision resources on machines with complex I/O subsystems. Modern I/O subsystems often have a rich mix of fast, high performing, but expensive SSDs sitting alongside with cheaper but relatively slower (for random accesses) traditional hard disk drives. The data center operators need to determine how to provision the I/O resources for specific workloads so as to abide by existing Service Level Agreements (SLAs), while minimizing the total operating cost (TOC) of running the workload, where the TOC includes the amortized hardware costs and the run time energy costs. The focus of this paper is on introducing this new problem of TOC-based storage allocation, cast in a framework that is compatible with traditional DBMS query optimization and query processing architecture. We also present a heuristic-based solution to this problem, called DOT. We have implemented DOT in PostgreSQL, and experiments using TPC-H and TPC-C demonstrate significant TOC reduction by DOT in various settings.
1201.0227
B+-tree Index Optimization by Exploiting Internal Parallelism of Flash-based Solid State Drives
cs.DB
Previous research addressed the potential problems of the hard-disk oriented design of DBMSs of flashSSDs. In this paper, we focus on exploiting potential benefits of flashSSDs. First, we examine the internal parallelism issues of flashSSDs by conducting benchmarks to various flashSSDs. Then, we suggest algorithm-design principles in order to best benefit from the internal parallelism. We present a new I/O request concept, called psync I/O that can exploit the internal parallelism of flashSSDs in a single process. Based on these ideas, we introduce B+-tree optimization methods in order to utilize internal parallelism. By integrating the results of these methods, we present a B+-tree variant, PIO B-tree. We confirmed that each optimization method substantially enhances the index performance. Consequently, PIO B-tree enhanced B+-tree's insert performance by a factor of up to 16.3, while improving point-search performance by a factor of 1.2. The range search of PIO B-tree was up to 5 times faster than that of the B+-tree. Moreover, PIO B-tree outperformed other flash-aware indexes in various synthetic workloads. We also confirmed that PIO B-tree outperforms B+-tree in index traces collected inside the Postgresql DBMS with TPC-C benchmark.
1201.0228
High-Performance Concurrency Control Mechanisms for Main-Memory Databases
cs.DB
A database system optimized for in-memory storage can support much higher transaction rates than current systems. However, standard concurrency control methods used today do not scale to the high transaction rates achievable by such systems. In this paper we introduce two efficient concurrency control methods specifically designed for main-memory databases. Both use multiversioning to isolate read-only transactions from updates but differ in how atomicity is ensured: one is optimistic and one is pessimistic. To avoid expensive context switching, transactions never block during normal processing but they may have to wait before commit to ensure correct serialization ordering. We also implemented a main-memory optimized version of single-version locking. Experimental results show that while single-version locking works well when transactions are short and contention is low performance degrades under more demanding conditions. The multiversion schemes have higher overhead but are much less sensitive to hotspots and the presence of long-running transactions.
1201.0229
Capturing Topology in Graph Pattern Matching
cs.DB
Graph pattern matching is often defined in terms of subgraph isomorphism, an NP-complete problem. To lower its complexity, various extensions of graph simulation have been considered instead. These extensions allow pattern matching to be conducted in cubic-time. However, they fall short of capturing the topology of data graphs, i.e., graphs may have a structure drastically different from pattern graphs they match, and the matches found are often too large to understand and analyze. To rectify these problems, this paper proposes a notion of strong simulation, a revision of graph simulation, for graph pattern matching. (1) We identify a set of criteria for preserving the topology of graphs matched. We show that strong simulation preserves the topology of data graphs and finds a bounded number of matches. (2) We show that strong simulation retains the same complexity as earlier extensions of simulation, by providing a cubic-time algorithm for computing strong simulation. (3) We present the locality property of strong simulation, which allows us to effectively conduct pattern matching on distributed graphs. (4) We experimentally verify the effectiveness and efficiency of these algorithms, using real-life data and synthetic data.
1201.0230
RTED: A Robust Algorithm for the Tree Edit Distance
cs.DB
We consider the classical tree edit distance between ordered labeled trees, which is defined as the minimum-cost sequence of node edit operations that transform one tree into another. The state-of-the-art solutions for the tree edit distance are not satisfactory. The main competitors in the field either have optimal worst-case complexity, but the worst case happens frequently, or they are very efficient for some tree shapes, but degenerate for others. This leads to unpredictable and often infeasible runtimes. There is no obvious way to choose between the algorithms. In this paper we present RTED, a robust tree edit distance algorithm. The asymptotic complexity of RTED is smaller or equal to the complexity of the best competitors for any input instance, i.e., RTED is both efficient and worst-case optimal. We introduce the class of LRH (Left-Right-Heavy) algorithms, which includes RTED and the fastest tree edit distance algorithms presented in literature. We prove that RTED outperforms all previously proposed LRH algorithms in terms of runtime complexity. In our experiments on synthetic and real world data we empirically evaluate our solution and compare it to the state-of-the-art.
1201.0231
Putting Lipstick on Pig: Enabling Database-style Workflow Provenance
cs.DB
Workflow provenance typically assumes that each module is a "black-box", so that each output depends on all inputs (coarse-grained dependencies). Furthermore, it does not model the internal state of a module, which can change between repeated executions. In practice, however, an output may depend on only a small subset of the inputs (fine-grained dependencies) as well as on the internal state of the module. We present a novel provenance framework that marries database-style and workflow-style provenance, by using Pig Latin to expose the functionality of modules, thus capturing internal state and fine-grained dependencies. A critical ingredient in our solution is the use of a novel form of provenance graph that models module invocations and yields a compact representation of fine-grained workflow provenance. It also enables a number of novel graph transformation operations, allowing to choose the desired level of granularity in provenance querying (ZoomIn and ZoomOut), and supporting "what-if" workflow analytic queries. We implemented our approach in the Lipstick system and developed a benchmark in support of a systematic performance evaluation. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of tracking and querying fine-grained workflow provenance.
1201.0232
Relational Approach for Shortest Path Discovery over Large Graphs
cs.DB
With the rapid growth of large graphs, we cannot assume that graphs can still be fully loaded into memory, thus the disk-based graph operation is inevitable. In this paper, we take the shortest path discovery as an example to investigate the technique issues when leveraging existing infrastructure of relational database (RDB) in the graph data management. Based on the observation that a variety of graph search queries can be implemented by iterative operations including selecting frontier nodes from visited nodes, making expansion from the selected frontier nodes, and merging the expanded nodes into the visited ones, we introduce a relational FEM framework with three corresponding operators to implement graph search tasks in the RDB context. We show new features such as window function and merge statement introduced by recent SQL standards can not only simplify the expression but also improve the performance of the FEM framework. In addition, we propose two optimization strategies specific to shortest path discovery inside the FEM framework. First, we take a bi-directional set Dijkstra's algorithm in the path finding. The bi-directional strategy can reduce the search space, and set Dijkstra's algorithm finds the shortest path in a set-at-a-time fashion. Second, we introduce an index named SegTable to preserve the local shortest segments, and exploit SegTable to further improve the performance. The final extensive experimental results illustrate our relational approach with the optimization strategies achieves high scalability and performance.
1201.0233
Mining Flipping Correlations from Large Datasets with Taxonomies
cs.DB
In this paper we introduce a new type of pattern -- a flipping correlation pattern. The flipping patterns are obtained from contrasting the correlations between items at different levels of abstraction. They represent surprising correlations, both positive and negative, which are specific for a given abstraction level, and which "flip" from positive to negative and vice versa when items are generalized to a higher level of abstraction. We design an efficient algorithm for finding flipping correlations, the Flipper algorithm, which outperforms naive pattern mining methods by several orders of magnitude. We apply Flipper to real-life datasets and show that the discovered patterns are non-redundant, surprising and actionable. Flipper finds strong contrasting correlations in itemsets with low-to-medium support, while existing techniques cannot handle the pattern discovery in this frequency range.
1201.0234
A Statistical Approach Towards Robust Progress Estimation
cs.DB
The need for accurate SQL progress estimation in the context of decision support administration has led to a number of techniques proposed for this task. Unfortunately, no single one of these progress estimators behaves robustly across the variety of SQL queries encountered in practice, meaning that each technique performs poorly for a significant fraction of queries. This paper proposes a novel estimator selection framework that uses a statistical model to characterize the sets of conditions under which certain estimators outperform others, leading to a significant increase in estimation robustness. The generality of this framework also enables us to add a number of novel "special purpose" estimators which increase accuracy further. Most importantly, the resulting model generalizes well to queries very different from the ones used to train it. We validate our findings using a large number of industrial real-life and benchmark workloads.
1201.0274
Overview of EIREX 2010: Computing
cs.IR
The first Information Retrieval Education through Experimentation track (EIREX 2010) was run at the University Carlos III of Madrid, during the 2010 spring semester. EIREX 2010 is the first in a series of experiments designed to foster new Information Retrieval (IR) education methodologies and resources, with the specific goal of teaching undergraduate IR courses from an experimental perspective. For an introduction to the motivation behind the EIREX experiments, see the first sections of [Urbano et al., 2011]. For information on other editions of EIREX and related data, see the website at http://ir.kr.inf.uc3m.es/eirex/. The EIREX series have the following goals: a) to help students get a view of the Information Retrieval process as they would find it in a real-world scenario, either industrial or academic; b) to make students realize the importance of laboratory experiments in Computer Science and have them initiated in their execution and analysis; c) to create a public repository of resources to teach Information Retrieval courses; d) to seek the collaboration and active participation of other Universities in this endeavor. This overview paper summarizes the results of the EIREX 2010 track, focusing on the creation of the test collection and the analysis to assess its reliability.
1201.0292
T-Learning
cs.LG
Traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) has focused on problems involving many states and few actions, such as simple grid worlds. Most real world problems, however, are of the opposite type, Involving Few relevant states and many actions. For example, to return home from a conference, humans identify only few subgoal states such as lobby, taxi, airport etc. Each valid behavior connecting two such states can be viewed as an action, and there are trillions of them. Assuming the subgoal identification problem is already solved, the quality of any RL method---in real-world settings---depends less on how well it scales with the number of states than on how well it scales with the number of actions. This is where our new method T-Learning excels, by evaluating the relatively few possible transits from one state to another in a policy-independent way, rather than a huge number of state-action pairs, or states in traditional policy-dependent ways. Illustrative experiments demonstrate that performance improvements of T-Learning over Q-learning can be arbitrarily large.
1201.0304
Bounds on Shannon Capacity and Ramsey Numbers from Product of Graphs
math.CO cs.IT math.IT
In this note we study Shannon capacity of channels in the context of classical Ramsey numbers. We overview some of the results on capacity of noisy channels modelled by graphs, and how some constructions may contribute to our knowledge of this capacity. We present an improvement to the constructions by Abbott and Song and thus establish new lower bounds for a special type of multicolor Ramsey numbers. We prove that our construction implies that the supremum of the Shannon capacity over all graphs with independence number 2 cannot be achieved by any finite graph power. This can be generalized to graphs with any bounded independence number.
1201.0320
Optimal Distributed Resource Allocation for Decode-and-Forward Relay Networks
cs.IT math.IT
This paper presents a distributed resource allocation algorithm to jointly optimize the power allocation, channel allocation and relay selection for decode-and-forward (DF) relay networks with a large number of sources, relays, and destinations. The well-known dual decomposition technique cannot directly be applied to resolve this problem, because the achievable data rate of DF relaying is not strictly concave, and thus the local resource allocation subproblem may have non-unique solutions. We resolve this non-strict concavity problem by using the idea of the proximal point method, which adds quadratic terms to make the objective function strictly concave. However, the proximal solution adds an extra layer of iterations over typical duality based approaches, which can significantly slow down the speed of convergence. To address this key weakness, we devise a fast algorithm without the need for this additional layer of iterations, which converges to the optimal solution. Our algorithm only needs local information exchange, and can easily adapt to variations of network size and topology. We prove that our distributed resource allocation algorithm converges to the optimal solution. A channel resource adjustment method is further developed to provide more channel resources to the bottleneck links and realize traffic load balance. Numerical results are provided to illustrate the benefits of our algorithm.
1201.0328
Let us first agree on what the term "semantics" means: An unorthodox approach to an age-old debate
cs.AI q-bio.NC
Traditionally, semantics has been seen as a feature of human language. The advent of the information era has led to its widespread redefinition as an information feature. Contrary to this praxis, I define semantics as a special kind of information. Revitalizing the ideas of Bar-Hillel and Carnap I have recreated and re-established the notion of semantics as the notion of Semantic Information. I have proposed a new definition of information (as a description, a linguistic text, a piece of a story or a tale) and a clear segregation between two different types of information - physical and semantic information. I hope, I have clearly explained the (usually obscured and mysterious) interrelations between data and physical information as well as the relation between physical information and semantic information. Consequently, usually indefinable notions of "information", "knowledge", "memory", "learning" and "semantics" have also received their suitable illumination and explanation.
1201.0341
Collaborative Filtering via Group-Structured Dictionary Learning
math.OC cs.LG math.ST stat.ML stat.TH
Structured sparse coding and the related structured dictionary learning problems are novel research areas in machine learning. In this paper we present a new application of structured dictionary learning for collaborative filtering based recommender systems. Our extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that the presented technique outperforms its state-of-the-art competitors and has several advantages over approaches that do not put structured constraints on the dictionary elements.
1201.0351
Liquid-gas-solid flows with lattice Boltzmann: Simulation of floating bodies
cs.CE physics.flu-dyn
This paper presents a model for the simulation of liquid-gas-solid flows by means of the lattice Boltzmann method. The approach is built upon previous works for the simulation of liquid-solid particle suspensions on the one hand, and on a liquid-gas free surface model on the other. We show how the two approaches can be unified by a novel set of dynamic cell conversion rules. For evaluation, we concentrate on the rotational stability of non-spherical rigid bodies floating on a plane water surface - a classical hydrostatic problem known from naval architecture. We show the consistency of our method in this kind of flows and obtain convergence towards the ideal solution for the measured heeling stability of a floating box.
1201.0362
Compressive sampling with chaotic dynamical systems
cs.IT math.IT
We investigate the possibility of using different chaotic sequences to construct measurement matrices in compressive sampling. In particular, we consider sequences generated by Chua, Lorenz and Rossler dynamical systems and investigate the accuracy of reconstruction when using each of them to construct measurement matrices. Chua and Lorenz sequences appear to be suitable to construct measurement matrices. We compare the recovery rate of the original sequence with that obtained by using Gaussian, Bernoulli and uniformly distributed random measurement matrices. We also investigate the impact of correlation on the recovery rate. It appears that correlation does not influence the probability of exact reconstruction significantly.
1201.0375
Gossip on Weighted Networks
cs.SI nlin.AO physics.soc-ph
We investigate how suitable a weighted network is for gossip spreading. The proposed model is based on the gossip spreading model introduced by Lind et.al. on unweighted networks. Weight represents "friendship." Potential spreader prefers not to spread if the victim of gossip is a "close friend". Gossip spreading is related to the triangles and cascades of triangles. It gives more insight about the structure of a network. We analyze gossip spreading on real weighted networks of human interactions. 6 co-occurrence and 7 social pattern networks are investigated. Gossip propagation is found to be a good parameter to distinguish co-occurrence and social pattern networks. As a comparison some miscellaneous networks and computer generated networks based on ER, BA, WS models are also investigated. They are found to be quite different than the human interaction networks.
1201.0394
2D Barcode for DNA Encoding
cs.IT math.IT
The paper presents a solution for endcoding/decoding DNA information in 2D barcodes. First part focuses on the existing techniques and symbologies in 2D barcodes field. The 2D barcode PDF417 is presented as starting point. The adaptations and optimizations on PDF417 and on DataMatrix lead to the solution - DNA2DBC - DeoxyriboNucleic Acid Two Dimensional Barcode. The second part shows the DNA2DBC encoding/decoding process step by step. In conclusions are enumerated the most important features of 2D barcode implementation for DNA.
1201.0409
Code Design for the Noisy Slepian-Wolf Problem
cs.IT math.IT
We consider a noisy Slepian-Wolf problem where two correlated sources are separately encoded (using codes of fixed rate) and transmitted over two independent binary memoryless symmetric channels. The capacity of each channel is characterized by a single parameter which is not known at the transmitter. The goal is to design systems that retain near-optimal performance without channel knowledge at the transmitter. It was conjectured that it may be hard to design codes that perform well for symmetric channel conditions. In this work, we present a provable capacity-achieving sequence of LDGM ensembles for the erasure Slepian-Wolf problem with symmetric channel conditions. We also introduce a staggered structure which enables codes optimized for single user channels to perform well for symmetric channel conditions. We provide a generic framework for analyzing the performance of joint iterative decoding, using density evolution. Using differential evolution, we design punctured systematic LDPC codes to maximize the region of achievable channel conditions. The resulting codes are then staggered to further increase the region of achievable parameters. The main contribution of this paper is to demonstrate that properly designed irregular LDPC codes can perform well simultaneously over a wide range of channel parameters.
1201.0410
A note on anti-coordination and social interactions
cs.GT cs.CC cs.MA
This note confirms a conjecture of [Bramoull\'{e}, Anti-coordination and social interactions, Games and Economic Behavior, 58, 2007: 30-49]. The problem, which we name the maximum independent cut problem, is a restricted version of the MAX-CUT problem, requiring one side of the cut to be an independent set. We show that the maximum independent cut problem does not admit any polynomial time algorithm with approximation ratio better than $n^{1-\epsilon}$, where $n$ is the number of nodes, and $\epsilon$ arbitrarily small, unless P=NP. For the rather special case where each node has a degree of at most four, the problem is still MAXSNP-hard.
1201.0414
Continuity in Information Algebras
cs.AI
In this paper, the continuity and strong continuity in domain-free information algebras and labeled information algebras are introduced respectively. A more general concept of continuous function which is defined between two domain-free continuous information algebras is presented. It is shown that, with the operations combination and focusing, the set of all continuous functions between two domain-free s-continuous information algebras forms a new s-continuous information algebra. By studying the relationship between domain-free information algebras and labeled information algebras, it is demonstrated that they do correspond to each other on s-compactness.
1201.0418
A New Family of Bounded Divergence Measures and Application to Signal Detection
math.ST cs.IT math.IT math.PR stat.TH
We introduce a new one-parameter family of divergence measures, called bounded Bhattacharyya distance (BBD) measures, for quantifying the dissimilarity between probability distributions. These measures are bounded, symmetric and positive semi-definite and do not require absolute continuity. In the asymptotic limit, BBD measure approaches the squared Hellinger distance. A generalized BBD measure for multiple distributions is also introduced. We prove an extension of a theorem of Bradt and Karlin for BBD relating Bayes error probability and divergence ranking. We show that BBD belongs to the class of generalized Csiszar f-divergence and derive some properties such as curvature and relation to Fisher Information. For distributions with vector valued parameters, the curvature matrix is related to the Fisher-Rao metric. We derive certain inequalities between BBD and well known measures such as Hellinger and Jensen-Shannon divergence. We also derive bounds on the Bayesian error probability. We give an application of these measures to the problem of signal detection where we compare two monochromatic signals buried in white noise and differing in frequency and amplitude.
1201.0423
Interference-Aware Scheduling for Connectivity in MIMO Ad Hoc Multicast Networks
cs.IT math.IT
We consider a multicast scenario involving an ad hoc network of co-channel MIMO nodes in which a source node attempts to share a streaming message with all nodes in the network via some pre-defined multi-hop routing tree. The message is assumed to be broken down into packets, and the transmission is conducted over multiple frames. Each frame is divided into time slots, and each link in the routing tree is assigned one time slot in which to transmit its current packet. We present an algorithm for determining the number of time slots and the scheduling of the links in these time slots in order to optimize the connectivity of the network, which we define to be the probability that all links can achieve the required throughput. In addition to time multiplexing, the MIMO nodes also employ beamforming to manage interference when links are simultaneously active, and the beamformers are designed with the maximum connectivity metric in mind. The effects of outdated channel state information (CSI) are taken into account in both the scheduling and the beamforming designs. We also derive bounds on the network connectivity and sum transmit power in order to illustrate the impact of interference on network performance. Our simulation results demonstrate that the choice of the number of time slots is critical in optimizing network performance, and illustrate the significant advantage provided by multiple antennas in improving network connectivity.
1201.0426
Phase-Only Analog Encoding for a Multi-Antenna Fusion Center
cs.IT math.IT
We consider a distributed sensor network in which the single antenna sensor nodes observe a deterministic unknown parameter and after encoding the observed signal with a phase parameter, the sensor nodes transmit it simultaneously to a multi-antenna fusion center (FC). The FC optimizes the phase encoding parameter and feeds it back to the sensor nodes such that the variance of estimation error can be minimized. We relax the phase optimization problem to a semidefinite programming problem and the numerical results show that the performance of the proposed method is close to the theoretical bound. Also, asymptotic results show that when the number of sensors is very large and the variance of the distance between the sensor nodes and FC is small, multiple antennas do not provide a benefit compared with a single antenna system; when the number of antennas $M$ is large and the measurement noise at the sensor nodes is small compared with the additive noise at the FC, the estimation error variance can be reduced by a factor of $M$.
1201.0435
Capacity Factors of a Point-to-point Network
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
In this paper, we investigate some properties on capacity factors, which were proposed to investigate the link failure problem from network coding. A capacity factor (CF) of a network is an edge set, deleting which will cause the maximum flow to decrease while deleting any proper subset will not. Generally, a $k$-CF is a minimal (not minimum) edge set which will cause the network maximum flow decrease by $k$. Under point to point acyclic scenario, we characterize all the edges which are contained in some CF, and propose an efficient algorithm to classify. And we show that all edges on some $s$-$t$ path in an acyclic point-to-point acyclic network are contained in some 2-CF. We also study some other properties of CF of point to point network, and a simple relationship with CF in multicast network. On the other hand, some computational hardness results relating to capacity factors are obtained. We prove that deciding whether there is a capacity factor of a cyclic network with size not less a given number is NP-complete, and the time complexity of calculating the capacity rank is lowered bounded by solving the maximal flow. Besides that, we propose the analogous definition of CF on vertices and show it captures edge capacity factors as a special case.
1201.0469
Computing Critical $k$-tuples in Power Networks
cs.CE
In this paper the problem of finding the sparsest (i.e., minimum cardinality) critical $k$-tuple including one arbitrarily specified measurement is considered. The solution to this problem can be used to identify weak points in the measurement set, or aid the placement of new meters. The critical $k$-tuple problem is a combinatorial generalization of the critical measurement calculation problem. Using topological network observability results, this paper proposes an efficient and accurate approximate solution procedure for the considered problem based on solving a minimum-cut (Min-Cut) problem and enumerating all its optimal solutions. It is also shown that the sparsest critical $k$-tuple problem can be formulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem. This MILP problem can be solved exactly using available solvers such as CPLEX and Gurobi. A detailed numerical study is presented to evaluate the efficiency and the accuracy of the proposed Min-Cut and MILP calculations.
1201.0478
Technical Note: Exploring \Sigma^P_2 / \Pi^P_2-hardness for Argumentation Problems with fixed distance to tractable classes
cs.AI cs.CC
We study the complexity of reasoning in abstracts argumentation frameworks close to graph classes that allow for efficient reasoning methods, i.e.\ to one of the classes of acyclic, noeven, biparite and symmetric AFs. In this work we show that certain reasoning problems on the second level of the polynomial hierarchy still maintain their full complexity when restricted to instances of fixed distance to one of the above graph classes.
1201.0490
Scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python
cs.LG cs.MS
Scikit-learn is a Python module integrating a wide range of state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms for medium-scale supervised and unsupervised problems. This package focuses on bringing machine learning to non-specialists using a general-purpose high-level language. Emphasis is put on ease of use, performance, documentation, and API consistency. It has minimal dependencies and is distributed under the simplified BSD license, encouraging its use in both academic and commercial settings. Source code, binaries, and documentation can be downloaded from http://scikit-learn.org.
1201.0533
Tightened Exponential Bounds for Discrete Time, Conditionally Symmetric Martingales with Bounded Jumps
math.PR cs.IT math.IT
This letter derives some new exponential bounds for discrete time, real valued, conditionally symmetric martingales with bounded jumps. The new bounds are extended to conditionally symmetric sub/ supermartingales, and they are compared to some existing bounds.
1201.0552
Reliability Analysis of Electric Power Systems Using an Object-oriented Hybrid Modeling Approach
cs.SY
The ongoing evolution of the electric power systems brings about the need to cope with increasingly complex interactions of technical components and relevant actors. In order to integrate a more comprehensive spectrum of different aspects into a probabilistic reliability assessment and to include time-dependent effects, this paper proposes an object-oriented hybrid approach combining agent-based modeling techniques with classical methods such as Monte Carlo simulation. Objects represent both technical components such as generators and transmission lines and non-technical components such as grid operators. The approach allows the calculation of conventional reliability indices and the estimation of blackout frequencies. Furthermore, the influence of the time needed to remove line overloads on the overall system reliability can be assessed. The applicability of the approach is demonstrated by performing simulations on the IEEE Reliability Test System 1996 and on a model of the Swiss high-voltage grid.
1201.0564
The RegularGcc Matrix Constraint
cs.AI
We study propagation of the RegularGcc global constraint. This ensures that each row of a matrix of decision variables satisfies a Regular constraint, and each column satisfies a Gcc constraint. On the negative side, we prove that propagation is NP-hard even under some strong restrictions (e.g. just 3 values, just 4 states in the automaton, or just 5 columns to the matrix). On the positive side, we identify two cases where propagation is fixed parameter tractable. In addition, we show how to improve propagation over a simple decomposition into separate Regular and Gcc constraints by identifying some necessary but insufficient conditions for a solution. We enforce these conditions with some additional weighted row automata. Experimental results demonstrate the potential of these methods on some standard benchmark problems.
1201.0566
Learning joint intensity-depth sparse representations
cs.CV
This paper presents a method for learning overcomplete dictionaries composed of two modalities that describe a 3D scene: image intensity and scene depth. We propose a novel Joint Basis Pursuit (JBP) algorithm that finds related sparse features in two modalities using conic programming and integrate it into a two-step dictionary learning algorithm. JBP differs from related convex algorithms because it finds joint sparsity models with different atoms and different coefficient values for intensity and depth. This is crucial for recovering generative models where the same sparse underlying causes (3D features) give rise to different signals (intensity and depth). We give a theoretical bound for the sparse coefficient recovery error obtained by JBP, and show experimentally that JBP is far superior to the state of the art Group Lasso algorithm. When applied to the Middlebury depth-intensity database, our learning algorithm converges to a set of related features, such as pairs of depth and intensity edges or image textures and depth slants. Finally, we show that the learned dictionary and JBP achieve the state of the art depth inpainting performance on time-of-flight 3D data.
1201.0610
Random Forests for Metric Learning with Implicit Pairwise Position Dependence
stat.ML cs.LG
Metric learning makes it plausible to learn distances for complex distributions of data from labeled data. However, to date, most metric learning methods are based on a single Mahalanobis metric, which cannot handle heterogeneous data well. Those that learn multiple metrics throughout the space have demonstrated superior accuracy, but at the cost of computational efficiency. Here, we take a new angle to the metric learning problem and learn a single metric that is able to implicitly adapt its distance function throughout the feature space. This metric adaptation is accomplished by using a random forest-based classifier to underpin the distance function and incorporate both absolute pairwise position and standard relative position into the representation. We have implemented and tested our method against state of the art global and multi-metric methods on a variety of data sets. Overall, the proposed method outperforms both types of methods in terms of accuracy (consistently ranked first) and is an order of magnitude faster than state of the art multi-metric methods (16x faster in the worst case).
1201.0638
Constrained Randomisation of Weighted Networks
physics.data-an cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We propose a Markov chain method to efficiently generate 'surrogate networks' that are random under the constraint of given vertex strengths. With these strength-preserving surrogates and with edge-weight-preserving surrogates we investigate the clustering coefficient and the average shortest path length of functional networks of the human brain as well as of the International Trade Networks. We demonstrate that surrogate networks can provide additional information about network-specific characteristics and thus help interpreting empirical weighted networks.
1201.0662
Transmission capacity of wireless networks
cs.IT cs.NI cs.PF math.IT
Transmission capacity (TC) is a performance metric for wireless networks that measures the spatial intensity of successful transmissions per unit area, subject to a constraint on the permissible outage probability (where outage occurs when the SINR at a receiver is below a threshold). This volume gives a unified treatment of the TC framework that has been developed by the authors and their collaborators over the past decade. The mathematical framework underlying the analysis (reviewed in Ch. 2) is stochastic geometry: Poisson point processes model the locations of interferers, and (stable) shot noise processes represent the aggregate interference seen at a receiver. Ch. 3 presents TC results (exact, asymptotic, and bounds) on a simple model in order to illustrate a key strength of the framework: analytical tractability yields explicit performance dependence upon key model parameters. Ch. 4 presents enhancements to this basic model --- channel fading, variable link distances, and multi-hop. Ch. 5 presents four network design case studies well-suited to TC: i) spectrum management, ii) interference cancellation, iii) signal threshold transmission scheduling, and iv) power control. Ch. 6 studies the TC when nodes have multiple antennas, which provides a contrast vs. classical results that ignore interference.
1201.0676
Knowledge epidemics and population dynamics models for describing idea diffusion
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
The diffusion of ideas is often closely connected to the creation and diffusion of knowledge and to the technological evolution of society. Because of this, knowledge creation, exchange and its subsequent transformation into innovations for improved welfare and economic growth is briefly described from a historical point of view. Next, three approaches are discussed for modeling the diffusion of ideas in the areas of science and technology, through (i) deterministic, (ii) stochastic, and (iii) statistical approaches. These are illustrated through their corresponding population dynamics and epidemic models relative to the spreading of ideas, knowledge and innovations. The deterministic dynamical models are considered to be appropriate for analyzing the evolution of large and small societal, scientific and technological systems when the influence of fluctuations is insignificant. Stochastic models are appropriate when the system of interest is small but when the fluctuations become significant for its evolution. Finally statistical approaches and models based on the laws and distributions of Lotka, Bradford, Yule, Zipf-Mandelbrot, and others, provide much useful information for the analysis of the evolution of systems in which development is closely connected to the process of idea diffusion.
1201.0715
Tree-Structure Expectation Propagation for LDPC Decoding over the BEC
cs.IT math.IT
We present the tree-structure expectation propagation (Tree-EP) algorithm to decode low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over discrete memoryless channels (DMCs). EP generalizes belief propagation (BP) in two ways. First, it can be used with any exponential family distribution over the cliques in the graph. Second, it can impose additional constraints on the marginal distributions. We use this second property to impose pair-wise marginal constraints over pairs of variables connected to a check node of the LDPC code's Tanner graph. Thanks to these additional constraints, the Tree-EP marginal estimates for each variable in the graph are more accurate than those provided by BP. We also reformulate the Tree-EP algorithm for the binary erasure channel (BEC) as a peeling-type algorithm (TEP) and we show that the algorithm has the same computational complexity as BP and it decodes a higher fraction of errors. We describe the TEP decoding process by a set of differential equations that represents the expected residual graph evolution as a function of the code parameters. The solution of these equations is used to predict the TEP decoder performance in both the asymptotic regime and the finite-length regime over the BEC. While the asymptotic threshold of the TEP decoder is the same as the BP decoder for regular and optimized codes, we propose a scaling law (SL) for finite-length LDPC codes, which accurately approximates the TEP improved performance and facilitates its optimization.
1201.0737
Spectrum Sensing in the Presence of Multiple Primary Users
cs.IT math.IT
We consider multi-antenna cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks, when there may be multiple primary users. A detector based on the spherical test is analyzed in such a scenario. Based on the moments of the distributions involved, simple and accurate analytical formulae for the key performance metrics of the detector are derived. The false alarm and the detection probabilities, as well as the detection threshold and Receiver Operation Characteristics are available in closed form. Simulations are provided to verify the accuracy of the derived results, and to compare with other detectors in realistic sensing scenarios.
1201.0745
Communities and bottlenecks: Trees and treelike networks have high modularity
physics.soc-ph cs.SI physics.data-an
Much effort has gone into understanding the modular nature of complex networks. Communities, also known as clusters or modules, are typically considered to be densely interconnected groups of nodes that are only sparsely connected to other groups in the network. Discovering high quality communities is a difficult and important problem in a number of areas. The most popular approach is the objective function known as modularity, used both to discover communities and to measure their strength. To understand the modular structure of networks it is then crucial to know how such functions evaluate different topologies, what features they account for, and what implicit assumptions they may make. We show that trees and treelike networks can have unexpectedly and often arbitrarily high values of modularity. This is surprising since trees are maximally sparse connected graphs and are not typically considered to possess modular structure, yet the nonlocal null model used by modularity assigns low probabilities, and thus high significance, to the densities of these sparse tree communities. We further study the practical performance of popular methods on model trees and on a genealogical data set and find that the discovered communities also have very high modularity, often approaching its maximum value. Statistical tests reveal the communities in trees to be significant, in contrast with known results for partitions of sparse, random graphs.
1201.0782
Umgebungserfassungssystem fuer mobile Roboter (environment logging system for mobile autonomous robots)
cs.RO cs.AR
This diploma thesis describes the theoretical bases, the conception of the module and the final result of the development process in application. for the environment logging with a small mobile robot for interiors should be sketched an economical alternative to the expensive laser scanners. the structure, color or the material of the objects in the radius of action, as well as the environment brightness and illuminating are to have thereby no influence on the results of measurement.
1201.0794
Sparse Nonparametric Graphical Models
stat.ML cs.LG stat.ME
We present some nonparametric methods for graphical modeling. In the discrete case, where the data are binary or drawn from a finite alphabet, Markov random fields are already essentially nonparametric, since the cliques can take only a finite number of values. Continuous data are different. The Gaussian graphical model is the standard parametric model for continuous data, but it makes distributional assumptions that are often unrealistic. We discuss two approaches to building more flexible graphical models. One allows arbitrary graphs and a nonparametric extension of the Gaussian; the other uses kernel density estimation and restricts the graphs to trees and forests. Examples of both methods are presented. We also discuss possible future research directions for nonparametric graphical modeling.
1201.0830
Wireless Network-Coded Accumulate-Compute and Forward Two-Way Relaying
cs.IT math.IT
The design of modulation schemes for the physical layer network-coded two way wireless relaying scenario is considered. It was observed by Koike-Akino et al. for the two way relaying scenario, that adaptively changing the network coding map used at the relay according to the channel conditions greatly reduces the impact of multiple access interference which occurs at the relay during the MA Phase and all these network coding maps should satisfy a requirement called exclusive law. We extend this approach to an Accumulate-Compute and Forward protocol which employs two phases: Multiple Access (MA) phase consisting of two channel uses with independent messages in each channel use, and Broadcast (BC) phase having one channel use. Assuming that the two users transmit points from the same 4-PSK constellation, every such network coding map that satisfies the exclusive law can be represented by a Latin Square with side 16, and conversely, this relationship can be used to get the network coding maps satisfying the exclusive law. Two methods of obtaining this network coding map to be used at the relay are discussed. Using the structural properties of the Latin Squares for a given set of parameters, the problem of finding all the required maps is reduced to finding a small set of maps. Having obtained all the Latin Squares, the set of all possible channel realizations is quantized, depending on which one of the Latin Squares obtained optimizes the performance. The quantization thus obtained, is shown to be the same as the one obtained in [7] for the 2-stage bidirectional relaying.
1201.0838
A Topic Modeling Toolbox Using Belief Propagation
cs.LG
Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is an important hierarchical Bayesian model for probabilistic topic modeling, which attracts worldwide interests and touches on many important applications in text mining, computer vision and computational biology. This paper introduces a topic modeling toolbox (TMBP) based on the belief propagation (BP) algorithms. TMBP toolbox is implemented by MEX C++/Matlab/Octave for either Windows 7 or Linux. Compared with existing topic modeling packages, the novelty of this toolbox lies in the BP algorithms for learning LDA-based topic models. The current version includes BP algorithms for latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), author-topic models (ATM), relational topic models (RTM), and labeled LDA (LaLDA). This toolbox is an ongoing project and more BP-based algorithms for various topic models will be added in the near future. Interested users may also extend BP algorithms for learning more complicated topic models. The source codes are freely available under the GNU General Public Licence, Version 1.0 at https://mloss.org/software/view/399/.
1201.0856
Complexity Classification in Infinite-Domain Constraint Satisfaction
cs.CC cs.AI cs.DM cs.LO math.LO
A constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is a computational problem where the input consists of a finite set of variables and a finite set of constraints, and where the task is to decide whether there exists a satisfying assignment of values to the variables. Depending on the type of constraints that we allow in the input, a CSP might be tractable, or computationally hard. In recent years, general criteria have been discovered that imply that a CSP is polynomial-time tractable, or that it is NP-hard. Finite-domain CSPs have become a major common research focus of graph theory, artificial intelligence, and finite model theory. It turned out that the key questions for complexity classification of CSPs are closely linked to central questions in universal algebra. This thesis studies CSPs where the variables can take values from an infinite domain. This generalization enhances dramatically the range of computational problems that can be modeled as a CSP. Many problems from areas that have so far seen no interaction with constraint satisfaction theory can be formulated using infinite domains, e.g. problems from temporal and spatial reasoning, phylogenetic reconstruction, and operations research. It turns out that the universal-algebraic approach can also be applied to study large classes of infinite-domain CSPs, yielding elegant complexity classification results. A new tool in this thesis that becomes relevant particularly for infinite domains is Ramsey theory. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with two complete complexity classification results: one on CSPs in temporal reasoning, the other on a generalization of Schaefer's theorem for propositional logic to logic over graphs. We also study the limits of complexity classification, and present classes of computational problems provably do not exhibit a complexity dichotomy into hard and easy problems.
1201.0876
Approximations of the Euclidean distance by chamfer distances
cs.IT math.IT
Chamfer distances play an important role in the theory of distance transforms. Though the determination of the exact Euclidean distance transform is also a well investigated area, the classical chamfering method based upon "small" neighborhoods still outperforms it e.g. in terms of computation time. In this paper we determine the best possible maximum relative error of chamfer distances under various boundary conditions. In each case some best approximating sequences are explicitly given. Further, because of possible practical interest, we give all best approximating sequences in case of small (i.e. 5 by 5 and 7 by 7) neighborhoods.
1201.0901
Two Algorithms for Orthogonal Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with Application to Clustering
math.OC cs.IR
Approximate matrix factorization techniques with both nonnegativity and orthogonality constraints, referred to as orthogonal nonnegative matrix factorization (ONMF), have been recently introduced and shown to work remarkably well for clustering tasks such as document classification. In this paper, we introduce two new methods to solve ONMF. First, we show athematical equivalence between ONMF and a weighted variant of spherical k-means, from which we derive our first method, a simple EM-like algorithm. This also allows us to determine when ONMF should be preferred to k-means and spherical k-means. Our second method is based on an augmented Lagrangian approach. Standard ONMF algorithms typically enforce nonnegativity for their iterates while trying to achieve orthogonality at the limit (e.g., using a proper penalization term or a suitably chosen search direction). Our method works the opposite way: orthogonality is strictly imposed at each step while nonnegativity is asymptotically obtained, using a quadratic penalty. Finally, we show that the two proposed approaches compare favorably with standard ONMF algorithms on synthetic, text and image data sets.
1201.0913
Novel Modulation Techniques using Isomers as Messenger Molecules for Molecular Communication via Diffusion
q-bio.QM cs.CE cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we propose novel modulation techniques using isomers as messenger molecules for nano communication via diffusion. To evaluate achievable rate performance, we compare the proposed techniques with concentration-based and molecular-type-based methods. Analytical and numerical results confirm that the proposed modulation techniques achieve higher data transmission rate performance than conventional insulin based concepts.
1201.0925
On The Convergence of Gradient Descent for Finding the Riemannian Center of Mass
math.DG cs.CV cs.NA math.NA math.OC
We study the problem of finding the global Riemannian center of mass of a set of data points on a Riemannian manifold. Specifically, we investigate the convergence of constant step-size gradient descent algorithms for solving this problem. The challenge is that often the underlying cost function is neither globally differentiable nor convex, and despite this one would like to have guaranteed convergence to the global minimizer. After some necessary preparations we state a conjecture which we argue is the best (in a sense described) convergence condition one can hope for. The conjecture specifies conditions on the spread of the data points, step-size range, and the location of the initial condition (i.e., the region of convergence) of the algorithm. These conditions depend on the topology and the curvature of the manifold and can be conveniently described in terms of the injectivity radius and the sectional curvatures of the manifold. For manifolds of constant nonnegative curvature (e.g., the sphere and the rotation group in $\mathbb{R}^{3}$) we show that the conjecture holds true (we do this by proving and using a comparison theorem which seems to be of a different nature from the standard comparison theorems in Riemannian geometry). For manifolds of arbitrary curvature we prove convergence results which are weaker than the conjectured one (but still superior over the available results). We also briefly study the effect of the configuration of the data points on the speed of convergence.
1201.0942
Competitive Comparison of Optimal Designs of Experiments for Sampling-based Sensitivity Analysis
cs.CE cs.NA stat.ME
Nowadays, the numerical models of real-world structures are more precise, more complex and, of course, more time-consuming. Despite the growth of a computational effort, the exploration of model behaviour remains a complex task. The sensitivity analysis is a basic tool for investigating the sensitivity of the model to its inputs. One widely used strategy to assess the sensitivity is based on a finite set of simulations for a given sets of input parameters, i.e. points in the design space. An estimate of the sensitivity can be then obtained by computing correlations between the input parameters and the chosen response of the model. The accuracy of the sensitivity prediction depends on the choice of design points called the design of experiments. The aim of the presented paper is to review and compare available criteria determining the quality of the design of experiments suitable for sampling-based sensitivity analysis.
1201.0946
Cops and Invisible Robbers: the Cost of Drunkenness
cs.DM cs.GT cs.RO math.CO math.PR
We examine a version of the Cops and Robber (CR) game in which the robber is invisible, i.e., the cops do not know his location until they capture him. Apparently this game (CiR) has received little attention in the CR literature. We examine two variants: in the first the robber is adversarial (he actively tries to avoid capture); in the second he is drunk (he performs a random walk). Our goal in this paper is to study the invisible Cost of Drunkenness (iCOD), which is defined as the ratio ct_i(G)/dct_i(G), with ct_i(G) and dct_i(G) being the expected capture times in the adversarial and drunk CiR variants, respectively. We show that these capture times are well defined, using game theory for the adversarial case and partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) for the drunk case. We give exact asymptotic values of iCOD for several special graph families such as $d$-regular trees, give some bounds for grids, and provide general upper and lower bounds for general classes of graphs. We also give an infinite family of graphs showing that iCOD can be arbitrarily close to any value in [2,infinty). Finally, we briefly examine one more CiR variant, in which the robber is invisible and "infinitely fast"; we argue that this variant is significantly different from the Graph Search game, despite several similarities between the two games.
1201.0959
Constrained variable clustering and the best basis problem in functional data analysis
stat.ML cs.LG
Functional data analysis involves data described by regular functions rather than by a finite number of real valued variables. While some robust data analysis methods can be applied directly to the very high dimensional vectors obtained from a fine grid sampling of functional data, all methods benefit from a prior simplification of the functions that reduces the redundancy induced by the regularity. In this paper we propose to use a clustering approach that targets variables rather than individual to design a piecewise constant representation of a set of functions. The contiguity constraint induced by the functional nature of the variables allows a polynomial complexity algorithm to give the optimal solution.
1201.0962
Power Grid Network Evolutions for Local Energy Trading
physics.soc-ph cs.CE cs.SI
The shift towards an energy Grid dominated by prosumers (consumers and producers of energy) will inevitably have repercussions on the distribution infrastructure. Today it is a hierarchical one designed to deliver energy from large scale facilities to end-users. Tomorrow it will be a capillary infrastructure at the medium and Low Voltage levels that will support local energy trading among prosumers. In our previous work, we analyzed the Dutch Power Grid and made an initial analysis of the economic impact topological properties have on decentralized energy trading. In this paper, we go one step further and investigate how different networks topologies and growth models facilitate the emergence of a decentralized market. In particular, we show how the connectivity plays an important role in improving the properties of reliability and path-cost reduction. From the economic point of view, we estimate how the topological evolutions facilitate local electricity distribution, taking into account the main cost ingredient required for increasing network connectivity, i.e., the price of cabling.
1201.0963
Clustering Dynamic Web Usage Data
stat.ML cs.LG
Most classification methods are based on the assumption that data conforms to a stationary distribution. The machine learning domain currently suffers from a lack of classification techniques that are able to detect the occurrence of a change in the underlying data distribution. Ignoring possible changes in the underlying concept, also known as concept drift, may degrade the performance of the classification model. Often these changes make the model inconsistent and regular updatings become necessary. Taking the temporal dimension into account during the analysis of Web usage data is a necessity, since the way a site is visited may indeed evolve due to modifications in the structure and content of the site, or even due to changes in the behavior of certain user groups. One solution to this problem, proposed in this article, is to update models using summaries obtained by means of an evolutionary approach based on an intelligent clustering approach. We carry out various clustering strategies that are applied on time sub-periods. To validate our approach we apply two external evaluation criteria which compare different partitions from the same data set. Our experiments show that the proposed approach is efficient to detect the occurrence of changes.
1201.0979
Sciduction: Combining Induction, Deduction, and Structure for Verification and Synthesis
cs.LO cs.AI cs.PL
Even with impressive advances in automated formal methods, certain problems in system verification and synthesis remain challenging. Examples include the verification of quantitative properties of software involving constraints on timing and energy consumption, and the automatic synthesis of systems from specifications. The major challenges include environment modeling, incompleteness in specifications, and the complexity of underlying decision problems. This position paper proposes sciduction, an approach to tackle these challenges by integrating inductive inference, deductive reasoning, and structure hypotheses. Deductive reasoning, which leads from general rules or concepts to conclusions about specific problem instances, includes techniques such as logical inference and constraint solving. Inductive inference, which generalizes from specific instances to yield a concept, includes algorithmic learning from examples. Structure hypotheses are used to define the class of artifacts, such as invariants or program fragments, generated during verification or synthesis. Sciduction constrains inductive and deductive reasoning using structure hypotheses, and actively combines inductive and deductive reasoning: for instance, deductive techniques generate examples for learning, and inductive reasoning is used to guide the deductive engines. We illustrate this approach with three applications: (i) timing analysis of software; (ii) synthesis of loop-free programs, and (iii) controller synthesis for hybrid systems. Some future applications are also discussed.
1201.1039
Impartial games emulating one-dimensional cellular automata and undecidability
math.CO cs.IT math.IT nlin.CG
We study two-player \emph{take-away} games whose outcomes emulate two-state one-dimensional cellular automata, such as Wolfram's rules 60 and 110. Given an initial string consisting of a central data pattern and periodic left and right patterns, the rule 110 cellular automaton was recently proved Turing-complete by Matthew Cook. Hence, many questions regarding its behavior are algorithmically undecidable. We show that similar questions are undecidable for our \emph{rule 110} game.
1201.1062
Network Coding Capacity Regions via Entropy Functions
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we use entropy functions to characterise the set of rate-capacity tuples achievable with either zero decoding error, or vanishing decoding error, for general network coding problems. We show that when sources are colocated, the outer bound obtained by Yeung, A First Course in Information Theory, Section 15.5 (2002) is tight and the sets of zero-error achievable and vanishing-error achievable rate-capacity tuples are the same. We also characterise the set of zero-error and vanishing-error achievable rate capacity tuples for network coding problems subject to linear encoding constraints, routing constraints (where some or all nodes can only perform routing) and secrecy constraints. Finally, we show that even for apparently simple networks, design of optimal codes may be difficult. In particular, we prove that for the incremental multicast problem and for the single-source secure network coding problem, characterisation of the achievable set is very hard and linear network codes may not be optimal.
1201.1065
A Novel Error Correcting System Based on Product Codes for Future Magnetic Recording Channels
cs.IT math.IT
We propose a novel construction of product codes for high-density magnetic recording based on binary low-density parity check (LDPC) codes and binary image of Reed Solomon (RS) codes. Moreover, two novel algorithms are proposed to decode the codes in the presence of both AWGN errors and scattered hard errors (SHEs). Simulation results show that at a bit error rate (bER) of approximately 10^-8, our method allows improving the error performance by approximately 1.9dB compared with that of a hard decision decoder of RS codes of the same length and code rate. For the mixed error channel including random noises and SHEs, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is set at 5dB and 150 to 400 SHEs are randomly generated. The bit error performance of the proposed product code shows a significant improvement over that of equivalent random LDPC codes or serial concatenation of LDPC and RS codes.
1201.1085
Ontologies and tag-statistics
physics.soc-ph cs.IR stat.AP
Due to the increasing popularity of collaborative tagging systems, the research on tagged networks, hypergraphs, ontologies, folksonomies and other related concepts is becoming an important interdisciplinary topic with great actuality and relevance for practical applications. In most collaborative tagging systems the tagging by the users is completely "flat", while in some cases they are allowed to define a shallow hierarchy for their own tags. However, usually no overall hierarchical organisation of the tags is given, and one of the interesting challenges of this area is to provide an algorithm generating the ontology of the tags from the available data. In contrast, there are also other type of tagged networks available for research, where the tags are already organised into a directed acyclic graph (DAG), encapsulating the "is a sub-category of" type of hierarchy between each other. In this paper we study how this DAG affects the statistical distribution of tags on the nodes marked by the tags in various real networks. We analyse the relation between the tag-frequency and the position of the tag in the DAG in two large sub-networks of the English Wikipedia and a protein-protein interaction network. We also study the tag co-occurrence statistics by introducing a 2d tag-distance distribution preserving both the difference in the levels and the absolute distance in the DAG for the co-occurring pairs of tags. Our most interesting finding is that the local relevance of tags in the DAG, (i.e., their rank or significance as characterised by, e.g., the length of the branches starting from them) is much more important than their global distance from the root. Furthermore, we also introduce a simple tagging model based on random walks on the DAG, capable of reproducing the main statistical features of tag co-occurrence.
1201.1096
Gibbs-Shannon Entropy and Related Measures: Tsallis Entropy
cs.IT math.IT
In this research paper, it is proved that an approximation to Gibbs-Shannon entropy measure naturally leads to Tsallis entropy for the real parameter q =2 . Several interesting measures based on the input as well as output of a discrete memoryless channel are provided and some of the properties of those measures are discussed. It is expected that these results will be of utility in Information Theoretic research.
1201.1170
Data Rate Limitations for Stabilization of Uncertain Systems over Lossy Channels
cs.SY cs.IT math.IT math.OC
This paper considers data rate limitations for mean square stabilization of uncertain discrete-time linear systems via finite data rate and lossy channels. For a plant having parametric uncertainties, a necessary condition and a sufficient condition are derived, represented by the data rate, the packet loss probability, uncertainty bounds on plant parameters, and the unstable eigenvalues of the plant. The results extend those existing in the area of networked control, and in particular, the condition is exact for the scalar plant case.
1201.1175
Throughput Optimal Multi-user Scheduling via Hierarchical Modulation
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT
We investigate the network stability problem when two users are scheduled simultaneously. The key idea is to simultaneously transmit to more than one users experiencing different channel conditions by employing hierarchical modulation. For two-user scheduling problem, we develop a throughput-optimal algorithm which can stabilize the network whenever this is possible. In addition, we analytically prove that the proposed algorithm achieves larger achievable rate region compared to the conventional Max-Weight algorithm which employs uniform modulation and transmits a single user. We demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithm on a realistic simulation environment using the parameters of High Data Rate protocol in a Code Division Multiple Access system. Simulation results show that with the proposed algorithm, the network can carry higher user traffic with lower delays.
1201.1192
Formalization of semantic network of image constructions in electronic content
cs.CL
A formal theory based on a binary operator of directional associative relation is constructed in the article and an understanding of an associative normal form of image constructions is introduced. A model of a commutative semigroup, which provides a presentation of a sentence as three components of an interrogative linguistic image construction, is considered.
1201.1215
Triadic motifs and dyadic self-organization in the World Trade Network
physics.soc-ph cs.SI physics.data-an q-fin.GN
In self-organizing networks, topology and dynamics coevolve in a continuous feedback, without exogenous driving. The World Trade Network (WTN) is one of the few empirically well documented examples of self-organizing networks: its topology strongly depends on the GDP of world countries, which in turn depends on the structure of trade. Therefore, understanding which are the key topological properties of the WTN that deviate from randomness provides direct empirical information about the structural effects of self-organization. Here, using an analytical pattern-detection method that we have recently proposed, we study the occurrence of triadic "motifs" (subgraphs of three vertices) in the WTN between 1950 and 2000. We find that, unlike other properties, motifs are not explained by only the in- and out-degree sequences. By contrast, they are completely explained if also the numbers of reciprocal edges are taken into account. This implies that the self-organization process underlying the evolution of the WTN is almost completely encoded into the dyadic structure, which strongly depends on reciprocity.