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1204.0052
Unique Decoding of Plane AG Codes Revisited
cs.IT math.IT
We reformulate a recently introduced interpolation-based unique decoding algorithm of algebraic geometry codes using the theory of Gr\"obner bases of modules on the coordinate ring of the base curve. With the same decoding performance, the new algorithm has a more conceptual description that lets us better understand the majority voting procedure central in the interpolation-based unique decoding.
1204.0065
MIMO Z Channel Interference Management
cs.IT math.IT
MIMO Z Channel is investigated in this paper. We focus on how to tackle the interference when different users try to send their codewords to their corresponding receivers while only one user will cause interference to the other. We assume there are two transmitters and two receivers each with two antennas. We propose a strategy to remove the interference while allowing different users transmit at the same time. Our strategy is low-complexity while the performance is good. Mathematical analysis is provided and simulations are given based on our system.
1204.0067
Estimating Rigid Transformation Between Two Range Maps Using Expectation Maximization Algorithm
cs.RO
We address the problem of estimating a rigid transformation between two point sets, which is a key module for target tracking system using Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR). A fast implementation of Expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is presented whose complexity is O(N) with $N$ the number of scan points.
1204.0072
Generalized fuzzy rough sets based on fuzzy coverings
cs.IT math.IT
This paper further studies the fuzzy rough sets based on fuzzy coverings. We first present the notions of the lower and upper approximation operators based on fuzzy coverings and derive their basic properties. To facilitate the computation of fuzzy coverings for fuzzy covering rough sets, the concepts of fuzzy subcoverings, the reducible and intersectional elements, the union and intersection operations are provided and their properties are discussed in detail. Afterwards, we introduce the concepts of consistent functions and fuzzy covering mappings and provide a basic theoretical foundation for the communication between fuzzy covering information systems. In addition, the notion of homomorphisms is proposed to reveal the relationship between fuzzy covering information systems. We show how large-scale fuzzy covering information systems and dynamic fuzzy covering information systems can be converted into small-scale ones by means of homomorphisms. Finally, an illustrative example is employed to show that the attribute reduction can be simplified significantly by our proposed approach.
1204.0075
Weighted Approach to R\'enyi Entropy
cs.IT math.IT
R\'enyi entropy of order \alpha is a general measure of entropy. In this paper we derive estimations for the R\'enyi entropy of the mixture of sources in terms of the entropy of the single sources. These relations allow to compute the R\'enyi entropy dimension of arbitrary order of a mixture of measures. The key for obtaining these results is our new definition of the weighted R\'enyi entropy. It is shown that weighted entropy is equal to the classical R\'enyi entropy.
1204.0077
Asynchronous Games over Tree Architectures
cs.FL cs.SY
We consider the task of controlling in a distributed way a Zielonka asynchronous automaton. Every process of a controller has access to its causal past to determine the next set of actions it proposes to play. An action can be played only if every process controlling this action proposes to play it. We consider reachability objectives: every process should reach its set of final states. We show that this control problem is decidable for tree architectures, where every process can communicate with its parent, its children, and with the environment. The complexity of our algorithm is l-fold exponential with l being the height of the tree representing the architecture. We show that this is unavoidable by showing that even for three processes the problem is EXPTIME-complete, and that it is non-elementary in general.
1204.0078
Partition Reduction for Lossy Data Compression Problem
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the computational aspects of lossy data compression problem, where the compression error is determined by a cover of the data space. We propose an algorithm which reduces the number of partitions needed to find the entropy with respect to the compression error. In particular, we show that, in the case of finite cover, the entropy is attained on some partition. We give an algorithmic construction of such partition.
1204.0100
Roles of Ties in Spreading
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Background: Controlling global epidemics in the real world and accelerating information propagation in the artificial world are of great significance, which have activated an upsurge in the studies on networked spreading dynamics. Lots of efforts have been made to understand the impacts of macroscopic statistics (e.g., degree distribution and average distance) and mesoscopic structures (e.g., communities and rich clubs) on spreading processes while the microscopic elements are less concerned. In particular, roles of ties are not yet clear to the academic community. Methodology/Principle Findings: Every edges is stamped by its strength that is defined solely based on the local topology. According to a weighted susceptible-infected-susceptible model, the steady-state infected density and spreading speed are respectively optimized by adjusting the relationship between edge's strength and spreading ability. Experiments on six real networks show that the infected density is increased when strong ties are favored in the spreading, while the speed is enhanced when weak ties are favored. Significance of these findings is further demonstrated by comparing with a null model. Conclusions/Significance: Experimental results indicate that strong and weak ties play distinguishable roles in spreading dynamics: the former enlarge the infected density while the latter fasten the process. The proposed method provides a quantitative way to reveal the qualitatively different roles of ties, which could find applications in analyzing many networked dynamical processes with multiple performance indices, such as synchronizability and converging time in synchronization and throughput and delivering time in transportation.
1204.0128
From User Comments to On-line Conversations
cs.CY cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We present an analysis of user conversations in on-line social media and their evolution over time. We propose a dynamic model that accurately predicts the growth dynamics and structural properties of conversation threads. The model successfully reconciles the differing observations that have been reported in existing studies. By separating artificial factors from user behaviors, we show that there are actually underlying rules in common for on-line conversations in different social media websites. Results of our model are supported by empirical measurements throughout a number of different social media websites.
1204.0133
Progressive Gaussian Filtering
cs.SY cs.IT cs.RO math.IT
In this paper, we propose a progressive Bayesian procedure, where the measurement information is continuously included into the given prior estimate (although we perform observations at discrete time steps). The key idea is to derive a system of ordinary first-order differential equations (ODE) by employing a new coupled density representation comprising a Gaussian density and its Dirac Mixture approximation. The ODE is used for continuously tracking the true non-Gaussian posterior by its best matching Gaussian approximation. The performance of the new filter is evaluated in comparison with state-of-the-art filters by means of a canonical benchmark example, the discrete-time cubic sensor problem.
1204.0136
Near-Optimal Algorithms for Online Matrix Prediction
cs.LG cs.DS
In several online prediction problems of recent interest the comparison class is composed of matrices with bounded entries. For example, in the online max-cut problem, the comparison class is matrices which represent cuts of a given graph and in online gambling the comparison class is matrices which represent permutations over n teams. Another important example is online collaborative filtering in which a widely used comparison class is the set of matrices with a small trace norm. In this paper we isolate a property of matrices, which we call (beta,tau)-decomposability, and derive an efficient online learning algorithm, that enjoys a regret bound of O*(sqrt(beta tau T)) for all problems in which the comparison class is composed of (beta,tau)-decomposable matrices. By analyzing the decomposability of cut matrices, triangular matrices, and low trace-norm matrices, we derive near optimal regret bounds for online max-cut, online gambling, and online collaborative filtering. In particular, this resolves (in the affirmative) an open problem posed by Abernethy (2010); Kleinberg et al (2010). Finally, we derive lower bounds for the three problems and show that our upper bounds are optimal up to logarithmic factors. In particular, our lower bound for the online collaborative filtering problem resolves another open problem posed by Shamir and Srebro (2011).
1204.0140
Roget's Thesaurus as a Lexical Resource for Natural Language Processing
cs.CL
WordNet proved that it is possible to construct a large-scale electronic lexical database on the principles of lexical semantics. It has been accepted and used extensively by computational linguists ever since it was released. Inspired by WordNet's success, we propose as an alternative a similar resource, based on the 1987 Penguin edition of Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. Peter Mark Roget published his first Thesaurus over 150 years ago. Countless writers, orators and students of the English language have used it. Computational linguists have employed Roget's for almost 50 years in Natural Language Processing, however hesitated in accepting Roget's Thesaurus because a proper machine tractable version was not available. This dissertation presents an implementation of a machine-tractable version of the 1987 Penguin edition of Roget's Thesaurus - the first implementation of its kind to use an entire current edition. It explains the steps necessary for taking a machine-readable file and transforming it into a tractable system. This involves converting the lexical material into a format that can be more easily exploited, identifying data structures and designing classes to computerize the Thesaurus. Roget's organization is studied in detail and contrasted with WordNet's. We show two applications of the computerized Thesaurus: computing semantic similarity between words and phrases, and building lexical chains in a text. The experiments are performed using well-known benchmarks and the results are compared to those of other systems that use Roget's, WordNet and statistical techniques. Roget's has turned out to be an excellent resource for measuring semantic similarity; lexical chains are easily built but more difficult to evaluate. We also explain ways in which Roget's Thesaurus and WordNet can be combined.
1204.0147
Covering Numbers for Convex Functions
cs.IT math.IT math.ST stat.ML stat.TH
In this paper we study the covering numbers of the space of convex and uniformly bounded functions in multi-dimension. We find optimal upper and lower bounds for the $\epsilon$-covering number of $\C([a, b]^d, B)$, in the $L_p$-metric, $1 \le p < \infty$, in terms of the relevant constants, where $d \geq 1$, $a < b \in \mathbb{R}$, $B>0$, and $\C([a,b]^d, B)$ denotes the set of all convex functions on $[a, b]^d$ that are uniformly bounded by $B$. We summarize previously known results on covering numbers for convex functions and also provide alternate proofs of some known results. Our results have direct implications in the study of rates of convergence of empirical minimization procedures as well as optimal convergence rates in the numerous convexity constrained function estimation problems.
1204.0156
Ranking Tweets Considering Trust and Relevance
cs.SI cs.IR
The increasing popularity of Twitter and other microblogs makes improved trustworthiness and relevance assessment of microblogs evermore important. We propose a method of ranking of tweets considering trustworthiness and content based popularity. The analysis of trustworthiness and popularity exploits the implicit relationships between the tweets. We model microblog ecosystem as a three-layer graph consisting of : (i) users (ii) tweets and (iii) web pages. We propose to derive trust and popularity scores of entities in these three layers, and propagate the scores to tweets considering the inter-layer relations. Our preliminary evaluations show improvement in precision and trustworthiness over the baseline methods and acceptable computation timings.
1204.0161
Rebels Lead to the Doctrine of the Mean: Opinion Dynamic in a Heterogeneous DeGroot Model
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We study an extension of the DeGroot model where part of the players may be rebels. The updating rule for rebels is quite different with that of normal players (which are referred to as conformists): at each step a rebel first takes the opposite value of the weighted average of her neighbors' opinions, i.e. 1 minus that average (the opinion space is assumed to be [0,1] as usual), and then updates her opinion by taking another weighted average between that value and her own opinion in the last round. We find that the effect of rebels is rather significant: as long as there is at least one rebel in every closed and strongly connected group, under very weak conditions, the opinion of each player in the whole society will eventually tend to 0.5.
1204.0163
Fashion, Cooperation, and Social Interactions
cs.MA cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Fashion plays such a crucial rule in the evolution of culture and society that it is regarded as a second nature to the human being. Also, its impact on economy is quite nontrivial. On what is fashionable, interestingly, there are two viewpoints that are both extremely widespread but almost opposite: conformists think that what is popular is fashionable, while rebels believe that being different is the essence. Fashion color is fashionable in the first sense, and Lady Gaga in the second. We investigate a model where the population consists of the afore-mentioned two groups of people that are located on social networks (a spatial cellular automata network and small-world networks). This model captures two fundamental kinds of social interactions (coordination and anti-coordination) simultaneously, and also has its own interest to game theory: it is a hybrid model of pure competition and pure cooperation. This is true because when a conformist meets a rebel, they play the zero sum matching pennies game, which is pure competition. When two conformists (rebels) meet, they play the (anti-) coordination game, which is pure cooperation. Simulation shows that simple social interactions greatly promote cooperation: in most cases people can reach an extraordinarily high level of cooperation, through a selfish, myopic, naive, and local interacting dynamic (the best response dynamic). We find that degree of synchronization also plays a critical role, but mostly on the negative side. Four indices, namely cooperation degree, average satisfaction degree, equilibrium ratio and complete ratio, are defined and applied to measure people's cooperation levels from various angles. Phase transition, as well as emergence of many interesting geographic patterns in the cellular automata network, is also observed.
1204.0165
Analytical Models for Power Networks: The case of the Western US and ERCOT grids
cs.SI physics.soc-ph stat.OT
The topological structure of the power grid plays a key role in the reliable delivery of electricity and price settlement in the electricity market. Incorporation of new energy sources and loads into the grid over time has led to its structural and geographical expansion and can affect its stable operation. This paper presents an intuitive analytical model for the temporal evolution of large grids and uses it to understand common structural features observed in grids across America. In particular, key graph parameters like degree distribution, graph diameter, betweenness centralities, eigen-spread and clustering coefficients, as well as graph processes like infection propagation are used to quantify the model's benefits through comparison with the Western US and ERCOT power grids. The most significant contribution of the developed model is its analytical tractability, that provides a closed form expression for the nodal degree distribution observed in large grids. The discussed model can be used to generate realistic test cases to analyze topological effects on grid functioning and new grid technologies.
1204.0166
Worst-Case Robust Multiuser Transmit Beamforming Using Semidefinite Relaxation: Duality and Implications
cs.IT math.IT
This paper studies a downlink multiuser transmit beamforming design under spherical channel uncertainties, using a worst-case robust formulation. This robust design problem is nonconvex. Recently, a convex approximation formulation based on semidefinite relaxation (SDR) has been proposed to handle the problem. Curiously, simulation results have consistently indicated that SDR can attain the global optimum of the robust design problem. This paper intends to provide some theoretical insights into this important empirical finding. Our main result is a dual representation of the SDR formulation, which reveals an interesting linkage to a different robust design problem, and the possibility of SDR optimality.
1204.0168
Modeling Infection with Multi-agent Dynamics
stat.AP cs.MA cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Developing the ability to comprehensively study infections in small populations enables us to improve epidemic models and better advise individuals about potential risks to their health. We currently have a limited understanding of how infections spread within a small population because it has been difficult to closely track an infection within a complete community. The paper presents data closely tracking the spread of an infection centered on a student dormitory, collected by leveraging the residents' use of cellular phones. The data are based on daily symptom surveys taken over a period of four months and proximity tracking through cellular phones. We demonstrate that using a Bayesian, discrete-time multi-agent model of infection to model real-world symptom reports and proximity tracking records gives us important insights about infec-tions in small populations.
1204.0170
A New Approach to Speeding Up Topic Modeling
cs.LG cs.IR
Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is a widely-used probabilistic topic modeling paradigm, and recently finds many applications in computer vision and computational biology. In this paper, we propose a fast and accurate batch algorithm, active belief propagation (ABP), for training LDA. Usually batch LDA algorithms require repeated scanning of the entire corpus and searching the complete topic space. To process massive corpora having a large number of topics, the training iteration of batch LDA algorithms is often inefficient and time-consuming. To accelerate the training speed, ABP actively scans the subset of corpus and searches the subset of topic space for topic modeling, therefore saves enormous training time in each iteration. To ensure accuracy, ABP selects only those documents and topics that contribute to the largest residuals within the residual belief propagation (RBP) framework. On four real-world corpora, ABP performs around $10$ to $100$ times faster than state-of-the-art batch LDA algorithms with a comparable topic modeling accuracy.
1204.0171
A New Fuzzy Stacked Generalization Technique and Analysis of its Performance
cs.LG cs.CV
In this study, a new Stacked Generalization technique called Fuzzy Stacked Generalization (FSG) is proposed to minimize the difference between N -sample and large-sample classification error of the Nearest Neighbor classifier. The proposed FSG employs a new hierarchical distance learning strategy to minimize the error difference. For this purpose, we first construct an ensemble of base-layer fuzzy k- Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) classifiers, each of which receives a different feature set extracted from the same sample set. The fuzzy membership values computed at the decision space of each fuzzy k-NN classifier are concatenated to form the feature vectors of a fusion space. Finally, the feature vectors are fed to a meta-layer classifier to learn the degree of accuracy of the decisions of the base-layer classifiers for meta-layer classification. Rather than the power of the individual base layer-classifiers, diversity and cooperation of the classifiers become an important issue to improve the overall performance of the proposed FSG. A weak base-layer classifier may boost the overall performance more than a strong classifier, if it is capable of recognizing the samples, which are not recognized by the rest of the classifiers, in its own feature space. The experiments explore the type of the collaboration among the individual classifiers required for an improved performance of the suggested architecture. Experiments on multiple feature real-world datasets show that the proposed FSG performs better than the state of the art ensemble learning algorithms such as Adaboost, Random Subspace and Rotation Forest. On the other hand, compatible performances are observed in the experiments on single feature multi-attribute datasets.
1204.0173
On The Achievable Rate Region of a New Wiretap Channel With Side Information
cs.IT math.IT
A new applicable wiretap channel with separated side information is considered here which consist of a sender, a legitimate receiver and a wiretapper. In the considered scenario, the links from the transmitter to the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper experience different conditions or channel states. So, the legitimate receiver and the wiretapper listen to the transmitted signal through the channels with different channel states which may have some correlation to each other. It is assumed that the transmitter knows the state of the main channel non-causally and uses this knowledge to encode its message. The state of the wiretap channel is not known anywhere. An achievable equivocation rate region is derived for this model and is compared to the existing works. In some special cases, the results are extended to the Gaussian wiretap channel.
1204.0176
Using Fuzzy Logic to Evaluate Normalization Completeness for An Improved Database Design
cs.DB
A new approach, to measure normalization completeness for conceptual model, is introduced using quantitative fuzzy functionality in this paper. We measure the normalization completeness of the conceptual model in two steps. In the first step, different normalization techniques are analyzed up to Boyce Codd Normal Form (BCNF) to find the current normal form of the relation. In the second step, fuzzy membership values are used to scale the normal form between 0 and 1. Case studies to explain schema transformation rules and measurements. Normalization completeness is measured by considering completeness attributes, preventing attributes of the functional dependencies and total number of attributes such as if the functional dependency is non-preventing then the attributes of that functional dependency are completeness attributes. The attributes of functional dependency which prevent to go to the next normal form are called preventing attributes.
1204.0179
Service-Oriented Architecture for Weaponry and Battle Command and Control Systems in Warfighting
cs.RO
Military is one of many industries that is more computer-dependent than ever before, from soldiers with computerized weapons, and tactical wireless devices, to commanders with advanced battle management, command and control systems. Fundamentally, command and control is the process of planning, monitoring, and commanding military personnel, weaponry equipment, and combating vehicles to execute military missions. In fact, command and control systems are revolutionizing as war fighting is changing into cyber, technology, information, and unmanned warfare. As a result, a new design model that supports scalability, reusability, maintainability, survivability, and interoperability is needed to allow commanders, hundreds of miles away from the battlefield, to plan, monitor, evaluate, and control the war events in a dynamic, robust, agile, and reliable manner. This paper proposes a service-oriented architecture for weaponry and battle command and control systems, made out of loosely-coupled and distributed web services. The proposed architecture consists of three elementary tiers: the client tier that corresponds to any computing military equipment; the server tier that corresponds to the web services that deliver the basic functionalities for the client tier; and the middleware tier that corresponds to an enterprise service bus that promotes interoperability between all the interconnected entities. A command and control system was simulated and experimented and it successfully exhibited the desired features of SOA. Future research can improve upon the proposed architecture so much so that it supports encryption for securing the exchange of data between the various communicating entities of the system.
1204.0181
Expert PC Troubleshooter With Fuzzy-Logic And Self-Learning Support
cs.AI
Expert systems use human knowledge often stored as rules within the computer to solve problems that generally would entail human intelligence. Today, with information systems turning out to be more pervasive and with the myriad advances in information technologies, automating computer fault diagnosis is becoming so fundamental that soon every enterprise has to endorse it. This paper proposes an expert system called Expert PC Troubleshooter for diagnosing computer problems. The system is composed of a user interface, a rule-base, an inference engine, and an expert interface. Additionally, the system features a fuzzy-logic module to troubleshoot POST beep errors, and an intelligent agent that assists in the knowledge acquisition process. The proposed system is meant to automate the maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) process, and free-up human technicians from manually performing routine, laborious, and timeconsuming maintenance tasks. As future work, the proposed system is to be parallelized so as to boost its performance and speed-up its various operations.
1204.0182
Hybrid Information Retrieval Model For Web Images
cs.IR
The Bing Bang of the Internet in the early 90's increased dramatically the number of images being distributed and shared over the web. As a result, image information retrieval systems were developed to index and retrieve image files spread over the Internet. Most of these systems are keyword-based which search for images based on their textual metadata; and thus, they are imprecise as it is vague to describe an image with a human language. Besides, there exist the content-based image retrieval systems which search for images based on their visual information. However, content-based type systems are still immature and not that effective as they suffer from low retrieval recall/precision rate. This paper proposes a new hybrid image information retrieval model for indexing and retrieving web images published in HTML documents. The distinguishing mark of the proposed model is that it is based on both graphical content and textual metadata. The graphical content is denoted by color features and color histogram of the image; while textual metadata are denoted by the terms that surround the image in the HTML document, more particularly, the terms that appear in the tags p, h1, and h2, in addition to the terms that appear in the image's alt attribute, filename, and class-label. Moreover, this paper presents a new term weighting scheme called VTF-IDF short for Variable Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency which unlike traditional schemes, it exploits the HTML tag structure and assigns an extra bonus weight for terms that appear within certain particular HTML tags that are correlated to the semantics of the image. Experiments conducted to evaluate the proposed IR model showed a high retrieval precision rate that outpaced other current models.
1204.0183
Neural Network Model for Path-Planning of Robotic Rover Systems
cs.NE
Today, robotics is an auspicious and fast-growing branch of technology that involves the manufacturing, design, and maintenance of robot machines that can operate in an autonomous fashion and can be used in a wide variety of applications including space exploration, weaponry, household, and transportation. More particularly, in space applications, a common type of robots has been of widespread use in the recent years. It is called planetary rover which is a robot vehicle that moves across the surface of a planet and conducts detailed geological studies pertaining to the properties of the landing cosmic environment. However, rovers are always impeded by obstacles along the traveling path which can destabilize the rover's body and prevent it from reaching its goal destination. This paper proposes an ANN model that allows rover systems to carry out autonomous path-planning to successfully navigate through challenging planetary terrains and follow their goal location while avoiding dangerous obstacles. The proposed ANN is a multilayer network made out of three layers: an input, a hidden, and an output layer. The network is trained in offline mode using back-propagation supervised learning algorithm. A software-simulated rover was experimented and it revealed that it was able to follow the safest trajectory despite existing obstacles. As future work, the proposed ANN is to be parallelized so as to speed-up the execution time of the training process.
1204.0184
Parallel Spell-Checking Algorithm Based on Yahoo! N-Grams Dataset
cs.CL
Spell-checking is the process of detecting and sometimes providing suggestions for incorrectly spelled words in a text. Basically, the larger the dictionary of a spell-checker is, the higher is the error detection rate; otherwise, misspellings would pass undetected. Unfortunately, traditional dictionaries suffer from out-of-vocabulary and data sparseness problems as they do not encompass large vocabulary of words indispensable to cover proper names, domain-specific terms, technical jargons, special acronyms, and terminologies. As a result, spell-checkers will incur low error detection and correction rate and will fail to flag all errors in the text. This paper proposes a new parallel shared-memory spell-checking algorithm that uses rich real-world word statistics from Yahoo! N-Grams Dataset to correct non-word and real-word errors in computer text. Essentially, the proposed algorithm can be divided into three sub-algorithms that run in a parallel fashion: The error detection algorithm that detects misspellings, the candidates generation algorithm that generates correction suggestions, and the error correction algorithm that performs contextual error correction. Experiments conducted on a set of text articles containing misspellings, showed a remarkable spelling error correction rate that resulted in a radical reduction of both non-word and real-word errors in electronic text. In a further study, the proposed algorithm is to be optimized for message-passing systems so as to become more flexible and less costly to scale over distributed machines.
1204.0185
Service-Oriented Architecture for Space Exploration Robotic Rover Systems
cs.RO
Currently, industrial sectors are transforming their business processes into e-services and component-based architectures to build flexible, robust, and scalable systems, and reduce integration-related maintenance and development costs. Robotics is yet another promising and fast-growing industry that deals with the creation of machines that operate in an autonomous fashion and serve for various applications including space exploration, weaponry, laboratory research, and manufacturing. It is in space exploration that the most common type of robots is the planetary rover which moves across the surface of a planet and conducts a thorough geological study of the celestial surface. This type of rover system is still ad-hoc in that it incorporates its software into its core hardware making the whole system cohesive, tightly-coupled, more susceptible to shortcomings, less flexible, hard to be scaled and maintained, and impossible to be adapted to other purposes. This paper proposes a service-oriented architecture for space exploration robotic rover systems made out of loosely-coupled and distributed web services. The proposed architecture consists of three elementary tiers: the client tier that corresponds to the actual rover; the server tier that corresponds to the web services; and the middleware tier that corresponds to an Enterprise Service Bus which promotes interoperability between the interconnected entities. The niche of this architecture is that rover's software components are decoupled and isolated from the rover's body and possibly deployed at a distant location. A service-oriented architecture promotes integrate-ability, scalability, reusability, maintainability, and interoperability for client-to-server communication.
1204.0186
Semantic-Sensitive Web Information Retrieval Model for HTML Documents
cs.IR
With the advent of the Internet, a new era of digital information exchange has begun. Currently, the Internet encompasses more than five billion online sites and this number is exponentially increasing every day. Fundamentally, Information Retrieval (IR) is the science and practice of storing documents and retrieving information from within these documents. Mathematically, IR systems are at the core based on a feature vector model coupled with a term weighting scheme that weights terms in a document according to their significance with respect to the context in which they appear. Practically, Vector Space Model (VSM), Term Frequency (TF), and Inverse Term Frequency (IDF) are among other long-established techniques employed in mainstream IR systems. However, present IR models only target generic-type text documents, in that, they do not consider specific formats of files such as HTML web documents. This paper proposes a new semantic-sensitive web information retrieval model for HTML documents. It consists of a vector model called SWVM and a weighting scheme called BTF-IDF, particularly designed to support the indexing and retrieval of HTML web documents. The chief advantage of the proposed model is that it assigns extra weights for terms that appear in certain pre-specified HTML tags that are correlated to the semantics of the document. Additionally, the model is semantic-sensitive as it generates synonyms for every term being indexed and later weights them appropriately to increase the likelihood of retrieving documents with similar context but different vocabulary terms. Experiments conducted, revealed a momentous enhancement in the precision of web IR systems and a radical increase in the number of relevant documents being retrieved. As further research, the proposed model is to be upgraded so as to support the indexing and retrieval of web images in multimedia-rich web documents.
1204.0188
OCR Context-Sensitive Error Correction Based on Google Web 1T 5-Gram Data Set
cs.CL cs.IR
Since the dawn of the computing era, information has been represented digitally so that it can be processed by electronic computers. Paper books and documents were abundant and widely being published at that time; and hence, there was a need to convert them into digital format. OCR, short for Optical Character Recognition was conceived to translate paper-based books into digital e-books. Regrettably, OCR systems are still erroneous and inaccurate as they produce misspellings in the recognized text, especially when the source document is of low printing quality. This paper proposes a post-processing OCR context-sensitive error correction method for detecting and correcting non-word and real-word OCR errors. The cornerstone of this proposed approach is the use of Google Web 1T 5-gram data set as a dictionary of words to spell-check OCR text. The Google data set incorporates a very large vocabulary and word statistics entirely reaped from the Internet, making it a reliable source to perform dictionary-based error correction. The core of the proposed solution is a combination of three algorithms: The error detection, candidate spellings generator, and error correction algorithms, which all exploit information extracted from Google Web 1T 5-gram data set. Experiments conducted on scanned images written in different languages showed a substantial improvement in the OCR error correction rate. As future developments, the proposed algorithm is to be parallelised so as to support parallel and distributed computing architectures.
1204.0191
OCR Post-Processing Error Correction Algorithm using Google Online Spelling Suggestion
cs.CL
With the advent of digital optical scanners, a lot of paper-based books, textbooks, magazines, articles, and documents are being transformed into an electronic version that can be manipulated by a computer. For this purpose, OCR, short for Optical Character Recognition was developed to translate scanned graphical text into editable computer text. Unfortunately, OCR is still imperfect as it occasionally mis-recognizes letters and falsely identifies scanned text, leading to misspellings and linguistics errors in the OCR output text. This paper proposes a post-processing context-based error correction algorithm for detecting and correcting OCR non-word and real-word errors. The proposed algorithm is based on Google's online spelling suggestion which harnesses an internal database containing a huge collection of terms and word sequences gathered from all over the web, convenient to suggest possible replacements for words that have been misspelled during the OCR process. Experiments carried out revealed a significant improvement in OCR error correction rate. Future research can improve upon the proposed algorithm so much so that it can be parallelized and executed over multiprocessing platforms.
1204.0198
Game arguments in computability theory and algorithmic information theory
math.LO cs.GT cs.IT math.IT
We provide some examples showing how game-theoretic arguments can be used in computability theory and algorithmic information theory: unique numbering theorem (Friedberg), the gap between conditional complexity and total conditional complexity, Epstein--Levin theorem and some (yet unpublished) result of Muchnik and Vyugin
1204.0199
Delay-aware BS Discontinuous Transmission Control and User Scheduling for Energy Harvesting Downlink Coordinated MIMO Systems
cs.SY
In this paper, we propose a two-timescale delay-optimal base station Discontinuous Transmission (BS-DTX) control and user scheduling for downlink coordinated MIMO systems with energy harvesting capability. To reduce the complexity and signaling overhead in practical systems, the BS-DTX control is adaptive to both the energy state information (ESI) and the data queue state information (QSI) over a longer timescale. The user scheduling is adaptive to the ESI, the QSI and the channel state information (CSI) over a shorter timescale. We show that the two-timescale delay-optimal control problem can be modeled as an infinite horizon average cost Partially Observed Markov Decision Problem (POMDP), which is well-known to be a difficult problem in general. By using sample-path analysis and exploiting specific problem structure, we first obtain some structural results on the optimal control policy and derive an equivalent Bellman equation with reduced state space. To reduce the complexity and facilitate distributed implementation, we obtain a delay-aware distributed solution with the BS-DTX control at the BS controller (BSC) and the user scheduling at each cluster manager (CM) using approximate dynamic programming and distributed stochastic learning. We show that the proposed distributed two-timescale algorithm converges almost surely. Furthermore, using queueing theory, stochastic geometry and optimization techniques, we derive sufficient conditions for the data queues to be stable in the coordinated MIMO network and discuss various design insights.
1204.0201
Limit complexities revisited [once more]
math.LO cs.IT math.IT
The main goal of this article is to put some known results in a common perspective and to simplify their proofs. We start with a simple proof of a result of Vereshchagin saying that $\limsup_n C(x|n)$ equals $C^{0'}(x)$. Then we use the same argument to prove similar results for prefix complexity, a priori probability on binary tree, to prove Conidis' theorem about limits of effectively open sets, and also to improve the results of Muchnik about limit frequencies. As a by-product, we get a criterion of 2-randomness proved by Miller: a sequence $X$ is 2-random if and only if there exists $c$ such that any prefix $x$ of $X$ is a prefix of some string $y$ such that $C(y)\ge |y|-c$. (In the 1960ies this property was suggested in Kolmogorov as one of possible randomness definitions.) We also get another 2-randomness criterion by Miller and Nies: $X$ is 2-random if and only if $C(x)\ge |x|-c$ for some $c$ and infinitely many prefixes $x$ of $X$. This is a modified version of our old paper that contained a weaker (and cumbersome) version of Conidis' result, and the proof used low basis theorem (in quite a strange way). The full version was formulated there as a conjecture. This conjecture was later proved by Conidis. Bruno Bauwens (personal communication) noted that the proof can be obtained also by a simple modification of our original argument, and we reproduce Bauwens' argument with his permission.
1204.0245
Roget's Thesaurus and Semantic Similarity
cs.CL
We have implemented a system that measures semantic similarity using a computerized 1987 Roget's Thesaurus, and evaluated it by performing a few typical tests. We compare the results of these tests with those produced by WordNet-based similarity measures. One of the benchmarks is Miller and Charles' list of 30 noun pairs to which human judges had assigned similarity measures. We correlate these measures with those computed by several NLP systems. The 30 pairs can be traced back to Rubenstein and Goodenough's 65 pairs, which we have also studied. Our Roget's-based system gets correlations of .878 for the smaller and .818 for the larger list of noun pairs; this is quite close to the .885 that Resnik obtained when he employed humans to replicate the Miller and Charles experiment. We further evaluate our measure by using Roget's and WordNet to answer 80 TOEFL, 50 ESL and 300 Reader's Digest questions: the correct synonym must be selected amongst a group of four words. Our system gets 78.75%, 82.00% and 74.33% of the questions respectively.
1204.0248
Small polygons and toric codes
math.CO cs.IT math.IT
We describe two different approaches to making systematic classifications of plane lattice polygons, and recover the toric codes they generate, over small fields, where these match or exceed the best known minimum distance. This includes a [36,19,12]-code over F_7 whose minimum distance 12 exceeds that of all previously known codes.
1204.0255
Keyphrase Extraction : Enhancing Lists
cs.CL cs.IR
This paper proposes some modest improvements to Extractor, a state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction system, by using a terabyte-sized corpus to estimate the informativeness and semantic similarity of keyphrases. We present two techniques to improve the organization and remove outliers of lists of keyphrases. The first is a simple ordering according to their occurrences in the corpus; the second is clustering according to semantic similarity. Evaluation issues are discussed. We present a novel technique of comparing extracted keyphrases to a gold standard which relies on semantic similarity rather than string matching or an evaluation involving human judges.
1204.0257
Not As Easy As It Seems: Automating the Construction of Lexical Chains Using Roget's Thesaurus
cs.CL
Morris and Hirst present a method of linking significant words that are about the same topic. The resulting lexical chains are a means of identifying cohesive regions in a text, with applications in many natural language processing tasks, including text summarization. The first lexical chains were constructed manually using Roget's International Thesaurus. Morris and Hirst wrote that automation would be straightforward given an electronic thesaurus. All applications so far have used WordNet to produce lexical chains, perhaps because adequate electronic versions of Roget's were not available until recently. We discuss the building of lexical chains using an electronic version of Roget's Thesaurus. We implement a variant of the original algorithm, and explain the necessary design decisions. We include a comparison with other implementations.
1204.0258
Roget's Thesaurus: a Lexical Resource to Treasure
cs.CL
This paper presents the steps involved in creating an electronic lexical knowledge base from the 1987 Penguin edition of Roget's Thesaurus. Semantic relations are labelled with the help of WordNet. The two resources are compared in a qualitative and quantitative manner. Differences in the organization of the lexical material are discussed, as well as the possibility of merging both resources.
1204.0262
Managing contextual artificial neural networks with a service-based mediator
cs.NE
Today, a wide variety of probabilistic and expert AI systems used to analyze real world inputs such as unstructured text, sounds, images, and statistical data. However, all these systems exist on different platforms, with different implementations, and with very different, often very specific goals in mind. This paper introduces a concept for a mediator framework for such systems and seeks to show several architectures which would support it, potential benefits in combining the signals of disparate networks for formalized, high level logic and signal processing, and its possible academic and industrial uses.
1204.0266
Uncovering disassortativity in large scale-free networks
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI
Mixing patterns in large self-organizing networks, such as the Internet, the World Wide Web, social and biological networks are often characterized by degree-degree dependencies between neighbouring nodes. In this paper we propose a new way of measuring degree-degree dependencies. One of the problems with the commonly used assortativity coefficient is that in disassortative networks its magnitude decreases with the network size. We mathematically explain this phenomenon and validate the results on synthetic graphs and real-world network data. As an alternative, we suggest to use rank correlation measures such as Spearman's rho. Our experiments convincingly show that Spearman's rho produces consistent values in graphs of different sizes but similar structure, and it is able to reveal strong (positive or negative) dependencies in large graphs. In particular, we discover much stronger negative degree-degree dependencies} in Web graphs than was previously thought. {Rank correlations allow us to compare the assortativity of networks of different sizes, which is impossible with the assortativity coefficient due to its genuine dependence on the network size. We conclude that rank correlations provide a suitable and informative method for uncovering network mixing patterns.
1204.0267
Computational science and re-discovery: open-source implementations of ellipsoidal harmonics for problems in potential theory
cs.CE cs.MS physics.chem-ph physics.comp-ph
We present two open-source (BSD) implementations of ellipsoidal harmonic expansions for solving problems of potential theory using separation of variables. Ellipsoidal harmonics are used surprisingly infrequently, considering their substantial value for problems ranging in scale from molecules to the entire solar system. In this article, we suggest two possible reasons for the paucity relative to spherical harmonics. The first is essentially historical---ellipsoidal harmonics developed during the late 19th century and early 20th, when it was found that only the lowest-order harmonics are expressible in closed form. Each higher-order term requires the solution of an eigenvalue problem, and tedious manual computation seems to have discouraged applications and theoretical studies. The second explanation is practical: even with modern computers and accurate eigenvalue algorithms, expansions in ellipsoidal harmonics are significantly more challenging to compute than those in Cartesian or spherical coordinates. The present implementations reduce the "barrier to entry" by providing an easy and free way for the community to begin using ellipsoidal harmonics in actual research. We demonstrate our implementation using the specific and physiologically crucial problem of how charged proteins interact with their environment, and ask: what other analytical tools await re-discovery in an era of inexpensive computation?
1204.0274
Learning from Humans as an I-POMDP
cs.RO cs.AI
The interactive partially observable Markov decision process (I-POMDP) is a recently developed framework which extends the POMDP to the multi-agent setting by including agent models in the state space. This paper argues for formulating the problem of an agent learning interactively from a human teacher as an I-POMDP, where the agent \emph{programming} to be learned is captured by random variables in the agent's state space, all \emph{signals} from the human teacher are treated as observed random variables, and the human teacher, modeled as a distinct agent, is explicitly represented in the agent's state space. The main benefits of this approach are: i. a principled action selection mechanism, ii. a principled belief update mechanism, iii. support for the most common teacher \emph{signals}, and iv. the anticipated production of complex beneficial interactions. The proposed formulation, its benefits, and several open questions are presented.
1204.0280
Framing Human-Robot Task Communication as a POMDP
cs.RO
As general purpose robots become more capable, pre-programming of all tasks at the factory will become less practical. We would like for non-technical human owners to be able to communicate, through interaction with their robot, the details of a new task; we call this interaction "task communication". During task communication the robot must infer the details of the task from unstructured human signals and it must choose actions that facilitate this inference. In this paper we propose the use of a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) for representing the task communication problem; with the unobservable task details and unobservable intentions of the human teacher captured in the state, with all signals from the human represented as observations, and with the cost function chosen to penalize uncertainty. We work through an example representation of task communication as a POMDP, and present results from a user experiment on an interactive virtual robot, compared with a human controlled virtual robot, for a task involving a single object movement and binary approval input from the teacher. The results suggest that the proposed POMDP representation produces robots that are robust to teacher error, that can accurately infer task details, and that are perceived to be intelligent.
1204.0281
The memory centre
cs.IT math.IT
Let $x \in \R$ be given. As we know the, amount of bits needed to binary code $x$ with given accuracy ($h \in \R$) is approximately $ \m_{h}(x) \approx \log_{2}(\max {1, |\frac{x}{h}|}). $ We consider the problem where we should translate the origin $a$ so that the mean amount of bits needed to code randomly chosen element from a realization of a random variable $X$ is minimal. In other words, we want to find $a \in \R$ such that $$ \R \ni a \to \mathrm{E} (\m_{h} (X-a)) $$ attains minimum.
1204.0301
Tree Codes Improve Convergence Rate of Consensus Over Erasure Channels
math.OC cs.IT math.IT
We study the problem of achieving average consensus between a group of agents over a network with erasure links. In the context of consensus problems, the unreliability of communication links between nodes has been traditionally modeled by allowing the underlying graph to vary with time. In other words, depending on the realization of the link erasures, the underlying graph at each time instant is assumed to be a subgraph of the original graph. Implicit in this model is the assumption that the erasures are symmetric: if at time t the packet from node i to node j is dropped, the same is true for the packet transmitted from node j to node i. However, in practical wireless communication systems this assumption is unreasonable and, due to the lack of symmetry, standard averaging protocols cannot guarantee that the network will reach consensus to the true average. In this paper we explore the use of channel coding to improve the performance of consensus algorithms. For symmetric erasures, we show that, for certain ranges of the system parameters, repetition codes can speed up the convergence rate. For asymmetric erasures we show that tree codes (which have recently been designed for erasure channels) can be used to simulate the performance of the original "unerased" graph. Thus, unlike conventional consensus methods, we can guarantee convergence to the average in the asymmetric case. The price is a slowdown in the convergence rate, relative to the unerased network, which is still often faster than the convergence rate of conventional consensus algorithms over noisy links.
1204.0304
Distributed continuous-time convex optimization on weight-balanced digraphs
math.OC cs.SY
This paper studies the continuous-time distributed optimization of a sum of convex functions over directed graphs. Contrary to what is known in the consensus literature, where the same dynamics works for both undirected and directed scenarios, we show that the consensus-based dynamics that solves the continuous-time distributed optimization problem for undirected graphs fails to converge when transcribed to the directed setting. This study sets the basis for the design of an alternative distributed dynamics which we show is guaranteed to converge, on any strongly connected weight-balanced digraph, to the set of minimizers of a sum of convex differentiable functions with globally Lipschitz gradients. Our technical approach combines notions of invariance and cocoercivity with the positive definiteness properties of graph matrices to establish the results.
1204.0309
A Model for Personalized Keyword Extraction from Web Pages using Segmentation
cs.IR
The World Wide Web caters to the needs of billions of users in heterogeneous groups. Each user accessing the World Wide Web might have his / her own specific interest and would expect the web to respond to the specific requirements. The process of making the web to react in a customized manner is achieved through personalization. This paper proposes a novel model for extracting keywords from a web page with personalization being incorporated into it. The keyword extraction problem is approached with the help of web page segmentation which facilitates in making the problem simpler and solving it effectively. The proposed model is implemented as a prototype and the experiments conducted on it empirically validate the model's efficiency.
1204.0334
Implementation Of Decoders for LDPC Block Codes and LDPC Convolutional Codes Based on GPUs
cs.IT cs.DC math.IT
With the use of belief propagation (BP) decoding algorithm, low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes can achieve near-Shannon limit performance. In order to evaluate the error performance of LDPC codes, simulators running on CPUs are commonly used. However, the time taken to evaluate LDPC codes with very good error performance is excessive. In this paper, efficient LDPC block-code decoders/simulators which run on graphics processing units (GPUs) are proposed. We also implement the decoder for the LDPC convolutional code (LDPCCC). The LDPCCC is derived from a pre-designed quasi-cyclic LDPC block code with good error performance. Compared to the decoder based on the randomly constructed LDPCCC code, the complexity of the proposed LDPCCC decoder is reduced due to the periodicity of the derived LDPCCC and the properties of the quasi-cyclic structure. In our proposed decoder architecture, $\Gamma$ (a multiple of a warp) codewords are decoded together and hence the messages of $\Gamma$ codewords are also processed together. Since all the $\Gamma$ codewords share the same Tanner graph, messages of the $\Gamma$ distinct codewords corresponding to the same edge can be grouped into one package and stored linearly. By optimizing the data structures of the messages used in the decoding process, both the read and write processes can be performed in a highly parallel manner by the GPUs. In addition, a thread hierarchy minimizing the divergence of the threads is deployed, and it can maximize the efficiency of the parallel execution. With the use of a large number of cores in the GPU to perform the simple computations simultaneously, our GPU-based LDPC decoder can obtain hundreds of times speedup compared with a serial CPU-based simulator and over 40 times speedup compared with an 8-thread CPU-based simulator.
1204.0343
Comments on "Prediction of Subharmonic Oscillation in Switching Converters Under Different Control Strategies"
cs.SY math.DS nlin.CD
A recent paper [1] (El Aroudi, 2012) misapplied a critical condition (Fang and Abed, 2001) to a well-known example. Even if the mistake is corrected, the results in [1] are applicable only to buck converters and period-doubling bifurcation. Actually, these results are known in Fang's works a decade ago which have broader critical conditions applicable to other converters and bifurcations. The flaws in [1] are identified.
1204.0354
Identifying Infection Sources and Regions in Large Networks
cs.DM cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Identifying the infection sources in a network, including the index cases that introduce a contagious disease into a population network, the servers that inject a computer virus into a computer network, or the individuals who started a rumor in a social network, plays a critical role in limiting the damage caused by the infection through timely quarantine of the sources. We consider the problem of estimating the infection sources and the infection regions (subsets of nodes infected by each source) in a network, based only on knowledge of which nodes are infected and their connections, and when the number of sources is unknown a priori. We derive estimators for the infection sources and their infection regions based on approximations of the infection sequences count. We prove that if there are at most two infection sources in a geometric tree, our estimator identifies the true source or sources with probability going to one as the number of infected nodes increases. When there are more than two infection sources, and when the maximum possible number of infection sources is known, we propose an algorithm with quadratic complexity to estimate the actual number and identities of the infection sources. Simulations on various kinds of networks, including tree networks, small-world networks and real world power grid networks, and tests on two real data sets are provided to verify the performance of our estimators.
1204.0357
Skull-stripping for Tumor-bearing Brain Images
cs.CV cs.CE
Skull-stripping separates the skull region of the head from the soft brain tissues. In many cases of brain image analysis, this is an essential preprocessing step in order to improve the final result. This is true for both registration and segmentation tasks. In fact, skull-stripping of magnetic resonance images (MRI) is a well-studied problem with numerous publications in recent years. Many different algorithms have been proposed, a summary and comparison of which can be found in [Fennema-Notestine, 2006]. Despite the abundance of approaches, we discovered that the algorithms which had been suggested so far, perform poorly when dealing with tumor-bearing brain images. This is mostly due to additional difficulties in separating the brain from the skull in this case, especially when the lesion is located very close to the skull border. Additionally, images acquired according to standard clinical protocols, often exhibit anisotropic resolution and only partial coverage, which further complicates the task. Therefore, we developed a method which is dedicated to skull-stripping for clinically acquired tumor-bearing brain images.
1204.0386
Tax evasion dynamics and Zaklan model on Opinion-dependent Network
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Within the context of agent-based Monte-Carlo simulations, we study the well-known majority-vote model (MVM) with noise applied to tax evasion on Stauffer-Hohnisch-Pittnauer (SHP) networks. To control the fluctuations for tax evasion in the economics model proposed by Zaklan, MVM is applied in the neighborhood of the critical noise $q_{c}$ to evolve the Zaklan model. The Zaklan model had been studied recently using the equilibrium Ising model. Here we show that the Zaklan model is robust because this can be studied besides using equilibrium dynamics of Ising model also through the nonequilibrium MVM and on various topologies giving the same behavior regardless of dynamic or topology used here.
1204.0423
On voting intentions inference from Twitter content: a case study on UK 2010 General Election
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
This is a report, where preliminary work regarding the topic of voting intention inference from Social Media - such as Twitter - is presented. Our case study is the UK 2010 General Election and we are focusing on predicting the percentages of voting intention polls (conducted by YouGov) for the three major political parties - Conservatives, Labours and Liberal Democrats - during a 5-month period before the election date (May 6, 2010). We form three methodologies for extracting positive or negative sentiment from tweets, which build on each other, and then propose two supervised models for turning sentiment into voting intention percentages. Interestingly, when the content of tweets is enriched by attaching synonymous words, a significant improvement on inference performance is achieved reaching a mean absolute error of 4.34% +/- 2.13%; in that case, the predictions are also shown to be statistically significant. The presented methods should be considered as work-in-progress; limitations and suggestions for future work appear in the final section of this script.
1204.0429
Relative Information Loss in the PCA
cs.IT math.IT
In this work we analyze principle component analysis (PCA) as a deterministic input-output system. We show that the relative information loss induced by reducing the dimensionality of the data after performing the PCA is the same as in dimensionality reduction without PCA. Finally, we analyze the case where the PCA uses the sample covariance matrix to compute the rotation. If the rotation matrix is not available at the output, we show that an infinite amount of information is lost. The relative information loss is shown to decrease with increasing sample size.
1204.0431
On Dispersions of Discrete Memoryless Channels with Noncausal State Information at the Encoder
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we study the finite blocklength limits of state-dependent discrete memoryless channels where the discrete memoryless state is known noncausally at the encoder. For the point-to-point case, this is known as the Gel'fand-Pinsker channel model. We define the (n,\epsilon)-capacity of the Gel'fand-Pinsker channel as the maximal rate of transmission of a message subject to the condition that the length of the block-code is n and the average error probability is no larger than \epsilon. This paper provides a lower bound for the (n,\epsilon)-capacity of the Gel'fand-Pinsker channel model, and hence an upper bound on the dispersion, a fundamental second-order quantity in the study of the performance limits of discrete memoryless channels. In addition, we extend the work of Y. Steinberg (2005), in which the (degraded) broadcast channel extension of the Gel'fand-Pinsker model was studied. We provide and inner bound to the (n,\epsilon)-capacity region for this broadcast channel model using a combination of ideas of Gel'fand-Pinsker coding, superposition coding and dispersion (finite blocklength) analysis.
1204.0479
A collaborative ant colony metaheuristic for distributed multi-level lot-sizing
cs.AI cs.DC
The paper presents an ant colony optimization metaheuristic for collaborative planning. Collaborative planning is used to coordinate individual plans of self-interested decision makers with private information in order to increase the overall benefit of the coalition. The method consists of a new search graph based on encoded solutions. Distributed and private information is integrated via voting mechanisms and via a simple but effective collaborative local search procedure. The approach is applied to a distributed variant of the multi-level lot-sizing problem and evaluated by means of 352 benchmark instances from the literature. The proposed approach clearly outperforms existing approaches on the sets of medium and large sized instances. While the best method in the literature so far achieves an average deviation from the best known non-distributed solutions of 46 percent for the set of the largest instances, for example, the presented approach reduces the average deviation to only 5 percent.
1204.0491
Analysis of complex contagions in random multiplex networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
We study the diffusion of influence in random multiplex networks where links can be of $r$ different types, and for a given content (e.g., rumor, product, political view), each link type is associated with a content dependent parameter $c_i$ in $[0,\infty]$ that measures the relative bias type-$i$ links have in spreading this content. In this setting, we propose a linear threshold model of contagion where nodes switch state if their "perceived" proportion of active neighbors exceeds a threshold \tau. Namely, a node connected to $m_i$ active neighbors and $k_i-m_i$ inactive neighbors via type-$i$ links will turn active if $\sum{c_i m_i}/\sum{c_i k_i}$ exceeds its threshold \tau. Under this model, we obtain the condition, probability and expected size of global spreading events. Our results extend the existing work on complex contagions in several directions by i) providing solutions for coupled random networks whose vertices are neither identical nor disjoint, (ii) highlighting the effect of content on the dynamics of complex contagions, and (iii) showing that content-dependent propagation over a multiplex network leads to a subtle relation between the giant vulnerable component of the graph and the global cascade condition that is not seen in the existing models in the literature.
1204.0521
Explicit receivers for pure-interference bosonic multiple access channels
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
The pure-interference bosonic multiple access channel has two senders and one receiver, such that the senders each communicate with multiple temporal modes of a single spatial mode of light. The channel mixes the input modes from the two users pairwise on a lossless beamsplitter, and the receiver has access to one of the two output ports. In prior work, Yen and Shapiro found the capacity region of this channel if encodings consist of coherent-state preparations. Here, we demonstrate how to achieve the coherent-state Yen-Shapiro region (for a range of parameters) using a sequential decoding strategy, and we show that our strategy outperforms the rate regions achievable using conventional receivers. Our receiver performs binary-outcome quantum measurements for every codeword pair in the senders' codebooks. A crucial component of this scheme is a non-destructive "vacuum-or-not" measurement that projects an n-symbol modulated codeword onto the n-fold vacuum state or its orthogonal complement, such that the post-measurement state is either the n-fold vacuum or has the vacuum removed from the support of the n symbols' joint quantum state. This receiver requires the additional ability to perform multimode optical phase-space displacements which are realizable using a beamsplitter and a laser.
1204.0556
Decomposition Methods for Large Scale LP Decoding
cs.IT math.IT math.OC
When binary linear error-correcting codes are used over symmetric channels, a relaxed version of the maximum likelihood decoding problem can be stated as a linear program (LP). This LP decoder can be used to decode error-correcting codes at bit-error-rates comparable to state-of-the-art belief propagation (BP) decoders, but with significantly stronger theoretical guarantees. However, LP decoding when implemented with standard LP solvers does not easily scale to the block lengths of modern error correcting codes. In this paper we draw on decomposition methods from optimization theory, specifically the Alternating Directions Method of Multipliers (ADMM), to develop efficient distributed algorithms for LP decoding. The key enabling technical result is a "two-slice" characterization of the geometry of the parity polytope, which is the convex hull of all codewords of a single parity check code. This new characterization simplifies the representation of points in the polytope. Using this simplification, we develop an efficient algorithm for Euclidean norm projection onto the parity polytope. This projection is required by ADMM and allows us to use LP decoding, with all its theoretical guarantees, to decode large-scale error correcting codes efficiently. We present numerical results for LDPC codes of lengths more than 1000. The waterfall region of LP decoding is seen to initiate at a slightly higher signal-to-noise ratio than for sum-product BP, however an error floor is not observed for LP decoding, which is not the case for BP. Our implementation of LP decoding using ADMM executes as fast as our baseline sum-product BP decoder, is fully parallelizable, and can be seen to implement a type of message-passing with a particularly simple schedule.
1204.0562
Atomic norm denoising with applications to line spectral estimation
cs.IT math.IT
Motivated by recent work on atomic norms in inverse problems, we propose a new approach to line spectral estimation that provides theoretical guarantees for the mean-squared-error (MSE) performance in the presence of noise and without knowledge of the model order. We propose an abstract theory of denoising with atomic norms and specialize this theory to provide a convex optimization problem for estimating the frequencies and phases of a mixture of complex exponentials. We show that the associated convex optimization problem can be solved in polynomial time via semidefinite programming (SDP). We also show that the SDP can be approximated by an l1-regularized least-squares problem that achieves nearly the same error rate as the SDP but can scale to much larger problems. We compare both SDP and l1-based approaches with classical line spectral analysis methods and demonstrate that the SDP outperforms the l1 optimization which outperforms MUSIC, Cadzow's, and Matrix Pencil approaches in terms of MSE over a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios.
1204.0566
The Kernelized Stochastic Batch Perceptron
cs.LG
We present a novel approach for training kernel Support Vector Machines, establish learning runtime guarantees for our method that are better then those of any other known kernelized SVM optimization approach, and show that our method works well in practice compared to existing alternatives.
1204.0590
Linear System Identification via Atomic Norm Regularization
math.OC cs.IT math.IT
This paper proposes a new algorithm for linear system identification from noisy measurements. The proposed algorithm balances a data fidelity term with a norm induced by the set of single pole filters. We pose a convex optimization problem that approximately solves the atomic norm minimization problem and identifies the unknown system from noisy linear measurements. This problem can be solved efficiently with standard, freely available software. We provide rigorous statistical guarantees that explicitly bound the estimation error (in the H_2-norm) in terms of the stability radius, the Hankel singular values of the true system and the number of measurements. These results in turn yield complexity bounds and asymptotic consistency. We provide numerical experiments demonstrating the efficacy of our method for estimating linear systems from a variety of linear measurements.
1204.0634
Multi-level agent-based modeling with the Influence Reaction principle
cs.MA
This paper deals with the specification and the implementation of multi-level agent-based models, using a formal model, IRM4MLS (an Influence Reaction Model for Multi-Level Simulation), based on the Influence Reaction principle. Proposed examples illustrate forms of top-down control in (multi-level) multi-agent based-simulations.
1204.0650
Variability of Contact Process in Complex Networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
We study numerically how the structures of distinct networks influence the epidemic dynamics in contact process. We first find that the variability difference between homogeneous and heterogeneous networks is very narrow, although the heterogeneous structures can induce the lighter prevalence. Contrary to non-community networks, strong community structures can cause the secondary outbreak of prevalence and two peaks of variability appeared. Especially in the local community, the extraordinarily large variability in early stage of the outbreak makes the prediction of epidemic spreading hard. Importantly, the bridgeness plays a significant role in the predictability, meaning the further distance of the initial seed to the bridgeness, the less accurate the predictability is. Also, we investigate the effect of different disease reaction mechanisms on variability, and find that the different reaction mechanisms will result in the distinct variabilities at the end of epidemic spreading.
1204.0684
Validation of nonlinear PCA
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CV stat.ML
Linear principal component analysis (PCA) can be extended to a nonlinear PCA by using artificial neural networks. But the benefit of curved components requires a careful control of the model complexity. Moreover, standard techniques for model selection, including cross-validation and more generally the use of an independent test set, fail when applied to nonlinear PCA because of its inherent unsupervised characteristics. This paper presents a new approach for validating the complexity of nonlinear PCA models by using the error in missing data estimation as a criterion for model selection. It is motivated by the idea that only the model of optimal complexity is able to predict missing values with the highest accuracy. While standard test set validation usually favours over-fitted nonlinear PCA models, the proposed model validation approach correctly selects the optimal model complexity.
1204.0706
Epidemic Variability in Hierarchical Geographical Networks with Human Activity Patterns
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Recently, some studies have revealed that non-Poissonian statistics of human behaviors stem from the hierarchical geographical network structure. On this view, we focus on epidemic spreading in the hierarchical geographical networks, and study how two distinct contact patterns (i. e., homogeneous time delay (HOTD) and heterogeneous time delay (HETD) associated with geographical distance) influence the spreading speed and the variability of outbreaks. We find that, compared with HOTD and null model, correlations between time delay and network hierarchy in HETD remarkably slow down epidemic spreading, and result in a upward cascading multi-modal phenomenon. Proportionately, the variability of outbreaks in HETD has the lower value, but several comparable peaks for a long time, which makes the long-term prediction of epidemic spreading hard. When a seed (i. e., the initial infected node) is from the high layers of networks, epidemic spreading is remarkably promoted. Interestingly, distinct trends of variabilities in two contact patterns emerge: high-layer seeds in HOTD result in the lower variabilities, the case of HETD is opposite. More importantly, the variabilities of high-layer seeds in HETD are much greater than that in HOTD, which implies the unpredictability of epidemic spreading in hierarchical geographical networks.
1204.0731
Unit contradiction versus unit propagation
cs.AI
Some aspects of the result of applying unit resolution on a CNF formula can be formalized as functions with domain a set of partial truth assignments. We are interested in two ways for computing such functions, depending on whether the result is the production of the empty clause or the assignment of a variable with a given truth value. We show that these two models can compute the same functions with formulae of polynomially related sizes, and we explain how this result is related to the CNF encoding of Boolean constraints.
1204.0746
Gradually Atom Pruning for Sparse Reconstruction and Extension to Correlated Sparsity
cs.IT math.IT
We propose a new algorithm for recovery of sparse signals from their compressively sensed samples. The proposed algorithm benefits from the strategy of gradual movement to estimate the positions of non-zero samples of sparse signal. We decompose each sample of signal into two variables, namely "value" and "detector", by a weighted exponential function. We update these new variables using gradient descent method. Like the traditional compressed sensing algorithms, the first variable is used to solve the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (Lasso) problem. As a new strategy, the second variable participates in the regularization term of the Lasso (l1 norm) that gradually detects the non-zero elements. The presence of the second variable enables us to extend the corresponding vector of the first variable to matrix form. This makes possible use of the correlation matrix for a heuristic search in the case that there are correlations among the samples of signal. We compare the performance of the new algorithm with various algorithms for uncorrelated and correlated sparsity. The results indicate the efficiency of the proposed methods.
1204.0767
Efficient Fruit Defect Detection and Glare removal Algorithm by anisotropic diffusion and 2D Gabor filter
cs.CV
This paper focuses on fruit defect detection and glare removal using morphological operations, Glare removal can be considered as an important preprocessing step as uneven lighting may introduce it in images, which hamper the results produced through segmentation by Gabor filters .The problem of glare in images is very pronounced sometimes due to the unusual reflectance from the camera sensor or stray light entering, this method counteracts this problem and makes the defect detection much more pronounced. Anisotropic diffusion is used for further smoothening of the images and removing the high energy regions in an image for better defect detection and makes the defects more retrievable. Our algorithm is robust and scalable the employability of a particular mask for glare removal has been checked and proved useful for counteracting.this problem, anisotropic diffusion further enhances the defects with its use further Optimal Gabor filter at various orientations is used for defect detection.
1204.0776
Exploiting Channel Correlation and PU Traffic Memory for Opportunistic Spectrum Scheduling
cs.IT cs.SY math.IT
We consider a cognitive radio network with multiple primary users (PUs) and one secondary user (SU), where a spectrum server is utilized for spectrum sensing and scheduling the SU to transmit over one of the PU channels opportunistically. One practical yet challenging scenario is when \textit{both} the PU occupancy and the channel fading vary over time and exhibit temporal correlations. Little work has been done for exploiting such temporal memory in the channel fading and the PU occupancy simultaneously for opportunistic spectrum scheduling. A main goal of this work is to understand the intricate tradeoffs resulting from the interactions of the two sets of system states - the channel fading and the PU occupancy, by casting the problem as a partially observable Markov decision process. We first show that a simple greedy policy is optimal in some special cases. To build a clear understanding of the tradeoffs, we then introduce a full-observation genie-aided system, where the spectrum server collects channel fading states from all PU channels. The genie-aided system is used to decompose the tradeoffs in the original system into multiple tiers, which are examined progressively. Numerical examples indicate that the optimal scheduler in the original system, with observation on the scheduled channel only, achieves a performance very close to the genie-aided system. Further, as expected, the optimal policy in the original system significantly outperforms randomized scheduling, pointing to the merit of exploiting the temporal correlation structure in both channel fading and PU occupancy.
1204.0803
Compressed Sensing for Denoising in Adaptive System Identification
cs.IT math.IT
We propose a new technique for adaptive identification of sparse systems based on the compressed sensing (CS) theory. We manipulate the transmitted pilot (input signal) and the received signal such that the weights of adaptive filter approach the compressed version of the sparse system instead of the original system. To this end, we use random filter structure at the transmitter to form the measurement matrix according to the CS framework. The original sparse system can be reconstructed by the conventional recovery algorithms. As a result, the denoising property of CS can be deployed in the proposed method at the recovery stage. The experiments indicate significant performance improvement of proposed method compared to the conventional LMS method which directly identifies the sparse system. Furthermore, at low levels of sparsity, our method outperforms a specialized identification algorithm that promotes sparsity.
1204.0830
Information Transmission using the Nonlinear Fourier Transform, Part II: Numerical Methods
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, numerical methods are suggested to compute the discrete and the continuous spectrum of a signal with respect to the Zakharov-Shabat system, a Lax operator underlying numerous integrable communication channels including the nonlinear Schr\"odinger channel, modeling pulse propagation in optical fibers. These methods are subsequently tested and their ability to estimate the spectrum are compared against each other. These methods are used to compute the spectrum of various signals commonly used in the optical fiber communications. It is found that the layer-peeling and the spectral methods are suitable schemes to estimate the nonlinear spectra with good accuracy. To illustrate the structure of the spectrum, the locus of the eigenvalues is determined under amplitude and phase modulation in a number of examples. It is observed that in some cases, as signal parameters vary, eigenvalues collide and change their course of motion. The real axis is typically the place from which new eigenvalues originate or are absorbed into after traveling a trajectory in the complex plane.
1204.0839
A Constrained Random Demodulator for Sub-Nyquist Sampling
cs.IT math.IT
This paper presents a significant modification to the Random Demodulator (RD) of Tropp et al. for sub-Nyquist sampling of frequency-sparse signals. The modification, termed constrained random demodulator, involves replacing the random waveform, essential to the operation of the RD, with a constrained random waveform that has limits on its switching rate because fast switching waveforms may be hard to generate cleanly. The result is a relaxation on the hardware requirements with a slight, but manageable, decrease in the recovery guarantees. The paper also establishes the importance of properly choosing the statistics of the constrained random waveform. If the power spectrum of the random waveform matches the distribution on the tones of the input signal (i.e., the distribution is proportional to the power spectrum), then recovery of the input signal tones is improved. The theoretical guarantees provided in the paper are validated through extensive numerical simulations and phase transition plots.
1204.0844
Mitigating Timing Errors in Time-Interleaved ADCs: a signal conditioning approach
cs.IT math.IT
Novel techniques based on signal-conditioning are presented to mitigate timing errors in time-interleaved ADCs. A theoretical bound on the achievable spurious signal content, on applying the techniques, is also derived. Behavioral simulations corroborating the same are presented.
1204.0852
Distributed convergence to Nash equilibria in two-network zero-sum games
math.OC cs.SY
This paper considers a class of strategic scenarios in which two networks of agents have opposing objectives with regards to the optimization of a common objective function. In the resulting zero-sum game, individual agents collaborate with neighbors in their respective network and have only partial knowledge of the state of the agents in the other network. For the case when the interaction topology of each network is undirected, we synthesize a distributed saddle-point strategy and establish its convergence to the Nash equilibrium for the class of strictly concave-convex and locally Lipschitz objective functions. We also show that this dynamics does not converge in general if the topologies are directed. This justifies the introduction, in the directed case, of a generalization of this distributed dynamics which we show converges to the Nash equilibrium for the class of strictly concave-convex differentiable functions with locally Lipschitz gradients. The technical approach combines tools from algebraic graph theory, nonsmooth analysis, set-valued dynamical systems, and game theory.
1204.0864
GeT_Move: An Efficient and Unifying Spatio-Temporal Pattern Mining Algorithm for Moving Objects
cs.DB
Recent improvements in positioning technology has led to a much wider availability of massive moving object data. A crucial task is to find the moving objects that travel together. Usually, these object sets are called spatio-temporal patterns. Due to the emergence of many different kinds of spatio-temporal patterns in recent years, different approaches have been proposed to extract them. However, each approach only focuses on mining a specific kind of pattern. In addition to being a painstaking task due to the large number of algorithms used to mine and manage patterns, it is also time consuming. Moreover, we have to execute these algorithms again whenever new data are added to the existing database. To address these issues, we first redefine spatio-temporal patterns in the itemset context. Secondly, we propose a unifying approach, named GeT_Move, which uses a frequent closed itemset-based spatio-temporal pattern-mining algorithm to mine and manage different spatio-temporal patterns. GeT_Move is implemented in two versions which are GeT_Move and Incremental GeT_Move. To optimize the efficiency and to free the parameters setting, we also propose a Parameter Free Incremental GeT_Move algorithm. Comprehensive experiments are performed on real datasets as well as large synthetic datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approaches.
1204.0867
Optimal Index Codes for a Class of Multicast Networks with Receiver Side Information
cs.IT math.IT
This paper studies a special class of multicast index coding problems where a sender transmits messages to multiple receivers, each with some side information. Here, each receiver knows a unique message a priori, and there is no restriction on how many messages each receiver requests from the sender. For this class of multicast index coding problems, we obtain the optimal index code, which has the shortest codelength for which the sender needs to send in order for all receivers to obtain their (respective) requested messages. This is the first class of index coding problems where the optimal index codes are found. In addition, linear index codes are shown to be optimal for this class of index coding problems.
1204.0870
Relax and Localize: From Value to Algorithms
cs.LG cs.GT stat.ML
We show a principled way of deriving online learning algorithms from a minimax analysis. Various upper bounds on the minimax value, previously thought to be non-constructive, are shown to yield algorithms. This allows us to seamlessly recover known methods and to derive new ones. Our framework also captures such "unorthodox" methods as Follow the Perturbed Leader and the R^2 forecaster. We emphasize that understanding the inherent complexity of the learning problem leads to the development of algorithms. We define local sequential Rademacher complexities and associated algorithms that allow us to obtain faster rates in online learning, similarly to statistical learning theory. Based on these localized complexities we build a general adaptive method that can take advantage of the suboptimality of the observed sequence. We present a number of new algorithms, including a family of randomized methods that use the idea of a "random playout". Several new versions of the Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader algorithms are presented, as well as methods based on the Littlestone's dimension, efficient methods for matrix completion with trace norm, and algorithms for the problems of transductive learning and prediction with static experts.
1204.0885
PID Parameters Optimization by Using Genetic Algorithm
cs.SY cs.LG cs.NE
Time delays are components that make time-lag in systems response. They arise in physical, chemical, biological and economic systems, as well as in the process of measurement and computation. In this work, we implement Genetic Algorithm (GA) in determining PID controller parameters to compensate the delay in First Order Lag plus Time Delay (FOLPD) and compare the results with Iterative Method and Ziegler-Nichols rule results.
1204.0958
Robust methods for LTE and WiMAX dimensioning
cs.RO cs.NI cs.PF
This paper proposes an analytic model for dimensioning OFDMA based networks like WiMAX and LTE systems. In such a system, users require a number of subchannels which depends on their \SNR, hence of their position and the shadowing they experience. The system is overloaded when the number of required subchannels is greater than the number of available subchannels. We give an exact though not closed expression of the loss probability and then give an algorithmic method to derive the number of subchannels which guarantees a loss probability less than a given threshold. We show that Gaussian approximation lead to optimistic values and are thus unusable. We then introduce Edgeworth expansions with error bounds and show that by choosing the right order of the expansion, one can have an approximate dimensioning value easy to compute but with guaranteed performance. As the values obtained are highly dependent from the parameters of the system, which turned to be rather undetermined, we provide a procedure based on concentration inequality for Poisson functionals, which yields to conservative dimensioning. This paper relies on recent results on concentration inequalities and establish new results on Edgeworth expansions.
1204.0982
Approximability of the Vertex Cover Problem in Power Law Graphs
cs.DS cs.SI
In this paper we construct an approximation algorithm for the Minimum Vertex Cover Problem (Min-VC) with an expected approximation ratio of 2-f(beta) for random Power Law Graphs (PLG) in the (alpha,beta)-model of Aiello et. al., where f(beta) is a strictly positive function of the parameter beta. We obtain this result by combining the Nemhauser and Trotter approach for Min-VC with a new deterministic rounding procedure which achieves an approximation ratio of 3/2 on a subset of low degree vertices for which the expected contribution to the cost of the associated linear program is sufficiently large.
1204.0992
Discrete Sampling and Interpolation: Universal Sampling Sets for Discrete Bandlimited Spaces
cs.IT math.IT
We study the problem of interpolating all values of a discrete signal f of length N when d<N values are known, especially in the case when the Fourier transform of the signal is zero outside some prescribed index set J; these comprise the (generalized) bandlimited spaces B^J. The sampling pattern for f is specified by an index set I, and is said to be a universal sampling set if samples in the locations I can be used to interpolate signals from B^J for any J. When N is a prime power we give several characterizations of universal sampling sets, some structure theorems for such sets, an algorithm for their construction, and a formula that counts them. There are also natural applications to additive uncertainty principles.
1204.1002
Fast Multi-Scale Detection of Relevant Communities
cs.DS cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Nowadays, networks are almost ubiquitous. In the past decade, community detection received an increasing interest as a way to uncover the structure of networks by grouping nodes into communities more densely connected internally than externally. Yet most of the effective methods available do not consider the potential levels of organisation, or scales, a network may encompass and are therefore limited. In this paper we present a method compatible with global and local criteria that enables fast multi-scale community detection. The method is derived in two algorithms, one for each type of criterion, and implemented with 6 known criteria. Uncovering communities at various scales is a computationally expensive task. Therefore this work puts a strong emphasis on the reduction of computational complexity. Some heuristics are introduced for speed-up purposes. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of our method with respect to each algorithm and criterion by testing them against large generated multi-scale networks. This study also offers a comparison between criteria and between the global and local approaches.
1204.1069
Convergence and Equivalence results for the Jensen's inequality - Application to time-delay and sampled-data systems
cs.SY math.DS math.OC
The Jensen's inequality plays a crucial role in the analysis of time-delay and sampled-data systems. Its conservatism is studied through the use of the Gr\"{u}ss Inequality. It has been reported in the literature that fragmentation (or partitioning) schemes allow to empirically improve the results. We prove here that the Jensen's gap can be made arbitrarily small provided that the order of uniform fragmentation is chosen sufficiently large. Non-uniform fragmentation schemes are also shown to speed up the convergence in certain cases. Finally, a family of bounds is characterized and a comparison with other bounds of the literature is provided. It is shown that the other bounds are equivalent to Jensen's and that they exhibit interesting well-posedness and linearity properties which can be exploited to obtain better numerical results.
1204.1080
Memory Resilient Gain-scheduled State-Feedback Control of Uncertain LTI/LPV Systems with Time-Varying Delays
cs.SY math.CA math.DS math.OC
The stabilization of uncertain LTI/LPV time delay systems with time varying delays by state-feedback controllers is addressed. At the difference of other works in the literature, the proposed approach allows for the synthesis of resilient controllers with respect to uncertainties on the implemented delay. It is emphasized that such controllers unify memoryless and exact-memory controllers usually considered in the literature. The solutions to the stability and stabilization problems are expressed in terms of LMIs which allow to check the stability of the closed-loop system for a given bound on the knowledge error and even optimize the uncertainty radius under some performance constraints; in this paper, the $\mathcal{H}_\infty$ performance measure is considered. The interest of the approach is finally illustrated through several examples.
1204.1085
Post-Nonlinear Sparse Component Analysis Using Single-Source Zones and Functional Data Clustering
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we introduce a general extension of linear sparse component analysis (SCA) approaches to postnonlinear (PNL) mixtures. In particular, and contrary to the state-of-art methods, our approaches use a weak sparsity source assumption: we look for tiny temporal zones where only one source is active. We investigate two nonlinear single-source confidence measures, using the mutual information and a local linear tangent space approximation (LTSA). For this latter measure, we derive two extensions of linear single-source measures, respectively based on correlation (LTSA-correlation) and eigenvalues (LTSA-PCA). A second novelty of our approach consists of applying functional data clustering techniques to the scattered observations in the above single-source zones, thus allowing us to accurately estimate them.We first study a classical approach using a B-spline approximation, and then two approaches which locally approximate the nonlinear functions as lines. Finally, we extend our PNL methods to more general nonlinear mixtures. Combining single-source zones and functional data clustering allows us to tackle speech signals, which has never been performed by other PNL-SCA methods. We investigate the performance of our approaches with simulated PNL mixtures of real speech signals. Both the mutual information and the LTSA-correlation measures are better-suited to detecting single-source zones than the LTSA-PCA measure. We also find local-linear-approximation-based clustering approaches to be more flexible and more accurate than the B-spline one.
1204.1091
Load-Aware Modeling and Analysis of Heterogeneous Cellular Networks
cs.IT math.IT
Random spatial models are attractive for modeling heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs) due to their realism, tractability, and scalability. A major limitation of such models to date in the context of HCNs is the neglect of network traffic and load: all base stations (BSs) have typically been assumed to always be transmitting. Small cells in particular will have a lighter load than macrocells, and so their contribution to the network interference may be significantly overstated in a fully loaded model. This paper incorporates a flexible notion of BS load by introducing a new idea of conditionally thinning the interference field. For a K-tier HCN where BSs across tiers differ in terms of transmit power, supported data rate, deployment density, and now load, we derive the coverage probability for a typical mobile, which connects to the strongest BS signal. Conditioned on this connection, the interfering BSs of the $i^{th}$ tier are assumed to transmit independently with probability $p_i$, which models the load. Assuming - reasonably - that smaller cells are more lightly loaded than macrocells, the analysis shows that adding such access points to the network always increases the coverage probability. We also observe that fully loaded models are quite pessimistic in terms of coverage.
1204.1096
MIMO Precoding in Underlay Cognitive Radio Systems with Completely Unknown Primary CSI
cs.IT math.IT
This paper studies a novel underlay MIMO cognitive radio (CR) system, where the instantaneous or statistical channel state information (CSI) of the interfering channels to the primary receivers (PRs) is completely unknown to the CR. For the single underlay receiver scenario, we assume a minimum information rate must be guaranteed on the CR main channel whose CSI is known at the CR transmitter. We first show that low-rank CR interference is preferable for improving the throughput of the PRs compared with spreading less power over more transmit dimensions. Based on this observation, we then propose a rank minimization CR transmission strategy assuming a minimum information rate must be guaranteed on the CR main channel. We propose a simple solution referred to as frugal waterfilling (FWF) that uses the least amount of power required to achieve the rate constraint with a minimum-rank transmit covariance matrix. We also present two heuristic approaches that have been used in prior work to transform rank minimization problems into convex optimization problems. The proposed schemes are then generalized to an underlay MIMO CR downlink network with multiple receivers. Finally, a theoretical analysis of the interference temperature and leakage rate outage probabilities at the PR is presented for Rayleigh fading channels.We demonstrate that the direct FWF solution leads to higher PR throughput even though it has higher interference "temperature (IT) compared with the heuristic methods and classic waterfilling, which calls into question the use of IT as a metric for CR interference.
1204.1106
Message Passing for Dynamic Network Energy Management
math.OC cs.DC cs.SY
We consider a network of devices, such as generators, fixed loads, deferrable loads, and storage devices, each with its own dynamic constraints and objective, connected by lossy capacitated lines. The problem is to minimize the total network objective subject to the device and line constraints, over a given time horizon. This is a large optimization problem, with variables for consumption or generation in each time period for each device. In this paper we develop a decentralized method for solving this problem. The method is iterative: At each step, each device exchanges simple messages with its neighbors in the network and then solves its own optimization problem, minimizing its own objective function, augmented by a term determined by the messages it has received. We show that this message passing method converges to a solution when the device objective and constraints are convex. The method is completely decentralized, and needs no global coordination other than synchronizing iterations; the problems to be solved by each device can typically be solved extremely efficiently and in parallel. The method is fast enough that even a serial implementation can solve substantial problems in reasonable time frames. We report results for several numerical experiments, demonstrating the method's speed and scaling, including the solution of a problem instance with over 30 million variables in 52 minutes for a serial implementation; with decentralized computing, the solve time would be less than one second.
1204.1156
Web Services Supply Chains: A Literature Review
cs.SY
The aim of this review paper is to bring into light a potential area i.e., web services supply chains for research by analyzing the existing state of art in this. It is observed from the review process that there seems to be much less work done in the area of web service supply chains as compared to e-commerce and product oriented service supply chains. The service quality assurance models, end to end Quality of Service (QoS) models, attempts made to QoS attributes are also found to be from individual perspectives of participating entities in a service process rather than a collective perspective considering individual QoS attributes rather than multiple QoS attributes. In light of these gaps we highlight the comparison between product oriented and pure online/ web service supply chains, a need for quality driven optimization in the web services supply chains, perceived complexities in the existing work and propose a conceptual model.
1204.1158
Dynamic Bayesian diffusion estimation
cs.IT math.IT
The rapidly increasing complexity of (mainly wireless) ad-hoc networks stresses the need of reliable distributed estimation of several variables of interest. The widely used centralized approach, in which the network nodes communicate their data with a single specialized point, suffers from high communication overheads and represents a potentially dangerous concept with a single point of failure needing special treatment. This paper's aim is to contribute to another quite recent method called diffusion estimation. By decentralizing the operating environment, the network nodes communicate just within a close neighbourhood. We adopt the Bayesian framework to modelling and estimation, which, unlike the traditional approaches, abstracts from a particular model case. This leads to a very scalable and universal method, applicable to a wide class of different models. A particularly interesting case - the Gaussian regressive model - is derived as an example.
1204.1160
Opinion formation in time-varying social networks: The case of the naming game
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
We study the dynamics of the naming game as an opinion formation model on time-varying social networks. This agent-based model captures the essential features of the agreement dynamics by means of a memory-based negotiation process. Our study focuses on the impact of time-varying properties of the social network of the agents on the naming game dynamics. In particular, we perform a computational exploration of this model using simulations on top of real networks. We investigate the outcomes of the dynamics on two different types of time-varying data - (i) the networks vary on a day-to-day basis and (ii) the networks vary within very short intervals of time (20 seconds). In the first case, we find that networks with strong community structure hinder the system from reaching global agreement; the evolution of the naming game in these networks maintains clusters of coexisting opinions indefinitely leading to metastability. In the second case, we investigate the evolution of the naming game in perfect synchronization with the time evolution of the underlying social network shedding new light on the traditional emergent properties of the game that differ largely from what has been reported in the existing literature.
1204.1162
Performance of the Google Desktop, Arabic Google Desktop and Peer to Peer Application in Arabic Language
cs.IR
The Arabic language is a complex language; it is different from Western languages especially at the morphological and spelling variations. Indeed, the performance of information retrieval systems in the Arabic language is still a problem. For this reason, we are interested in studying the performance of the most famous search engine, which is a Google Desktop, while searching in Arabic language documents. Then, we propose an update to the Google Desktop to take into consideration in search the Arabic words that have the same root. After that, we evaluate the performance of the Google Desktop in this context. Also, we are interested in evaluation the performance of peer-to-peer application in two ways. The first one uses a simple indexation that indexes Arabic documents without taking in consideration the root of words. The second way takes in consideration the roots in the indexation of Arabic documents. This evaluation is done by using a corpus of ten thousand documents and one hundred different queries.
1204.1172
Timing acquisition and demodulation of an UWB system based on the differential scheme
cs.IT math.IT
Blind synchronization constitutes a major challenge in realizing highly efficient ultra wide band (UWB) systems because of the short pulse duration which requires a fast synchronization algorithm to accommodate several asynchronous users. In this paper, we present a new Code Block Synchronization Algorithm (CBSA) based on a particular code design for a non coherent transmission. Synchronization algorithm is applied directly on received signal to estimate timing offset, without needing any training sequence. Different users can share the available bandwidth by means of different spreading codes with different lengths. This allows the receiver to separate users, and to recover the timing information of the transmitted symbols. Simulation results and comparisons validate the promising performance of the proposed scheme even in a multi user scenario. In fact, the proposed algorithm offers a gain of about 3 dB in comparison with reference [5].
1204.1177
Principal Component Analysis-Linear Discriminant Analysis Feature Extractor for Pattern Recognition
cs.CV
Robustness of embedded biometric systems is of prime importance with the emergence of fourth generation communication devices and advancement in security systems This paper presents the realization of such technologies which demands reliable and error-free biometric identity verification systems. High dimensional patterns are not permitted due to eigen-decomposition in high dimensional image space and degeneration of scattering matrices in small size sample. Generalization, dimensionality reduction and maximizing the margins are controlled by minimizing weight vectors. Results show good pattern by multimodal biometric system proposed in this paper. This paper is aimed at investigating a biometric identity system using Principal Component Analysis and Lindear Discriminant Analysis with K-Nearest Neighbor and implementing such system in real-time using SignalWAVE.
1204.1185
Query Language for Complex Similarity Queries
cs.DB cs.IR cs.MM
For complex data types such as multimedia, traditional data management methods are not suitable. Instead of attribute matching approaches, access methods based on object similarity are becoming popular. Recently, this resulted in an intensive research of indexing and searching methods for the similarity-based retrieval. Nowadays, many efficient methods are already available, but using them to build an actual search system still requires specialists that tune the methods and build the system manually. Several attempts have already been made to provide a more convenient high-level interface in a form of query languages for such systems, but these are limited to support only basic similarity queries. In this paper, we propose a new language that allows to formulate content-based queries in a flexible way, taking into account the functionality offered by a particular search engine in use. To ensure this, the language is based on a general data model with an abstract set of operations. Consequently, the language supports various advanced query operations such as similarity joins, reverse nearest neighbor queries, or distinct kNN queries, as well as multi-object and multi-modal queries. The language is primarily designed to be used with the MESSIF framework for content-based searching but can be employed by other retrieval systems as well.
1204.1198
A Complete Workflow for Development of Bangla OCR
cs.CV
Developing a Bangla OCR requires bunch of algorithm and methods. There were many effort went on for developing a Bangla OCR. But all of them failed to provide an error free Bangla OCR. Each of them has some lacking. We discussed about the problem scope of currently existing Bangla OCR's. In this paper, we present the basic steps required for developing a Bangla OCR and a complete workflow for development of a Bangla OCR with mentioning all the possible algorithms required.
1204.1231
How Many Vote Operations Are Needed to Manipulate A Voting System?
cs.AI cs.GT
In this paper, we propose a framework to study a general class of strategic behavior in voting, which we call vote operations. We prove the following theorem: if we fix the number of alternatives, generate $n$ votes i.i.d. according to a distribution $\pi$, and let $n$ go to infinity, then for any $\epsilon >0$, with probability at least $1-\epsilon$, the minimum number of operations that are needed for the strategic individual to achieve her goal falls into one of the following four categories: (1) 0, (2) $\Theta(\sqrt n)$, (3) $\Theta(n)$, and (4) $\infty$. This theorem holds for any set of vote operations, any individual vote distribution $\pi$, and any integer generalized scoring rule, which includes (but is not limited to) almost all commonly studied voting rules, e.g., approval voting, all positional scoring rules (including Borda, plurality, and veto), plurality with runoff, Bucklin, Copeland, maximin, STV, and ranked pairs. We also show that many well-studied types of strategic behavior fall under our framework, including (but not limited to) constructive/destructive manipulation, bribery, and control by adding/deleting votes, margin of victory, and minimum manipulation coalition size. Therefore, our main theorem naturally applies to these problems.