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1203.1995
Classify Participants in Online Communities
cs.SI
As online communities become increasingly popular, researchers have tried to examine participating activities in online communities as well as how to sustain online communities. However, relatively few studies have tried to understand what kinds of participants constitute online communities. In this study, we try to contribute online community research by developing "common language" to classify different participants in online communities. Specifically, we argue that the previous way to classify participants is not sufficient and accurate, and we propose a continuum to classify participants based on participants' overall trend of posting activities. In order to further online community research, we also propose potential directions for future studies.
1203.2000
Overview of streaming-data algorithms
cs.DB cs.IR
Due to recent advances in data collection techniques, massive amounts of data are being collected at an extremely fast pace. Also, these data are potentially unbounded. Boundless streams of data collected from sensors, equipments, and other data sources are referred to as data streams. Various data mining tasks can be performed on data streams in search of interesting patterns. This paper studies a particular data mining task, clustering, which can be used as the first step in many knowledge discovery processes. By grouping data streams into homogeneous clusters, data miners can learn about data characteristics which can then be developed into classification models for new data or predictive models for unknown events. Recent research addresses the problem of data-stream mining to deal with applications that require processing huge amounts of data such as sensor data analysis and financial applications. For such analysis, single-pass algorithms that consume a small amount of memory are critical.
1203.2002
Graph partitioning advance clustering technique
cs.LG cs.DB
Clustering is a common technique for statistical data analysis, Clustering is the process of grouping the data into classes or clusters so that objects within a cluster have high similarity in comparison to one another, but are very dissimilar to objects in other clusters. Dissimilarities are assessed based on the attribute values describing the objects. Often, distance measures are used. Clustering is an unsupervised learning technique, where interesting patterns and structures can be found directly from very large data sets with little or none of the background knowledge. This paper also considers the partitioning of m-dimensional lattice graphs using Fiedler's approach, which requires the determination of the eigenvector belonging to the second smallest Eigenvalue of the Laplacian with K-means partitioning algorithm.
1203.2021
A new supervised non-linear mapping
cs.IR
Supervised mapping methods project multi-dimensional labeled data onto a 2-dimensional space attempting to preserve both data similarities and topology of classes. Supervised mappings are expected to help the user to understand the underlying original class structure and to classify new data visually. Several methods have been designed to achieve supervised mapping, but many of them modify original distances prior to the mapping so that original data similarities are corrupted and even overlapping classes tend to be separated onto the map ignoring their original topology. We propose ClassiMap, an alternative method for supervised mapping. Mappings come with distortions which can be split between tears (close points mapped far apart) and false neighborhoods (points far apart mapped as neighbors). Some mapping methods favor the former while others favor the latter. ClassiMap switches between such mapping methods so that tears tend to appear between classes and false neighborhood within classes, better preserving classes' topology. We also propose two new objective criteria instead of the usual subjective visual inspection to perform fair comparisons of supervised mapping methods. ClassiMap appears to be the best supervised mapping method according to these criteria in our experiments on synthetic and real datasets.
1203.2024
A Greedy Link Scheduler for Wireless Networks with Fading Channels
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT
We consider the problem of link scheduling for wireless networks with fading channels, where the link rates are varying with time. Due to the high computational complexity of the throughput optimal scheduler, we provide a low complexity greedy link scheduler GFS, with provable performance guarantees. We show that the performance of our greedy scheduler can be analyzed using the Local Pooling Factor (LPF) of a network graph, which has been previously used to characterize the stability of the Greedy Maximal Scheduling (GMS) policy for networks with static channels. We conjecture that the performance of GFS is a lower bound on the performance of GMS for wireless networks with fading channels
1203.2031
Design of modular wireless sensor
cs.SE cs.NI cs.SY math.OC
The paper addresses combinatorial approach to design of modular wireless sensor as composition of the sensor element from its component alternatives and aggregation of the obtained solutions into a resultant aggregated solution. A hierarchical model is used for the wireless sensor element. The solving process consists of three stages: (i) multicriteria ranking of design alternatives for system components/parts, (ii) composing the selected design alternatives into composite solution(s) while taking into account ordinal quality of the design alternatives above and their compatibility (this stage is based on Hierarchical Morphological Multicriteria Design - HMMD), and (iii) aggregation of the obtained composite solutions into a resultant aggregated solution(s). A numerical example describes the problem structuring and solving processes for modular alarm wireless sensor element.
1203.2109
Network Cosmology
gr-qc cond-mat.dis-nn cs.NI cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Prediction and control of the dynamics of complex networks is a central problem in network science. Structural and dynamical similarities of different real networks suggest that some universal laws might accurately describe the dynamics of these networks, albeit the nature and common origin of such laws remain elusive. Here we show that the causal network representing the large-scale structure of spacetime in our accelerating universe is a power-law graph with strong clustering, similar to many complex networks such as the Internet, social, or biological networks. We prove that this structural similarity is a consequence of the asymptotic equivalence between the large-scale growth dynamics of complex networks and causal networks. This equivalence suggests that unexpectedly similar laws govern the dynamics of complex networks and spacetime in the universe, with implications to network science and cosmology.
1203.2147
A Hybrid Image Cryptosystem Based On OMFLIP Permutation Cipher
cs.MM cs.IT math.IT
The protection of confidential image data from unauthorized access is an important area of research in network communication. This paper presents a high-level security encryption scheme for gray scale images. The gray level image is first decomposed into binary images using bit scale decomposition. Each binary image is then compressed by selecting a good scanning path that minimizes the total number of bits needed to encode the bit sequence along the scanning path using two dimensional run encoding. The compressed bit string is then scrambled iteratively using a pseudo-random number generator and finally encrypted using a bit level permutation OMFLIP. The performance is tested, illustrated and discussed.
1203.2169
Blind Carrier Phase Recovery for General 2{\pi}/M-rotationally Symmetric Constellations
cs.IT math.IT
This paper introduces a novel blind carrier phase recovery estimator for general 2{\Pi}/M-rotationally symmetric constellations. This estimation method is a generalization of the non-data-aided (NDA) nonlinear Phase Metric Method (PMM) estimator already designed for general quadrature amplitude constellations. This unbiased estimator is seen here as a fourth order PMM then generalized to Mth order (Mth PMM) in such manner that it covers general 2{\Pi}/M-rotationally symmetric constellations such as PAM, QAM, PSK. Simulation results demonstrate the good performance of this Mth PMM estimation algorithm against competitive blind phase estimators already published for various modulation systems of practical interest.
1203.2177
Regret Bounds for Deterministic Gaussian Process Bandits
cs.LG stat.ML
This paper analyses the problem of Gaussian process (GP) bandits with deterministic observations. The analysis uses a branch and bound algorithm that is related to the UCB algorithm of (Srinivas et al., 2010). For GPs with Gaussian observation noise, with variance strictly greater than zero, (Srinivas et al., 2010) proved that the regret vanishes at the approximate rate of $O(\frac{1}{\sqrt{t}})$, where t is the number of observations. To complement their result, we attack the deterministic case and attain a much faster exponential convergence rate. Under some regularity assumptions, we show that the regret decreases asymptotically according to $O(e^{-\frac{\tau t}{(\ln t)^{d/4}}})$ with high probability. Here, d is the dimension of the search space and $\tau$ is a constant that depends on the behaviour of the objective function near its global maximum.
1203.2200
Role-Dynamics: Fast Mining of Large Dynamic Networks
cs.SI cs.AI cs.LG stat.ML
To understand the structural dynamics of a large-scale social, biological or technological network, it may be useful to discover behavioral roles representing the main connectivity patterns present over time. In this paper, we propose a scalable non-parametric approach to automatically learn the structural dynamics of the network and individual nodes. Roles may represent structural or behavioral patterns such as the center of a star, peripheral nodes, or bridge nodes that connect different communities. Our novel approach learns the appropriate structural role dynamics for any arbitrary network and tracks the changes over time. In particular, we uncover the specific global network dynamics and the local node dynamics of a technological, communication, and social network. We identify interesting node and network patterns such as stationary and non-stationary roles, spikes/steps in role-memberships (perhaps indicating anomalies), increasing/decreasing role trends, among many others. Our results indicate that the nodes in each of these networks have distinct connectivity patterns that are non-stationary and evolve considerably over time. Overall, the experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for fast mining and tracking of the dynamics in large networks. Furthermore, the dynamic structural representation provides a basis for building more sophisticated models and tools that are fast for exploring large dynamic networks.
1203.2202
Exact-MSR Codes for Distributed Storage with Low Repair Complexity
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we propose two new constructions of exact-repair minimum storage regenerating (exact-MSR) codes. For both constructions, the encoded symbols are obtained by treating the message vector over GF(q) as a linearized polynomial and evaluating it over an extension field GF(q^m). For our exact-MSR codes, data repair does not need matrix inversion, and can be implemented by additions and multiplications over GF$(q)$ as well as cyclic shifts when a normal basis is used. The two constructions assume a base field of GF(q) (q>2) and GF(2), respectively. In contrast to existing constructions of exact-MSR codes, the former construction works for arbitrary code parameters, provided that $q$ is large enough. This is the first construction of exact-MSR codes with arbitrary code parameters, to the best of our knowledge. In comparison to existing exact-MSR codes, while data construction of our exact-MSR codes has a higher complexity, the complexity of data repair is lower. Thus, they are attractive for applications that need a small number of data reconstructions along with a large number of data repairs.
1203.2210
Fixed-Rank Representation for Unsupervised Visual Learning
cs.CV cs.NA
Subspace clustering and feature extraction are two of the most commonly used unsupervised learning techniques in computer vision and pattern recognition. State-of-the-art techniques for subspace clustering make use of recent advances in sparsity and rank minimization. However, existing techniques are computationally expensive and may result in degenerate solutions that degrade clustering performance in the case of insufficient data sampling. To partially solve these problems, and inspired by existing work on matrix factorization, this paper proposes fixed-rank representation (FRR) as a unified framework for unsupervised visual learning. FRR is able to reveal the structure of multiple subspaces in closed-form when the data is noiseless. Furthermore, we prove that under some suitable conditions, even with insufficient observations, FRR can still reveal the true subspace memberships. To achieve robustness to outliers and noise, a sparse regularizer is introduced into the FRR framework. Beyond subspace clustering, FRR can be used for unsupervised feature extraction. As a non-trivial byproduct, a fast numerical solver is developed for FRR. Experimental results on both synthetic data and real applications validate our theoretical analysis and demonstrate the benefits of FRR for unsupervised visual learning.
1203.2213
On the Mixing Time of Markov Chain Monte Carlo for Integer Least-Square Problems
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we study the mixing time of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for integer least-square (LS) optimization problems. It is found that the mixing time of MCMC for integer LS problems depends on the structure of the underlying lattice. More specifically, the mixing time of MCMC is closely related to whether there is a local minimum in the lattice structure. For some lattices, the mixing time of the Markov chain is independent of the signal-to-noise ($SNR$) ratio and grows polynomially in the problem dimension; while for some lattices, the mixing time grows unboundedly as $SNR$ grows. Both theoretical and empirical results suggest that to ensure fast mixing, the temperature for MCMC should often grow positively as the $SNR$ increases. We also derive the probability that there exist local minima in an integer least-square problem, which can be as high as $1/3-\frac{1}{\sqrt{5}}+\frac{2\arctan(\sqrt{5/3})}{\sqrt{5}\pi}$.
1203.2228
A network-based dynamical ranking system for competitive sports
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
From the viewpoint of networks, a ranking system for players or teams in sports is equivalent to a centrality measure for sports networks, whereby a directed link represents the result of a single game. Previously proposed network-based ranking systems are derived from static networks, i.e., aggregation of the results of games over time. However, the score of a player (or team) fluctuates over time. Defeating a renowned player in the peak performance is intuitively more rewarding than defeating the same player in other periods. To account for this factor, we propose a dynamic variant of such a network-based ranking system and apply it to professional men's tennis data. We derive a set of linear online update equations for the score of each player. The proposed ranking system predicts the outcome of the future games with a higher accuracy than the static counterparts.
1203.2245
Facticity as the amount of self-descriptive information in a data set
cs.IT math.IT
Using the theory of Kolmogorov complexity the notion of facticity {\phi}(x) of a string is defined as the amount of self-descriptive information it contains. It is proved that (under reasonable assumptions: the existence of an empty machine and the availability of a faithful index) facticity is definite, i.e. random strings have facticity 0 and for compressible strings 0 < {\phi}(x) < 1/2 |x| + O(1). Consequently facticity measures the tension in a data set between structural and ad-hoc information objectively. For binary strings there is a so-called facticity threshold that is dependent on their entropy. Strings with facticty above this threshold have no optimal stochastic model and are essentially computational. The shape of the facticty versus entropy plot coincides with the well-known sawtooth curves observed in complex systems. The notion of factic processes is discussed. This approach overcomes problems with earlier proposals to use two-part code to define the meaningfulness or usefulness of a data set.
1203.2268
Friends FTW! Friendship, Collaboration and Competition in Halo: Reach
cs.SI cs.CY cs.HC physics.soc-ph
How important are friendships in determining success by individuals and teams in complex collaborative environments? By combining a novel data set containing the dynamics of millions of ad hoc teams from the popular multiplayer online first person shooter Halo: Reach with survey data on player demographics, play style, psychometrics and friendships derived from an anonymous online survey, we investigate the impact of friendship on collaborative and competitive performance. In addition to finding significant differences in player behavior across these variables, we find that friendships exert a strong influence, leading to both improved individual and team performance--even after controlling for the overall expertise of the team--and increased pro-social behaviors. Players also structure their in-game activities around social opportunities, and as a result hidden friendship ties can be accurately inferred directly from behavioral time series. Virtual environments that enable such friendship effects will thus likely see improved collaboration and competition.
1203.2293
Categories of Emotion names in Web retrieved texts
cs.CL cs.IR
The categorization of emotion names, i.e., the grouping of emotion words that have similar emotional connotations together, is a key tool of Social Psychology used to explore people's knowledge about emotions. Without exception, the studies following that research line were based on the gauging of the perceived similarity between emotion names by the participants of the experiments. Here we propose and examine a new approach to study the categories of emotion names - the similarities between target emotion names are obtained by comparing the contexts in which they appear in texts retrieved from the World Wide Web. This comparison does not account for any explicit semantic information; it simply counts the number of common words or lexical items used in the contexts. This procedure allows us to write the entries of the similarity matrix as dot products in a linear vector space of contexts. The properties of this matrix were then explored using Multidimensional Scaling Analysis and Hierarchical Clustering. Our main findings, namely, the underlying dimension of the emotion space and the categories of emotion names, were consistent with those based on people's judgments of emotion names similarities.
1203.2297
Analog network coding in general SNR regime: Performance of a greedy scheme
cs.IT math.IT
The problem of maximum rate achievable with analog network coding for a unicast communication over a layered relay network with directed links is considered. A relay node performing analog network coding scales and forwards the signals received at its input. Recently this problem has been considered under certain assumptions on per node scaling factor and received SNR. Previously, we established a result that allows us to characterize the optimal performance of analog network coding in network scenarios beyond those that can be analyzed using the approaches based on such assumptions. The key contribution of this work is a scheme to greedily compute a lower bound to the optimal rate achievable with analog network coding in the general layered networks. This scheme allows for exact computation of the optimal achievable rates in a wider class of layered networks than those that can be addressed using existing approaches. For the specific case of Gaussian N-relay diamond network, to the best of our knowledge, the proposed scheme provides the first exact characterization of the optimal rate achievable with analog network coding. Further, for general layered networks, our scheme allows us to compute optimal rates within a constant gap from the cut-set upper bound asymptotically in the source power.
1203.2298
Minimum Cost Multicast with Decentralized Sources
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper we study the multisource multicast problem where every sink in a given directed acyclic graph is a client and is interested in a common file. We consider the case where each node can have partial knowledge about the file as a side information. Assuming that nodes can communicate over the capacity constrained links of the graph, the goal is for each client to gain access to the file, while minimizing some linear cost function of number of bits transmitted in the network. We consider three types of side-information settings:(ii) side information in the form of linearly correlated packets; and (iii) the general setting where the side information at the nodes have an arbitrary (i.i.d.) correlation structure. In this work we 1) provide a polynomial time feasibility test, i.e., whether or not all the clients can recover the file, and 2) we provide a polynomial-time algorithm that finds the optimal rate allocation among the links of the graph, and then determines an explicit transmission scheme for cases (i) and (ii).
1203.2299
A Cross-cultural Corpus of Annotated Verbal and Nonverbal Behaviors in Receptionist Encounters
cs.CL cs.RO
We present the first annotated corpus of nonverbal behaviors in receptionist interactions, and the first nonverbal corpus (excluding the original video and audio data) of service encounters freely available online. Native speakers of American English and Arabic participated in a naturalistic role play at reception desks of university buildings in Doha, Qatar and Pittsburgh, USA. Their manually annotated nonverbal behaviors include gaze direction, hand and head gestures, torso positions, and facial expressions. We discuss possible uses of the corpus and envision it to become a useful tool for the human-robot interaction community.
1203.2315
Modeling multistage decision processes with Reflexive Game Theory
cs.MA cs.AI
This paper introduces application of Reflexive Game Theory to the matter of multistage decision making processes. The idea behind is that each decision making session has certain parameters like "when the session is taking place", "who are the group members to make decision", "how group members influence on each other", etc. This study illustrates the consecutive or sequential decision making process, which consist of two stages. During the stage 1 decisions about the parameters of the ultimate decision making are made. Then stage 2 is implementation of Ultimate decision making itself. Since during stage 1 there can be multiple decision sessions. In such a case it takes more than two sessions to make ultimate (final) decision. Therefore the overall process of ultimate decision making becomes multistage decision making process consisting of consecutive decision making sessions.
1203.2316
Near-optimal quantization and linear network coding for relay networks
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
We introduce a discrete network corresponding to any Gaussian wireless network that is obtained by simply quantizing the received signals and restricting the transmitted signals to a finite precision. Since signals in the discrete network are obtained from those of a Gaussian network, the Gaussian network can be operated on the quantization-based digital interface defined by the discrete network. We prove that this digital interface is near-optimal for Gaussian relay networks and the capacities of the Gaussian and the discrete networks are within a bounded gap of O(M^2) bits, where M is the number of nodes. We prove that any near-optimal coding strategy for the discrete network can be naturally transformed into a near-optimal coding strategy for the Gaussian network merely by quantization. We exploit this by designing a linear coding strategy for the case of layered discrete relay networks. The linear coding strategy is near-optimal for Gaussian and discrete networks and achieves rates within O(M^2) bits of the capacity, independent of channel gains or SNR. The linear code is robust and the relays need not know the channel gains. The transmit and receive signals at all relays are simply quantized to binary tuples of the same length $n$ . The linear network code requires all the relay nodes to collect the received binary tuples into a long binary vector and apply a linear transformation on the long vector. The resulting binary vector is split into smaller binary tuples for transmission by the relays. The quantization requirements of the linear network code are completely defined by the parameter $n$, which also determines the resolution of the analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog convertors for operating the network within a bounded gap of the network's capacity. The linear network code explicitly connects network coding for wireline networks with codes for Gaussian networks.
1203.2384
Elements of Cellular Blind Interference Alignment --- Aligned Frequency Reuse, Wireless Index Coding and Interference Diversity
cs.IT math.IT
We explore degrees of freedom (DoF) characterizations of partially connected wireless networks, especially cellular networks, with no channel state information at the transmitters. Specifically, we introduce three fundamental elements --- aligned frequency reuse, wireless index coding and interference diversity --- through a series of examples, focusing first on infinite regular arrays, then on finite clusters with arbitrary connectivity and message sets, and finally on heterogeneous settings with asymmetric multiple antenna configurations. Aligned frequency reuse refers to the optimality of orthogonal resource allocations in many cases, but according to unconventional reuse patterns that are guided by interference alignment principles. Wireless index coding highlights both the intimate connection between the index coding problem and cellular blind interference alignment, as well as the added complexity inherent to wireless settings. Interference diversity refers to the observation that in a wireless network each receiver experiences a different set of interferers, and depending on the actions of its own set of interferers, the interference-free signal space at each receiver fluctuates differently from other receivers, creating opportunities for robust applications of blind interference alignment principles.
1203.2386
On-Board Visual Tracking with Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS)
cs.CV cs.RO
This paper presents the development of a real time tracking algorithm that runs on a 1.2 GHz PC/104 computer on-board a small UAV. The algorithm uses zero mean normalized cross correlation to detect and locate an object in the image. A kalman filter is used to make the tracking algorithm computationally efficient. Object position in an image frame is predicted using the motion model and a search window, centered at the predicted position is generated. Object position is updated with the measurement from object detection. The detected position is sent to the motion controller to move the gimbal so that the object stays at the center of the image frame. Detection and tracking is autonomously carried out on the payload computer and the system is able to work in two different methods. The first method starts detecting and tracking using a stored image patch. The second method allows the operator on the ground to select the interest object for the UAV to track. The system is capable of re-detecting an object, in the event of tracking failure. Performance of the tracking system was verified both in the lab and on the field by mounting the payload on a vehicle and simulating a flight. Tests show that the system can detect and track a diverse set of objects in real time. Flight testing of the system will be conducted at the next available opportunity.
1203.2394
Decentralized, Adaptive, Look-Ahead Particle Filtering
stat.ML cs.LG stat.CO
The decentralized particle filter (DPF) was proposed recently to increase the level of parallelism of particle filtering. Given a decomposition of the state space into two nested sets of variables, the DPF uses a particle filter to sample the first set and then conditions on this sample to generate a set of samples for the second set of variables. The DPF can be understood as a variant of the popular Rao-Blackwellized particle filter (RBPF), where the second step is carried out using Monte Carlo approximations instead of analytical inference. As a result, the range of applications of the DPF is broader than the one for the RBPF. In this paper, we improve the DPF in two ways. First, we derive a Monte Carlo approximation of the optimal proposal distribution and, consequently, design and implement a more efficient look-ahead DPF. Although the decentralized filters were initially designed to capitalize on parallel implementation, we show that the look-ahead DPF can outperform the standard particle filter even on a single machine. Second, we propose the use of bandit algorithms to automatically configure the state space decomposition of the DPF.
1203.2404
Video Object Tracking and Analysis for Computer Assisted Surgery
cs.CV
Pedicle screw insertion technique has made revolution in the surgical treatment of spinal fractures and spinal disorders. Although X- ray fluoroscopy based navigation is popular, there is risk of prolonged exposure to X- ray radiation. Systems that have lower radiation risk are generally quite expensive. The position and orientation of the drill is clinically very important in pedicle screw fixation. In this paper, the position and orientation of the marker on the drill is determined using pattern recognition based methods, using geometric features, obtained from the input video sequence taken from CCD camera. A search is then performed on the video frames after preprocessing, to obtain the exact position and orientation of the drill. Animated graphics, showing the instantaneous position and orientation of the drill is then overlaid on the processed video for real time drill control and navigation.
1203.2456
On Secrecy above Secrecy Capacity
cs.IT math.IT
We consider secrecy obtained when one transmits on a Gaussian Wiretap channel above the secrecy capacity. Instead of equivocation, we consider probability of error as the criterion of secrecy. The usual channel codes are considered for transmission. The rates obtained can reach the channel capacity. We show that the "confusion" caused to the Eve when the rate of transmission is above capacity of the Eve's channel is similar to the confusion caused by using the wiretap channel codes used below the secrecy capacity.
1203.2468
Diversity, Coding, and Multiplexing Trade-Off of Network-Coded Cooperative Wireless Networks
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we study the performance of network-coded cooperative diversity systems with practical communication constraints. More specifically, we investigate the interplay between diversity, coding, and multiplexing gain when the relay nodes do not act as dedicated repeaters, which only forward data packets transmitted by the sources, but they attempt to pursue their own interest by forwarding packets which contain a network-coded version of received and their own data. We provide a very accurate analysis of the Average Bit Error Probability (ABEP) for two network topologies with three and four nodes, when practical communication constraints, i.e., erroneous decoding at the relays and fading over all the wireless links, are taken into account. Furthermore, diversity and coding gain are studied, and advantages and disadvantages of cooperation and binary Network Coding (NC) are highlighted. Our results show that the throughput increase introduced by NC is offset by a loss of diversity and coding gain. It is shown that there is neither a coding nor a diversity gain for the source node when the relays forward a network-coded version of received and their own data. Compared to other results available in the literature, the conclusion is that binary NC seems to be more useful when the relay nodes act only on behalf of the source nodes, and do not mix their own packets to the received ones. Analytical derivation and findings are substantiated through extensive Monte Carlo simulations.
1203.2498
Fault detection system for Arabic language
cs.CL
The study of natural language, especially Arabic, and mechanisms for the implementation of automatic processing is a fascinating field of study, with various potential applications. The importance of tools for natural language processing is materialized by the need to have applications that can effectively treat the vast mass of information available nowadays on electronic forms. Among these tools, mainly driven by the necessity of a fast writing in alignment to the actual daily life speed, our interest is on the writing auditors. The morphological and syntactic properties of Arabic make it a difficult language to master, and explain the lack in the processing tools for that language. Among these properties, we can mention: the complex structure of the Arabic word, the agglutinative nature, lack of vocalization, the segmentation of the text, the linguistic richness, etc.
1203.2499
A framework for integrated design of algorithmic architectural forms
cs.CE
This paper presents a methodology and software tools for parametric design of complex architectural objects, called digital or algorithmic forms. In order to provide a flexible tool, the proposed design philosophy involves two open source utilities Donkey and MIDAS written in Grasshopper algorithm editor and C++, respectively, that are to be linked with a scripting-based architectural modellers Rhinoceros, IntelliCAD and the open source Finite Element solver OOFEM. The emphasis is put on the mechanical response in order to provide architects with a consistent learning framework and an insight into structural behaviour of designed objects. As demonstrated on three case studies, the proposed modular solution is capable of handling objects of considerable structural complexity, thereby accelerating the process of finding procedural design parameters from orders of weeks to days or hours.
1203.2506
Vibrating Cantilever Transducer Incorporated in Dual Diaphragms Structure for Sensing Differential Pneumatic Pressure
cs.SY
Pneumatic pressure cells with thin metallic spherical diaphragm of shallow spherical shell configuration linked with vibrating wire pickup or vibrating cantilever pickup were reported in the past. In order to enhance the sensitivity of the pressure cell this work considers dual diaphragm structure fitted with cantilever pickup. The design and development of the pressure cell with this dual diaphragm structure having cantilever pickup is presented here. The geometrical design is optimally made as to sense either mono pressure or differential pressure resources. The cantilevers of the two diaphragms are excited to produce vibrations and the frequencies of vibrations are determined by picking up signals from orthogonally arranged opto-coupler links. With the computed frequency a lookup table is referred to obtain the pressure acting on the concerned diaphragm. In the external circuits, the average pressure and the differential pressure acting on two diaphragms are computed. Furthermore transmitting circuits taking the average pressure and differential pressure in digital form and analogue form to remote area are presented. Performance analysis of the proposed mechatronic pressure cell is made and its improved performance over other pressure cells is presented.
1203.2507
Deviation optimal learning using greedy Q-aggregation
math.ST cs.LG stat.ML stat.TH
Given a finite family of functions, the goal of model selection aggregation is to construct a procedure that mimics the function from this family that is the closest to an unknown regression function. More precisely, we consider a general regression model with fixed design and measure the distance between functions by the mean squared error at the design points. While procedures based on exponential weights are known to solve the problem of model selection aggregation in expectation, they are, surprisingly, sub-optimal in deviation. We propose a new formulation called Q-aggregation that addresses this limitation; namely, its solution leads to sharp oracle inequalities that are optimal in a minimax sense. Moreover, based on the new formulation, we design greedy Q-aggregation procedures that produce sparse aggregation models achieving the optimal rate. The convergence and performance of these greedy procedures are illustrated and compared with other standard methods on simulated examples.
1203.2508
Pneumatic Pressure Cell with Twin Diaphragms Embedding Spherical Corrugations in a Dual Diaphragm Structure
cs.SY
Thin metallic shallow spherical diaphragms are being used for measuring pneumatic pressure in process industries. The drift in vertex realized due to application of pressure is transformed into electrical signal and this is calibrated for pressure. We now propose a modified structure for the pressure cell by having double ended shallow spherical shells embedded with spherical corrugations as to enhance the sensitivity to a greater extent. By having dual such installation in the structure of the pressure cell it concedes further increase in sensitivity. The construction details of the diaphragm structure, theory and analysis to assess the performance are presented.
1203.2509
Tripartite Bell inequality, random matrices and trilinear forms
math.OA cs.IT math-ph math.FA math.IT math.MP math.PR
In this seminar report, we present in detail the proof of a recent result due to J. Bri\"et and T. Vidick, improving an estimate in a 2008 paper by D. P\'erez-Garc\'{\i}a, M. Wolf, C. Palazuelos, I. Villanueva, and M. Junge, estimating the growth of the deviation in the tripartite Bell inequality. The proof requires a delicate estimate of the norms of certain trilinear (or $d$-linear) forms on Hilbert space with coefficients in the second Gaussian Wiener chaos. Let $E^n_{\vee}$ (resp. $E^n_{\min}$) denote $ \ell_1^n \otimes \ell_1^n\otimes \ell_1^n$ equipped with the injective (resp. minimal) tensor norm. Here $ \ell_1^n$ is equipped with its maximal operator space structure. The Bri\"et-Vidick method yields that the identity map $I_n$ satisfies (for some $c>0$) $\|I_n:\ E^n_{\vee}\to E^n_{\min}\|\ge c n^{1/4} (\log n)^{-3/2}.$ Let $S^n_2$ denote the (Hilbert) space of $n\times n$-matrices equipped with the Hilbert-Schmidt norm. While a lower bound closer to $n^{1/2} $ is still open, their method produces an interesting, asymptotically almost sharp, related estimate for the map $J_n:\ S^n_2\stackrel{\vee}{\otimes} S^n_2\stackrel{\vee}{\otimes}S^n_2 \to \ell_2^{n^3} \stackrel{\vee}{\otimes} \ell_2^{n^3} $ taking $e_{i,j}\otimes e_{k,l}\otimes e_{m,n}$ to $e_{[i,k,m],[j,l,n]}$.
1203.2511
A Simple Flood Forecasting Scheme Using Wireless Sensor Networks
cs.LG cs.CE cs.NI cs.SY stat.AP
This paper presents a forecasting model designed using WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks) to predict flood in rivers using simple and fast calculations to provide real-time results and save the lives of people who may be affected by the flood. Our prediction model uses multiple variable robust linear regression which is easy to understand and simple and cost effective in implementation, is speed efficient, but has low resource utilization and yet provides real time predictions with reliable accuracy, thus having features which are desirable in any real world algorithm. Our prediction model is independent of the number of parameters, i.e. any number of parameters may be added or removed based on the on-site requirements. When the water level rises, we represent it using a polynomial whose nature is used to determine if the water level may exceed the flood line in the near future. We compare our work with a contemporary algorithm to demonstrate our improvements over it. Then we present our simulation results for the predicted water level compared to the actual water level.
1203.2514
Enhancement of Images using Morphological Transformation
cs.CV
This paper deals with enhancement of images with poor contrast and detection of background. Proposes a frame work which is used to detect the background in images characterized by poor contrast. Image enhancement has been carried out by the two methods based on the Weber's law notion. The first method employs information from image background analysis by blocks, while the second transformation method utilizes the opening operation, closing operation, which is employed to define the multi-background gray scale images. The complete image processing is done using MATLAB simulation model. Finally, this paper is organized as follows as Morphological transformation and Weber's law. Image background approximation to the background by means of block analysis in conjunction with transformations that enhance images with poor lighting. The multibackground notion is introduced by means of the opening by reconstruction shows a comparison among several techniques to improve contrast in images. Finally, conclusions are presented.
1203.2528
Knowledge-based antenna pattern extrapolation
cs.CE
We describe a theoretically-motivated algorithm for extrapolation of antenna radiation patterns from a small number of measurements. This algorithm exploits constraints on the antenna's underlying design to avoid ambiguities, but is sufficiently general to address many different antenna types. A theoretical basis for the robustness of this algorithm is developed, and its performance is verified in simulation using a number of popular antenna designs.
1203.2550
Degrees of Freedom of Time Correlated MISO Broadcast Channel with Delayed CSIT
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the time correlated multiple-input single-output (MISO) broadcast channel where the transmitter has imperfect knowledge on the current channel state, in addition to delayed channel state information. By representing the quality of the current channel state information as P^-{\alpha} for the signal-to-noise ratio P and some constant {\alpha} \geq 0, we characterize the optimal degree of freedom region for this more general two-user MISO broadcast correlated channel. The essential ingredients of the proposed scheme lie in the quantization and multicasting of the overheard interferences, while broadcasting new private messages. Our proposed scheme smoothly bridges between the scheme recently proposed by Maddah-Ali and Tse with no current state information and a simple zero-forcing beamforming with perfect current state information.
1203.2556
A Probabilistic Transmission Expansion Planning Methodology based on Roulette Wheel Selection and Social Welfare
cs.AI cs.SY
A new probabilistic methodology for transmission expansion planning (TEP) that does not require a priori specification of new/additional transmission capacities and uses the concept of social welfare has been proposed. Two new concepts have been introduced in this paper: (i) roulette wheel methodology has been used to calculate the capacity of new transmission lines and (ii) load flow analysis has been used to calculate expected demand not served (EDNS). The overall methodology has been implemented on a modified IEEE 5-bus test system. Simulations show an important result: addition of only new transmission lines is not sufficient to minimize EDNS.
1203.2557
On the Necessity of Irrelevant Variables
cs.LG
This work explores the effects of relevant and irrelevant boolean variables on the accuracy of classifiers. The analysis uses the assumption that the variables are conditionally independent given the class, and focuses on a natural family of learning algorithms for such sources when the relevant variables have a small advantage over random guessing. The main result is that algorithms relying predominately on irrelevant variables have error probabilities that quickly go to 0 in situations where algorithms that limit the use of irrelevant variables have errors bounded below by a positive constant. We also show that accurate learning is possible even when there are so few examples that one cannot determine with high confidence whether or not any individual variable is relevant.
1203.2563
Average Consensus on General Strongly Connected Digraphs
cs.SY
We study the average consensus problem of multi-agent systems for general network topologies with unidirectional information flow. We propose two (linear) distributed algorithms, deterministic and gossip, respectively for the cases where the inter-agent communication is synchronous and asynchronous. Our contribution is that in both cases, the developed algorithms guarantee state averaging on arbitrary strongly connected digraphs; in particular, this graphical condition does not require that the network be balanced or symmetric, thereby extending many previous results in the literature. The key novelty of our approach is to augment an additional variable for each agent, called "surplus", whose function is to locally record individual state updates. For convergence analysis, we employ graph-theoretic and nonnegative matrix tools, with the eigenvalue perturbation theory playing a crucial role.
1203.2569
When Index Term Probability Violates the Classical Probability Axioms Quantum Probability can be a Necessary Theory for Information Retrieval
cs.IR
Probabilistic models require the notion of event space for defining a probability measure. An event space has a probability measure which ensues the Kolmogorov axioms. However, the probabilities observed from distinct sources, such as that of relevance of documents, may not admit a single event space thus causing some issues. In this article, some results are introduced for ensuring whether the observed prob- abilities of relevance of documents admit a single event space. More- over, an alternative framework of probability is introduced, thus chal- lenging the use of classical probability for ranking documents. Some reflections on the convenience of extending the classical probabilis- tic retrieval toward a more general framework which encompasses the issues are made.
1203.2570
Differential Privacy for Functions and Functional Data
stat.ML cs.LG
Differential privacy is a framework for privately releasing summaries of a database. Previous work has focused mainly on methods for which the output is a finite dimensional vector, or an element of some discrete set. We develop methods for releasing functions while preserving differential privacy. Specifically, we show that adding an appropriate Gaussian process to the function of interest yields differential privacy. When the functions lie in the same RKHS as the Gaussian process, then the correct noise level is established by measuring the "sensitivity" of the function in the RKHS norm. As examples we consider kernel density estimation, kernel support vector machines, and functions in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces.
1203.2574
Towards a Unified Architecture for in-RDBMS Analytics
cs.DB
The increasing use of statistical data analysis in enterprise applications has created an arms race among database vendors to offer ever more sophisticated in-database analytics. One challenge in this race is that each new statistical technique must be implemented from scratch in the RDBMS, which leads to a lengthy and complex development process. We argue that the root cause for this overhead is the lack of a unified architecture for in-database analytics. Our main contribution in this work is to take a step towards such a unified architecture. A key benefit of our unified architecture is that performance optimizations for analytics techniques can be studied generically instead of an ad hoc, per-technique fashion. In particular, our technical contributions are theoretical and empirical studies of two key factors that we found impact performance: the order data is stored, and parallelization of computations on a single-node multicore RDBMS. We demonstrate the feasibility of our architecture by integrating several popular analytics techniques into two commercial and one open-source RDBMS. Our architecture requires changes to only a few dozen lines of code to integrate a new statistical technique. We then compare our approach with the native analytics tools offered by the commercial RDBMSes on various analytics tasks, and validate that our approach achieves competitive or higher performance, while still achieving the same quality.
1203.2655
Control centrality and hierarchical structure in complex networks
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI
We introduce the concept of control centrality to quantify the ability of a single node to control a directed weighted network. We calculate the distribution of control centrality for several real networks and find that it is mainly determined by the network's degree distribution. We rigorously prove that in a directed network without loops the control centrality of a node is uniquely determined by its layer index or topological position in the underlying hierarchical structure of the network. Inspired by the deep relation between control centrality and hierarchical structure in a general directed network, we design an efficient attack strategy against the controllability of malicious networks.
1203.2672
FDB: A Query Engine for Factorised Relational Databases
cs.DB cs.DS
Factorised databases are relational databases that use compact factorised representations at the physical layer to reduce data redundancy and boost query performance. This paper introduces FDB, an in-memory query engine for select-project-join queries on factorised databases. Key components of FDB are novel algorithms for query optimisation and evaluation that exploit the succinctness brought by data factorisation. Experiments show that for data sets with many-to-many relationships FDB can outperform relational engines by orders of magnitude.
1203.2675
Quantum Simpsons Paradox and High Order Bell-Tsirelson Inequalities
quant-ph cs.IT math-ph math.IT math.MP math.ST stat.TH
The well-known Simpson's Paradox, or Yule-Simpson Effect, in statistics is often illustrated by the following thought experiment: A drug may be found in a trial to increase the survival rate for both men and women, but decrease the rate for all the subjects as a whole. This paradoxical reversal effect has been found in numerous datasets across many disciplines, and is now included in most introductory statistics textbooks. In the language of the drug trial, the effect is impossible, however, if both treatment groups' survival rates are higher than both control groups'. Here we show that for quantum probabilities, such a reversal remains possible. In particular, a "quantum drug", so to speak, could be life-saving for both men and women yet deadly for the whole population. We further identify a simple inequality on conditional probabilities that must hold classically but is violated by our quantum scenarios, and completely characterize the maximum quantum violation. As polynomial inequalities on entries of the density operator, our inequalities are of degree 6.
1203.2676
Robust Stability of Uncertain Quantum Systems
quant-ph cs.SY math.OC
This paper considers the problem of robust stability for a class of uncertain quantum systems subject to unknown perturbations in the system Hamiltonian. Some general stability results are given for different classes of perturbations to the system Hamiltonian. Then, the special case of a nominal linear quantum system is considered with either quadratic or non-quadratic perturbations to the system Hamiltonian. In this case, robust stability conditions are given in terms of strict bounded real conditions.
1203.2690
Analysis of Sparse MIMO Radar
cs.IT math.IT math.NA
We consider a multiple-input-multiple-output radar system and derive a theoretical framework for the recoverability of targets in the azimuth-range domain and the azimuth-range-Doppler domain via sparse approximation algorithms. Using tools developed in the area of compressive sensing, we prove bounds on the number of detectable targets and the achievable resolution in the presence of additive noise. Our theoretical findings are validated by numerical simulations.
1203.2721
Analysis of Finite Field Spreading for Multiple-Access Channel
cs.IT math.IT
Finite field spreading scheme is proposed for a synchronous multiple-access channel with Gaussian noise and equal-power users. For each user, $s$ information bits are spread \emph{jointly} into a length-$sL$ vector by $L$ multiplications on GF($2^s$). Thus, each information bit is dispersed into $sL$ transmitted symbols, and the finite field despreading (FF-DES) of each bit can take advantage of $sL$ independent receiving observations. To show the performance gain of joint spreading quantitatively, an extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) function analysis of the FF-DES is given. It shows that the asymptotic slope of this EXIT function increases as $s$ increases and is in fact the absolute slope of the bit error rate (BER) curve at the low BER region. This means that by increasing the length $s$ of information bits for joint spreading, a larger absolute slope of the BER curve is achieved. For $s, L\geq 2$, the BER curve of the finite field spreading has a larger absolute slope than that of the single-user transmission with BPSK modulation.
1203.2725
On the Complexity of the Minimum Latency Scheduling Problem on the Euclidean Plane
cs.NI cs.SY
We show NP-hardness of the minimum latency scheduling (MLS) problem under the physical model of wireless networking. In this model a transmission is received successfully if the Signal to Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR), is above a given threshold. In the minimum latency scheduling problem, the goal is to assign a time slot and power level to each transmission, so that all the messages are received successfully, and the number of distinct times slots is minimized. Despite its seeming simplicity and several previous hardness results for various settings of the minimum latency scheduling problem, it has remained an open question whether or not the minimum latency scheduling problem is NP-hard, when the nodes are placed in the Euclidean plane and arbitrary power levels can be chosen for the transmissions. We resolve this open question for all path loss exponent values $\alpha \geq 3$.
1203.2760
New approximations for DQPSK transmission bit error rate
cs.IT math.CA math.IT
In this correspondence our aim is to use some tight lower and upper bounds for the differential quaternary phase shift keying transmission bit error rate in order to deduce accurate approximations for the bit error rate by improving the known results in the literature. The computation of our new approximate expressions are significantly simpler than that of the exact expression.
1203.2768
On the Performance Limits of Pilot-Based Estimation of Bandlimited Frequency-Selective Communication Channels
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
In this paper the problem of assessing bounds on the accuracy of pilot-based estimation of a bandlimited frequency selective communication channel is tackled. Mean square error is taken as a figure of merit in channel estimation and a tapped-delay line model is adopted to represent a continuous time channel via a finite number of unknown parameters. This allows to derive some properties of optimal waveforms for channel sounding and closed form Cramer-Rao bounds.
1203.2769
Performance Guarantees of the Thresholding Algorithm for the Co-Sparse Analysis Model
cs.IT math.IT
The co-sparse analysis model for signals assumes that the signal of interest can be multiplied by an analysis dictionary \Omega, leading to a sparse outcome. This model stands as an interesting alternative to the more classical synthesis based sparse representation model. In this work we propose a theoretical study of the performance guarantee of the thresholding algorithm for the pursuit problem in the presence of noise. Our analysis reveals two significant properties of \Omega, which govern the pursuit performance: The first is the degree of linear dependencies between sets of rows in \Omega, depicted by the co-sparsity level. The second property, termed the Restricted Orthogonal Projection Property (ROPP), is the level of independence between such dependent sets and other rows in \Omega. We show how these dictionary properties are meaningful and useful, both in the theoretical bounds derived, and in a series of experiments that are shown to align well with the theoretical prediction.
1203.2778
Seven Means, Generalized Triangular Discrimination, and Generating Divergence Measures
cs.IT math.IT
From geometrical point of view, Eve (2003) studied seven means. These means are Harmonic, Geometric, Arithmetic, Heronian, Contra-harmonic, Root-mean square and Centroidal mean. We have considered for the first time a new measure calling generalized triangular discrimination. Inequalities among non-negative differences arising due to seven means and particular cases of generalized triangular discrimination are considered. Some new generating measures and their exponential representations are also presented.
1203.2816
Animal-Inspired Agile Flight Using Optical Flow Sensing
cs.SY
There is evidence that flying animals such as pigeons, goshawks, and bats use optical flow sensing to enable high-speed flight through forest clutter. This paper discusses the elements of a theory of controlled flight through obstacle fields in which motion control laws are based on optical flow sensing. Performance comparison is made with feedback laws that use distance and bearing measurements, and practical challenges of implementation on an actual robotic air vehicle are described. The related question of fundamental performance limits due to clutter density is addressed.
1203.2821
Graphlet decomposition of a weighted network
stat.ME cs.LG cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We introduce the graphlet decomposition of a weighted network, which encodes a notion of social information based on social structure. We develop a scalable inference algorithm, which combines EM with Bron-Kerbosch in a novel fashion, for estimating the parameters of the model underlying graphlets using one network sample. We explore some theoretical properties of the graphlet decomposition, including computational complexity, redundancy and expected accuracy. We demonstrate graphlets on synthetic and real data. We analyze messaging patterns on Facebook and criminal associations in the 19th century.
1203.2835
Statistical Characterization and Mitigation of NLOS Errors in UWB Localization Systems
cs.IT math.IT stat.AP
In this paper some new experimental results about the statistical characterization of the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) bias affecting time-of-arrival (TOA) estimation in ultrawideband (UWB) wireless localization systems are illustrated. Then, these results are exploited to assess the performance of various maximum-likelihood (ML) based algorithms for joint TOA localization and NLOS bias mitigation. Our numerical results evidence that the accuracy of all the considered algorithms is appreciably influenced by the LOS/NLOS conditions of the propagation environment.
1203.2839
Square-Cut: A Segmentation Algorithm on the Basis of a Rectangle Shape
cs.CV
We present a rectangle-based segmentation algorithm that sets up a graph and performs a graph cut to separate an object from the background. However, graph-based algorithms distribute the graph's nodes uniformly and equidistantly on the image. Then, a smoothness term is added to force the cut to prefer a particular shape. This strategy does not allow the cut to prefer a certain structure, especially when areas of the object are indistinguishable from the background. We solve this problem by referring to a rectangle shape of the object when sampling the graph nodes, i.e., the nodes are distributed nonuniformly and non-equidistantly on the image. This strategy can be useful, when areas of the object are indistinguishable from the background. For evaluation, we focus on vertebrae images from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) datasets to support the time consuming manual slice-by-slice segmentation performed by physicians. The ground truth of the vertebrae boundaries were manually extracted by two clinical experts (neurological surgeons) with several years of experience in spine surgery and afterwards compared with the automatic segmentation results of the proposed scheme yielding an average Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 90.97\pm62.2%.
1203.2860
Receding Horizon Temporal Logic Control for Finite Deterministic Systems
math.OC cs.SY
This paper considers receding horizon control of finite deterministic systems, which must satisfy a high level, rich specification expressed as a linear temporal logic formula. Under the assumption that time-varying rewards are associated with states of the system and they can be observed in real-time, the control objective is to maximize the collected reward while satisfying the high level task specification. In order to properly react to the changing rewards, a controller synthesis framework inspired by model predictive control is proposed, where the rewards are locally optimized at each time-step over a finite horizon, and the immediate optimal control is applied. By enforcing appropriate constraints, the infinite trajectory produced by the controller is guaranteed to satisfy the desired temporal logic formula. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.
1203.2870
Streaming Transmitter over Block-Fading Channels with Delay Constraint
cs.IT math.IT
Data streaming transmission over a block fading channel is studied. It is assumed that the transmitter receives a new message at each channel block at a constant rate, which is fixed by an underlying application, and tries to deliver the arriving messages by a common deadline. Various transmission schemes are proposed and compared with an informed transmitter upper bound in terms of the average decoded rate. It is shown that in the single receiver case the adaptive joint encoding (aJE) scheme is asymptotically optimal, in that it achieves the ergodic capacity as the transmission deadline goes to infinity; and it closely follows the performance of the informed transmitter upper bound in the case of finite transmission deadline. On the other hand, in the presence of multiple receivers with different signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), memoryless transmission (MT), time sharing (TS) and superposition transmission (ST) schemes are shown to be more robust than the joint encoding (JE) scheme as they have gradual performance loss with decreasing SNR.
1203.2886
BitPath -- Label Order Constrained Reachability Queries over Large Graphs
cs.DB cs.DS
In this paper we focus on the following constrained reachability problem over edge-labeled graphs like RDF -- "given source node x, destination node y, and a sequence of edge labels (a, b, c, d), is there a path between the two nodes such that the edge labels on the path satisfy a regular expression "*a.*b.*c.*d.*". A "*" before "a" allows any other edge label to appear on the path before edge "a". "a.*" forces at least one edge with label "a". ".*" after "a" allows zero or more edge labels after "a" and before "b". Our query processing algorithm uses simple divide-and-conquer and greedy pruning procedures to limit the search space. However, our graph indexing technique -- based on "compressed bit-vectors" -- allows indexing large graphs which otherwise would have been infeasible. We have evaluated our approach on graphs with more than 22 million edges and 6 million nodes -- much larger compared to the datasets used in the contemporary work on path queries.
1203.2890
Statistical Characterization and Mitigation of NLOS Bias in UWB Localization Systems
cs.IT math.IT stat.AP
Propagation in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions is one of the major impairments in ultrawideband (UWB) wireless localization systems based on time-of-arrival (TOA) measurements. In this paper the problem of the joint statistical characterization of the NLOS bias and of the most representative features of LOS/NLOS UWB waveforms is investigated. In addition, the performance of various maximum-likelihood (ML) estimators for joint localization and NLOS bias mitigation is assessed. Our numerical results evidence that the accuracy of all the considered estimators is appreciably influenced by the LOS/NLOS conditions of the propagation environment and that a statistical knowledge of multiple signal features can be exploited to mitigate the NLOS bias, reducing the overall localization error.
1203.2936
Combinatorial Selection and Least Absolute Shrinkage via the CLASH Algorithm
cs.IT math.IT
The least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) for linear regression exploits the geometric interplay of the $\ell_2$-data error objective and the $\ell_1$-norm constraint to arbitrarily select sparse models. Guiding this uninformed selection process with sparsity models has been precisely the center of attention over the last decade in order to improve learning performance. To this end, we alter the selection process of LASSO to explicitly leverage combinatorial sparsity models (CSMs) via the combinatorial selection and least absolute shrinkage (CLASH) operator. We provide concrete guidelines how to leverage combinatorial constraints within CLASH, and characterize CLASH's guarantees as a function of the set restricted isometry constants of the sensing matrix. Finally, our experimental results show that CLASH can outperform both LASSO and model-based compressive sensing in sparse estimation.
1203.2982
Enhancing network robustness for malicious attacks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI physics.comp-ph
In a recent work [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 108, 3838 (2011)], the authors proposed a simple measure for network robustness under malicious attacks on nodes. With a greedy algorithm, they found the optimal structure with respect to this quantity is an onion structure in which high-degree nodes form a core surrounded by rings of nodes with decreasing degree. However, in real networks the failure can also occur in links such as dysfunctional power cables and blocked airlines. Accordingly, complementary to the node-robustness measurement ($R_{n}$), we propose a link-robustness index ($R_{l}$). We show that solely enhancing $R_{n}$ cannot guarantee the improvement of $R_{l}$. Moreover, the structure of $R_{l}$-optimized network is found to be entirely different from that of onion network. In order to design robust networks resistant to more realistic attack condition, we propose a hybrid greedy algorithm which takes both the $R_{n}$ and $R_{l}$ into account. We validate the robustness of our generated networks against malicious attacks mixed with both nodes and links failure. Finally, some economical constraints for swapping the links in real networks are considered and significant improvement in both aspects of robustness are still achieved.
1203.2987
Mining Education Data to Predict Student's Retention: A comparative Study
cs.LG cs.DB
The main objective of higher education is to provide quality education to students. One way to achieve highest level of quality in higher education system is by discovering knowledge for prediction regarding enrolment of students in a course. This paper presents a data mining project to generate predictive models for student retention management. Given new records of incoming students, these predictive models can produce short accurate prediction lists identifying students who tend to need the support from the student retention program most. This paper examines the quality of the predictive models generated by the machine learning algorithms. The results show that some of the machines learning algorithms are able to establish effective predictive models from the existing student retention data.
1203.2990
Evolving Culture vs Local Minima
cs.LG cs.AI
We propose a theory that relates difficulty of learning in deep architectures to culture and language. It is articulated around the following hypotheses: (1) learning in an individual human brain is hampered by the presence of effective local minima; (2) this optimization difficulty is particularly important when it comes to learning higher-level abstractions, i.e., concepts that cover a vast and highly-nonlinear span of sensory configurations; (3) such high-level abstractions are best represented in brains by the composition of many levels of representation, i.e., by deep architectures; (4) a human brain can learn such high-level abstractions if guided by the signals produced by other humans, which act as hints or indirect supervision for these high-level abstractions; and (5), language and the recombination and optimization of mental concepts provide an efficient evolutionary recombination operator, and this gives rise to rapid search in the space of communicable ideas that help humans build up better high-level internal representations of their world. These hypotheses put together imply that human culture and the evolution of ideas have been crucial to counter an optimization difficulty: this optimization difficulty would otherwise make it very difficult for human brains to capture high-level knowledge of the world. The theory is grounded in experimental observations of the difficulties of training deep artificial neural networks. Plausible consequences of this theory for the efficiency of cultural evolutions are sketched.
1203.2992
Hybrid Poisson and multi-Bernoulli filters
cs.SY cs.CV
The probability hypothesis density (PHD) and multi-target multi-Bernoulli (MeMBer) filters are two leading algorithms that have emerged from random finite sets (RFS). In this paper we study a method which combines these two approaches. Our work is motivated by a sister paper, which proves that the full Bayes RFS filter naturally incorporates a Poisson component representing targets that have never been detected, and a linear combination of multi-Bernoulli components representing targets under track. Here we demonstrate the benefit (in speed of track initiation) that maintenance of a Poisson component of undetected targets provides. Subsequently, we propose a method of recycling, which projects Bernoulli components with a low probability of existence onto the Poisson component (as opposed to deleting them). We show that this allows us to achieve similar tracking performance using a fraction of the number of Bernoulli components (i.e., tracks).
1203.2995
Marginal multi-Bernoulli filters: RFS derivation of MHT, JIPDA and association-based MeMBer
cs.SY cs.CV
Recent developments in random finite sets (RFSs) have yielded a variety of tracking methods that avoid data association. This paper derives a form of the full Bayes RFS filter and observes that data association is implicitly present, in a data structure similar to MHT. Subsequently, algorithms are obtained by approximating the distribution of associations. Two algorithms result: one nearly identical to JIPDA, and another related to the MeMBer filter. Both improve performance in challenging environments.
1203.3002
A Proximal-Gradient Homotopy Method for the Sparse Least-Squares Problem
math.OC cs.IT math.IT stat.ML
We consider solving the $\ell_1$-regularized least-squares ($\ell_1$-LS) problem in the context of sparse recovery, for applications such as compressed sensing. The standard proximal gradient method, also known as iterative soft-thresholding when applied to this problem, has low computational cost per iteration but a rather slow convergence rate. Nevertheless, when the solution is sparse, it often exhibits fast linear convergence in the final stage. We exploit the local linear convergence using a homotopy continuation strategy, i.e., we solve the $\ell_1$-LS problem for a sequence of decreasing values of the regularization parameter, and use an approximate solution at the end of each stage to warm start the next stage. Although similar strategies have been studied in the literature, there have been no theoretical analysis of their global iteration complexity. This paper shows that under suitable assumptions for sparse recovery, the proposed homotopy strategy ensures that all iterates along the homotopy solution path are sparse. Therefore the objective function is effectively strongly convex along the solution path, and geometric convergence at each stage can be established. As a result, the overall iteration complexity of our method is $O(\log(1/\epsilon))$ for finding an $\epsilon$-optimal solution, which can be interpreted as global geometric rate of convergence. We also present empirical results to support our theoretical analysis.
1203.3023
Toward an example-based machine translation from written text to ASL using virtual agent animation
cs.CL
Modern computational linguistic software cannot produce important aspects of sign language translation. Using some researches we deduce that the majority of automatic sign language translation systems ignore many aspects when they generate animation; therefore the interpretation lost the truth information meaning. Our goals are: to translate written text from any language to ASL animation; to model maximum raw information using machine learning and computational techniques; and to produce a more adapted and expressive form to natural looking and understandable ASL animations. Our methods include linguistic annotation of initial text and semantic orientation to generate the facial expression. We use the genetic algorithms coupled to learning/recognized systems to produce the most natural form. To detect emotion we are based on fuzzy logic to produce the degree of interpolation between facial expressions. Roughly, we present a new expressive language Text Adapted Sign Modeling Language TASML that describes all maximum aspects related to a natural sign language interpretation. This paper is organized as follow: the next section is devoted to present the comprehension effect of using Space/Time/SVO form in ASL animation based on experimentation. In section 3, we describe our technical considerations. We present the general approach we adopted to develop our tool in section 4. Finally, we give some perspectives and future works.
1203.3037
Expanding the Transfer Entropy to Identify Information Subgraphs in Complex Systems
q-bio.QM cs.IT math.IT physics.data-an
We propose a formal expansion of the transfer entropy to put in evidence irreducible sets of variables which provide information for the future state of each assigned target. Multiplets characterized by a large contribution to the expansion are associated to informational circuits present in the system, with an informational character which can be associated to the sign of the contribution. For the sake of computational complexity, we adopt the assumption of Gaussianity and use the corresponding exact formula for the conditional mutual information. We report the application of the proposed methodology on two EEG data sets.
1203.3051
Combining Voting Rules Together
cs.AI
We propose a simple method for combining together voting rules that performs a run-off between the different winners of each voting rule. We prove that this combinator has several good properties. For instance, even if just one of the base voting rules has a desirable property like Condorcet consistency, the combination inherits this property. In addition, we prove that combining voting rules together in this way can make finding a manipulation more computationally difficult. Finally, we study the impact of this combinator on approximation methods that find close to optimal manipulations.
1203.3055
Application of sensitivity analysis in building energy simulations: combining first and second order elementary effects Methods
cs.CE stat.AP
Sensitivity analysis plays an important role in the understanding of complex models. It helps to identify influence of input parameters in relation to the outputs. It can be also a tool to understand the behavior of the model and then can help in its development stage. This study aims to analyze and illustrate the potential usefulness of combining first and second-order sensitivity analysis, applied to a building energy model (ESP-r). Through the example of a collective building, a sensitivity analysis is performed using the method of elementary effects (also known as Morris method), including an analysis of interactions between the input parameters (second order analysis). Importance of higher-order analysis to better support the results of first order analysis, highlighted especially in such complex model. Several aspects are tackled to implement efficiently the multi-order sensitivity analysis: interval size of the variables, management of non-linearity, usefulness of various outputs.
1203.3065
The Leviathan model: Absolute dominance, generalised distrust, small worlds and other patterns emerging from combining vanity with opinion propagation
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
We propose an opinion dynamics model that combines processes of vanity and opinion propagation. The interactions take place between randomly chosen pairs. During an interaction, the agents propagate their opinions about themselves and about other people they know. Moreover, each individual is subject to vanity: if her interlocutor seems to value her highly, then she increases her opinion about this interlocutor. On the contrary she tends to decrease her opinion about those who seem to undervalue her. The combination of these dynamics with the hypothesis that the opinion propagation is more efficient when coming from highly valued individuals, leads to different patterns when varying the parameters. For instance, for some parameters the positive opinion links between individuals generate a small world network. In one of the patterns, absolute dominance of one agent alternates with a state of generalised distrust, where all agents have a very low opinion of all the others (including themselves). We provide some explanations of the mechanisms behind these emergent behaviors and finally propose a discussion about their interest
1203.3092
gcodeml: A Grid-enabled Tool for Detecting Positive Selection in Biological Evolution
cs.DC cs.CE q-bio.PE
One of the important questions in biological evolution is to know if certain changes along protein coding genes have contributed to the adaptation of species. This problem is known to be biologically complex and computationally very expensive. It, therefore, requires efficient Grid or cluster solutions to overcome the computational challenge. We have developed a Grid-enabled tool (gcodeml) that relies on the PAML (codeml) package to help analyse large phylogenetic datasets on both Grids and computational clusters. Although we report on results for gcodeml, our approach is applicable and customisable to related problems in biology or other scientific domains.
1203.3097
A Comparative Study of Adaptive Crossover Operators for Genetic Algorithms to Resolve the Traveling Salesman Problem
cs.NE cs.CE
Genetic algorithm includes some parameters that should be adjusting so that the algorithm can provide positive results. Crossover operators play very important role by constructing competitive Genetic Algorithms (GAs). In this paper, the basic conceptual features and specific characteristics of various crossover operators in the context of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) are discussed. The results of experimental comparison of more than six different crossover operators for the TSP are presented. The experiment results show that OX operator enables to achieve a better solutions than other operators tested.
1203.3099
Analyzing the Performance of Mutation Operators to Solve the Travelling Salesman Problem
cs.NE cs.CE
The genetic algorithm includes some parameters that should be adjusted, so as to get reliable results. Choosing a representation of the problem addressed, an initial population, a method of selection, a crossover operator, mutation operator, the probabilities of crossover and mutation, and the insertion method creates a variant of genetic algorithms. Our work is part of the answer to this perspective to find a solution for this combinatorial problem. What are the best parameters to select for a genetic algorithm that creates a variety efficient to solve the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP)? In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of different mutation operators, surrounded by a dilated discussion that justifying the relevance of genetic operators chosen to solving the TSP problem.
1203.3114
Integrated three-dimensional reconstruction using reflectance fields
cs.CV
A method to obtain three-dimensional data of real-world objects by integrating their material properties is presented. The material properties are defined by capturing the Reflectance Fields of the real-world objects. It is shown, unlike conventional reconstruction methods, the method is able to use the reflectance information to recover surface depth for objects having a non-Lambertian surface reflectance. It is, for recovering 3D data of objects exhibiting an anisotropic BRDF with an error less than 0.3%.
1203.3115
Codes on Graphs: Observability, Controllability and Local Reducibility
cs.IT cs.SY math.IT
This paper investigates properties of realizations of linear or group codes on general graphs that lead to local reducibility. Trimness and properness are dual properties of constraint codes. A linear or group realization with a constraint code that is not both trim and proper is locally reducible. A linear or group realization on a finite cycle-free graph is minimal if and only if every local constraint code is trim and proper. A realization is called observable if there is a one-to-one correspondence between codewords and configurations, and controllable if it has independent constraints. A linear or group realization is observable if and only if its dual is controllable. A simple counting test for controllability is given. An unobservable or uncontrollable realization is locally reducible. Parity-check realizations are controllable if and only if they have independent parity checks. In an uncontrollable tail-biting trellis realization, the behavior partitions into disconnected subbehaviors, but this property does not hold for non-trellis realizations. On a general graph, the support of an unobservable configuration is a generalized cycle.
1203.3128
Distributed Space Time Coding for Wireless Two-way Relaying
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the wireless two-way relay channel, in which two-way data transfer takes place between the end nodes with the help of a relay. For the Denoise-And-Forward (DNF) protocol, it was shown by Koike-Akino et. al. that adaptively changing the network coding map used at the relay greatly reduces the impact of Multiple Access interference at the relay. The harmful effect of the deep channel fade conditions can be effectively mitigated by proper choice of these network coding maps at the relay. Alternatively, in this paper we propose a Distributed Space Time Coding (DSTC) scheme, which effectively removes most of the deep fade channel conditions at the transmitting nodes itself without any CSIT and without any need to adaptively change the network coding map used at the relay. It is shown that the deep fades occur when the channel fade coefficient vector falls in a finite number of vector subspaces of $\mathbb{C}^2$, which are referred to as the singular fade subspaces. DSTC design criterion referred to as the \textit{singularity minimization criterion} under which the number of such vector subspaces are minimized is obtained. Also, a criterion to maximize the coding gain of the DSTC is obtained. Explicit low decoding complexity DSTC designs which satisfy the singularity minimization criterion and maximize the coding gain for QAM and PSK signal sets are provided. Simulation results show that at high Signal to Noise Ratio, the DSTC scheme provides large gains when compared to the conventional Exclusive OR network code and performs slightly better than the adaptive network coding scheme proposed by Koike-Akino et. al.
1203.3136
A Receding Horizon Strategy for Systems with Interval-Wise Energy Constraints
cs.SY
We propose a receding horizon control strategy that readily handles systems that exhibit interval-wise total energy constraints on the input control sequence. The approach is based on a variable optimization horizon length and contractive final state constraint sets. The optimization horizon, which recedes by N steps every N steps, is the key to accommodate the interval-wise total energy constraints. The varying optimization horizon along with the contractive constraints are used to achieve analytic asymptotic stability of the system under the proposed scheme. The strategy is demonstrated by simulation examples.
1203.3143
Dynamic Compression-Transmission for Energy-Harvesting Multihop Networks with Correlated Sources
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
Energy-harvesting wireless sensor networking is an emerging technology with applications to various fields such as environmental and structural health monitoring. A distinguishing feature of wireless sensors is the need to perform both source coding tasks, such as measurement and compression, and transmission tasks. It is known that the overall energy consumption for source coding is generally comparable to that of transmission, and that a joint design of the two classes of tasks can lead to relevant performance gains. Moreover, the efficiency of source coding in a sensor network can be potentially improved via distributed techniques by leveraging the fact that signals measured by different nodes are correlated. In this paper, a data gathering protocol for multihop wireless sensor networks with energy harvesting capabilities is studied whereby the sources measured by the sensors are correlated. Both the energy consumptions of source coding and transmission are modeled, and distributed source coding is assumed. The problem of dynamically and jointly optimizing the source coding and transmission strategies is formulated for time-varying channels and sources. The problem consists in the minimization of a cost function of the distortions in the source reconstructions at the sink under queue stability constraints. By adopting perturbation-based Lyapunov techniques, a close-to-optimal online scheme is proposed that has an explicit and controllable trade-off between optimality gap and queue sizes. The role of side information available at the sink is also discussed under the assumption that acquiring the side information entails an energy cost. It is shown that the presence of side information can improve the network performance both in terms of overall network cost function and queue sizes.
1203.3170
Single Reduct Generation Based on Relative Indiscernibility of Rough Set Theory
cs.CV
In real world everything is an object which represents particular classes. Every object can be fully described by its attributes. Any real world dataset contains large number of attributes and objects. Classifiers give poor performance when these huge datasets are given as input to it for proper classification. So from these huge dataset most useful attributes need to be extracted that contribute the maximum to the decision. In the paper, attribute set is reduced by generating reducts using the indiscernibility relation of Rough Set Theory (RST). The method measures similarity among the attributes using relative indiscernibility relation and computes attribute similarity set. Then the set is minimized and an attribute similarity table is constructed from which attribute similar to maximum number of attributes is selected so that the resultant minimum set of selected attributes (called reduct) cover all attributes of the attribute similarity table. The method has been applied on glass dataset collected from the UCI repository and the classification accuracy is calculated by various classifiers. The result shows the efficiency of the proposed method.
1203.3178
A Fast fixed-point Quantum Search Algorithm by using Disentanglement and Measurement
cs.IT math.IT quant-ph
Generic quantum search algorithm searches for target entity in an unsorted database by repeatedly applying canonical Grover's quantum rotation transform to reach near the vicinity of the target entity. Thus, upon measurement, there is a high probability of finding the target entity. However, the number of times quantum rotation transform is to be applied for reaching near the vicinity of the target is a function of the number of target entities present in an unsorted database, which is generally unknown. A wrong estimate of the number of target entities can lead to overshooting or undershooting the targets, thus reducing the success probability. Some proposals have been made to overcome this limitation. These proposals either employ quantum counting to estimate the number of solutions or fixed-point schemes. This paper proposes a new scheme for stopping the application of quantum rotation transformation on reaching near the targets by disentanglement, measurement and subsequent processing to estimate the distance of the state vector from the target states. It ensures a success probability, which is greater than half for all practically significant ratios of the number of target entities to the total number of entities in a database. The search problem is trivial for remaining possible ratios. The proposed scheme is simpler than quantum counting and more efficient than the known fixed-point schemes. It has same order of computational complexity as canonical Grover`s search algorithm but is slow by a factor of two and requires two additional ancilla qubits.
1203.3210
A Game Theoretic Model for the Gaussian Broadcast Channel
cs.IT math.IT
The behavior of rational and selfish players (receivers) over a multiple-input multiple-output Gaussian broadcast channel is investigated using the framework of noncooperative game theory. In contrast to the game-theoretic model of the Gaussian multiple access channel where the set of feasible actions for each player is independent of other players' actions, the strategies of the players in the broadcast channel are mutually coupled, usually by a sum power or joint covariance constraint, and hence cannot be treated using traditional Nash equilibrium solution concepts. To characterize the strategic behavior of receivers connected to a single transmitter, this paper models the broadcast channel as a generalized Nash equilibrium problem with coupled constraints. The concept of normalized equilibrium (NoE) is used to characterize the equilibrium points and the existence and uniqueness of the NoE are proven for key scenarios.
1203.3217
Channel simulation via interactive communications
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we study the problem of channel simulation via interactive communication, known as the coordination capacity, in a two-terminal network. We assume that two terminals observe i.i.d.\ copies of two random variables and would like to generate i.i.d.\ copies of two other random variables jointly distributed with the observed random variables. The terminals are provided with two-way communication links, and shared common randomness, all at limited rates. Two special cases of this problem are the interactive function computation studied by Ma and Ishwar, and the tradeoff curve between one-way communication and shared randomness studied by Cuff. The latter work had inspired Gohari and Anantharam to study the general problem of channel simulation via interactive communication stated above. However only inner and outer bounds for the special case of no shared randomness were obtained in their work. In this paper we settle this problem by providing an exact computable characterization of the multi-round problem. To show this we employ the technique of "output statistics of random binning" that has been recently developed by the authors.
1203.3227
Generalisation of language and knowledge models for corpus analysis
cs.AI cs.CL
This paper takes new look on language and knowledge modelling for corpus linguistics. Using ideas of Chaitin, a line of argument is made against language/knowledge separation in Natural Language Processing. A simplistic model, that generalises approaches to language and knowledge, is proposed. One of hypothetical consequences of this model is Strong AI.
1203.3230
Reconstruction error in a motion capture system
cs.CV
Marker-based motion capture (MoCap) systems can be composed by several dozens of cameras with the purpose of reconstructing the trajectories of hundreds of targets. With a large amount of cameras it becomes interesting to determine the optimal reconstruction strategy. For such aim it is of fundamental importance to understand the information provided by different camera measurements and how they are combined, i.e. how the reconstruction error changes by considering different cameras. In this work, first, an approximation of the reconstruction error variance is derived. The results obtained in some simulations suggest that the proposed strategy allows to obtain a good approximation of the real error variance with significant reduction of the computational time.
1203.3241
Dynamics of periodic node states on a model of static networks with repeated-averaging rules
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI
We introduce a simple model of static networks, where nodes are located on a ring structure, and two accompanying dynamic rules of repeated averaging on periodic node states. We assume nodes can interact with neighbors, and will add long-range links randomly. The number of long-range links, E, controls structures of these networks, and we show that there exist many types of fixed points, when E is varied. When E is low, fixed points are mostly diverse states, in which node states are diversely populated; on the other hand, when E is high, fixed points tend to be dominated by converged states, in which node states converge to one value. Numerically, we observe properties of fixed points for various E's, and also estimate points of the transition from diverse states to converged states for four different cases. This kind of simple network models will help us understand how diversities that we encounter in many systems of complex networks are sustained, even when mechanisms of averaging are at work,and when they break down if more long-range connections are added.
1203.3245
The Parameters For Powerline Channel Modeling
cs.IT math.IT
This is a support document which describes the properties of the cable and parameters of the formulas for the statistical powerline channel modeling. The cable parameters help the reader build powerline channel according to the transmission line theory. The document also presents the parameters which describe the distribution of the number of path, path magnitude, path interval and the cable loss feature of the powerline channel. By using the parameters in this document, readers can model the powerline channel according to the statistical methodology proposed.
1203.3258
QoE-aware Media Streaming in Technology and Cost Heterogeneous Networks
cs.SY cs.MM cs.NI
We present a framework for studying the problem of media streaming in technology and cost heterogeneous environments. We first address the problem of efficient streaming in a technology-heterogeneous setting. We employ random linear network coding to simplify the packet selection strategies and alleviate issues such as duplicate packet reception. Then, we study the problem of media streaming from multiple cost-heterogeneous access networks. Our objective is to characterize analytically the trade-off between access cost and user experience. We model the Quality of user Experience (QoE) as the probability of interruption in playback as well as the initial waiting time. We design and characterize various control policies, and formulate the optimal control problem using a Markov Decision Process (MDP) with a probabilistic constraint. We present a characterization of the optimal policy using the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation. For a fluid approximation model, we provide an exact and explicit characterization of a threshold policy and prove its optimality using the HJB equation. Our simulation results show that under properly designed control policy, the existence of alternative access technology as a complement for a primary access network can significantly improve the user experience without any bandwidth over-provisioning.
1203.3269
Physical Layer Network Coding for Two-Way Relaying with QAM and Latin Squares
cs.IT math.IT
The design of modulation schemes for the physical layer network-coded two way relaying scenario has been extensively studied recently with the protocol which employs two phases: Multiple access (MA) Phase and Broadcast (BC) Phase. It was observed by Koike-Akino et al. 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 the exclusive law. Only the scenario in which the end nodes use M-PSK signal sets is extensively studied in \cite{NVR} using Latin Sqaures. In this paper, we address the case in which the end nodes use M-QAM signal sets (where M is of the form $2^{2\lambda}$, $\lambda$ being any positive integer). In a fading scenario, for certain channel conditions $\gamma e^{j \theta}$, termed singular fade states, the MA phase performance is greatly reduced. We show that the square QAM signal sets give lesser number of singular fade states compared to PSK signal sets. Because of this, the complexity at the relay is enormously reduced. Moreover, lesser number of overhead bits are required in the BC phase. The fade state $\gamma e^{j \theta}=1$ is singular for all constellations of arbitrary size including PSK and QAM. For arbitrary PSK constellation it is well known that the Latin Square obtained by bit-wise XOR mapping removes this singularity. We show that XOR mapping fails to remove this singularity for QAM of size more greater than 4 and show that a doubly block circulant Latin Square removes this singularity. Simulation results are presented to show the superiority of QAM over PSK.
1203.3270
Extraction of Facial Feature Points Using Cumulative Histogram
cs.CV
This paper proposes a novel adaptive algorithm to extract facial feature points automatically such as eyebrows corners, eyes corners, nostrils, nose tip, and mouth corners in frontal view faces, which is based on cumulative histogram approach by varying different threshold values. At first, the method adopts the Viola-Jones face detector to detect the location of face and also crops the face region in an image. From the concept of the human face structure, the six relevant regions such as right eyebrow, left eyebrow, right eye, left eye, nose, and mouth areas are cropped in a face image. Then the histogram of each cropped relevant region is computed and its cumulative histogram value is employed by varying different threshold values to create a new filtering image in an adaptive way. The connected component of interested area for each relevant filtering image is indicated our respective feature region. A simple linear search algorithm for eyebrows, eyes and mouth filtering images and contour algorithm for nose filtering image are applied to extract our desired corner points automatically. The method was tested on a large BioID frontal face database in different illuminations, expressions and lighting conditions and the experimental results have achieved average success rates of 95.27%.
1203.3271
The thermodynamics of prediction
cond-mat.stat-mech cs.IT math.IT q-bio.QM
A system responding to a stochastic driving signal can be interpreted as computing, by means of its dynamics, an implicit model of the environmental variables. The system's state retains information about past environmental fluctuations, and a fraction of this information is predictive of future ones. The remaining nonpredictive information reflects model complexity that does not improve predictive power, and thus represents the ineffectiveness of the model. We expose the fundamental equivalence between this model inefficiency and thermodynamic inefficiency, measured by dissipation. Our results hold arbitrarily far from thermodynamic equilibrium and are applicable to a wide range of systems, including biomolecular machines. They highlight a profound connection between the effective use of information and efficient thermodynamic operation: any system constructed to keep memory about its environment and to operate with maximal energetic efficiency has to be predictive.
1203.3274
Two kinds of Phase transitions in a Voting model
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI
In this paper, we discuss a voting model with two candidates, C_0 and C_1. We consider two types of voters--herders and independents. The voting of independents is based on their fundamental values; on the other hand, the voting of herders is based on the number of previous votes. We can identify two kinds of phase transitions. One is an information cascade transition similar to a phase transition seen in Ising model. The other is a transition of super and normal diffusions. These phase transitions coexist. We compared our results to the conclusions of experiments and identified the phase transitions in the upper limit of the time t by using analysis of human behavior obtained from experiments.
1203.3282
Practical Encoders and Decoders for Euclidean Codes from Barnes-Wall Lattices
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we address the design of high spectral-efficiency Barnes-Wall (BW) lattice codes which are amenable to low-complexity decoding in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. We propose a new method of constructing complex BW lattice codes from linear codes over polynomial rings, and show that the proposed construction provides an explicit method of bit-labeling complex BW lattice codes. To decode the code, we adapt the low-complexity sequential BW lattice decoder (SBWD) recently proposed by Micciancio and Nicolosi. First, we study the error performance of SBWD in decoding the infinite lattice, wherein we analyze the noise statistics in the algorithm, and propose a new upper bound on its error performance. We show that the SBWD is powerful in making correct decisions well beyond the packing radius. Subsequently, we use the SBWD to decode lattice codes through a novel noise-trimming technique. This is the first work that showcases the error performance of SBWD in decoding BW lattice codes of large block lengths.
1203.3287
Analysis of a Cooperative Strategy for a Large Decentralized Wireless Network
cs.IT math.IT
This paper investigates the benefits of cooperation and proposes a relay activation strategy for a large wireless network with multiple transmitters. In this framework, some nodes cooperate with a nearby node that acts as a relay, using the decode-and-forward protocol, and others use direct transmission. The network is modeled as an independently marked Poisson point process and the source nodes may choose their relays from the set of inactive nodes. Although cooperation can potentially lead to significant improvements in the performance of a communication pair, relaying causes additional interference in the network, increasing the average noise that other nodes see. We investigate how source nodes should balance cooperation vs. interference to obtain reliable transmissions, and for this purpose we study and optimize a relay activation strategy with respect to the outage probability. Surprisingly, in the high reliability regime, the optimized strategy consists on the activation of all the relays or none at all, depending on network parameters. We provide a simple closed-form expression that indicates when the relays should be active, and we introduce closed form expressions that quantify the performance gains of this scheme with respect to a network that only uses direct transmission.
1203.3288
Approximation to Distribution of Product of Random Variables Using Orthogonal Polynomials for Lognormal Density
cs.IT math.IT
We derive a closed-form expression for the orthogonal polynomials associated with the general lognormal density. The result can be utilized to construct easily computable approximations for probability density function of a product of random variables, when the considered variates are either independent or correlated. As an example, we have calculated the approximative distribution for the product of Nakagami-m variables. Simulations indicate that accuracy of the proposed approximation is good with small cross-correlations under light fading condition.