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1207.5184
Lossy Compression of Quality Values via Rate Distortion Theory
q-bio.GN cs.IT math.IT q-bio.QM
Motivation: Next Generation Sequencing technologies revolutionized many fields in biology by enabling the fast and cheap sequencing of large amounts of genomic data. The ever increasing sequencing capacities enabled by current sequencing machines hold a lot of promise as for the future applications of these technologies, but also create increasing computational challenges related to the analysis and storage of these data. A typical sequencing data file may occupy tens or even hundreds of gigabytes of disk space, prohibitively large for many users. Raw sequencing data consists of both the DNA sequences (reads) and per-base quality values that indicate the level of confidence in the readout of these sequences. Quality values account for about half of the required disk space in the commonly used FASTQ format and therefore their compression can significantly reduce storage requirements and speed up analysis and transmission of these data. Results: In this paper we present a framework for the lossy compression of the quality value sequences of genomic read files. Numerical experiments with reference based alignment using these quality values suggest that we can achieve significant compression with little compromise in performance for several downstream applications of interest, as is consistent with our theoretical analysis. Our framework also allows compression in a regime - below one bit per quality value - for which there are no existing compressors.
1207.5191
Schrodinger equation and wave equation on finite graphs
math.AP cs.IT math.DG math.DS math.IT
In this paper, we study the schrodinger equation and wave equation with the Dirichlet boundary condition on a connected finite graph. The explicit expressions for solutions are given and the energy conservations are derived. Applications to the corresponding nonlinear problems are indicated.
1207.5206
Transmit Optimization with Improper Gaussian Signaling for Interference Channels
cs.IT math.IT
This paper studies the achievable rates of Gaussian interference channels with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), when improper or circularly asymmetric complex Gaussian signaling is applied. For the Gaussian multiple-input multiple-output interference channel (MIMO-IC) with the interference treated as Gaussian noise, we show that the user's achievable rate can be expressed as a summation of the rate achievable by the conventional proper or circularly symmetric complex Gaussian signaling in terms of the users' transmit covariance matrices, and an additional term, which is a function of both the users' transmit covariance and pseudo-covariance matrices. The additional degrees of freedom in the pseudo-covariance matrix, which is conventionally set to be zero for the case of proper Gaussian signaling, provide an opportunity to further improve the achievable rates of Gaussian MIMO-ICs by employing improper Gaussian signaling. To this end, this paper proposes widely linear precoding, which efficiently maps proper information-bearing signals to improper transmitted signals at each transmitter for any given pair of transmit covariance and pseudo-covariance matrices. In particular, for the case of two-user Gaussian single-input single-output interference channel (SISO-IC), we propose a joint covariance and pseudo-covariance optimization algorithm with improper Gaussian signaling to achieve the Pareto-optimal rates. By utilizing the separable structure of the achievable rate expression, an alternative algorithm with separate covariance and pseudo-covariance optimization is also proposed, which guarantees the rate improvement over conventional proper Gaussian signaling.
1207.5208
Meta-Learning of Exploration/Exploitation Strategies: The Multi-Armed Bandit Case
cs.AI cs.LG stat.ML
The exploration/exploitation (E/E) dilemma arises naturally in many subfields of Science. Multi-armed bandit problems formalize this dilemma in its canonical form. Most current research in this field focuses on generic solutions that can be applied to a wide range of problems. However, in practice, it is often the case that a form of prior information is available about the specific class of target problems. Prior knowledge is rarely used in current solutions due to the lack of a systematic approach to incorporate it into the E/E strategy. To address a specific class of E/E problems, we propose to proceed in three steps: (i) model prior knowledge in the form of a probability distribution over the target class of E/E problems; (ii) choose a large hypothesis space of candidate E/E strategies; and (iii), solve an optimization problem to find a candidate E/E strategy of maximal average performance over a sample of problems drawn from the prior distribution. We illustrate this meta-learning approach with two different hypothesis spaces: one where E/E strategies are numerically parameterized and another where E/E strategies are represented as small symbolic formulas. We propose appropriate optimization algorithms for both cases. Our experiments, with two-armed Bernoulli bandit problems and various playing budgets, show that the meta-learnt E/E strategies outperform generic strategies of the literature (UCB1, UCB1-Tuned, UCB-v, KL-UCB and epsilon greedy); they also evaluate the robustness of the learnt E/E strategies, by tests carried out on arms whose rewards follow a truncated Gaussian distribution.
1207.5216
A colouring protocol for the generalized Russian cards problem
cs.IT math.IT
In the generalized Russian cards problem, Alice, Bob and Cath draw $a$, $b$ and $c$ cards, respectively, from a deck of size $a+b+c$. Alice and Bob must then communicate their entire hand to each other, without Cath learning the owner of a single card she does not hold. Unlike many traditional problems in cryptography, however, they are not allowed to encode or hide the messages they exchange from Cath. The problem is then to find methods through which they can achieve this. We propose a general four-step solution based on finite vector spaces, and call it the "colouring protocol", as it involves colourings of lines. Our main results show that the colouring protocol may be used to solve the generalized Russian cards problem in cases where $a$ is a power of a prime, $c=O(a^2)$ and $b=O(c^2)$. This improves substantially on the set of parameters for which solutions are known to exist; in particular, it had not been shown previously that the problem could be solved in cases where the eavesdropper has more cards than one of the communicating players.
1207.5226
On the Relative Trust between Inconsistent Data and Inaccurate Constraints
cs.DB
Functional dependencies (FDs) specify the intended data semantics while violations of FDs indicate deviation from these semantics. In this paper, we study a data cleaning problem in which the FDs may not be completely correct, e.g., due to data evolution or incomplete knowledge of the data semantics. We argue that the notion of relative trust is a crucial aspect of this problem: if the FDs are outdated, we should modify them to fit the data, but if we suspect that there are problems with the data, we should modify the data to fit the FDs. In practice, it is usually unclear how much to trust the data versus the FDs. To address this problem, we propose an algorithm for generating non-redundant solutions (i.e., simultaneous modifications of the data and the FDs) corresponding to various levels of relative trust. This can help users determine the best way to modify their data and/or FDs to achieve consistency.
1207.5232
Peer-to-Peer and Mass Communication Effect on Revolution Dynamics
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Revolution dynamics is studied through a minimal Ising model with three main influences (fields): personal conservatism (power-law distributed), inter-personal and group pressure, and a global field incorporating peer-to-peer and mass communications, which is generated bottom-up from the revolutionary faction. A rich phase diagram appears separating possible terminal stages of the revolution, characterizing failure phases by the features of the individuals who had joined the revolution. An exhaustive solution of the model is produced, allowing predictions to be made on the revolution's outcome.
1207.5259
Optimal discovery with probabilistic expert advice: finite time analysis and macroscopic optimality
cs.LG stat.ML
We consider an original problem that arises from the issue of security analysis of a power system and that we name optimal discovery with probabilistic expert advice. We address it with an algorithm based on the optimistic paradigm and on the Good-Turing missing mass estimator. We prove two different regret bounds on the performance of this algorithm under weak assumptions on the probabilistic experts. Under more restrictive hypotheses, we also prove a macroscopic optimality result, comparing the algorithm both with an oracle strategy and with uniform sampling. Finally, we provide numerical experiments illustrating these theoretical findings.
1207.5261
Modelling Epistemic Systems
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
In this Chapter, I will explore the use of modeling in order to understand how Science works. I will discuss the modeling of scientific communities, providing a general, non-comprehensive overview of existing models, with a focus on the use of the tools of Agent-Based Modeling and Opinion Dynamics. A special attention will be paid to models inspired by a Bayesian formalism of Opinion Dynamics. The objective of this exploration is to better understand the effect that different conditions might have on the reliability of the opinions of a scientific community. We will see that, by using artificial worlds as exploring grounds, we can prevent some epistemological problems with the definition of truth and obtain insights on the conditions that might cause the quest for more reliable knowledge to fail.
1207.5265
Hidden information and regularities of information dynamics IR
nlin.AO cs.IT math.IT
The introduced entropy functional's (EF) information measure of random process integrates multiple information contributions along the process trajectories, evaluating both the states' and between states' bound information connections. This measure reveals information that is hidden by traditional information measures, which commonly use Shannon's entropy function for each selected stationary states of the process. The hidden information is important for evaluation of missing connections, disclosing the process' meaningful information, which enables producing logic of the information. The presentation consists of three Parts. In Part 1R-revised we analyze mechanism of arising information regularities from a stochastic process, measured by EF, independently of the process' specific source and origin. Uncovering the process' regularities leads us to an information law, based on extracting maximal information from its minimum, which could create these regularities. The solved variation problem (VP) determines a dynamic process, measured by information path functional (IPF), and information dynamic model, approximating the EF measured stochastic process with a maximal functional probability on trajectories. In Part 2, we study the cooperative processes, arising at the consolidation, as a result of the VP-EF-IPF approach, which is able to produce multiple cooperative structures, concurrently assembling in hierarchical information network (IN) and generating the IN's digital genetic code. In Part 3 we study the evolutionary information processes and regularities of evolution dynamics, evaluated by the entropy functional (EF) of random field and informational path functional of a dynamic space-time process. The information law and the regularities determine unified functional informational mechanisms of evolution dynamics.
1207.5272
Information spreading on dynamic social networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Nowadays, information spreading on social networks has triggered an explosive attention in various disciplines. Most of previous works in this area mainly focus on discussing the effects of spreading probability or immunization strategy on static networks. However, in real systems, the peer-to-peer network structure changes constantly according to frequently social activities of users. In order to capture this dynamical property and study its impact on information spreading, in this paper, a link rewiring strategy based on the Fermi function is introduced. In the present model, the informed individuals tend to break old links and reconnect to their second-order friends with more uninformed neighbors. Simulation results on the susceptible-infected-recovered (\textit{SIR}) model with fixed recovery time $T=1$ indicate that the information would spread more faster and broader with the proposed rewiring strategy. Extensive analyses of the information cascade size distribution show that the spreading process of the initial steps plays a very important role, that is to say, the information will spread out if it is still survival at the beginning time. The proposed model may shed some light on the in-depth understanding of information spreading on dynamical social networks.
1207.5293
Probability Bracket Notation, Multivariable Systems and Static Bayesian Networks
cs.AI math.PR
Probability Bracket Notation (PBN) is applied to systems of multiple random variables for preliminary study of static Bayesian Networks (BN) and Probabilistic Graphic Models (PGM). The famous Student BN Example is explored to show the local independences and reasoning power of a BN. Software package Elvira is used to graphically display the student BN. Our investigation shows that PBN provides a consistent and convenient alternative to manipulate many expressions related to joint, marginal and conditional probability distributions in static BN.
1207.5319
On the Capacity of the Two-user Gaussian Causal Cognitive Interference Channel
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers the two-user Gaussian Causal Cognitive Interference Channel (GCCIC), which consists of two source-destination pairs that share the same channel and where one full-duplex cognitive source can causally learn the message of the primary source through a noisy link. The GCCIC is an interference channel with unilateral source cooperation that better models practical cognitive radio networks than the commonly used model which assumes that one source has perfect non-causal knowledge of the other source's message. First the sum-capacity of the symmetric GCCIC is determined to within a constant gap. Then, the insights gained from the derivation of the symmetric sum-capacity are extended to characterize the whole capacity region to within a constant gap for more general cases. In particular, the capacity is determined (a) to within 2 bits for the fully connected GCCIC when, roughly speaking, the interference is not weak at both receivers, (b) to within 2 bits for the Z-channel, i.e., when there is no interference from the primary user, and (c) to within 2 bits for the S-channel, i.e., when there is no interference from the secondary user. The parameter regimes where the GCCIC is equivalent, in terms of generalized degrees-of-freedom, to the noncooperative interference channel (i.e., unilateral causal cooperation is not useful), to the non-causal cognitive interference channel (i.e., causal cooperation attains the ultimate limit of cognitive radio technology), and to bilateral source cooperation are identified. These comparisons shed lights into the parameter regimes and network topologies that in practice might provide an unbounded throughput gain compared to currently available (non cognitive) technologies.
1207.5326
Guarantees of Augmented Trace Norm Models in Tensor Recovery
cs.IT cs.CV math.IT
This paper studies the recovery guarantees of the models of minimizing $\|\mathcal{X}\|_*+\frac{1}{2\alpha}\|\mathcal{X}\|_F^2$ where $\mathcal{X}$ is a tensor and $\|\mathcal{X}\|_*$ and $\|\mathcal{X}\|_F$ are the trace and Frobenius norm of respectively. We show that they can efficiently recover low-rank tensors. In particular, they enjoy exact guarantees similar to those known for minimizing $\|\mathcal{X}\|_*$ under the conditions on the sensing operator such as its null-space property, restricted isometry property, or spherical section property. To recover a low-rank tensor $\mathcal{X}^0$, minimizing $\|\mathcal{X}\|_*+\frac{1}{2\alpha}\|\mathcal{X}\|_F^2$ returns the same solution as minimizing $\|\mathcal{X}\|_*$ almost whenever $\alpha\geq10\mathop {\max}\limits_{i}\|X^0_{(i)}\|_2$.
1207.5328
A prototype for projecting HPSG syntactic lexica towards LMF
cs.CL
The comparative evaluation of Arabic HPSG grammar lexica requires a deep study of their linguistic coverage. The complexity of this task results mainly from the heterogeneity of the descriptive components within those lexica (underlying linguistic resources and different data categories, for example). It is therefore essential to define more homogeneous representations, which in turn will enable us to compare them and eventually merge them. In this context, we present a method for comparing HPSG lexica based on a rule system. This method is implemented within a prototype for the projection from Arabic HPSG to a normalised pivot language compliant with LMF (ISO 24613 - Lexical Markup Framework) and serialised using a TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) based representation. The design of this system is based on an initial study of the HPSG formalism looking at its adequacy for the representation of Arabic, and from this, we identify the appropriate feature structures corresponding to each Arabic lexical category and their possible LMF counterparts.
1207.5342
A Robust Signal Classification Scheme for Cognitive Radio
cs.IT cs.LG cs.NI math.IT
This paper presents a robust signal classification scheme for achieving comprehensive spectrum sensing of multiple coexisting wireless systems. It is built upon a group of feature-based signal detection algorithms enhanced by the proposed dimension cancelation (DIC) method for mitigating the noise uncertainty problem. The classification scheme is implemented on our testbed consisting real-world wireless devices. The simulation and experimental performances agree with each other well and shows the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed scheme.
1207.5343
Social and strategic imitation: the way to consensus
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Humans do not always make rational choices, a fact that experimental economics is putting on solid grounds. The social context plays an important role in determining our actions, and often we imitate friends or acquaintances without any strategic consideration. We explore here the interplay between strategic and social imitative behaviors in a coordination problem on a social network. We observe that for interactions in 1D and 2D lattices any amount of social imitation prevents the freezing of the network in domains with different conventions, thus leading to global consensus. For interactions in complex networks, the interplay of social and strategic imitation also drives the system towards global consensus while neither dynamics alone does. We find an optimum value for the combination of imitative behaviors to reach consensus in a minimum time, and two different dynamical regimes to approach it: exponential when social imitation predominates, and power-law when strategic considerations dominate.
1207.5371
Towards a theory of statistical tree-shape analysis
stat.ME cs.CV math.MG
In order to develop statistical methods for shapes with a tree-structure, we construct a shape space framework for tree-like shapes and study metrics on the shape space. This shape space has singularities, corresponding to topological transitions in the represented trees. We study two closely related metrics on the shape space, TED and QED. QED is a quotient Euclidean distance arising naturally from the shape space formulation, while TED is the classical tree edit distance. Using Gromov's metric geometry we gain new insight into the geometries defined by TED and QED. We show that the new metric QED has nice geometric properties which facilitate statistical analysis, such as existence and local uniqueness of geodesics and averages. TED, on the other hand, does not share the geometric advantages of QED, but has nice algorithmic properties. We provide a theoretical framework and experimental results on synthetic data trees as well as airway trees from pulmonary CT scans. This way, we effectively illustrate that our framework has both the theoretical and qualitative properties necessary to build a theory of statistical tree-shape analysis.
1207.5409
FST Based Morphological Analyzer for Hindi Language
cs.CL cs.IR
Hindi being a highly inflectional language, FST (Finite State Transducer) based approach is most efficient for developing a morphological analyzer for this language. The work presented in this paper uses the SFST (Stuttgart Finite State Transducer) tool for generating the FST. A lexicon of root words is created. Rules are then added for generating inflectional and derivational words from these root words. The Morph Analyzer developed was used in a Part Of Speech (POS) Tagger based on Stanford POS Tagger. The system was first trained using a manually tagged corpus and MAXENT (Maximum Entropy) approach of Stanford POS tagger was then used for tagging input sentences. The morphological analyzer gives approximately 97% correct results. POS tagger gives an accuracy of approximately 87% for the sentences that have the words known to the trained model file, and 80% accuracy for the sentences that have the words unknown to the trained model file.
1207.5425
Ranked Document Retrieval in (Almost) No Space
cs.IR cs.DB
Ranked document retrieval is a fundamental task in search engines. Such queries are solved with inverted indexes that require additional 45%-80% of the compressed text space, and take tens to hundreds of microseconds per query. In this paper we show how ranked document retrieval queries can be solved within tens of milliseconds using essentially no extra space over an in-memory compressed representation of the document collection. More precisely, we enhance wavelet trees on bytecodes (WTBCs), a data structure that rearranges the bytes of the compressed collection, so that they support ranked conjunctive and disjunctive queries, using just 6%-18% of the compressed text space.
1207.5434
sSCADA: Securing SCADA Infrastructure Communications
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
Distributed control systems (DCS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems were developed to reduce labour costs, and to allow system-wide monitoring and remote control from a central location. Control systems are widely used in critical infrastructures such as electric grid, natural gas, water and wastewater industries. While control systems can be vulnerable to a variety of types of cyber attacks that could have devastating consequences, little research has been done to secure the control systems. American Gas Association (AGA), IEC TC57 WG15, IEEE, NIST and National SCADA Test Bed Program have been actively designing cryptographic standard to protect SCADA systems. American Gas Association (AGA) had originally been designing cryptographic standard to protect SCADA communication links and finished the report AGA 12 part 1. The AGA 12 part 2 has been transferred to IEEE P1711. This paper presents an attack on the protocols in the first draft of AGA standard (Wright et al., 2004). This attack shows that the security mechanisms in the first version of the AGA standard protocol could be easily defeated. We then propose a suite of security protocols optimised for SCADA/DCS systems which include: point-to-point secure channels, authenticated broadcast channels, authenticated emergency channels, and revised authenticated emergency channels. These protocols are designed to address the specific challenges that SCADA systems have.
1207.5437
Generalization Bounds for Metric and Similarity Learning
cs.LG stat.ML
Recently, metric learning and similarity learning have attracted a large amount of interest. Many models and optimisation algorithms have been proposed. However, there is relatively little work on the generalization analysis of such methods. In this paper, we derive novel generalization bounds of metric and similarity learning. In particular, we first show that the generalization analysis reduces to the estimation of the Rademacher average over "sums-of-i.i.d." sample-blocks related to the specific matrix norm. Then, we derive generalization bounds for metric/similarity learning with different matrix-norm regularisers by estimating their specific Rademacher complexities. Our analysis indicates that sparse metric/similarity learning with $L^1$-norm regularisation could lead to significantly better bounds than those with Frobenius-norm regularisation. Our novel generalization analysis develops and refines the techniques of U-statistics and Rademacher complexity analysis.
1207.5439
Edge-Colored Graphs with Applications To Homogeneous Faults
cs.DM cs.IT math.CO math.IT
In this paper, we use the concept of colored edge graphs to model homogeneous faults in networks. We then use this model to study the minimum connectivity (and design) requirements of networks for being robust against homogeneous faults within certain thresholds. In particular, necessary and sufficient conditions for most interesting cases are obtained. For example, we will study the following cases: (1) the number of colors (or the number of non-homogeneous network device types) is one more than the homogeneous fault threshold; (2) there is only one homogeneous fault (i.e., only one color could fail); and (3) the number of non-homogeneous network device types is less than five.
1207.5458
On the Non-robustness of Essentially Conditional Information Inequalities
cs.IT math.IT math.PR
We show that two essentially conditional linear inequalities for Shannon's entropies (including the Zhang-Yeung'97 conditional inequality) do not hold for asymptotically entropic points. This means that these inequalities are non-robust in a very strong sense. This result raises the question of the meaning of these inequalities and the validity of their use in practice-oriented applications.
1207.5466
Approximate Inverse Frequent Itemset Mining: Privacy, Complexity, and Approximation
cs.DB
In order to generate synthetic basket data sets for better benchmark testing, it is important to integrate characteristics from real-life databases into the synthetic basket data sets. The characteristics that could be used for this purpose include the frequent itemsets and association rules. The problem of generating synthetic basket data sets from frequent itemsets is generally referred to as inverse frequent itemset mining. In this paper, we show that the problem of approximate inverse frequent itemset mining is {\bf NP}-complete. Then we propose and analyze an approximate algorithm for approximate inverse frequent itemset mining, and discuss privacy issues related to the synthetic basket data set. In particular, we propose an approximate algorithm to determine the privacy leakage in a synthetic basket data set.
1207.5483
Exact Cramer-Rao Bounds for Semi-blind Channel Estimation in Amplify-and-Forward Two-Way Relay Networks
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we derive for the first time the exact Cramer-Rao bounds (CRBs) on semi-blind channel estimation for amplify-and-forward two-way relay networks. The bounds cover a wide range of modulation schemes that satisfy a certain symmetry condition. In particular, the important classes of PSK and square QAM are covered. For the case square QAM, we also provide simplified expressions that lend themselves more easily to numerical implementation. The derived bounds are used to show that the semi-blind approach, which exploits both the transmitted pilots and the transmitted data symbols, can provide substantial improvements in estimation accuracy over the training-based approach which only uses pilot symbols to estimate the channel parameters. We also derive the more tractable modified CRB which accurately approximates the exact CRB at high SNR for low modulation orders.
1207.5528
On the Conjecture on APN Functions
cs.IT math.AG math.CO math.IT
An almost perfect nonlinear (APN) function (necessarily a polynomial function) on a finite field $\mathbb{F}$ is called exceptional APN, if it is also APN on infinitely many extensions of $\mathbb{F}$. In this article we consider the most studied case of $\mathbb{F}=\mathbb{F}_{2^n}$. A conjecture of Janwa-Wilson and McGuire-Janwa-Wilson (1993/1996), settled in 2011, was that the only exceptional monomial APN functions are the monomials $x^n$, where $n=2^i+1$ or $n={2^{2i}-2^i+1}$ (the Gold or the Kasami exponents respectively). A subsequent conjecture states that any exceptional APN function is one of the monomials just described. One of our result is that all functions of the form $f(x)=x^{2^k+1}+h(x)$ (for any odd degree $h(x)$, with a mild condition in few cases), are not exceptional APN, extending substantially several recent results towards the resolution of the stated conjecture.
1207.5536
MCTS Based on Simple Regret
cs.AI cs.LG
UCT, a state-of-the art algorithm for Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) in games and Markov decision processes, is based on UCB, a sampling policy for the Multi-armed Bandit problem (MAB) that minimizes the cumulative regret. However, search differs from MAB in that in MCTS it is usually only the final "arm pull" (the actual move selection) that collects a reward, rather than all "arm pulls". Therefore, it makes more sense to minimize the simple regret, as opposed to the cumulative regret. We begin by introducing policies for multi-armed bandits with lower finite-time and asymptotic simple regret than UCB, using it to develop a two-stage scheme (SR+CR) for MCTS which outperforms UCT empirically. Optimizing the sampling process is itself a metareasoning problem, a solution of which can use value of information (VOI) techniques. Although the theory of VOI for search exists, applying it to MCTS is non-trivial, as typical myopic assumptions fail. Lacking a complete working VOI theory for MCTS, we nevertheless propose a sampling scheme that is "aware" of VOI, achieving an algorithm that in empirical evaluation outperforms both UCT and the other proposed algorithms.
1207.5542
LT Codes For Efficient and Reliable Distributed Storage Systems Revisited
cs.IT math.IT
LT codes and digital fountain techniques have received significant attention from both academics and industry in the past few years. There have also been extensive interests in applying LT code techniques to distributed storage systems such as cloud data storage in recent years. However, Plank and Thomason's experimental results show that LDPC code performs well only asymptotically when the number of data fragments increases and it has the worst performance for small number of data fragments (e.g., less than 100). In their INFOCOM 2012 paper, Cao, Yu, Yang, Lou, and Hou proposed to use exhaustive search approach to find a deterministic LT code that could be used to decode the original data content correctly in distributed storage systems. However, by Plank and Thomason's experimental results, it is not clear whether the exhaustive search approach will work efficiently or even correctly. This paper carries out the theoretical analysis on the feasibility and performance issues for applying LT codes to distributed storage systems. By employing the underlying ideas of efficient Belief Propagation (BP) decoding process in LT codes, this paper introduces two classes of codes called flat BP-XOR codes and array BP-XOR codes (which can be considered as a deterministic version of LT codes). We will show the equivalence between the edge-colored graph model and degree-one-and-two encoding symbols based array BP-XOR codes. Using this equivalence result, we are able to design general array BP-XOR codes using graph based results. Similarly, based on this equivalence result, we are able to get new results for edge-colored graph models using results from array BP-XOR codes.
1207.5554
Bellman Error Based Feature Generation using Random Projections on Sparse Spaces
cs.LG stat.ML
We address the problem of automatic generation of features for value function approximation. Bellman Error Basis Functions (BEBFs) have been shown to improve the error of policy evaluation with function approximation, with a convergence rate similar to that of value iteration. We propose a simple, fast and robust algorithm based on random projections to generate BEBFs for sparse feature spaces. We provide a finite sample analysis of the proposed method, and prove that projections logarithmic in the dimension of the original space are enough to guarantee contraction in the error. Empirical results demonstrate the strength of this method.
1207.5555
A Simplified Min-Sum Decoding Algorithm for Non-Binary LDPC Codes
cs.IT math.IT
Non-binary low-density parity-check codes are robust to various channel impairments. However, based on the existing decoding algorithms, the decoder implementations are expensive because of their excessive computational complexity and memory usage. Based on the combinatorial optimization, we present an approximation method for the check node processing. The simulation results demonstrate that our scheme has small performance loss over the additive white Gaussian noise channel and independent Rayleigh fading channel. Furthermore, the proposed reduced-complexity realization provides significant savings on hardware, so it yields a good performance-complexity tradeoff and can be efficiently implemented.
1207.5558
Fast directional spatially localized spherical harmonic transform
cs.IT astro-ph.IM math.IT
We propose a transform for signals defined on the sphere that reveals their localized directional content in the spatio-spectral domain when used in conjunction with an asymmetric window function. We call this transform the directional spatially localized spherical harmonic transform (directional SLSHT) which extends the SLSHT from the literature whose usefulness is limited to symmetric windows. We present an inversion relation to synthesize the original signal from its directional-SLSHT distribution for an arbitrary window function. As an example of an asymmetric window, the most concentrated band-limited eigenfunction in an elliptical region on the sphere is proposed for directional spatio-spectral analysis and its effectiveness is illustrated on the synthetic and Mars topographic data-sets. Finally, since such typical data-sets on the sphere are of considerable size and the directional SLSHT is intrinsically computationally demanding depending on the band-limits of the signal and window, a fast algorithm for the efficient computation of the transform is developed. The floating point precision numerical accuracy of the fast algorithm is demonstrated and a full numerical complexity analysis is presented.
1207.5560
Evolving Musical Counterpoint: The Chronopoint Musical Evolution System
cs.SD cs.AI cs.NE
Musical counterpoint, a musical technique in which two or more independent melodies are played simultaneously with the goal of creating harmony, has been around since the baroque era. However, to our knowledge computational generation of aesthetically pleasing linear counterpoint based on subjective fitness assessment has not been explored by the evolutionary computation community (although generation using objective fitness has been attempted in quite a few cases). The independence of contrapuntal melodies and the subjective nature of musical aesthetics provide an excellent platform for the application of genetic algorithms. In this paper, a genetic algorithm approach to generating contrapuntal melodies is explained, with a description of the various musical heuristics used and of how variable-length chromosome strings are used to avoid generating "jerky" rhythms and melodic phrases, as well as how subjectivity is incorporated into the algorithm's fitness measures. Next, results from empirical testing of the algorithm are presented, with a focus on how a user's musical sophistication influences their experience. Lastly, further musical and compositional applications of the algorithm are discussed along with planned future work on the algorithm.
1207.5589
VOI-aware MCTS
cs.AI cs.LG
UCT, a state-of-the art algorithm for Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) in games and Markov decision processes, is based on UCB1, a sampling policy for the Multi-armed Bandit problem (MAB) that minimizes the cumulative regret. However, search differs from MAB in that in MCTS it is usually only the final "arm pull" (the actual move selection) that collects a reward, rather than all "arm pulls". In this paper, an MCTS sampling policy based on Value of Information (VOI) estimates of rollouts is suggested. Empirical evaluation of the policy and comparison to UCB1 and UCT is performed on random MAB instances as well as on Computer Go.
1207.5640
Enabling Wireless Power Transfer in Cellular Networks: Architecture, Modeling and Deployment
cs.IT math.IT
Microwave power transfer (MPT) delivers energy wirelessly from stations called power beacons (PBs) to mobile devices by microwave radiation. This provides mobiles practically infinite battery lives and eliminates the need of power cords and chargers. To enable MPT for mobile charging, this paper proposes a new network architecture that overlays an uplink cellular network with randomly deployed PBs for powering mobiles, called a hybrid network. The deployment of the hybrid network under an outage constraint on data links is investigated based on a stochastic-geometry model where single-antenna base stations (BSs) and PBs form independent homogeneous Poisson point processes (PPPs) and single-antenna mobiles are uniformly distributed in Voronoi cells generated by BSs. In this model, mobiles and PBs fix their transmission power at p and q, respectively; a PB either radiates isotropically, called isotropic MPT, or directs energy towards target mobiles by beamforming, called directed MPT. The model is applied to derive the tradeoffs between the network parameters including p, q, and the BS/PB densities under the outage constraint. First, consider the deployment of the cellular network. It is proved that the outage constraint is satisfied so long as the product the BS density decreases with increasing p following a power law where the exponent is proportional to the path-loss exponent. Next, consider the deployment of the hybrid network assuming infinite energy storage at mobiles. It is shown that for isotropic MPT, the product between q, the PB density, and the BS density raised to a power proportional to the path-loss exponent has to be above a given threshold so that PBs are sufficiently dense; for directed MPT, a similar result is obtained with the aforementioned product increased by the array gain. Last, similar results are derived for the case of mobiles having small energy storage.
1207.5660
Achieving the Capacity of the N-Relay Gaussian Diamond Network Within log N Bits
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the N-relay Gaussian diamond network where a source node communicates to a destination node via N parallel relays through a cascade of a Gaussian broadcast (BC) and a multiple access (MAC) channel. Introduced in 2000 by Schein and Gallager, the capacity of this relay network is unknown in general. The best currently available capacity approximation, independent of the coefficients and the SNR's of the constituent channels, is within an additive gap of 1.3 N bits, which follows from the recent capacity approximations for general Gaussian relay networks with arbitrary topology. In this paper, we approximate the capacity of this network within 2 log N bits. We show that two strategies can be used to achieve the information-theoretic cutset upper bound on the capacity of the network up to an additive gap of O(log N) bits, independent of the channel configurations and the SNR's. The first of these strategies is simple partial decode-and-forward. Here, the source node uses a superposition codebook to broadcast independent messages to the relays at appropriately chosen rates; each relay decodes its intended message and then forwards it to the destination over the MAC channel. A similar performance can be also achieved with compress-and-forward type strategies (such as quantize-map-and-forward and noisy network coding) that provide the 1.3 N-bit approximation for general Gaussian networks, but only if the relays quantize their observed signals at a resolution inversely proportional to the number of relay nodes N. This suggest that the rule-of-thumb to quantize the received signals at the noise level in the current literature can be highly suboptimal.
1207.5661
A Framework of Algorithms: Computing the Bias and Prestige of Nodes in Trust Networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
A trust network is a social network in which edges represent the trust relationship between two nodes in the network. In a trust network, a fundamental question is how to assess and compute the bias and prestige of the nodes, where the bias of a node measures the trustworthiness of a node and the prestige of a node measures the importance of the node. The larger bias of a node implies the lower trustworthiness of the node, and the larger prestige of a node implies the higher importance of the node. In this paper, we define a vector-valued contractive function to characterize the bias vector which results in a rich family of bias measurements, and we propose a framework of algorithms for computing the bias and prestige of nodes in trust networks. Based on our framework, we develop four algorithms that can calculate the bias and prestige of nodes effectively and robustly. The time and space complexities of all our algorithms are linear w.r.t. the size of the graph, thus our algorithms are scalable to handle large datasets. We evaluate our algorithms using five real datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and scalability of our algorithms.
1207.5663
Groupwise information sharing promotes ingroup favoritism in indirect reciprocity
physics.soc-ph cs.SI q-bio.PE
Indirect reciprocity is a mechanism for cooperation in social dilemma situations, in which an individual is motivated to help another to acquire a good reputation and receive help from others afterwards. Ingroup favoritism is another aspect of human cooperation, whereby individuals help members in their own group more often than those in other groups. Ingroup favoritism is a puzzle for the theory of cooperation because it is not easily evolutionarily stable. In the context of indirect reciprocity, ingroup favoritism has been shown to be a consequence of employing a double standard when assigning reputations to ingroup and outgroup members; e.g., helping an ingroup member is regarded as good, whereas the same action toward an outgroup member is regarded as bad. We analyze a model of indirect reciprocity in which information sharing is conducted groupwise. In our model, individuals play social dilemma games within and across groups, and the information about their reputations is shared within each group. We show that evolutionarily stable ingroup favoritism emerges even if all the players use the same reputation assignment rule regardless of group (i.e., a single standard). Two reputation assignment rules called simple standing and stern judging yield ingroup favoritism. Stern judging induces much stronger ingroup favoritism than does simple standing. Simple standing and stern judging are evolutionarily stable against each other when groups employing different assignment rules compete and the number of groups is sufficiently large. In addition, we analytically show as a limiting case that homogeneous populations of reciprocators that use reputations are unstable when individuals independently infer reputations of individuals, which is consistent with previously reported numerical results.
1207.5721
Cognitive network structure: an experimental study
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
In this paper we present first experimental results about a small group of people exchanging private and public messages in a virtual community. Our goal is the study of the cognitive network that emerges during a chat seance. We used the Derrida coefficient and the triangle structure under the working assumption that moods and perceived mutual affinity can produce results complementary to a full semantic analysis. The most outstanding outcome is the difference between the network obtained considering publicly exchanged messages and the one considering only privately exchanged messages: in the former case, the network is very homogeneous, in the sense that each individual interacts in the same way with all the participants, whilst in the latter the interactions among different agents are very heterogeneous, and are based on "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" strategy. Finally a recent characterization of the triangular cliques has been considered in order to describe the intimate structure of the network. Experimental results confirm recent theoretical studies indicating that certain 3-vertex structures can be used as indicators for the network aging and some relevant dynamical features.
1207.5742
Conditional Information Inequalities for Entropic and Almost Entropic Points
cs.IT cs.DM math.IT math.PR
We study conditional linear information inequalities, i.e., linear inequalities for Shannon entropy that hold for distributions whose entropies meet some linear constraints. We prove that some conditional information inequalities cannot be extended to any unconditional linear inequalities. Some of these conditional inequalities hold for almost entropic points, while others do not. We also discuss some counterparts of conditional information inequalities for Kolmogorov complexity.
1207.5745
Semantic Information Retrieval Using Ontology In University Domain
cs.IR
Today's conventional search engines hardly do provide the essential content relevant to the user's search query. This is because the context and semantics of the request made by the user is not analyzed to the full extent. So here the need for a semantic web search arises. SWS is upcoming in the area of web search which combines Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence. The objective of the work done here is to design, develop and implement a semantic search engine- SIEU(Semantic Information Extraction in University Domain) confined to the university domain. SIEU uses ontology as a knowledge base for the information retrieval process. It is not just a mere keyword search. It is one layer above what Google or any other search engines retrieve by analyzing just the keywords. Here the query is analyzed both syntactically and semantically. The developed system retrieves the web results more relevant to the user query through keyword expansion. The results obtained here will be accurate enough to satisfy the request made by the user. The level of accuracy will be enhanced since the query is analyzed semantically. The system will be of great use to the developers and researchers who work on web. The Google results are re-ranked and optimized for providing the relevant links. For ranking an algorithm has been applied which fetches more apt results for the user query.
1207.5746
Delay Stability Regions of the Max-Weight Policy under Heavy-Tailed Traffic
cs.SY cs.NI math.PR
We carry out a delay stability analysis (i.e., determine conditions under which expected steady-state delays at a queue are finite) for a simple 3-queue system operated under the Max-Weight scheduling policy, for the case where one of the queues is fed by heavy-tailed traffic (i.e, when the number of arrivals at each time slot has infinite second moment). This particular system exemplifies an intricate phenomenon whereby heavy-tailed traffic at one queue may or may not result in the delay instability of another queue, depending on the arrival rates. While the ordinary stability region (in the sense of convergence to a steady-state distribution) is straightforward to determine, the determination of the delay stability region is more involved: (i) we use "fluid-type" sample path arguments, combined with renewal theory, to prove delay instability outside a certain region; (ii) we use a piecewise linear Lyapunov function to prove delay stability in the interior of that same region; (iii) as an intermediate step in establishing delay stability, we show that the expected workload of a stable M/GI/1 queue scales with time as $\mathcal{O}(t^{1/(1+\gamma)})$, assuming that service times have a finite $1+\gamma$ moment, where $\gamma \in (0,1)$.
1207.5774
A New Training Algorithm for Kanerva's Sparse Distributed Memory
cs.CV cs.LG cs.NE
The Sparse Distributed Memory proposed by Pentii Kanerva (SDM in short) was thought to be a model of human long term memory. The architecture of the SDM permits to store binary patterns and to retrieve them using partially matching patterns. However Kanerva's model is especially efficient only in handling random data. The purpose of this article is to introduce a new approach of training Kanerva's SDM that can handle efficiently non-random data, and to provide it the capability to recognize inverted patterns. This approach uses a signal model which is different from the one proposed for different purposes by Hely, Willshaw and Hayes in [4]. This article additionally suggests a different way of creating hard locations in the memory despite the Kanerva's static model.
1207.5777
Efficient Snapshot Retrieval over Historical Graph Data
cs.DB cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We address the problem of managing historical data for large evolving information networks like social networks or citation networks, with the goal to enable temporal and evolutionary queries and analysis. We present the design and architecture of a distributed graph database system that stores the entire history of a network and provides support for efficient retrieval of multiple graphs from arbitrary time points in the past, in addition to maintaining the current state for ongoing updates. Our system exposes a general programmatic API to process and analyze the retrieved snapshots. We introduce DeltaGraph, a novel, extensible, highly tunable, and distributed hierarchical index structure that enables compactly recording the historical information, and that supports efficient retrieval of historical graph snapshots for single-site or parallel processing. Along with the original graph data, DeltaGraph can also maintain and index auxiliary information; this functionality can be used to extend the structure to efficiently execute queries like subgraph pattern matching over historical data. We develop analytical models for both the storage space needed and the snapshot retrieval times to aid in choosing the right parameters for a specific scenario. In addition, we present strategies for materializing portions of the historical graph state in memory to further speed up the retrieval process. Secondly, we present an in-memory graph data structure called GraphPool that can maintain hundreds of historical graph instances in main memory in a non-redundant manner. We present a comprehensive experimental evaluation that illustrates the effectiveness of our proposed techniques at managing historical graph information.
1207.5781
Confidence-based Optimization for the Newsvendor Problem
math.OC cs.SY stat.OT
We introduce a novel strategy to address the issue of demand estimation in single-item single-period stochastic inventory optimisation problems. Our strategy analytically combines confidence interval analysis and inventory optimisation. We assume that the decision maker is given a set of past demand samples and we employ confidence interval analysis in order to identify a range of candidate order quantities that, with prescribed confidence probability, includes the real optimal order quantity for the underlying stochastic demand process with unknown stationary parameter(s). In addition, for each candidate order quantity that is identified, our approach can produce an upper and a lower bound for the associated cost. We apply our novel approach to three demand distribution in the exponential family: binomial, Poisson, and exponential. For two of these distributions we also discuss the extension to the case of unobserved lost sales. Numerical examples are presented in which we show how our approach complements existing frequentist - e.g. based on maximum likelihood estimators - or Bayesian strategies.
1207.5810
Ordering dynamics of the multi-state voter model
cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI physics.soc-ph
The voter model is a paradigm of ordering dynamics. At each time step, a random node is selected and copies the state of one of its neighbors. Traditionally, this state has been considered as a binary variable. Here, we relax this assumption and address the case in which the number of states is a parameter that can assume any value, from 2 to \infty, in the thermodynamic limit. We derive mean-field analytical expressions for the exit probability and the consensus time for the case of an arbitrary number of states. We then perform a numerical study of the model in low dimensional lattices, comparing the case of multiple states with the usual binary voter model. Our work generalizes the well-known results for the voter model, and sheds light on the role of the so far almost neglected parameter accounting for the number of states.
1207.5844
SODEXO: A System Framework for Deployment and Exploitation of Deceptive Honeybots in Social Networks
cs.SI cs.CR cs.GT
As social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are becoming increasingly popular, a growing number of malicious attacks, such as phishing and malware, are exploiting them. Among these attacks, social botnets have sophisticated infrastructure that leverages compromised users accounts, known as bots, to automate the creation of new social networking accounts for spamming and malware propagation. Traditional defense mechanisms are often passive and reactive to non-zero-day attacks. In this paper, we adopt a proactive approach for enhancing security in social networks by infiltrating botnets with honeybots. We propose an integrated system named SODEXO which can be interfaced with social networking sites for creating deceptive honeybots and leveraging them for gaining information from botnets. We establish a Stackelberg game framework to capture strategic interactions between honeybots and botnets, and use quantitative methods to understand the tradeoffs of honeybots for their deployment and exploitation in social networks. We design a protection and alert system that integrates both microscopic and macroscopic models of honeybots and optimally determines the security strategies for honeybots. We corroborate the proposed mechanism with extensive simulations and comparisons with passive defenses.
1207.5847
Growing a Network on a Given Substrate
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI
Conventional studies of network growth models mainly look at the steady state degree distribution of the graph. Often long time behavior is considered, hence the initial condition is ignored. In this contribution, the time evolution of the degree distribution is the center of attention. We consider two specific growth models; incoming nodes with uniform and preferential attachment, and the degree distribution of the graph for arbitrary initial condition is obtained as a function of time. This allows us to characterize the transient behavior of the degree distribution, as well as to quantify the rate of convergence to the steady-state limit.
1207.5849
Migration in a Small World: A Network Approach to Modeling Immigration Processes
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI
Existing theories of migration either focus on micro- or macroscopic behavior of populations; that is, either the average behavior of entire population is modeled directly, or decisions of individuals are modeled directly. In this work, we seek to bridge these two perspectives by modeling individual agents decisions to migrate while accounting for the social network structure that binds individuals into a population. Pecuniary considerations combined with the decisions of peers are the primary elements of the model, being the main driving forces of migration. People of the home country are modeled as nodes on a small-world network. A dichotomous state is associated with each node, indicating whether it emigrates to the destination country or it stays in the home country. We characterize the emigration rate in terms of the relative welfare and population of the home and destination countries. The time evolution and the steady-state fraction of emigrants are also derived.
1207.5850
Performance of the Bounded Distance Decoder on the AWGN Channel
cs.IT math.IT
In contrast to a maximum-likelihood decoder, it is often desirable to use an incomplete decoder that can detect its decoding errors with high probability. One common choice is the bounded distance decoder. Bounds are derived for the total word error rate, Pw, and the undetected error rate, Pu. Excellent agreement is found with simulation results for a small code, and the bounds are shown to be tractable for a larger code.
1207.5853
Spectrum Coordination in Energy Efficient Cognitive Radio Networks
cs.GT cs.IT math.IT math.OC
Device coordination in open spectrum systems is a challenging problem, particularly since users experience varying spectrum availability over time and location. In this paper, we propose a game theoretical approach that allows cognitive radio pairs, namely the primary user (PU) and the secondary user (SU), to update their transmission powers and frequencies simultaneously. Specifically, we address a Stackelberg game model in which individual users attempt to hierarchically access to the wireless spectrum while maximizing their energy efficiency. A thorough analysis of the existence, uniqueness and characterization of the Stackelberg equilibrium is conducted. In particular, we show that a spectrum coordination naturally occurs when both actors in the system decide sequentially about their powers and their transmitting carriers. As a result, spectrum sensing in such a situation turns out to be a simple detection of the presence/absence of a transmission on each sub-band. We also show that when users experience very different channel gains on their two carriers, they may choose to transmit on the same carrier at the Stackelberg equilibrium as this contributes enough energy efficiency to outweigh the interference degradation caused by the mutual transmission. Then, we provide an algorithmic analysis on how the PU and the SU can reach such a spectrum coordination using an appropriate learning process. We validate our results through extensive simulations and compare the proposed algorithm to some typical scenarios including the non-cooperative case and the throughput-based-utility systems. Typically, it is shown that the proposed Stackelberg decision approach optimizes the energy efficiency while still maximizing the throughput at the equilibrium.
1207.5857
Distance Distributions in Regular Polygons
cs.IT math.IT
This paper derives the exact cumulative density function of the distance between a randomly located node and any arbitrary reference point inside a regular $\el$-sided polygon. Using this result, we obtain the closed-form probability density function (PDF) of the Euclidean distance between any arbitrary reference point and its $n$-th neighbour node, when $N$ nodes are uniformly and independently distributed inside a regular $\ell$-sided polygon. First, we exploit the rotational symmetry of the regular polygons and quantify the effect of polygon sides and vertices on the distance distributions. Then we propose an algorithm to determine the distance distributions given any arbitrary location of the reference point inside the polygon. For the special case when the arbitrary reference point is located at the center of the polygon, our framework reproduces the existing result in the literature.
1207.5871
Optimal Sampling Points in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces
cs.IT math.IT stat.ML
The recent developments of basis pursuit and compressed sensing seek to extract information from as few samples as possible. In such applications, since the number of samples is restricted, one should deploy the sampling points wisely. We are motivated to study the optimal distribution of finite sampling points. Formulation under the framework of optimal reconstruction yields a minimization problem. In the discrete case, we estimate the distance between the optimal subspace resulting from a general Karhunen-Loeve transform and the kernel space to obtain another algorithm that is computationally favorable. Numerical experiments are then presented to illustrate the performance of the algorithms for the searching of optimal sampling points.
1207.5879
Selecting Computations: Theory and Applications
cs.AI
Sequential decision problems are often approximately solvable by simulating possible future action sequences. {\em Metalevel} decision procedures have been developed for selecting {\em which} action sequences to simulate, based on estimating the expected improvement in decision quality that would result from any particular simulation; an example is the recent work on using bandit algorithms to control Monte Carlo tree search in the game of Go. In this paper we develop a theoretical basis for metalevel decisions in the statistical framework of Bayesian {\em selection problems}, arguing (as others have done) that this is more appropriate than the bandit framework. We derive a number of basic results applicable to Monte Carlo selection problems, including the first finite sampling bounds for optimal policies in certain cases; we also provide a simple counterexample to the intuitive conjecture that an optimal policy will necessarily reach a decision in all cases. We then derive heuristic approximations in both Bayesian and distribution-free settings and demonstrate their superiority to bandit-based heuristics in one-shot decision problems and in Go.
1207.5926
Redundant Sudoku Rules
cs.AI
The rules of Sudoku are often specified using twenty seven \texttt{all\_different} constraints, referred to as the {\em big} \mrules. Using graphical proofs and exploratory logic programming, the following main and new result is obtained: many subsets of six of these big \mrules are redundant (i.e., they are entailed by the remaining twenty one \mrules), and six is maximal (i.e., removing more than six \mrules is not possible while maintaining equivalence). The corresponding result for binary inequality constraints, referred to as the {\em small} \mrules, is stated as a conjecture.
1207.5990
File system on CRDT
cs.DC cs.DB
In this report we show how to manage a distributed hierarchical structure representing a file system. This structure is optimistically replicated, each user work on his local replica, and updates are sent to other replica. The different replicas eventually observe same view of file systems. At this stage, conflicts between updates are very common. We claim that conflict resolution should rely as little as possible on users. In this report we propose a simple and modular solution to resolve these problems and maintain data consistency.
1207.6033
Effective Retrieval of Resources in Folksonomies Using a New Tag Similarity Measure
cs.IR cs.SI
Social (or folksonomic) tagging has become a very popular way to describe content within Web 2.0 websites. However, as tags are informally defined, continually changing, and ungoverned, it has often been criticised for lowering, rather than increasing, the efficiency of searching. To address this issue, a variety of approaches have been proposed that recommend users what tags to use, both when labeling and when looking for resources. These techniques work well in dense folksonomies, but they fail to do so when tag usage exhibits a power law distribution, as it often happens in real-life folksonomies. To tackle this issue, we propose an approach that induces the creation of a dense folksonomy, in a fully automatic and transparent way: when users label resources, an innovative tag similarity metric is deployed, so to enrich the chosen tag set with related tags already present in the folksonomy. The proposed metric, which represents the core of our approach, is based on the mutual reinforcement principle. Our experimental evaluation proves that the accuracy and coverage of searches guaranteed by our metric are higher than those achieved by applying classical metrics.
1207.6037
Measuring Similarity in Large-scale Folksonomies
cs.IR cs.SI
Social (or folksonomic) tagging has become a very popular way to describe content within Web 2.0 websites. Unlike taxonomies, which overimpose a hierarchical categorisation of content, folksonomies enable end-users to freely create and choose the categories (in this case, tags) that best describe some content. However, as tags are informally defined, continually changing, and ungoverned, social tagging has often been criticised for lowering, rather than increasing, the efficiency of searching, due to the number of synonyms, homonyms, polysemy, as well as the heterogeneity of users and the noise they introduce. To address this issue, a variety of approaches have been proposed that recommend users what tags to use, both when labelling and when looking for resources. As we illustrate in this paper, real world folksonomies are characterized by power law distributions of tags, over which commonly used similarity metrics, including the Jaccard coefficient and the cosine similarity, fail to compute. We thus propose a novel metric, specifically developed to capture similarity in large-scale folksonomies, that is based on a mutual reinforcement principle: that is, two tags are deemed similar if they have been associated to similar resources, and vice-versa two resources are deemed similar if they have been labelled by similar tags. We offer an efficient realisation of this similarity metric, and assess its quality experimentally, by comparing it against cosine similarity, on three large-scale datasets, namely Bibsonomy, MovieLens and CiteULike.
1207.6051
Composition of Modular Telemetry System with Interval Multiset Estimates
cs.SY cs.AI math.OC
The paper describes combinatorial synthesis approach with interval multset estimates of system elements for modeling, analysis, design, and improvement of a modular telemetry system. Morphological (modular) system design and improvement are considered as composition of the telemetry system elements (components) configuration. The solving process is based on Hierarchical Morphological Multicriteria Design (HMMD): (i) multicriteria selection of alternatives for system components, (ii) synthesis of the selected alternatives into a resultant combination (while taking into account quality of the alternatives above and their compatibility). Interval multiset estimates are used for assessment of design alternatives for telemetry system elements. Two additional systems problems are examined: (a) improvement of the obtained solutions, (b) aggregation of the obtained solutions into a resultant system configuration. The improvement and aggregation processes are based on multiple choice problem with interval multiset estimates. Numerical examples for an on-board telemetry subsystem illustrate the design and improvement processes.
1207.6052
Coding Delay Analysis of Dense and Chunked Network Codes over Line Networks
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we analyze the coding delay and the average coding delay of random linear network codes (a.k.a. dense codes) and chunked codes (CC), which are an attractive alternative to dense codes due to their lower complexity, over line networks with Bernoulli losses and deterministic regular or Poisson transmissions. Our results, which include upper bounds on the delay and the average delay, are (i) for dense codes, in some cases more general, and in some other cases tighter, than the existing bounds, and provide a more clear picture of the speed of convergence of dense codes to the (min-cut) capacity of line networks; and (ii) the first of their kind for CC over networks with such probabilistic traffics. In particular, these results demonstrate that a stand-alone CC or a precoded CC provide a better tradeoff between the computational complexity and the convergence speed to the network capacity over the probabilistic traffics compared to arbitrary deterministic traffics which have previously been studied in the literature.
1207.6053
Compressed Sensing off the Grid
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the problem of estimating the frequency components of a mixture of s complex sinusoids from a random subset of n regularly spaced samples. Unlike previous work in compressed sensing, the frequencies are not assumed to lie on a grid, but can assume any values in the normalized frequency domain [0,1]. We propose an atomic norm minimization approach to exactly recover the unobserved samples. We reformulate this atomic norm minimization as an exact semidefinite program. Even with this continuous dictionary, we show that most sampling sets of size O(s log s log n) are sufficient to guarantee the exact frequency estimation with high probability, provided the frequencies are well separated. Numerical experiments are performed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
1207.6076
Equivalence of distance-based and RKHS-based statistics in hypothesis testing
stat.ME cs.LG math.ST stat.ML stat.TH
We provide a unifying framework linking two classes of statistics used in two-sample and independence testing: on the one hand, the energy distances and distance covariances from the statistics literature; on the other, maximum mean discrepancies (MMD), that is, distances between embeddings of distributions to reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS), as established in machine learning. In the case where the energy distance is computed with a semimetric of negative type, a positive definite kernel, termed distance kernel, may be defined such that the MMD corresponds exactly to the energy distance. Conversely, for any positive definite kernel, we can interpret the MMD as energy distance with respect to some negative-type semimetric. This equivalence readily extends to distance covariance using kernels on the product space. We determine the class of probability distributions for which the test statistics are consistent against all alternatives. Finally, we investigate the performance of the family of distance kernels in two-sample and independence tests: we show in particular that the energy distance most commonly employed in statistics is just one member of a parametric family of kernels, and that other choices from this family can yield more powerful tests.
1207.6083
Determinantal point processes for machine learning
stat.ML cs.IR cs.LG
Determinantal point processes (DPPs) are elegant probabilistic models of repulsion that arise in quantum physics and random matrix theory. In contrast to traditional structured models like Markov random fields, which become intractable and hard to approximate in the presence of negative correlations, DPPs offer efficient and exact algorithms for sampling, marginalization, conditioning, and other inference tasks. We provide a gentle introduction to DPPs, focusing on the intuitions, algorithms, and extensions that are most relevant to the machine learning community, and show how DPPs can be applied to real-world applications like finding diverse sets of high-quality search results, building informative summaries by selecting diverse sentences from documents, modeling non-overlapping human poses in images or video, and automatically building timelines of important news stories.
1207.6084
Information Embedding on Actions
cs.IT math.IT
The problem of optimal actuation for channel and source coding was recently formulated and solved in a number of relevant scenarios. In this class of models, actions are taken at encoders or decoders, either to acquire side information in an efficient way or to control or probe effectively the channel state. In this paper, the problem of embedding information on the actions is studied for both the source and the channel coding set-ups. In both cases, a decoder is present that observes only a function of the actions taken by an encoder or a decoder of an action-dependent point-to-point link. For the source coding model, this decoder wishes to reconstruct a lossy version of the source being transmitted over the point-to-point link, while for the channel coding problem the decoder wishes to retrieve a portion of the message conveyed over the link. For the problem of source coding with actions taken at the decoder, a single letter characterization of the set of all achievable tuples of rate, distortions at the two decoders and action cost is derived, under the assumption that the mentioned decoder observes a function of the actions non-causally, strictly causally or causally. A special case of the problem in which the actions are taken by the encoder is also solved. A single-letter characterization of the achievable capacity-cost region is then obtained for the channel coding set-up with actions. Examples are provided that shed light into the effect of information embedding on the actions for the action-dependent source and channel coding problems.
1207.6087
Automated Dynamic Offset Applied to Cell Association
cs.GT cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we develop a hierarchical Bayesian game framework for automated dynamic offset selection. Users compete to maximize their throughput by picking the best locally serving radio access network (RAN) with respect to their own measurement, their demand and a partial statistical channel state information (CSI) of other users. In particular, we investigate the properties of a Stackelberg game, in which the base station is a player on its own. We derive analytically the utilities related to the channel quality perceived by users to obtain the equilibria. We study the Price of Anarchy (PoA) of such system, where the PoA is the ratio of the social welfare attained when a network planner chooses policies to maximize social welfare versus the social welfare attained in Nash/Stackeleberg equilibrium when users choose their policies strategically. We show by means of a Stackelberg formulation, how the operator, by sending appropriate information about the state of the channel, can configure a dynamic offset that optimizes its global utility while users maximize their individual utilities. The proposed hierarchical decision approach for wireless networks can reach a good trade-off between the global network performance at the equilibrium and the requested amount of signaling. Typically, it is shown that when the network goal is orthogonal to user's goal, this can lead the users to a misleading association problem.
1207.6096
Accurate and Efficient Private Release of Datacubes and Contingency Tables
cs.DB
A central problem in releasing aggregate information about sensitive data is to do so accurately while providing a privacy guarantee on the output. Recent work focuses on the class of linear queries, which include basic counting queries, data cubes, and contingency tables. The goal is to maximize the utility of their output, while giving a rigorous privacy guarantee. Most results follow a common template: pick a "strategy" set of linear queries to apply to the data, then use the noisy answers to these queries to reconstruct the queries of interest. This entails either picking a strategy set that is hoped to be good for the queries, or performing a costly search over the space of all possible strategies. In this paper, we propose a new approach that balances accuracy and efficiency: we show how to improve the accuracy of a given query set by answering some strategy queries more accurately than others. This leads to an efficient optimal noise allocation for many popular strategies, including wavelets, hierarchies, Fourier coefficients and more. For the important case of marginal queries we show that this strictly improves on previous methods, both analytically and empirically. Our results also extend to ensuring that the returned query answers are consistent with an (unknown) data set at minimal extra cost in terms of time and noise.
1207.6137
Degrees of Freedom of MIMO X Networks: Spatial Scale Invariance, One-Sided Decomposability and Linear Feasibility
cs.IT math.IT
We show that an M X N user MIMO X network with A antennas at each node has AMN/(M+N-1) degrees of freedom (DoF), thus resolving in this case a discrepancy between the spatial scale invariance conjecture (scaling the number of antennas at each node by a constant factor will scale the total DoF by the same factor) and a decomposability property of overconstrained wireless networks. While the best previously-known general DoF outer bound is consistent with the spatial invariance conjecture, the best previously-known general DoF inner bound, inspired by the K user MIMO interference channel, was based on the decomposition of every transmitter and receiver into multiple single antenna nodes, transforming the network into an AM X AN user SISO X network. While such a decomposition is DoF optimal for the K user MIMO interference channel, a gap remained between the best inner and outer bound for the MIMO X channel. Here we close this gap with the new insight that the MIMO X network is only one-sided decomposable, i.e., either all the transmitters or all the receivers (but not both) can be decomposed by splitting multiple antenna nodes into multiple single antenna nodes without loss of DoF. The result is extended to SIMO and MISO X networks as well and in each case the DoF results satisfy the spatial scale invariance property. In addition, the feasibility of linear interference alignment is investigated based only on spatial beamforming without symbol extensions. Similar to MIMO interference networks, we show that when the problem is improper, it is infeasible.
1207.6146
Systematic DFT Frames: Principle, Eigenvalues Structure, and Applications
cs.IT math.IT
Motivated by a host of recent applications requiring some amount of redundancy, frames are becoming a standard tool in the signal processing toolbox. In this paper, we study a specific class of frames, known as discrete Fourier transform (DFT) codes, and introduce the notion of systematic frames for this class. This is encouraged by a new application of frames, namely, distributed source coding that uses DFT codes for compression. Studying their extreme eigenvalues, we show that, unlike DFT frames, systematic DFT frames are not necessarily tight. Then, we come up with conditions for which these frames can be tight. In either case, the best and worst systematic frames are established in the minimum mean-squared reconstruction error sense. Eigenvalues of DFT frames and their subframes play a pivotal role in this work. Particularly, we derive some bounds on the extreme eigenvalues DFT subframes which are used to prove most of the results; these bounds are valuable independently.
1207.6164
Customer Empowerment in Healthcare Organisations Through CRM 2.0: Survey Results from Brunei Tracking a Future Path in E-Health Research
cs.CY cs.SI
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with the Web technology provides healthcare organizations the ability to broaden services beyond its usual practices, and thus provides a particular advantageous environment to achieve complex e-health goals. This paper discusses and demonstrates how a new approach in CRM based on Web 2.0 namely CRM 2.0 will help customers to have greater control in the sense of controlling the process of interaction (empowerment) between healthcare organizations with its customers, and among customers themselves. A survey was conducted to gather preliminary requirements and expectations on empowerment in Brunei. The survey revealed that there is a high demand for empowering customers in Brunei through the Web. Regardless of the limitations of the survey, the general public has responded with a great support for the capabilities of empowerment listed from the questionnaires. The data were analyzed to provide initial ideas and recommendation to a future direction on research for customers' empowerment in e-health services.
1207.6174
A++ Random Access for Two-way Relaying in Wireless Networks
cs.IT math.IT
Two-way relaying can significantly improve performance of next generation wireless networks. However, due to its dependence on multi-node cooperation and transmission coordination, applying this technique to a wireless network in an effective and scalable manner poses a challenging problem. To tackle this problem without relying on complicated scheduling or network optimization algorithms, we propose a scalable random access scheme that takes measures in both the physical layer and the medium access control layer. Specifically, we propose a two-way relaying technique that supports fully asynchronous transmission and is modulation-independent. It also assumes no priori knowledge of channel conditions. On the top of this new physical layer technique, a random access MAC protocol is designed to dynamically form two-way relaying cooperation in a wireless network. To evaluate the scalable random access scheme, both theoretical analysis and simulations are carried out. Performance results illustrate that our scheme has achieved the goal of scalable two-way relaying in a wireless network and significantly outperforms CSMA/CA protocol.
1207.6178
A Biased Review of Sociophysics
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Various aspects of recent sociophysics research are shortly reviewed: Schelling model as an example for lack of interdisciplinary cooperation, opinion dynamics, combat, and citation statistics as an example for strong interdisciplinarity.
1207.6180
A Unified Approach of Observability Analysis for Airborne SLAM
cs.RO
Observability is a key aspect of the state estimation problem of SLAM, However, the dimension and variables of SLAM system might be changed with new features, to which little attention is paid in the previous work. In this paper, a unified approach of observability analysis for SLAM system is provided, whether the dimension and variables of SLAM system are changed or not, we can use this approach to analyze the local or total observability of the SLAM system.
1207.6199
Achieving Approximate Soft Clustering in Data Streams
cs.DS cs.AI
In recent years, data streaming has gained prominence due to advances in technologies that enable many applications to generate continuous flows of data. This increases the need to develop algorithms that are able to efficiently process data streams. Additionally, real-time requirements and evolving nature of data streams make stream mining problems, including clustering, challenging research problems. In this paper, we propose a one-pass streaming soft clustering (membership of a point in a cluster is described by a distribution) algorithm which approximates the "soft" version of the k-means objective function. Soft clustering has applications in various aspects of databases and machine learning including density estimation and learning mixture models. We first achieve a simple pseudo-approximation in terms of the "hard" k-means algorithm, where the algorithm is allowed to output more than $k$ centers. We convert this batch algorithm to a streaming one (using an extension of the k-means++ algorithm recently proposed) in the "cash register" model. We also extend this algorithm when the clustering is done over a moving window in the data stream.
1207.6202
Sum-Rate Optimization in a Two-Way Relay Network with Buffering
cs.IT math.IT
A Relay Station (RS) uses a buffer to store and process the received data packets before forwarding them. Recently, the buffer has been exploited in one-way relaying to opportunistically schedule the two different links according to their channel quality. The intuition is that, if the channel to the destination is poor, then RS stores more data from the source, in order to use it when the channel to the destination is good. We apply this intuition to the case of half-duplex two-way relaying, where the interactions among the buffers and the links become more complex. We investigate the sum-rate maximization problem in the Time Division Broadcast (TDBC): the users send signals to the RS in different time slots, the RS decodes and stores messages in the buffers. For downlink transmission, the RS re-encodes and sends using the optimal broadcast strategy. The operation in each time slot is not determined in advance, but depends on the channel state information (CSI). We derive the decision function for adaptive link selection with respect to CSI using the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. The thresholds of the decision function are obtained under Rayleigh fading channel conditions. The numerical results show that the sum-rate of the adaptive link selection protocol with buffering is significantly larger compared to the reference protocol with fixed transmission schedule.
1207.6224
Evolving knowledge through negotiation
cs.AI cs.HC
Semantic web information is at the extremities of long pipelines held by human beings. They are at the origin of information and they will consume it either explicitly because the information will be delivered to them in a readable way, or implicitly because the computer processes consuming this information will affect them. Computers are particularly capable of dealing with information the way it is provided to them. However, people may assign to the information they provide a narrower meaning than semantic technologies may consider. This is typically what happens when people do not think their assertions as ambiguous. Model theory, used to provide semantics to the information on the semantic web, is particularly apt at preserving ambiguity and delivering it to the other side of the pipeline. Indeed, it preserves as much interpretations as possible. This quality for reasoning efficiency, becomes a deficiency for accurate communication and meaning preservation. Overcoming it may require either interactive feedback or preservation of the source context. Work from social science and humanities may help solving this particular problem.
1207.6231
Touchalytics: On the Applicability of Touchscreen Input as a Behavioral Biometric for Continuous Authentication
cs.CR cs.LG
We investigate whether a classifier can continuously authenticate users based on the way they interact with the touchscreen of a smart phone. We propose a set of 30 behavioral touch features that can be extracted from raw touchscreen logs and demonstrate that different users populate distinct subspaces of this feature space. In a systematic experiment designed to test how this behavioral pattern exhibits consistency over time, we collected touch data from users interacting with a smart phone using basic navigation maneuvers, i.e., up-down and left-right scrolling. We propose a classification framework that learns the touch behavior of a user during an enrollment phase and is able to accept or reject the current user by monitoring interaction with the touch screen. The classifier achieves a median equal error rate of 0% for intra-session authentication, 2%-3% for inter-session authentication and below 4% when the authentication test was carried out one week after the enrollment phase. While our experimental findings disqualify this method as a standalone authentication mechanism for long-term authentication, it could be implemented as a means to extend screen-lock time or as a part of a multi-modal biometric authentication system.
1207.6253
On When and How to use SAT to Mine Frequent Itemsets
cs.AI cs.DB cs.LG
A new stream of research was born in the last decade with the goal of mining itemsets of interest using Constraint Programming (CP). This has promoted a natural way to combine complex constraints in a highly flexible manner. Although CP state-of-the-art solutions formulate the task using Boolean variables, the few attempts to adopt propositional Satisfiability (SAT) provided an unsatisfactory performance. This work deepens the study on when and how to use SAT for the frequent itemset mining (FIM) problem by defining different encodings with multiple task-driven enumeration options and search strategies. Although for the majority of the scenarios SAT-based solutions appear to be non-competitive with CP peers, results show a variety of interesting cases where SAT encodings are the best option.
1207.6255
Power Control for Two User Cooperative OFDMA Channels
cs.IT math.IT
For a two user cooperative orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) system with full channel state information (CSI), we obtain the optimal power allocation (PA) policies which maximize the rate region achievable by a channel adaptive implementation of inter-subchannel block Markov superposition encoding (BMSE), used in conjunction with backwards decoding. We provide the optimality conditions that need to be satisfied by the powers associated with the users' codewords and derive the closed form expressions for the optimal powers. We propose two algorithms that can be used to optimize the powers to achieve any desired rate pair on the rate region boundary: a projected subgradient algorithm, and an iterative waterfilling-like algorithm based on Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions for optimality, which operates one user at a time and converges much faster. We observe that, utilization of power control to take advantage of the diversity offered by the cooperative OFDMA system, not only leads to a remarkable improvement in achievable rates, but also may help determine how the subchannels have to be instantaneously allocated to various tasks in cooperation.
1207.6269
Shaping Communities out of Triangles
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Community detection has arisen as one of the most relevant topics in the field of graph data mining due to its importance in many fields such as biology, social networks or network traffic analysis. The metrics proposed to shape communities are generic and follow two approaches: maximizing the internal density of such communities or reducing the connectivity of the internal vertices with those outside the community. However, these metrics take the edges as a set and do not consider the internal layout of the edges in the community. We define a set of properties oriented to social networks that ensure that communities are cohesive, structured and well defined. Then, we propose the Weighted Community Clustering (WCC), which is a community metric based on triangles. We proof that analyzing communities by triangles gives communities that fulfill the listed set of properties, in contrast to previous metrics. Finally, we experimentally show that WCC correctly captures the concept of community in social networks using real and syntethic datasets, and compare statistically some of the most relevant community detection algorithms in the state of the art.
1207.6282
Using Community Structure for Complex Network Layout
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
We present a new layout algorithm for complex networks that combines a multi-scale approach for community detection with a standard force-directed design. Since community detection is computationally cheap, we can exploit the multi-scale approach to generate network configurations with close-to-minimal energy very fast. As a further asset, we can use the knowledge of the community structure to facilitate the interpretation of large networks, for example the network defined by protein-protein interactions.
1207.6313
A CLT on the SNR of Diagonally Loaded MVDR Filters
cs.IT math.IT math.ST stat.TH
This paper studies the fluctuations of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of minimum variance distorsionless response (MVDR) filters implementing diagonal loading in the estimation of the covariance matrix. Previous results in the signal processing literature are generalized and extended by considering both spatially as well as temporarily correlated samples. Specifically, a central limit theorem (CLT) is established for the fluctuations of the SNR of the diagonally loaded MVDR filter, under both supervised and unsupervised training settings in adaptive filtering applications. Our second-order analysis is based on the Nash-Poincar\'e inequality and the integration by parts formula for Gaussian functionals, as well as classical tools from statistical asymptotic theory. Numerical evaluations validating the accuracy of the CLT confirm the asymptotic Gaussianity of the fluctuations of the SNR of the MVDR filter.
1207.6329
Computing optimal k-regret minimizing sets with top-k depth contours
cs.DB cs.CG
Regret minimizing sets are a very recent approach to representing a dataset D with a small subset S of representative tuples. The set S is chosen such that executing any top-1 query on S rather than D is minimally perceptible to any user. To discover an optimal regret minimizing set of a predetermined cardinality is conjectured to be a hard problem. In this paper, we generalize the problem to that of finding an optimal k$regret minimizing set, wherein the difference is computed over top-k queries, rather than top-1 queries. We adapt known geometric ideas of top-k depth contours and the reverse top-k problem. We show that the depth contours themselves offer a means of comparing the optimality of regret minimizing sets using L2 distance. We design an O(cn^2) plane sweep algorithm for two dimensions to compute an optimal regret minimizing set of cardinality c. For higher dimensions, we introduce a greedy algorithm that progresses towards increasingly optimal solutions by exploiting the transitivity of L2 distance.
1207.6353
PETRELS: Parallel Subspace Estimation and Tracking by Recursive Least Squares from Partial Observations
stat.ME cs.IT math.IT
Many real world data sets exhibit an embedding of low-dimensional structure in a high-dimensional manifold. Examples include images, videos and internet traffic data. It is of great significance to reduce the storage requirements and computational complexity when the data dimension is high. Therefore we consider the problem of reconstructing a data stream from a small subset of its entries, where the data is assumed to lie in a low-dimensional linear subspace, possibly corrupted by noise. We further consider tracking the change of the underlying subspace, which can be applied to applications such as video denoising, network monitoring and anomaly detection. Our problem can be viewed as a sequential low-rank matrix completion problem in which the subspace is learned in an on-line fashion. The proposed algorithm, dubbed Parallel Estimation and Tracking by REcursive Least Squares (PETRELS), first identifies the underlying low-dimensional subspace via a recursive procedure for each row of the subspace matrix in parallel with discounting for previous observations, and then reconstructs the missing entries via least-squares estimation if required. Numerical examples are provided for direction-of-arrival estimation and matrix completion, comparing PETRELS with state of the art batch algorithms.
1207.6355
The Entropy Power Inequality and Mrs. Gerber's Lemma for Abelian Groups of Order 2^n
cs.IT math.CO math.GR math.IT math.PR
Shannon's Entropy Power Inequality can be viewed as characterizing the minimum differential entropy achievable by the sum of two independent random variables with fixed differential entropies. The entropy power inequality has played a key role in resolving a number of problems in information theory. It is therefore interesting to examine the existence of a similar inequality for discrete random variables. In this paper we obtain an entropy power inequality for random variables taking values in an abelian group of order 2^n, i.e. for such a group G we explicitly characterize the function f_G(x,y) giving the minimum entropy of the sum of two independent G-valued random variables with respective entropies x and y. Random variables achieving the extremum in this inequality are thus the analogs of Gaussians in this case, and these are also determined. It turns out that f_G(x,y) is convex in x for fixed y and, by symmetry, convex in y for fixed x. This is a generalization to abelian groups of order 2^n of the result known as Mrs. Gerber's Lemma.
1207.6379
Identifying Users From Their Rating Patterns
cs.IR cs.LG stat.ML
This paper reports on our analysis of the 2011 CAMRa Challenge dataset (Track 2) for context-aware movie recommendation systems. The train dataset comprises 4,536,891 ratings provided by 171,670 users on 23,974$ movies, as well as the household groupings of a subset of the users. The test dataset comprises 5,450 ratings for which the user label is missing, but the household label is provided. The challenge required to identify the user labels for the ratings in the test set. Our main finding is that temporal information (time labels of the ratings) is significantly more useful for achieving this objective than the user preferences (the actual ratings). Using a model that leverages on this fact, we are able to identify users within a known household with an accuracy of approximately 96% (i.e. misclassification rate around 4%).
1207.6380
About the Linear Complexity of Ding-Hellesth Generalized Cyclotomic Binary Sequences of Any Period
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
We defined sufficient conditions for designing Ding-Helleseth sequences with arbitrary period and high linear complexity for generalized cyclotomies. Also we discuss the method of computing the linear complexity of Ding-Helleseth sequences in the general case.
1207.6416
The Social Climbing Game
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
The structure of a society depends, to some extent, on the incentives of the individuals they are composed of. We study a stylized model of this interplay, that suggests that the more individuals aim at climbing the social hierarchy, the more society's hierarchy gets strong. Such a dependence is sharp, in the sense that a persistent hierarchical order emerges abruptly when the preference for social status gets larger than a threshold. This phase transition has its origin in the fact that the presence of a well defined hierarchy allows agents to climb it, thus reinforcing it, whereas in a "disordered" society it is harder for agents to find out whom they should connect to in order to become more central. Interestingly, a social order emerges when agents strive harder to climb society and it results in a state of reduced social mobility, as a consequence of ergodicity breaking, where climbing is more difficult.
1207.6430
Optimal Data Collection For Informative Rankings Expose Well-Connected Graphs
stat.ML cs.LG stat.AP
Given a graph where vertices represent alternatives and arcs represent pairwise comparison data, the statistical ranking problem is to find a potential function, defined on the vertices, such that the gradient of the potential function agrees with the pairwise comparisons. Our goal in this paper is to develop a method for collecting data for which the least squares estimator for the ranking problem has maximal Fisher information. Our approach, based on experimental design, is to view data collection as a bi-level optimization problem where the inner problem is the ranking problem and the outer problem is to identify data which maximizes the informativeness of the ranking. Under certain assumptions, the data collection problem decouples, reducing to a problem of finding multigraphs with large algebraic connectivity. This reduction of the data collection problem to graph-theoretic questions is one of the primary contributions of this work. As an application, we study the Yahoo! Movie user rating dataset and demonstrate that the addition of a small number of well-chosen pairwise comparisons can significantly increase the Fisher informativeness of the ranking. As another application, we study the 2011-12 NCAA football schedule and propose schedules with the same number of games which are significantly more informative. Using spectral clustering methods to identify highly-connected communities within the division, we argue that the NCAA could improve its notoriously poor rankings by simply scheduling more out-of-conference games.
1207.6435
Capacity of optical reading, Part 1: Reading boundless error-free bits using a single photon
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
We show that nature imposes no fundamental upper limit to the number of information bits per expended photon that can, in principle, be read reliably when classical data is encoded in a medium that can only passively modulate the amplitude and phase of the probe light. We show that with a coherent-state (laser) source, an on-off (amplitude-modulation) pixel encoding, and shot-noise-limited direct detection (an overly-optimistic model for commercial CD/DVD drives), the highest photon information efficiency achievable in principle is about 0.5 bit per transmitted photon. We then show that a coherent-state probe can read unlimited bits per photon when the receiver is allowed to make joint (inseparable) measurements on the reflected light from a large block of phase-modulated memory pixels. Finally, we show an example of a spatially-entangled non-classical light probe and a receiver design---constructable using a single-photon source, beam splitters, and single-photon detectors---that can in principle read any number of error-free bits of information. The probe is a single photon prepared in a uniform coherent superposition of multiple orthogonal spatial modes, i.e., a W-state. The code, target, and joint-detection receiver complexity required by a coherent-state transmitter to achieve comparable photon efficiency performance is shown to be much higher in comparison to that required by the W-state transceiver.
1207.6438
Product Superposition for MIMO Broadcast Channels
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers the multiantenna broadcast channel without transmit-side channel state information (CSIT). For this channel, it has been known that when all receivers have channel state information (CSIR), the degrees of freedom (DoF) cannot be improved beyond what is available via TDMA. The same is true if none of the receivers possess CSIR. This paper shows that an entirely new scenario emerges when receivers have unequal CSIR. In particular, orthogonal transmission is no longer DoF-optimal when one receiver has CSIR and the other does not. A multiplicative superposition is proposed for this scenario and shown to attain the optimal degrees of freedom under a wide set of antenna configurations and coherence lengths. Two signaling schemes are constructed based on the multiplicative superposition. In the first method, the messages of the two receivers are carried in the row and column spaces of a matrix, respectively. This method works better than orthogonal transmission while reception at each receiver is still interference free. The second method uses coherent signaling for the receiver with CSIR, and Grassmannian signaling for the receiver without CSIR. This second method requires interference cancellation at the receiver with CSIR, but achieves higher DoF than the first method.
1207.6445
Profit Incentive In A Secondary Spectrum Market: A Contract Design Approach
cs.CE cs.GT
In this paper we formulate a contract design problem where a primary license holder wishes to profit from its excess spectrum capacity by selling it to potential secondary users/buyers. It needs to determine how to optimally price the excess spectrum so as to maximize its profit, knowing that this excess capacity is stochastic in nature, does not come with exclusive access, and cannot provide deterministic service guarantees to a buyer. At the same time, buyers are of different {\em types}, characterized by different communication needs, tolerance for the channel uncertainty, and so on, all of which a buyer's private information. The license holder must then try to design different contracts catered to different types of buyers in order to maximize its profit. We address this problem by adopting as a reference a traditional spectrum market where the buyer can purchase exclusive access with fixed/deterministic guarantees. We fully characterize the optimal solution in the cases where there is a single buyer type, and when multiple types of buyers share the same, known channel condition as a result of the primary user activity. In the most general case we construct an algorithm that generates a set of contracts in a computationally efficient manner, and show that this set is optimal when the buyer types satisfy a monotonicity condition.
1207.6448
Query Optimization Over Web Services Using A Mixed Approach
cs.DB cs.IR
A Web Service Management System (WSMS) can be well-thought-out as a consistent and a secure way of managing the web services. Web Service has become a quintessential part of the web world, managing and sharing the resources of the business it is associated with. In this paper, we focus on the query optimization aspect of handling the "natural language" query, queried to the WSMS. The map-select-composite operations are piloted to select specific web services. The main aftermath of our research is ensued in an algorithm which uses cost-based as well as heuristic based approach for query optimization. Query plan is formed after cost-based evaluation and using Greedy algorithm. The heuristic based approach further optimizes the evaluation plan. This scheme not only guarantees an optimal solution, which has a minimum diversion from the ideal solution, but also saves time which is otherwise utilized in generating various query plans using many mathematical models and then evaluating each one.
1207.6465
Sketch \star-metric: Comparing Data Streams via Sketching
cs.DS cs.DM cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we consider the problem of estimating the distance between any two large data streams in small- space constraint. This problem is of utmost importance in data intensive monitoring applications where input streams are generated rapidly. These streams need to be processed on the fly and accurately to quickly determine any deviance from nominal behavior. We present a new metric, the Sketch \star-metric, which allows to define a distance between updatable summaries (or sketches) of large data streams. An important feature of the Sketch \star-metric is that, given a measure on the entire initial data streams, the Sketch \star-metric preserves the axioms of the latter measure on the sketch (such as the non-negativity, the identity, the symmetry, the triangle inequality but also specific properties of the f-divergence). Extensive experiments conducted on both synthetic traces and real data allow us to validate the robustness and accuracy of the Sketch \star-metric.
1207.6475
Distributed team formation in multi-agent systems: stability and approximation
cs.MA cs.SI
We consider a scenario in which leaders are required to recruit teams of followers. Each leader cannot recruit all followers, but interaction is constrained according to a bipartite network. The objective for each leader is to reach a state of local stability in which it controls a team whose size is equal to a given constraint. We focus on distributed strategies, in which agents have only local information of the network topology and propose a distributed algorithm in which leaders and followers act according to simple local rules. The performance of the algorithm is analyzed with respect to the convergence to a stable solution. Our results are as follows. For any network, the proposed algorithm is shown to converge to an approximate stable solution in polynomial time, namely the leaders quickly form teams in which the total number of additional followers required to satisfy all team size constraints is an arbitrarily small fraction of the entire population. In contrast, for general graphs there can be an exponential time gap between convergence to an approximate solution and to a stable solution.
1207.6512
CSS-like Constructions of Asymmetric Quantum Codes
cs.IT math.IT
Asymmetric quantum error-correcting codes (AQCs) may offer some advantage over their symmetric counterparts by providing better error-correction for the more frequent error types. The well-known CSS construction of $q$-ary AQCs is extended by removing the $\F_{q}$-linearity requirement as well as the limitation on the type of inner product used. The proposed constructions are called CSS-like constructions and utilize pairs of nested subfield linear codes under one of the Euclidean, trace Euclidean, Hermitian, and trace Hermitian inner products. After establishing some theoretical foundations, best-performing CSS-like AQCs are constructed. Combining some constructions of nested pairs of classical codes and linear programming, many optimal and good pure $q$-ary CSS-like codes for $q \in {2,3,4,5,7,8,9}$ up to reasonable lengths are found. In many instances, removing the $\F_{q}$-linearity and using alternative inner products give us pure AQCs with improved parameters than relying solely on the standard CSS construction.
1207.6514
Earthquake Scenario Reduction by Symmetry Reasoning
cs.AI
A recently identified problem is that of finding an optimal investment plan for a transportation network, given that a disaster such as an earthquake may destroy links in the network. The aim is to strengthen key links to preserve the expected network connectivity. A network based on the Istanbul highway system has thirty links and therefore a billion scenarios, but it has been estimated that sampling a million scenarios gives reasonable accuracy. In this paper we use symmetry reasoning to reduce the number of scenarios to a much smaller number, making sampling unnecessary. This result can be used to facilitate metaheuristic and exact approaches to the problem.
1207.6540
Achieving Net Feedback Gain in the Butterfly Network with a Full-Duplex Bidirectional Relay
cs.IT math.IT
A symmetric butterfly network (BFN) with a full-duplex relay operating in a bi-directional fashion for feedback is considered. This network is relevant for a variety of wireless networks, including cellular systems dealing with cell-edge users. Upper bounds on the capacity region of the general memoryless BFN with feedback are derived based on cut-set and cooperation arguments and then specialized to the linear deterministic BFN with really-source feedback. It is shown that the upper bounds are achievable using combinations of the compute-forward strategy and the classical decode-and-forward strategy, thus fully characterizing the capacity region. It is shown that net rate gains are possible in certain parameter regimes.
1207.6560
Covering Rough Sets From a Topological Point of View
cs.DB
Covering-based rough set theory is an extension to classical rough set. The main purpose of this paper is to study covering rough sets from a topological point of view. The relationship among upper approximations based on topological spaces are explored.
1207.6563
Hidden information and regularities of information dynamics IIR
nlin.AO cs.IT math.IT
Part 1 has studied the conversion of observed random process with its hidden information to related dynamic process, applying entropy functional measure (EF) of the random process and path functional information measure (IPF) of the dynamic conversion process. The variation principle, satisfying the EF-IPF equivalence along shortest path-trajectory, leads to information dual complementary maxmin-minimax law, which creates mechanism of arising information regularities from stochastic process(Lerner 2012). This Part 2 studies mechanism of cooperation of the observed multiple hidden information process, which follows from the law and produces cooperative structures, concurrently assembling in hierarchical information network (IN) and generating the IN digital genetic code. We analyze the interactive information contributions, information quality, inner time scale, information geometry of the cooperative structures, evaluate curvature of these geometrical forms and their cooperative information complexities. The law information mechanisms operate in information observer. The observer, acting according the law, selects random information, converts it in information dynamics, builds the IN cooperatives, which generate the genetic code.
1207.6588
Dynamical Models Explaining Social Balance and Evolution of Cooperation
physics.soc-ph cs.SI nlin.AO
Social networks with positive and negative links often split into two antagonistic factions. Examples of such a split abound: revolutionaries versus an old regime, Republicans versus Democrats, Axis versus Allies during the second world war, or the Western versus the Eastern bloc during the Cold War. Although this structure, known as social balance, is well understood, it is not clear how such factions emerge. An earlier model could explain the formation of such factions if reputations were assumed to be symmetric. We show this is not the case for non-symmetric reputations, and propose an alternative model which (almost) always leads to social balance, thereby explaining the tendency of social networks to split into two factions. In addition, the alternative model may lead to cooperation when faced with defectors, contrary to the earlier model. The difference between the two models may be understood in terms of the underlying gossiping mechanism: whereas the earlier model assumed that an individual adjusts his opinion about somebody by gossiping about that person with everybody in the network, we assume instead that the individual gossips with that person about everybody. It turns out that the alternative model is able to lead to cooperative behaviour, unlike the previous model.