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1207.6600
Diversity in Ranking using Negative Reinforcement
cs.IR cs.AI cs.SI
In this paper, we consider the problem of diversity in ranking of the nodes in a graph. The task is to pick the top-k nodes in the graph which are both 'central' and 'diverse'. Many graph-based models of NLP like text summarization, opinion summarization involve the concept of diversity in generating the summaries. We develop a novel method which works in an iterative fashion based on random walks to achieve diversity. Specifically, we use negative reinforcement as a main tool to introduce diversity in the Personalized PageRank framework. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our algorithm is competitive to the existing methods.
1207.6650
Information-Theoretic Study on Routing Path Selection in Two-Way Relay Networks
cs.IT math.IT
Two-way relaying is a promising technique to improve network throughput. However, how to apply it to a wireless network remains an unresolved issue. Particularly, challenges lie in the joint design between the physical layer and the routing protocol. Applying an existing routing protocol to a two-way relay network can easily compromise the advantages of two-way relaying. Considering routing path selection and two-way relaying together can be formulated as a network optimization problem, but it is usually NP-hard. In this paper, we take a different approach to study routing path selection for two-way relay networks. Instead of solving the joint optimization problem, we study the fundamental characteristics of a routing path consisting of multihop two-way relaying nodes. Information theoretical analysis is carried out to derive bandwidth efficiency and energy efficiency of a routing path in a two-way relay network. Such analysis provides a framework of routing path selection by considering bandwidth efficiency, energy efficiency and latency subject to physical layer constraints such as the transmission rate, transmission power, path loss exponent, path length, and the number of relays. This framework provides insightful guidelines on routing protocol design of a two-way relay network. Our analytical framework and insights are illustrated by extensive numerical results.
1207.6656
Measuring the Complexity of Ultra-Large-Scale Adaptive Systems
cs.NE cs.NI nlin.AO
Ultra-large scale (ULS) systems are becoming pervasive. They are inherently complex, which makes their design and control a challenge for traditional methods. Here we propose the design and analysis of ULS systems using measures of complexity, emergence, self-organization, and homeostasis based on information theory. These measures allow the evaluation of ULS systems and thus can be used to guide their design. We evaluate the proposal with a ULS computing system provided with adaptation mechanisms. We show the evolution of the system with stable and also changing workload, using different fitness functions. When the adaptive plan forces the system to converge to a predefined performance level, the nodes may result in highly unstable configurations, that correspond to a high variance in time of the measured complexity. Conversely, if the adaptive plan is less "aggressive", the system may be more stable, but the optimal performance may not be achieved.
1207.6667
Relay Selection for OFDM Wireless Systems under Asymmetric Information: A Contract-Theory Based Approach
cs.NI cs.MA
User cooperation although improves performance of wireless systems, it requires incentives for the potential cooperating nodes to spend their energy acting as relays. Moreover, these potential relays are better informed than the source about their transmission costs, which depend on the exact channel conditions on their relay-destination links. This results in asymmetry of available information between the source and the relays. In this paper, we use contract theory to tackle the problem of relay selection under asymmetric information in OFDM-based cooperative wireless system that employs decode-and-forward (DF) relaying. We first design incentive compatible offers/contracts, consisting of a menu of payments and desired signal-to-noise-ratios (SNR)s at the destination and then the source broadcasts this menu to nearby mobile nodes. The nearby mobile nodes who are willing to relay notify back the source with the contracts they are willing to accept in each subcarrier. We show that when the source is under a budget constraint, the problem of relay selection in each subcarrier in order to maximize the capacity is a nonlinear non-separable knapsack problem. We propose a heuristic relay selection scheme to solve this problem. We compare the performance of our overall mechanism and the heuristic solution with a simple relay selection scheme and selected numerical results showed that our solution performs better and is close to optimal. The overall mechanism introduced in this paper is simple to implement, requires limited interaction with potential relays and hence requires minimal signalling overhead.
1207.6677
Ergodic Sum Capacity of Macrodiversity MIMO Systems in Flat Rayleigh Fading
cs.IT math.IT
The prospect of base station (BS) cooperation leading to joint combining at widely separated antennas has led to increased interest in macrodiversity systems, where both sources and receive antennas are geographically distributed. In this scenario, little is known analytically about channel capacity since the channel matrices have a very general form where each path may have a different power. Hence, in this paper we consider the ergodic sum capacity of a macrodiversity MIMO system with arbitrary numbers of sources and receive antennas operating over Rayleigh fading channels. For this system, we compute the exact ergodic capacity for a two-source system and a compact approximation for the general system, which is shown to be very accurate over a wide range of cases. Finally, we develop a highly simplified upper-bound which leads to insights into the relationship between capacity and the channel powers. Results are verified by Monte Carlo simulations and the impact on capacity of various channel power profiles is investigated
1207.6678
Performance Analysis of Macrodiversity MIMO Systems with MMSE and ZF Receivers in Flat Rayleigh Fading
cs.IT math.IT
Consider a multiuser system where an arbitrary number of users communicate with a distributed receive array over independent Rayleigh fading paths. The receive array performs minimum mean squared error (MMSE) or zero forcing (ZF) combining and perfect channel state information is assumed at the receiver. This scenario is well-known and exact analysis is possible when the receive antennas are located in a single array. However, when the antennas are distributed, the individual links all have different average signal to noise ratio (SNRs) and this is a much more challenging problem. In this paper, we provide approximate distributions for the output SNR of a ZF receiver and the output signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) of an MMSE receiver. In addition, simple high SNR approximations are provided for the symbol error rate (SER) of both receivers assuming M-PSK or M-QAM modulations. These high SNR results provide array gain and diversity gain information as well as a remarkably simple functional link between performance and the link powers.
1207.6682
Exploring Promising Stepping Stones by Combining Novelty Search with Interactive Evolution
cs.NE
The field of evolutionary computation is inspired by the achievements of natural evolution, in which there is no final objective. Yet the pursuit of objectives is ubiquitous in simulated evolution. A significant problem is that objective approaches assume that intermediate stepping stones will increasingly resemble the final objective when in fact they often do not. The consequence is that while solutions may exist, searching for such objectives may not discover them. This paper highlights the importance of leveraging human insight during search as an alternative to articulating explicit objectives. In particular, a new approach called novelty-assisted interactive evolutionary computation (NA-IEC) combines human intuition with novelty search for the first time to facilitate the serendipitous discovery of agent behaviors. In this approach, the human user directs evolution by selecting what is interesting from the on-screen population of behaviors. However, unlike in typical IEC, the user can now request that the next generation be filled with novel descendants. The experimental results demonstrate that combining human insight with novelty search finds solutions significantly faster and at lower genomic complexities than fully-automated processes, including pure novelty search, suggesting an important role for human users in the search for solutions.
1207.6685
FMLtoHOL (version 1.0): Automating First-order Modal Logics with LEO-II and Friends
cs.LO cs.AI
A converter from first-order modal logics to classical higher- order logic is presented. This tool enables the application of off-the-shelf higher-order theorem provers and model finders for reasoning within first- order modal logics. The tool supports logics K, K4, D, D4, T, S4, and S5 with respect to constant, varying and cumulative domain semantics.
1207.6706
Wireless MIMO Switching: Weighted Sum Mean Square Error and Sum Rate Optimization
cs.IT math.IT
This paper addresses joint transceiver and relay design for a wireless multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) switching scheme that enables data exchange among multiple users. Here, a multi-antenna relay linearly precodes the received (uplink) signals from multiple users before forwarding the signal in the downlink, where the purpose of precoding is to let each user receive its desired signal with interference from other users suppressed. The problem of optimizing the precoder based on various design criteria is typically non-convex and difficult to solve. The main contribution of this paper is a unified approach to solve the weighted sum mean square error (MSE) minimization and weighted sum rate maximization problems in MIMO switching. Specifically, an iterative algorithm is proposed for jointly optimizing the relay's precoder and the users' receive filters to minimize the weighted sum MSE. It is also shown that the weighted sum rate maximization problem can be reformulated as an iterated weighted sum MSE minimization problem and can therefore be solved similarly to the case of weighted sum MSE minimization. With properly chosen initial values, the proposed iterative algorithms are asymptotically optimal in both high and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes for MIMO switching, either with or without self-interference cancellation (a.k.a., physical-layer network coding). Numerical results show that the optimized MIMO switching scheme based on the proposed algorithms significantly outperforms existing approaches in the literature.
1207.6713
Model-Lite Case-Based Planning
cs.AI
There is increasing awareness in the planning community that depending on complete models impedes the applicability of planning technology in many real world domains where the burden of specifying complete domain models is too high. In this paper, we consider a novel solution for this challenge that combines generative planning on incomplete domain models with a library of plan cases that are known to be correct. While this was arguably the original motivation for case-based planning, most existing case-based planners assume (and depend on) from-scratch planners that work on complete domain models. In contrast, our approach views the plan generated with respect to the incomplete model as a "skeletal plan" and augments it with directed mining of plan fragments from library cases. We will present the details of our approach and present an empirical evaluation of our method in comparison to a state-of-the-art case-based planner that depends on complete domain models.
1207.6742
Low-Speed ADC Sampling Based High-Resolution Compressive Channel Estimation
cs.IT math.IT
Broadband channel is often characterized by a sparse multipath channel where dominant multipath taps are widely separated in time, thereby resulting in a large delay spread. Traditionally, accurate channel estimation is done by sampling received signal by analog-to-digital converter (ADC) at Nyquist rate (high-speed ADC sampling) and then estimate all channel taps with high-resolution. However, traditional linear estimation methods have two mainly disadvantages: 1) demand of the high-speed ADC sampling rate which already exceeds the capability of current ADC and also the high-speed ADC is very expensive for regular wireless communications; 2) neglect the inherent channel sparsity and the low spectral efficiency wireless communication is unavoidable. To solve these challenges, in this paper, we propose a high-resolution compressive channel estimation method by using low-speed ADC sampling. Our proposed method can achieve close performance comparing with traditional sparse channel estimation methods. At the same time, the proposed method has following advantages: 1) reduce communication cost by utilizing cheap low-speed ADC; 2) improve spectral efficiency by extracting potential training signal resource. Numerical simulations confirm our proposed method using low-speed ADC sampling.
1207.6762
Cooperative Regenerating Codes
cs.IT math.IT
One of the design objectives in distributed storage system is the minimization of the data traffic during the repair of failed storage nodes. By repairing multiple failures simultaneously and cooperatively, further reduction of repair traffic is made possible. A closed-form expression of the optimal tradeoff between the repair traffic and the amount of storage in each node for cooperative repair is given. We show that the points on the tradeoff curve can be achieved by linear cooperative regenerating codes, with an explicit bound on the required finite field size. The proof relies on a max-flow-min-cut-type theorem for submodular flow from combinatorial optimization. Two families of explicit constructions are given.
1207.6774
A Survey Of Activity Recognition And Understanding The Behavior In Video Survelliance
cs.CV
This paper presents a review of human activity recognition and behaviour understanding in video sequence. The key objective of this paper is to provide a general review on the overall process of a surveillance system used in the current trend. Visual surveillance system is directed on automatic identification of events of interest, especially on tracking and classification of moving objects. The processing step of the video surveillance system includes the following stages: Surrounding model, object representation, object tracking, activity recognition and behaviour understanding. It describes techniques that use to define a general set of activities that are applicable to a wide range of scenes and environments in video sequence.
1207.6788
Submartingale Property of E_0 Under The Polarization Transformations
cs.IT math.IT
We prove that the relation $E_0(\rho, W^{-}) + E_0(\rho, W^{+}) \geq 2 E_0(\rho, W)$ holds for any binary input discrete memoryless channel $W$, and $\rho \geq 0$.
1207.6805
Statistical Agent Based Modelization of the Phenomenon of Drug Abuse
physics.soc-ph cs.CY cs.SI
We introduce a statistical agent based model to describe the phenomenon of drug abuse and its dynamical evolution at the individual and global level. The agents are heterogeneous with respect to their intrinsic inclination to drugs, to their budget attitude and social environment. The various levels of drug use were inspired by the professional description of the phenomenon and this permits a direct comparison with all available data. We show that certain elements have a great importance to start the use of drugs, for example the rare events in the personal experiences which permit to overcame the barrier of drug use occasionally. The analysis of how the system reacts to perturbations is very important to understand its key elements and it provides strategies for effective policy making. The present model represents the first step of a realistic description of this phenomenon and can be easily generalized in various directions.
1207.6808
Wireless Scheduling with Dominant Interferers and Applications to Femtocellular Interference Cancellation
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
We consider a general class of wireless scheduling and resource allocation problems where the received rate in each link is determined by the actions of the transmitter in that link along with a single dominant interferer. Such scenarios arise in a range of scenarios, particularly in emerging femto- and picocellular networks with strong, localized interference. For these networks, a utility maximizing scheduler based on loopy belief propagation is presented that enables computationally-efficient local processing and low communication overhead. Our main theoretical result shows that the fixed points of the method are provably globally optimal for arbitrary (potentially non-convex) rate and utility functions. The methodology thus provides globally optimal solutions to a large class of inter-cellular interference coordination problems including subband scheduling, dynamic orthogonalization and beamforming whenever the dominant interferer assumption is valid. The paper focuses on applications for systems with interference cancellation (IC) and suggests a new scheme on optimal rate control, as opposed to traditional power control. Simulations are presented in industry standard femtocellular network models demonstrate significant improvements in rates over simple reuse 1 without IC, and near optimal performance of loopy belief propagation for rate selection in only one or two iterations.
1207.6814
Adaptive Fractal-like Network Structure for Efficient Search of Inhomogeneously Distributed Targets at Unknown Positions
physics.soc-ph cs.SI math-ph math.MP
Since a spatial distribution of communication requests is inhomogeneous and related to a population, in constructing a network, it is crucial for delivering packets on short paths through the links between proximity nodes and for distributing the load of nodes how to locate the nodes as base-stations on a realistic wireless environment. In this paper, from viewpoints of complex network science and biological foraging, we propose a scalably self-organized geographical network, in which the proper positions of nodes and the network topology are simultaneously determined according to the population, by iterative divisions of rectangles for load balancing of nodes in the adaptive change of their territories. In particular, we consider a decentralized routing by using only local information,and show that, for searching targets around high population areas, the routing on the naturally embedded fractal-like structure by population has higher efficiency than the conventionally optimal strategy on a square lattice.
1207.6821
Proceedings 7th International Workshop on Developments of Computational Methods
cs.CE cs.ET
This volume contains the proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Developments in Computational Models (DCM 2011) which was held on Sunday July 3, 2011, in Zurich, Switzerland, as a satelite workshop of ICALP 2011. Recently several new models of computation have emerged, for instance for bio-computing and quantum-computing, and in addition traditional models of computation have been adapted to accommodate new demands or capabilities of computer systems. The aim of DCM is to bring together researchers who are currently developing new computational models or new features for traditional computational models, in order to foster their interaction, to provide a forum for presenting new ideas and work in progress, and to enable newcomers to learn about current activities in this area.
1207.6839
Three Degrees of Distance on Twitter
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Recent work has found that the propagation of behaviors and sentiments through networks extends in ranges up to 2 to 4 degrees of distance. The regularity with which the same observation is found in dissimilar phenomena has been associated with friction in the propagation process and the instability of link structure that emerges in the dynamic of social networks. We study a contagious behavior, the practice of retweeting, in a setting where neither of those restrictions is present and still found the same result.
1207.6862
Improved Channel Estimation with Partial Sparse Constraint for AF Cooperative Communication Systems
cs.IT math.IT
Accurate channel state information (CSI) is necessary for coherent detection in amplify and forward (AF) broadband cooperative communication systems. Based on the assumption of ordinary sparse channel, efficient sparse channel estimation methods have been investigated in our previous works. However, when the cooperative channel exhibits partial sparse structure rather than ordinary sparsity, our previous method cannot take advantage of the prior information. In this paper, we propose an improved channel estimation method with partial sparse constraint on cooperative channel. At first, we formulate channel estimation as a compressive sensing problem and utilize sparse decomposition theory. Secondly, the cooperative channel is reconstructed by LASSO with partial sparse constraint. Finally, numerical simulations are carried out to confirm the superiority of proposed methods over ordinary sparse channel estimation methods.
1207.6889
A robust l_1 penalized DOA estimator
cs.IT math.IT
The SPS-LASSO has recently been introduced as a solution to the problem of regularization parameter selection in the complex-valued LASSO problem. Still, the dependence on the grid size and the polynomial time of performing convex optimization technique in each iteration, in addition to the deficiencies in the low noise regime, confines its performance for Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation. This work presents methods to apply LASSO without grid size limitation and with less complexity. As we show by simulations, the proposed methods loose a negligible performance compared to the Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimator, which needs a combinatorial search We also show by simulations that compared to practical implementations of ML, the proposed techniques are less sensitive to the source power difference.
1207.6902
Interference Alignment with Quantized Grassmannian Feedback in the K-user Constant MIMO Interference Channel
cs.IT math.IT
A simple channel state information (CSI) feedback scheme is proposed for interference alignment (IA) over the K-user constant Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output Interference Channel (MIMO IC). The proposed technique relies on the identification of invariants in the IA equations, which enables the reformulation of the CSI quantization problem as a single quantization on the Grassmann manifold at each receiver. The scaling of the number of feedback bits with the transmit power sufficient to preserve the multiplexing gain that can be achieved under perfect CSI is established. We show that the CSI feedback requirements of the proposed technique are better (lower) than what is required when using previously published methods, for system dimensions (number of users and antennas) of practical interest. Furthermore, we show through simulations that this advantage persists at low SNR, in the sense that the proposed technique yields a higher sum-rate performance for a given number of feedback bits. Finally, to complement our analysis, we introduce a statistical model that faithfully captures the properties of the quantization error obtained for random vector quantization (RVQ) on the Grassmann manifold for large codebooks; this enables the numerical (Monte-Carlo) analysis of general Grassmannian RVQ schemes for codebook sizes that would be impractically large to simulate.
1207.6910
Gaussian process regression as a predictive model for Quality-of-Service in Web service systems
cs.NI cs.LG
In this paper, we present the Gaussian process regression as the predictive model for Quality-of-Service (QoS) attributes in Web service systems. The goal is to predict performance of the execution system expressed as QoS attributes given existing execution system, service repository, and inputs, e.g., streams of requests. In order to evaluate the performance of Gaussian process regression the simulation environment was developed. Two quality indexes were used, namely, Mean Absolute Error and Mean Squared Error. The results obtained within the experiment show that the Gaussian process performed the best with linear kernel and statistically significantly better comparing to Classification and Regression Trees (CART) method.
1207.6986
Two Embedding Theorems for Data with Equivalences under Finite Group Action
cs.DS cs.IT math.IT
There is recent interest in compressing data sets for non-sequential settings, where lack of obvious orderings on their data space, require notions of data equivalences to be considered. For example, Varshney & Goyal (DCC, 2006) considered multiset equivalences, while Choi & Szpankowski (IEEE Trans. IT, 2012) considered isomorphic equivalences in graphs. Here equivalences are considered under a relatively broad framework - finite-dimensional, non-sequential data spaces with equivalences under group action, for which analogues of two well-studied embedding theorems are derived: the Whitney embedding theorem and the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma. Only the canonical data points need to be carefully embedded, each such point representing a set of data points equivalent under group action. Two-step embeddings are considered. First, a group invariant is applied to account for equivalences, and then secondly, a linear embedding takes it down to low-dimensions. Our results require hypotheses on discriminability of the applied invariant, such notions related to seperating invariants (Dufresne, 2008), and completeness in pattern recognition (Kakarala, 1992). In the latter theorem, the embedding complexity depends on the size of the canonical part, which may be significantly smaller than the whole data set, up to a factor equal to the size the group.
1207.6991
The probability of finding a fixed pattern in random data depends monotonically on the bifix indicator
math.PR cs.IT math.IT
We consider the problem of finding a fixed L-ary sequence in a stream of random L-ary data. It is known that the expected search time is a strictly increasing function of the lengths of the bifices of the pattern. In this paper we prove the related statement that the probability of finding the pattern in a finite random word is a strictly decreasing function of the lengths of the bifices of the pattern.
1207.7019
Finite Automata with Time-Delay Blocks (Extended Version)
cs.FL cs.SY
The notion of delays arises naturally in many computational models, such as, in the design of circuits, control systems, and dataflow languages. In this work, we introduce \emph{automata with delay blocks} (ADBs), extending finite state automata with variable time delay blocks, for deferring individual transition output symbols, in a discrete-time setting. We show that the ADB languages strictly subsume the regular languages, and are incomparable in expressive power to the context-free languages. We show that ADBs are closed under union, concatenation and Kleene star, and under intersection with regular languages, but not closed under complementation and intersection with other ADB languages. We show that the emptiness and the membership problems are decidable in polynomial time for ADBs, whereas the universality problem is undecidable. Finally we consider the linear-time model checking problem, i.e., whether the language of an ADB is contained in a regular language, and show that the model checking problem is PSPACE-complete.
1207.7035
Supervised Laplacian Eigenmaps with Applications in Clinical Diagnostics for Pediatric Cardiology
cs.LG
Electronic health records contain rich textual data which possess critical predictive information for machine-learning based diagnostic aids. However many traditional machine learning methods fail to simultaneously integrate both vector space data and text. We present a supervised method using Laplacian eigenmaps to augment existing machine-learning methods with low-dimensional representations of textual predictors which preserve the local similarities. The proposed implementation performs alternating optimization using gradient descent. For the evaluation we applied our method to over 2,000 patient records from a large single-center pediatric cardiology practice to predict if patients were diagnosed with cardiac disease. Our method was compared with latent semantic indexing, latent Dirichlet allocation, and local Fisher discriminant analysis. The results were assessed using AUC, MCC, specificity, and sensitivity. Results indicate supervised Laplacian eigenmaps was the highest performing method in our study, achieving 0.782 and 0.374 for AUC and MCC respectively. SLE showed an increase in 8.16% in AUC and 20.6% in MCC over the baseline which excluded textual data and a 2.69% and 5.35% increase in AUC and MCC respectively over unsupervised Laplacian eigenmaps. This method allows many existing machine learning predictors to effectively and efficiently utilize the potential of textual predictors.
1207.7079
Improving multivariate Horner schemes with Monte Carlo tree search
cs.SC cs.AI math-ph math.MP
Optimizing the cost of evaluating a polynomial is a classic problem in computer science. For polynomials in one variable, Horner's method provides a scheme for producing a computationally efficient form. For multivariate polynomials it is possible to generalize Horner's method, but this leaves freedom in the order of the variables. Traditionally, greedy schemes like most-occurring variable first are used. This simple textbook algorithm has given remarkably efficient results. Finding better algorithms has proved difficult. In trying to improve upon the greedy scheme we have implemented Monte Carlo tree search, a recent search method from the field of artificial intelligence. This results in better Horner schemes and reduces the cost of evaluating polynomials, sometimes by factors up to two.
1207.7125
Degree Relations of Triangles in Real-world Networks and Models
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Triangles are an important building block and distinguishing feature of real-world networks, but their structure is still poorly understood. Despite numerous reports on the abundance of triangles, there is very little information on what these triangles look like. We initiate the study of degree-labeled triangles -- specifically, degree homogeneity versus heterogeneity in triangles. This yields new insight into the structure of real-world graphs. We observe that networks coming from social and collaborative situations are dominated by homogeneous triangles, i.e., degrees of vertices in a triangle are quite similar to each other. On the other hand, information networks (e.g., web graphs) are dominated by heterogeneous triangles, i.e., the degrees in triangles are quite disparate. Surprisingly, nodes within the top 1% of degrees participate in the vast majority of triangles in heterogeneous graphs. We also ask the question of whether or not current graph models reproduce the types of triangles that are observed in real data and showed that most models fail to accurately capture these salient features.
1207.7144
Information and Estimation over Binomial and Negative Binomial Models
cs.IT math.IT
In recent years, a number of results have been developed which connect information measures and estimation measures under various models, including, predominently, Gaussian and Poisson models. More recent results due to Taborda and Perez-Cruz relate the relative entropy to certain mismatched estimation errors in the context of binomial and negative binomial models, where, unlike in the case of Gaussian and Poisson models, the conditional mean estimates concern models of different parameters than those of the original model. In this note, a different set of results in simple forms are developed for binomial and negative binomial models, where the conditional mean estimates are produced through the original models. The new results are more consistent with existing results for Gaussian and Poisson models.
1207.7147
A Calculus of Looping Sequences with Local Rules
cs.CE cs.FL
In this paper we present a variant of the Calculus of Looping Sequences (CLS for short) with global and local rewrite rules. While global rules, as in CLS, are applied anywhere in a given term, local rules can only be applied in the compartment on which they are defined. Local rules are dynamic: they can be added, moved and erased. We enrich the new calculus with a parallel semantics where a reduction step is lead by any number of global and local rules that could be performed in parallel. A type system is developed to enforce the property that a compartment must contain only local rules with specific features. As a running example we model some interactions happening in a cell starting from its nucleus and moving towards its mitochondria.
1207.7150
Probabilistic Monads, Domains and Classical Information
cs.PL cs.DM cs.IT math.IT
Shannon's classical information theory uses probability theory to analyze channels as mechanisms for information flow. In this paper, we generalize results of Martin, Allwein and Moskowitz for binary channels to show how some more modern tools - probabilistic monads and domain theory in particular - can be used to model classical channels. As initiated Martin, et al., the point of departure is to consider the family of channels with fixed inputs and outputs, rather than trying to analyze channels one at a time. The results show that domain theory has a role to play in the capacity of channels; in particular, the (n x n)-stochastic matrices, which are the classical channels having the same sized input as output, admit a quotient compact ordered space which is a domain, and the capacity map factors through this quotient via a Scott-continuous map that measures the quotient domain. We also comment on how some of our results relate to recent discoveries about quantum channels and free affine monoids.
1207.7167
Predicate Generation for Learning-Based Quantifier-Free Loop Invariant Inference
cs.LO cs.LG
We address the predicate generation problem in the context of loop invariant inference. Motivated by the interpolation-based abstraction refinement technique, we apply the interpolation theorem to synthesize predicates implicitly implied by program texts. Our technique is able to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the learning-based loop invariant inference algorithm in [14]. We report experiment results of examples from Linux, SPEC2000, and Tar utility.
1207.7179
Novel Modulation Techniques using Isomers as Messenger Molecules for Nano Communication Networks via Diffusion
cs.IT math.IT q-bio.QM
In this paper, we propose three novel modulation techniques, i.e., concentration-based, molecular-type-based, and molecular-ratio-based, using isomers as messenger molecules for nano communication networks via diffusion. To evaluate achievable rate performance, we compare the proposed tech- niques with conventional insulin based concepts under practical scenarios. Analytical and numerical results confirm that the proposed modulation techniques using isomers achieve higher data transmission rate performance (max 7.5 dB signal-to-noise ratio gain) than the insulin based concepts. We also investigate the tradeoff between messenger sizes and modulation orders and provide guidelines for selecting from among several possible candidates.
1207.7193
Canalizing Boolean Functions Maximize the Mutual Information
cs.IT math.IT nlin.AO q-bio.MN
The ability of information processing in biologically motivated Boolean networks is of interest in recent information theoretic research. One measure to quantify this ability is the well known mutual information. Using Fourier analysis we show that canalizing functions maximize the mutual information between an input variable and the outcome of the function. We proof our result for Boolean functions with uniform distributed as well as product distributed input variables.
1207.7199
Message in a Sealed Bottle: Privacy Preserving Friending in Social Networks
cs.SI cs.CR
Many proximity-based mobile social networks are developed to facilitate connections between any two people, or to help a user to find people with matched profile within a certain distance. A challenging task in these applications is to protect the privacy the participants' profiles and personal interests. In this paper, we design novel mechanisms, when given a preference-profile submitted by a user, that search a person with matching-profile in decentralized multi-hop mobile social networks. Our mechanisms are privacy-preserving: no participants' profile and the submitted preference-profile are exposed. Our mechanisms establish a secure communication channel between the initiator and matching users at the time when the matching user is found. Our rigorous analysis shows that our mechanism is secure, privacy-preserving, verifiable, and efficient both in communication and computation. Extensive evaluations using real social network data, and actual system implementation on smart phones show that our mechanisms are significantly more efficient then existing solutions.
1207.7222
Multi-Dimensional Nonsystematic Reed-Solomon Codes
cs.IT math.IT
This paper proposes a new class of multi-dimensional nonsystematic Reed-Solomon codes that are constructed based on the multi-dimensional Fourier transform over a finite field. The proposed codes are the extension of the nonsystematic Reed-Solomon codes to multi-dimension. This paper also discusses the performance of the multi-dimensional nonsystematic Reed-Solomon codes.
1207.7241
Gathering an even number of robots in an odd ring without global multiplicity detection
cs.DC cs.RO
We propose a gathering protocol for an even number of robots in a ring-shaped network that allows symmetric but not periodic configurations as initial configurations, yet uses only local weak multiplicity detection. Robots are assumed to be anonymous and oblivious, and the execution model is the non- atomic CORDA model with asynchronous fair scheduling. In our scheme, the number of robots k must be greater than 8, the number of nodes n on a network must be odd and greater than k+3. The running time of our protocol is O(n2) asynchronous rounds.
1207.7244
Visual Vocabulary Learning and Its Application to 3D and Mobile Visual Search
cs.CV
In this technical report, we review related works and recent trends in visual vocabulary based web image search, object recognition, mobile visual search, and 3D object retrieval. Especial focuses would be also given for the recent trends in supervised/unsupervised vocabulary optimization, compact descriptor for visual search, as well as in multi-view based 3D object representation.
1207.7245
Autofocus Correction of Azimuth Phase Error and Residual Range Cell Migration in Spotlight SAR Polar Format Imagery
astro-ph.IM cs.CV
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are often blurred by phase perturbations induced by uncompensated sensor motion and /or unknown propagation effects caused by turbulent media. To get refocused images, autofocus proves to be useful post-processing technique applied to estimate and compensate the unknown phase errors. However, a severe drawback of the conventional autofocus algorithms is that they are only capable of removing one-dimensional azimuth phase errors (APE). As the resolution becomes finer, residual range cell migration (RCM), which makes the defocus inherently two-dimensional, becomes a new challenge. In this paper, correction of APE and residual RCM are presented in the framework of polar format algorithm (PFA). First, an insight into the underlying mathematical mechanism of polar reformatting is presented. Then based on this new formulation, the effect of polar reformatting on the uncompensated APE and residual RCM is investigated in detail. By using the derived analytical relationship between APE and residual RCM, an efficient two-dimensional (2-D) autofocus method is proposed. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
1207.7251
Dynamics of Influence on Hierarchical Structures
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI
Dichotomous spin dynamics on a pyramidal hierarchical structure (the Bethe lattice) are studied. The system embodies a number of \emph{classes}, where a class comprises of nodes that are equidistant from the root (head node). Weighted links exist between nodes from the same and different classes. The spin (hereafter, \emph{state}) of the head node is fixed. We solve for the dynamics of the system for different boundary conditions. We find necessary conditions so that the classes eventually repudiate or acquiesce in the state imposed by the head node. The results indicate that to reach unanimity across the hierarchy, it suffices that the bottom-most class adopts the same state as the head node. Then the rest of the hierarchy will inevitably comply. This also sheds light on the importance of mass media as a means of synchronization between the top-most and bottom-most classes. Surprisingly, in the case of discord between the head node and the bottom-most classes, the average state over all nodes inclines towards that of the bottom-most class regardless of the link weights and intra-class configurations. Hence the role of the bottom-most class is signified.
1207.7253
Learning a peptide-protein binding affinity predictor with kernel ridge regression
q-bio.QM cs.LG q-bio.BM stat.ML
We propose a specialized string kernel for small bio-molecules, peptides and pseudo-sequences of binding interfaces. The kernel incorporates physico-chemical properties of amino acids and elegantly generalize eight kernels, such as the Oligo, the Weighted Degree, the Blended Spectrum, and the Radial Basis Function. We provide a low complexity dynamic programming algorithm for the exact computation of the kernel and a linear time algorithm for it's approximation. Combined with kernel ridge regression and SupCK, a novel binding pocket kernel, the proposed kernel yields biologically relevant and good prediction accuracy on the PepX database. For the first time, a machine learning predictor is capable of accurately predicting the binding affinity of any peptide to any protein. The method was also applied to both single-target and pan-specific Major Histocompatibility Complex class II benchmark datasets and three Quantitative Structure Affinity Model benchmark datasets. On all benchmarks, our method significantly (p-value < 0.057) outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods at predicting peptide-protein binding affinities. The proposed approach is flexible and can be applied to predict any quantitative biological activity. The method should be of value to a large segment of the research community with the potential to accelerate peptide-based drug and vaccine development.
1207.7261
Dynamical phase transition due to preferential cluster growth of collective emotions in online communities
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
We consider a preferential cluster growth in a one-dimensional stochastic model describing the dynamics of a binary chain with long-range memory. The model is driven by data corresponding to emotional patterns observed during online communities' discussions. The system undergoes a dynamical phase transition. For low values of the preference exponent, both states are observed during the string evolution in the majority of simulated discussion threads. When the exponent crosses a critical value, in the majority of threads an ordered phase emerges, i.e. from a certain time moment only one state is represented. The transition becomes discontinuous in the thermodynamical limit when the discussions are infinitely long and even an infinitely small preference exponent leads to the ordering behavior in every discussion thread. Numerical simulations are in a good agreement with approximated analytical formula.
1207.7274
The Dynamics of Health Behavior Sentiments on a Large Online Social Network
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Modifiable health behaviors, a leading cause of illness and death in many countries, are often driven by individual beliefs and sentiments about health and disease. Individual behaviors affecting health outcomes are increasingly modulated by social networks, for example through the associations of like-minded individuals - homophily - or through peer influence effects. Using a statistical approach to measure the individual temporal effects of a large number of variables pertaining to social network statistics, we investigate the spread of a health sentiment towards a new vaccine on Twitter, a large online social network. We find that the effects of neighborhood size and exposure intensity are qualitatively very different depending on the type of sentiment. Generally, we find that larger numbers of opinionated neighbors inhibit the expression of sentiments. We also find that exposure to negative sentiment is contagious - by which we merely mean predictive of future negative sentiment expression - while exposure to positive sentiments is generally not. In fact, exposure to positive sentiments can even predict increased negative sentiment expression. Our results suggest that the effects of peer influence and social contagion on the dynamics of behavioral spread on social networks are strongly content-dependent.
1207.7298
Throughput of Rateless Codes over Broadcast Erasure Channels
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we characterize the throughput of a broadcast network with n receivers using rateless codes with block size K. We assume that the underlying channel is a Markov modulated erasure channel that is i.i.d. across users, but can be correlated in time. We characterize the system throughput asymptotically in n. Specifically, we explicitly show how the throughput behaves for different values of the coding block size K as a function of n, as n approaches infinity. For finite values of K and n, under the more restrictive assumption of Gilbert-Elliott channels, we are able to provide a lower bound on the maximum achievable throughput. Using simulations we show the tightness of the bound with respect to system parameters n and K, and find that its performance is significantly better than the previously known lower bounds.
1207.7321
Universality in polytope phase transitions and message passing algorithms
math.PR cs.IT math.IT
We consider a class of nonlinear mappings $\mathsf{F}_{A,N}$ in $\mathbb{R}^N$ indexed by symmetric random matrices $A\in\mathbb{R}^{N\times N}$ with independent entries. Within spin glass theory, special cases of these mappings correspond to iterating the TAP equations and were studied by Bolthausen [Comm. Math. Phys. 325 (2014) 333-366]. Within information theory, they are known as "approximate message passing" algorithms. We study the high-dimensional (large $N$) behavior of the iterates of $\mathsf{F}$ for polynomial functions $\mathsf{F}$, and prove that it is universal; that is, it depends only on the first two moments of the entries of $A$, under a sub-Gaussian tail condition. As an application, we prove the universality of a certain phase transition arising in polytope geometry and compressed sensing. This solves, for a broad class of random projections, a conjecture by David Donoho and Jared Tanner.
1207.7347
RIP Analysis of Modulated Sampling Schemes for Recovering Spectrally Sparse Signals
cs.IT cs.SY math.IT
In this work, we analyze modulated sampling schemes, such as the Nyquist Folding Receiver, which are highly efficient, readily implementable, non-uniform sampling schemes that allows for the blind estimation of a narrow-band signal's spectral content and location in a wide-band environment. This non-uniform sampling, achieved by narrow-band modulation of the RF instantaneous sample rate, results in a frequency domain point spread function that is between the extremes obtained by uniform sampling and totally random sampling. As a result, while still preserving structured aliasing, the modulated sampling scheme is also useful in a compressive sensing (CS) setting. We estimate restricted isometry property (RIP) constants for CS matrices induced by such modulated sampling schemes and use those estimates to determine the amount of sparsity needed for signal recovery. This is followed by a demonstration and analysis of Orthogonal Matching Pursuit's ability to reconstruct signals from noisy non-uniform samples.
1208.0055
Large-scale continuous subgraph queries on streams
cs.DB cs.DC
Graph pattern matching involves finding exact or approximate matches for a query subgraph in a larger graph. It has been studied extensively and has strong applications in domains such as computer vision, computational biology, social networks, security and finance. The problem of exact graph pattern matching is often described in terms of subgraph isomorphism which is NP-complete. The exponential growth in streaming data from online social networks, news and video streams and the continual need for situational awareness motivates a solution for finding patterns in streaming updates. This is also the prime driver for the real-time analytics market. Development of incremental algorithms for graph pattern matching on streaming inputs to a continually evolving graph is a nascent area of research. Some of the challenges associated with this problem are the same as found in continuous query (CQ) evaluation on streaming databases. This paper reviews some of the representative work from the exhaustively researched field of CQ systems and identifies important semantics, constraints and architectural features that are also appropriate for HPC systems performing real-time graph analytics. For each of these features we present a brief discussion of the challenge encountered in the database realm, the approach to the solution and state their relevance in a high-performance, streaming graph processing framework.
1208.0063
Capacity Results for Two Classes of Three-Way Channels
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers the three-way channel, consisting of three nodes, where each node broadcasts a message to the two other nodes. The capacity of the finite-field three-way channel is derived, and is shown to be achievable using a non-cooperative scheme without feedback. The same scheme is also shown to achieve the equal-rate capacity (when all nodes transmit at the same rate) of the sender-symmetrical (each node receives the same SNR from the other two nodes) phase-fading AWGN channel. In the light that the non-cooperative scheme is not optimal in general, a cooperative feedback scheme that utilizes relaying and network coding is proposed and is shown to achieve the equal-rate capacity of the reciprocal (each pair of nodes has the same forward and backward SNR) phase-fading AWGN three-way channel.
1208.0072
Streaming Codes for Channels with Burst and Isolated Erasures
cs.IT cs.MM math.IT
We study low-delay error correction codes for streaming recovery over a class of packet-erasure channels that introduce both burst-erasures and isolated erasures. We propose a simple, yet effective class of codes whose parameters can be tuned to obtain a tradeoff between the capability to correct burst and isolated erasures. Our construction generalizes previously proposed low-delay codes which are effective only against burst erasures. We establish an information theoretic upper bound on the capability of any code to simultaneously correct burst and isolated erasures and show that our proposed constructions meet the upper bound in some special cases. We discuss the operational significance of column-distance and column-span metrics and establish that the rate 1/2 codes discovered by Martinian and Sundberg [IT Trans.\, 2004] through a computer search indeed attain the optimal column-distance and column-span tradeoff. Numerical simulations over a Gilbert-Elliott channel model and a Fritchman model show significant performance gains over previously proposed low-delay codes and random linear codes for certain range of channel parameters.
1208.0073
A Scalable Algorithm for Maximizing Range Sum in Spatial Databases
cs.DB
This paper investigates the MaxRS problem in spatial databases. Given a set O of weighted points and a rectangular region r of a given size, the goal of the MaxRS problem is to find a location of r such that the sum of the weights of all the points covered by r is maximized. This problem is useful in many location-based applications such as finding the best place for a new franchise store with a limited delivery range and finding the most attractive place for a tourist with a limited reachable range. However, the problem has been studied mainly in theory, particularly, in computational geometry. The existing algorithms from the computational geometry community are in-memory algorithms which do not guarantee the scalability. In this paper, we propose a scalable external-memory algorithm (ExactMaxRS) for the MaxRS problem, which is optimal in terms of the I/O complexity. Furthermore, we propose an approximation algorithm (ApproxMaxCRS) for the MaxCRS problem that is a circle version of the MaxRS problem. We prove the correctness and optimality of the ExactMaxRS algorithm along with the approximation bound of the ApproxMaxCRS algorithm. From extensive experimental results, we show that the ExactMaxRS algorithm is two orders of magnitude faster than methods adapted from existing algorithms, and the approximation bound in practice is much better than the theoretical bound of the ApproxMaxCRS algorithm.
1208.0074
Spatial Queries with Two kNN Predicates
cs.DB
The widespread use of location-aware devices has led to countless location-based services in which a user query can be arbitrarily complex, i.e., one that embeds multiple spatial selection and join predicates. Amongst these predicates, the k-Nearest-Neighbor (kNN) predicate stands as one of the most important and widely used predicates. Unlike related research, this paper goes beyond the optimization of queries with single kNN predicates, and shows how queries with two kNN predicates can be optimized. In particular, the paper addresses the optimization of queries with: (i) two kNN-select predicates, (ii) two kNN-join predicates, and (iii) one kNN-join predicate and one kNN-select predicate. For each type of queries, conceptually correct query evaluation plans (QEPs) and new algorithms that optimize the query execution time are presented. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms outperform the conceptually correct QEPs by orders of magnitude.
1208.0075
Optimal Algorithms for Crawling a Hidden Database in the Web
cs.DB
A hidden database refers to a dataset that an organization makes accessible on the web by allowing users to issue queries through a search interface. In other words, data acquisition from such a source is not by following static hyper-links. Instead, data are obtained by querying the interface, and reading the result page dynamically generated. This, with other facts such as the interface may answer a query only partially, has prevented hidden databases from being crawled effectively by existing search engines. This paper remedies the problem by giving algorithms to extract all the tuples from a hidden database. Our algorithms are provably efficient, namely, they accomplish the task by performing only a small number of queries, even in the worst case. We also establish theoretical results indicating that these algorithms are asymptotically optimal -- i.e., it is impossible to improve their efficiency by more than a constant factor. The derivation of our upper and lower bound results reveals significant insight into the characteristics of the underlying problem. Extensive experiments confirm the proposed techniques work very well on all the real datasets examined.
1208.0076
Diversifying Top-K Results
cs.DB
Top-k query processing finds a list of k results that have largest scores w.r.t the user given query, with the assumption that all the k results are independent to each other. In practice, some of the top-k results returned can be very similar to each other. As a result some of the top-k results returned are redundant. In the literature, diversified top-k search has been studied to return k results that take both score and diversity into consideration. Most existing solutions on diversified top-k search assume that scores of all the search results are given, and some works solve the diversity problem on a specific problem and can hardly be extended to general cases. In this paper, we study the diversified top-k search problem. We define a general diversified top-k search problem that only considers the similarity of the search results themselves. We propose a framework, such that most existing solutions for top-k query processing can be extended easily to handle diversified top-k search, by simply applying three new functions, a sufficient stop condition sufficient(), a necessary stop condition necessary(), and an algorithm for diversified top-k search on the current set of generated results, div-search-current(). We propose three new algorithms, namely, div-astar, div-dp, and div-cut to solve the div-search-current() problem. div-astar is an A* based algorithm, div-dp is an algorithm that decomposes the results into components which are searched using div-astar independently and combined using dynamic programming. div-cut further decomposes the current set of generated results using cut points and combines the results using sophisticated operations. We conducted extensive performance studies using two real datasets, enwiki and reuters. Our div-cut algorithm finds the optimal solution for diversified top-k search problem in seconds even for k as large as 2,000.
1208.0077
Keyword-aware Optimal Route Search
cs.DB
Identifying a preferable route is an important problem that finds applications in map services. When a user plans a trip within a city, the user may want to find "a most popular route such that it passes by shopping mall, restaurant, and pub, and the travel time to and from his hotel is within 4 hours." However, none of the algorithms in the existing work on route planning can be used to answer such queries. Motivated by this, we define the problem of keyword-aware optimal route query, denoted by KOR, which is to find an optimal route such that it covers a set of user-specified keywords, a specified budget constraint is satisfied, and an objective score of the route is optimal. The problem of answering KOR queries is NP-hard. We devise an approximation algorithm OSScaling with provable approximation bounds. Based on this algorithm, another more efficient approximation algorithm BucketBound is proposed. We also design a greedy approximation algorithm. Results of empirical studies show that all the proposed algorithms are capable of answering KOR queries efficiently, while the BucketBound and Greedy algorithms run faster. The empirical studies also offer insight into the accuracy of the proposed algorithms.
1208.0078
Answering Queries using Views over Probabilistic XML: Complexity and Tractability
cs.DB
We study the complexity of query answering using views in a probabilistic XML setting, identifying large classes of XPath queries -- with child and descendant navigation and predicates -- for which there are efficient (PTime) algorithms. We consider this problem under the two possible semantics for XML query results: with persistent node identifiers and in their absence. Accordingly, we consider rewritings that can exploit a single view, by means of compensation, and rewritings that can use multiple views, by means of intersection. Since in a probabilistic setting queries return answers with probabilities, the problem of rewriting goes beyond the classic one of retrieving XML answers from views. For both semantics of XML queries, we show that, even when XML answers can be retrieved from views, their probabilities may not be computable. For rewritings that use only compensation, we describe a PTime decision procedure, based on easily verifiable criteria that distinguish between the feasible cases -- when probabilistic XML results are computable -- and the unfeasible ones. For rewritings that can use multiple views, with compensation and intersection, we identify the most permissive conditions that make probabilistic rewriting feasible, and we describe an algorithm that is sound in general, and becomes complete under fairly permissive restrictions, running in PTime modulo worst-case exponential time equivalence tests. This is the best we can hope for since intersection makes query equivalence intractable already over deterministic data. Our algorithm runs in PTime whenever deterministic rewritings can be found in PTime.
1208.0079
Probabilistic Databases with MarkoViews
cs.DB
Most of the work on query evaluation in probabilistic databases has focused on the simple tuple-independent data model, where tuples are independent random events. Several efficient query evaluation techniques exists in this setting, such as safe plans, algorithms based on OBDDs, tree-decomposition and a variety of approximation algorithms. However, complex data analytics tasks often require complex correlations, and query evaluation then is significantly more expensive, or more restrictive. In this paper, we propose MVDB as a framework both for representing complex correlations and for efficient query evaluation. An MVDB specifies correlations by views, called MarkoViews, on the probabilistic relations and declaring the weights of the view's outputs. An MVDB is a (very large) Markov Logic Network. We make two sets of contributions. First, we show that query evaluation on an MVDB is equivalent to evaluating a Union of Conjunctive Query(UCQ) over a tuple-independent database. The translation is exact (thus allowing the techniques developed for tuple independent databases to be carried over to MVDB), yet it is novel and quite non-obvious (some resulting probabilities may be negative!). This translation in itself though may not lead to much gain since the translated query gets complicated as we try to capture more correlations. Our second contribution is to propose a new query evaluation strategy that exploits offline compilation to speed up online query evaluation. Here we utilize and extend our prior work on compilation of UCQ. We validate experimentally our techniques on a large probabilistic database with MarkoViews inferred from the DBLP data.
1208.0080
The Complexity of Social Coordination
cs.DB
Coordination is a challenging everyday task; just think of the last time you organized a party or a meeting involving several people. As a growing part of our social and professional life goes online, an opportunity for an improved coordination process arises. Recently, Gupta et al. proposed entangled queries as a declarative abstraction for data-driven coordination, where the difficulty of the coordination task is shifted from the user to the database. Unfortunately, evaluating entangled queries is very hard, and thus previous work considered only a restricted class of queries that satisfy safety (the coordination partners are fixed) and uniqueness (all queries need to be satisfied). In this paper we significantly extend the class of feasible entangled queries beyond uniqueness and safety. First, we show that we can simply drop uniqueness and still efficiently evaluate a set of safe entangled queries. Second, we show that as long as all users coordinate on the same set of attributes, we can give an efficient algorithm for coordination even if the set of queries does not satisfy safety. In an experimental evaluation we show that our algorithms are feasible for a wide spectrum of coordination scenarios.
1208.0081
Efficient Multi-way Theta-Join Processing Using MapReduce
cs.DB
Multi-way Theta-join queries are powerful in describing complex relations and therefore widely employed in real practices. However, existing solutions from traditional distributed and parallel databases for multi-way Theta-join queries cannot be easily extended to fit a shared-nothing distributed computing paradigm, which is proven to be able to support OLAP applications over immense data volumes. In this work, we study the problem of efficient processing of multi-way Theta-join queries using MapReduce from a cost-effective perspective. Although there have been some works using the (key,value) pair-based programming model to support join operations, efficient processing of multi-way Theta-join queries has never been fully explored. The substantial challenge lies in, given a number of processing units (that can run Map or Reduce tasks), mapping a multi-way Theta-join query to a number of MapReduce jobs and having them executed in a well scheduled sequence, such that the total processing time span is minimized. Our solution mainly includes two parts: 1) cost metrics for both single MapReduce job and a number of MapReduce jobs executed in a certain order; 2) the efficient execution of a chain-typed Theta-join with only one MapReduce job. Comparing with the query evaluation strategy proposed in [23] and the widely adopted Pig Latin and Hive SQL solutions, our method achieves significant improvement of the join processing efficiency.
1208.0082
Stubby: A Transformation-based Optimizer for MapReduce Workflows
cs.DB
There is a growing trend of performing analysis on large datasets using workflows composed of MapReduce jobs connected through producer-consumer relationships based on data. This trend has spurred the development of a number of interfaces--ranging from program-based to query-based interfaces--for generating MapReduce workflows. Studies have shown that the gap in performance can be quite large between optimized and unoptimized workflows. However, automatic cost-based optimization of MapReduce workflows remains a challenge due to the multitude of interfaces, large size of the execution plan space, and the frequent unavailability of all types of information needed for optimization. We introduce a comprehensive plan space for MapReduce workflows generated by popular workflow generators. We then propose Stubby, a cost-based optimizer that searches selectively through the subspace of the full plan space that can be enumerated correctly and costed based on the information available in any given setting. Stubby enumerates the plan space based on plan-to-plan transformations and an efficient search algorithm. Stubby is designed to be extensible to new interfaces and new types of optimizations, which is a desirable feature given how rapidly MapReduce systems are evolving. Stubby's efficiency and effectiveness have been evaluated using representative workflows from many domains.
1208.0083
Labeling Workflow Views with Fine-Grained Dependencies
cs.DB
This paper considers the problem of efficiently answering reachability queries over views of provenance graphs, derived from executions of workflows that may include recursion. Such views include composite modules and model fine-grained dependencies between module inputs and outputs. A novel view-adaptive dynamic labeling scheme is developed for efficient query evaluation, in which view specifications are labeled statically (i.e. as they are created) and data items are labeled dynamically as they are produced during a workflow execution. Although the combination of fine-grained dependencies and recursive workflows entail, in general, long (linear-size) data labels, we show that for a large natural class of workflows and views, labels are compact (logarithmic-size) and reachability queries can be evaluated in constant time. Experimental results demonstrate the benefit of this approach over the state-of-the-art technique when applied for labeling multiple views.
1208.0084
Fundamentals of Order Dependencies
cs.DB
Dependencies have played a significant role in database design for many years. They have also been shown to be useful in query optimization. In this paper, we discuss dependencies between lexicographically ordered sets of tuples. We introduce formally the concept of order dependency and present a set of axioms (inference rules) for them. We show how query rewrites based on these axioms can be used for query optimization. We present several interesting theorems that can be derived using the inference rules. We prove that functional dependencies are subsumed by order dependencies and that our set of axioms for order dependencies is sound and complete.
1208.0086
Optimization of Analytic Window Functions
cs.DB
Analytic functions represent the state-of-the-art way of performing complex data analysis within a single SQL statement. In particular, an important class of analytic functions that has been frequently used in commercial systems to support OLAP and decision support applications is the class of window functions. A window function returns for each input tuple a value derived from applying a function over a window of neighboring tuples. However, existing window function evaluation approaches are based on a naive sorting scheme. In this paper, we study the problem of optimizing the evaluation of window functions. We propose several efficient techniques, and identify optimization opportunities that allow us to optimize the evaluation of a set of window functions. We have integrated our scheme into PostgreSQL. Our comprehensive experimental study on the TPC-DS datasets as well as synthetic datasets and queries demonstrate significant speedup over existing approaches.
1208.0087
Opening the Black Boxes in Data Flow Optimization
cs.DB
Many systems for big data analytics employ a data flow abstraction to define parallel data processing tasks. In this setting, custom operations expressed as user-defined functions are very common. We address the problem of performing data flow optimization at this level of abstraction, where the semantics of operators are not known. Traditionally, query optimization is applied to queries with known algebraic semantics. In this work, we find that a handful of properties, rather than a full algebraic specification, suffice to establish reordering conditions for data processing operators. We show that these properties can be accurately estimated for black box operators by statically analyzing the general-purpose code of their user-defined functions. We design and implement an optimizer for parallel data flows that does not assume knowledge of semantics or algebraic properties of operators. Our evaluation confirms that the optimizer can apply common rewritings such as selection reordering, bushy join-order enumeration, and limited forms of aggregation push-down, hence yielding similar rewriting power as modern relational DBMS optimizers. Moreover, it can optimize the operator order of non-relational data flows, a unique feature among today's systems.
1208.0088
Spinning Fast Iterative Data Flows
cs.DB
Parallel dataflow systems are a central part of most analytic pipelines for big data. The iterative nature of many analysis and machine learning algorithms, however, is still a challenge for current systems. While certain types of bulk iterative algorithms are supported by novel dataflow frameworks, these systems cannot exploit computational dependencies present in many algorithms, such as graph algorithms. As a result, these algorithms are inefficiently executed and have led to specialized systems based on other paradigms, such as message passing or shared memory. We propose a method to integrate incremental iterations, a form of workset iterations, with parallel dataflows. After showing how to integrate bulk iterations into a dataflow system and its optimizer, we present an extension to the programming model for incremental iterations. The extension alleviates for the lack of mutable state in dataflows and allows for exploiting the sparse computational dependencies inherent in many iterative algorithms. The evaluation of a prototypical implementation shows that those aspects lead to up to two orders of magnitude speedup in algorithm runtime, when exploited. In our experiments, the improved dataflow system is highly competitive with specialized systems while maintaining a transparent and unified dataflow abstraction.
1208.0089
REX: Recursive, Delta-Based Data-Centric Computation
cs.DB
In today's Web and social network environments, query workloads include ad hoc and OLAP queries, as well as iterative algorithms that analyze data relationships (e.g., link analysis, clustering, learning). Modern DBMSs support ad hoc and OLAP queries, but most are not robust enough to scale to large clusters. Conversely, "cloud" platforms like MapReduce execute chains of batch tasks across clusters in a fault tolerant way, but have too much overhead to support ad hoc queries. Moreover, both classes of platform incur significant overhead in executing iterative data analysis algorithms. Most such iterative algorithms repeatedly refine portions of their answers, until some convergence criterion is reached. However, general cloud platforms typically must reprocess all data in each step. DBMSs that support recursive SQL are more efficient in that they propagate only the changes in each step -- but they still accumulate each iteration's state, even if it is no longer useful. User-defined functions are also typically harder to write for DBMSs than for cloud platforms. We seek to unify the strengths of both styles of platforms, with a focus on supporting iterative computations in which changes, in the form of deltas, are propagated from iteration to iteration, and state is efficiently updated in an extensible way. We present a programming model oriented around deltas, describe how we execute and optimize such programs in our REX runtime system, and validate that our platform also handles failures gracefully. We experimentally validate our techniques, and show speedups over the competing methods ranging from 2.5 to nearly 100 times.
1208.0090
K-Reach: Who is in Your Small World
cs.DB
We study the problem of answering k-hop reachability queries in a directed graph, i.e., whether there exists a directed path of length k, from a source query vertex to a target query vertex in the input graph. The problem of k-hop reachability is a general problem of the classic reachability (where k=infinity). Existing indexes for processing classic reachability queries, as well as for processing shortest path queries, are not applicable or not efficient for processing k-hop reachability queries. We propose an index for processing k-hop reachability queries, which is simple in design and efficient to construct. Our experimental results on a wide range of real datasets show that our index is more efficient than the state-of-the-art indexes even for processing classic reachability queries, for which these indexes are primarily designed. We also show that our index is efficient in answering k-hop reachability queries.
1208.0091
Performance Guarantees for Distributed Reachability Queries
cs.DB
In the real world a graph is often fragmented and distributed across different sites. This highlights the need for evaluating queries on distributed graphs. This paper proposes distributed evaluation algorithms for three classes of queries: reachability for determining whether one node can reach another, bounded reachability for deciding whether there exists a path of a bounded length between a pair of nodes, and regular reachability for checking whether there exists a path connecting two nodes such that the node labels on the path form a string in a given regular expression. We develop these algorithms based on partial evaluation, to explore parallel computation. When evaluating a query Q on a distributed graph G, we show that these algorithms possess the following performance guarantees, no matter how G is fragmented and distributed: (1) each site is visited only once; (2) the total network traffic is determined by the size of Q and the fragmentation of G, independent of the size of G; and (3) the response time is decided by the largest fragment of G rather than the entire G. In addition, we show that these algorithms can be readily implemented in the MapReduce framework. Using synthetic and real-life data, we experimentally verify that these algorithms are scalable on large graphs, regardless of how the graphs are distributed.
1208.0092
Efficient Indexing and Querying over Syntactically Annotated Trees
cs.DB
Natural language text corpora are often available as sets of syntactically parsed trees. A wide range of expressive tree queries are possible over such parsed trees that open a new avenue in searching over natural language text. They not only allow for querying roles and relationships within sentences, but also improve search effectiveness compared to flat keyword queries. One major drawback of current systems supporting querying over parsed text is the performance of evaluating queries over large data. In this paper we propose a novel indexing scheme over unique subtrees as index keys. We also propose a novel root-split coding scheme that stores subtree structural information only partially, thus reducing index size and improving querying performance. Our extensive set of experiments show that root-split coding reduces the index size of any interval coding which stores individual node numbers by a factor of 50% to 80%, depending on the sizes of subtrees indexed. Moreover, We show that our index using root-split coding, outperforms previous approaches by at least an order of magnitude in terms of the response time of queries.
1208.0093
PrivBasis: Frequent Itemset Mining with Differential Privacy
cs.DB
The discovery of frequent itemsets can serve valuable economic and research purposes. Releasing discovered frequent itemsets, however, presents privacy challenges. In this paper, we study the problem of how to perform frequent itemset mining on transaction databases while satisfying differential privacy. We propose an approach, called PrivBasis, which leverages a novel notion called basis sets. A theta-basis set has the property that any itemset with frequency higher than theta is a subset of some basis. We introduce algorithms for privately constructing a basis set and then using it to find the most frequent itemsets. Experiments show that our approach greatly outperforms the current state of the art.
1208.0094
Low-Rank Mechanism: Optimizing Batch Queries under Differential Privacy
cs.DB
Differential privacy is a promising privacy-preserving paradigm for statistical query processing over sensitive data. It works by injecting random noise into each query result, such that it is provably hard for the adversary to infer the presence or absence of any individual record from the published noisy results. The main objective in differentially private query processing is to maximize the accuracy of the query results, while satisfying the privacy guarantees. Previous work, notably the matrix mechanism, has suggested that processing a batch of correlated queries as a whole can potentially achieve considerable accuracy gains, compared to answering them individually. However, as we point out in this paper, the matrix mechanism is mainly of theoretical interest; in particular, several inherent problems in its design limit its accuracy in practice, which almost never exceeds that of naive methods. In fact, we are not aware of any existing solution that can effectively optimize a query batch under differential privacy. Motivated by this, we propose the Low-Rank Mechanism (LRM), the first practical differentially private technique for answering batch queries with high accuracy, based on a low rank approximation of the workload matrix. We prove that the accuracy provided by LRM is close to the theoretical lower bound for any mechanism to answer a batch of queries under differential privacy. Extensive experiments using real data demonstrate that LRM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art query processing solutions under differential privacy, by large margins.
1208.0095
The Simmel effect and babies names
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Simulations of the Simmel effect are performed for agents in a scale-free social network. The social hierarchy of an agent is determined by the degree of her node. Particular features, once selected by a highly connected agent, became common in lower class but soon fall out of fashion and extinct. Numerical results reflect the dynamics of frequency of American babies names in 1880-2011.
1208.0107
Search Me If You Can: Privacy-preserving Location Query Service
cs.CR cs.SI
Location-Based Service (LBS) becomes increasingly popular with the dramatic growth of smartphones and social network services (SNS), and its context-rich functionalities attract considerable users. Many LBS providers use users' location information to offer them convenience and useful functions. However, the LBS could greatly breach personal privacy because location itself contains much information. Hence, preserving location privacy while achieving utility from it is still an challenging question now. This paper tackles this non-trivial challenge by designing a suite of novel fine-grained Privacy-preserving Location Query Protocol (PLQP). Our protocol allows different levels of location query on encrypted location information for different users, and it is efficient enough to be applied in mobile platforms.
1208.0129
Oracle inequalities for computationally adaptive model selection
stat.ML cs.LG
We analyze general model selection procedures using penalized empirical loss minimization under computational constraints. While classical model selection approaches do not consider computational aspects of performing model selection, we argue that any practical model selection procedure must not only trade off estimation and approximation error, but also the computational effort required to compute empirical minimizers for different function classes. We provide a framework for analyzing such problems, and we give algorithms for model selection under a computational budget. These algorithms satisfy oracle inequalities that show that the risk of the selected model is not much worse than if we had devoted all of our omputational budget to the optimal function class.
1208.0153
Personalization in Geographic information systems: A survey
cs.IR cs.DB
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are widely used in different domains of applications, such as maritime navigation, museums visits and route planning, as well as ecological, demographical and economical applications. Nowadays, organizations need sophisticated and adapted GIS-based Decision Support System (DSS) to get quick access to relevant information and to analyze data with respect to geographic information, represented not only as spatial objects, but also as maps. Several research works on GIS personalization was proposed: Face the great challenge of developing both the theory and practice to provide personalization GIS visualization systems. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of literature on presented GIS personalization approaches. A benchmarking study of GIS personalization methods is proposed. Several evaluation criteria are used to identify the existence of trends as well as potential needs for further investigations.
1208.0163
Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Multidimensional Data Modelling: A Survey
cs.DB
Data warehouse store and provide access to large volume of historical data supporting the strategic decisions of organisations. Data warehouse is based on a multidimensional model which allow to express user's needs for supporting the decision making process. Since it is estimated that 80% of data used for decision making has a spatial or location component [1, 2], spatial data have been widely integrated in Data Warehouses and in OLAP systems. Extending a multidimensional data model by the inclusion of spatial data provides a concise and organised spatial datawarehouse representation. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of litterature on developed and suggested spatial and spatio-temporel multidimensional models. A benchmarking study of the proposed models is presented. Several evaluation criterias are used to identify the existence of trends as well as potential needs for further investigations.
1208.0186
Opportunistic Forwarding with Partial Centrality
cs.NI cs.SI
In opportunistic networks, the use of social metrics (e.g., degree, closeness and betweenness centrality) of human mobility network, has recently been shown to be an effective solution to improve the performance of opportunistic forwarding algorithms. Most of the current social-based forwarding schemes exploit some globally defined node centrality, resulting in a bias towards the most popular nodes. However, these nodes may not be appropriate relay candidates for some target nodes, because they may have low importance relative to these subsets of target nodes. In this paper, to improve the opportunistic forwarding efficiency, we exploit the relative importance (called partial centrality) of a node with respect to a group of nodes. We design a new opportunistic forwarding scheme, opportunistic forwarding with partial centrality (OFPC), and theoretically quantify the influence of the partial centrality on the data forwarding performance using graph spectrum. By applying our scheme on three real opportunistic networking scenarios, our extensive evaluations show that our scheme achieves significantly better mean delivery delay and cost compared to the state-of-the-art works, while achieving delivery ratios sufficiently close to those by Epidemic under different TTL requirements.
1208.0193
Matched Decoding for Punctured Convolutional Encoded Transmission Over ISI-Channels
cs.IT math.IT
Matched decoding is a technique that enables the efficient maximum-likelihood sequence estimation of convolutionally encoded PAM-transmission over ISI-channels. Recently, we have shown that the super-trellis of encoder and channel can be described with significantly fewer states without loss in Euclidean distance, by introducing a non-linear representation of the trellis. This paper extends the matched decoding concept to punctured convolutional codes and introduces a time-variant, non-linear trellis description.
1208.0200
Adaptation of pedagogical resources description standard (LOM) with the specificity of Arabic language
cs.CL
In this article we focus firstly on the principle of pedagogical indexing and characteristics of Arabic language and secondly on the possibility of adapting the standard for describing learning resources used (the LOM and its Application Profiles) with learning conditions such as the educational levels of students and their levels of understanding,... the educational context with taking into account the representative elements of text, text length, ... in particular, we put in relief the specificity of the Arabic language which is a complex language, characterized by its flexion, its voyellation and agglutination.
1208.0203
Towards the Next Generation of Data Warehouse Personalization System: A Survey and a Comparative Study
cs.DB
Multidimensional databases are a great asset for decision making. Their users express complex OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) queries, often returning huge volumes of facts, sometimes providing little or no information. Furthermore, due to the huge volume of historical data stored in DWs, the OLAP applications may return a big amount of irrelevant information that could make the data exploration process not efficient and tardy. OLAP personalization systems play a major role in reducing the effort of decision-makers to find the most interesting information. Several works dealing with OLAP personalization were presented in the last few years. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of literature on OLAP personalization approaches. A benchmarking study of OLAP personalization methods is proposed. Several evaluation criteria are used to identify the existence of trends as well as potential needs for further investigations.
1208.0219
Functional Mechanism: Regression Analysis under Differential Privacy
cs.DB
\epsilon-differential privacy is the state-of-the-art model for releasing sensitive information while protecting privacy. Numerous methods have been proposed to enforce epsilon-differential privacy in various analytical tasks, e.g., regression analysis. Existing solutions for regression analysis, however, are either limited to non-standard types of regression or unable to produce accurate regression results. Motivated by this, we propose the Functional Mechanism, a differentially private method designed for a large class of optimization-based analyses. The main idea is to enforce epsilon-differential privacy by perturbing the objective function of the optimization problem, rather than its results. As case studies, we apply the functional mechanism to address two most widely used regression models, namely, linear regression and logistic regression. Both theoretical analysis and thorough experimental evaluations show that the functional mechanism is highly effective and efficient, and it significantly outperforms existing solutions.
1208.0220
Publishing Microdata with a Robust Privacy Guarantee
cs.DB
Today, the publication of microdata poses a privacy threat. Vast research has striven to define the privacy condition that microdata should satisfy before it is released, and devise algorithms to anonymize the data so as to achieve this condition. Yet, no method proposed to date explicitly bounds the percentage of information an adversary gains after seeing the published data for each sensitive value therein. This paper introduces beta-likeness, an appropriately robust privacy model for microdata anonymization, along with two anonymization schemes designed therefor, the one based on generalization, and the other based on perturbation. Our model postulates that an adversary's confidence on the likelihood of a certain sensitive-attribute (SA) value should not increase, in relative difference terms, by more than a predefined threshold. Our techniques aim to satisfy a given beta threshold with little information loss. We experimentally demonstrate that (i) our model provides an effective privacy guarantee in a way that predecessor models cannot, (ii) our generalization scheme is more effective and efficient in its task than methods adapting algorithms for the k-anonymity model, and (iii) our perturbation method outperforms a baseline approach. Moreover, we discuss in detail the resistance of our model and methods to attacks proposed in previous research.
1208.0221
Measuring Two-Event Structural Correlations on Graphs
cs.DB
Real-life graphs usually have various kinds of events happening on them, e.g., product purchases in online social networks and intrusion alerts in computer networks. The occurrences of events on the same graph could be correlated, exhibiting either attraction or repulsion. Such structural correlations can reveal important relationships between different events. Unfortunately, correlation relationships on graph structures are not well studied and cannot be captured by traditional measures. In this work, we design a novel measure for assessing two-event structural correlations on graphs. Given the occurrences of two events, we choose uniformly a sample of "reference nodes" from the vicinity of all event nodes and employ the Kendall's tau rank correlation measure to compute the average concordance of event density changes. Significance can be efficiently assessed by tau's nice property of being asymptotically normal under the null hypothesis. In order to compute the measure in large scale networks, we develop a scalable framework using different sampling strategies. The complexity of these strategies is analyzed. Experiments on real graph datasets with both synthetic and real events demonstrate that the proposed framework is not only efficacious, but also efficient and scalable.
1208.0222
Ranking Large Temporal Data
cs.DB
Ranking temporal data has not been studied until recently, even though ranking is an important operator (being promoted as a firstclass citizen) in database systems. However, only the instant top-k queries on temporal data were studied in, where objects with the k highest scores at a query time instance t are to be retrieved. The instant top-k definition clearly comes with limitations (sensitive to outliers, difficult to choose a meaningful query time t). A more flexible and general ranking operation is to rank objects based on the aggregation of their scores in a query interval, which we dub the aggregate top-k query on temporal data. For example, return the top-10 weather stations having the highest average temperature from 10/01/2010 to 10/07/2010; find the top-20 stocks having the largest total transaction volumes from 02/05/2011 to 02/07/2011. This work presents a comprehensive study to this problem by designing both exact and approximate methods (with approximation quality guarantees). We also provide theoretical analysis on the construction cost, the index size, the update and the query costs of each approach. Extensive experiments on large real datasets clearly demonstrate the efficiency, the effectiveness, and the scalability of our methods compared to the baseline methods.
1208.0223
The bistable brain: a neuronal model with symbiotic interactions
nlin.CD cs.NE math.DS
In general, the behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary components can not be understood nor extrapolated from the properties of a few components. The brain is a good example of this type of networked systems where some patterns of behavior are observed independently of the topology and of the number of coupled units. Following this insight, we have studied the dynamics of different aggregates of logistic maps according to a particular {\it symbiotic} coupling scheme that imitates the neuronal excitation coupling. All these aggregates show some common dynamical properties, concretely a bistable behavior that is reported here with a certain detail. Thus, the qualitative relationship with neural systems is suggested through a naive model of many of such networked logistic maps whose behavior mimics the waking-sleeping bistability displayed by brain systems. Due to its relevance, some regions of multistability are determined and sketched for all these logistic models.
1208.0224
Compacting Transactional Data in Hybrid OLTP & OLAP Databases
cs.DB
Growing main memory sizes have facilitated database management systems that keep the entire database in main memory. The drastic performance improvements that came along with these in-memory systems have made it possible to reunite the two areas of online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP): An emerging class of hybrid OLTP and OLAP database systems allows to process analytical queries directly on the transactional data. By offering arbitrarily current snapshots of the transactional data for OLAP, these systems enable real-time business intelligence. Despite memory sizes of several Terabytes in a single commodity server, RAM is still a precious resource: Since free memory can be used for intermediate results in query processing, the amount of memory determines query performance to a large extent. Consequently, we propose the compaction of memory-resident databases. Compaction consists of two tasks: First, separating the mutable working set from the immutable "frozen" data. Second, compressing the immutable data and optimizing it for efficient, memory-consumption-friendly snapshotting. Our approach reorganizes and compresses transactional data online and yet hardly affects the mission-critical OLTP throughput. This is achieved by unburdening the OLTP threads from all additional processing and performing these tasks asynchronously.
1208.0225
Processing a Trillion Cells per Mouse Click
cs.DB
Column-oriented database systems have been a real game changer for the industry in recent years. Highly tuned and performant systems have evolved that provide users with the possibility of answering ad hoc queries over large datasets in an interactive manner. In this paper we present the column-oriented datastore developed as one of the central components of PowerDrill. It combines the advantages of columnar data layout with other known techniques (such as using composite range partitions) and extensive algorithmic engineering on key data structures. The main goal of the latter being to reduce the main memory footprint and to increase the efficiency in processing typical user queries. In this combination we achieve large speed-ups. These enable a highly interactive Web UI where it is common that a single mouse click leads to processing a trillion values in the underlying dataset.
1208.0227
OLTP on Hardware Islands
cs.DB
Modern hardware is abundantly parallel and increasingly heterogeneous. The numerous processing cores have non-uniform access latencies to the main memory and to the processor caches, which causes variability in the communication costs. Unfortunately, database systems mostly assume that all processing cores are the same and that microarchitecture differences are not significant enough to appear in critical database execution paths. As we demonstrate in this paper, however, hardware heterogeneity does appear in the critical path and conventional database architectures achieve suboptimal and even worse, unpredictable performance. We perform a detailed performance analysis of OLTP deployments in servers with multiple cores per CPU (multicore) and multiple CPUs per server (multisocket). We compare different database deployment strategies where we vary the number and size of independent database instances running on a single server, from a single shared-everything instance to fine-grained shared-nothing configurations. We quantify the impact of non-uniform hardware on various deployments by (a) examining how efficiently each deployment uses the available hardware resources and (b) measuring the impact of distributed transactions and skewed requests on different workloads. Finally, we argue in favor of shared-nothing deployments that are topology- and workload-aware and take advantage of fast on-chip communication between islands of cores on the same socket.
1208.0228
Initial Version of State Transition Algorithm
math.OC cs.NE
In terms of the concepts of state and state transition, a new algorithm-State Transition Algorithm (STA) is proposed in order to probe into classical and intelligent optimization algorithms. On the basis of state and state transition, it becomes much simpler and easier to understand. As for continuous function optimization problems, three special operators named rotation, translation and expansion are presented. While for discrete function optimization problems, an operator called general elementary transformation is introduced. Finally, with 4 common benchmark continuous functions and a discrete problem used to test the performance of STA, the experiment shows that STA is a promising algorithm due to its good search capability.
1208.0270
Serializability, not Serial: Concurrency Control and Availability in Multi-Datacenter Datastores
cs.DB
We present a framework for concurrency control and availability in multi-datacenter datastores. While we consider Google's Megastore as our motivating example, we define general abstractions for key components, making our solution extensible to any system that satisfies the abstraction properties. We first develop and analyze a transaction management and replication protocol based on a straightforward implementation of the Paxos algorithm. Our investigation reveals that this protocol acts as a concurrency prevention mechanism rather than a concurrency control mechanism. We then propose an enhanced protocol called Paxos with Combination and Promotion (Paxos-CP) that provides true transaction concurrency while requiring the same per instance message complexity as the basic Paxos protocol. Finally, we compare the performance of Paxos and Paxos-CP in a multi-datacenter experimental study, and we demonstrate that Paxos-CP results in significantly fewer aborted transactions than basic Paxos.
1208.0271
Automatic Partitioning of Database Applications
cs.DB
Database-backed applications are nearly ubiquitous in our daily lives. Applications that make many small accesses to the database create two challenges for developers: increased latency and wasted resources from numerous network round trips. A well-known technique to improve transactional database application performance is to convert part of the application into stored procedures that are executed on the database server. Unfortunately, this conversion is often difficult. In this paper we describe Pyxis, a system that takes database-backed applications and automatically partitions their code into two pieces, one of which is executed on the application server and the other on the database server. Pyxis profiles the application and server loads, statically analyzes the code's dependencies, and produces a partitioning that minimizes the number of control transfers as well as the amount of data sent during each transfer. Our experiments using TPC-C and TPC-W show that Pyxis is able to generate partitions with up to 3x reduction in latency and 1.7x improvement in throughput when compared to a traditional non-partitioned implementation and has comparable performance to that of a custom stored procedure implementation.
1208.0273
Whom to Ask? Jury Selection for Decision Making Tasks on Micro-blog Services
cs.DB
It is universal to see people obtain knowledge on micro-blog services by asking others decision making questions. In this paper, we study the Jury Selection Problem(JSP) by utilizing crowdsourcing for decision making tasks on micro-blog services. Specifically, the problem is to enroll a subset of crowd under a limited budget, whose aggregated wisdom via Majority Voting scheme has the lowest probability of drawing a wrong answer(Jury Error Rate-JER). Due to various individual error-rates of the crowd, the calculation of JER is non-trivial. Firstly, we explicitly state that JER is the probability when the number of wrong jurors is larger than half of the size of a jury. To avoid the exponentially increasing calculation of JER, we propose two efficient algorithms and an effective bounding technique. Furthermore, we study the Jury Selection Problem on two crowdsourcing models, one is for altruistic users(AltrM) and the other is for incentive-requiring users(PayM) who require extra payment when enrolled into a task. For the AltrM model, we prove the monotonicity of JER on individual error rate and propose an efficient exact algorithm for JSP. For the PayM model, we prove the NP-hardness of JSP on PayM and propose an efficient greedy-based heuristic algorithm. Finally, we conduct a series of experiments to investigate the traits of JSP, and validate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed algorithms on both synthetic and real micro-blog data.
1208.0274
ALAE: Accelerating Local Alignment with Affine Gap Exactly in Biosequence Databases
cs.DB
We study the problem of local alignment, which is finding pairs of similar subsequences with gaps. The problem exists in biosequence databases. BLAST is a typical software for finding local alignment based on heuristic, but could miss results. Using the Smith-Waterman algorithm, we can find all local alignments in O(mn) time, where m and n are lengths of a query and a text, respectively. A recent exact approach BWT-SW improves the complexity of the Smith-Waterman algorithm under constraints, but still much slower than BLAST. This paper takes on the challenge of designing an accurate and efficient algorithm for evaluating local-alignment searches, especially for long queries. In this paper, we propose an efficient software called ALAE to speed up BWT-SW using a compressed suffix array. ALAE utilizes a family of filtering techniques to prune meaningless calculations and an algorithm for reusing score calculations. We also give a mathematical analysis and show that the upper bound of the total number of calculated entries using ALAE could vary from 4.50mn0.520 to 9.05mn0.896 for random DNA sequences and vary from 8.28mn0.364 to 7.49mn0.723 for random protein sequences. We demonstrate the significant performance improvement of ALAE on BWT-SW using a thorough experimental study on real biosequences. ALAE guarantees correctness and accelerates BLAST for most of parameters.
1208.0275
sDTW: Computing DTW Distances using Locally Relevant Constraints based on Salient Feature Alignments
cs.DB
Many applications generate and consume temporal data and retrieval of time series is a key processing step in many application domains. Dynamic time warping (DTW) distance between time series of size N and M is computed relying on a dynamic programming approach which creates and fills an NxM grid to search for an optimal warp path. Since this can be costly, various heuristics have been proposed to cut away the potentially unproductive portions of the DTW grid. In this paper, we argue that time series often carry structural features that can be used for identifying locally relevant constraints to eliminate redundant work. Relying on this observation, we propose salient feature based sDTW algorithms which first identify robust salient features in the given time series and then find a consistent alignment of these to establish the boundaries for the warp path search. More specifically, we propose alternative fixed core&adaptive width, adaptive core&fixed width, and adaptive core&adaptive width strategies which enforce different constraints reflecting the high level structural characteristics of the series in the data set. Experiment results show that the proposed sDTW algorithms help achieve much higher accuracy in DTWcomputation and time series retrieval than fixed core & fixed width algorithms that do not leverage local features of the given time series.
1208.0276
SCOUT: Prefetching for Latent Feature Following Queries
cs.DB
Today's scientists are quickly moving from in vitro to in silico experimentation: they no longer analyze natural phenomena in a petri dish, but instead they build models and simulate them. Managing and analyzing the massive amounts of data involved in simulations is a major task. Yet, they lack the tools to efficiently work with data of this size. One problem many scientists share is the analysis of the massive spatial models they build. For several types of analysis they need to interactively follow the structures in the spatial model, e.g., the arterial tree, neuron fibers, etc., and issue range queries along the way. Each query takes long to execute, and the total time for executing a sequence of queries significantly delays data analysis. Prefetching the spatial data reduces the response time considerably, but known approaches do not prefetch with high accuracy. We develop SCOUT, a structure-aware method for prefetching data along interactive spatial query sequences. SCOUT uses an approximate graph model of the structures involved in past queries and attempts to identify what particular structure the user follows. Our experiments with neuroscience data show that SCOUT prefetches with an accuracy from 71% to 92%, which translates to a speedup of 4x-15x. SCOUT also improves the prefetching accuracy on datasets from other scientific domains, such as medicine and biology.
1208.0277
Accelerating Pathology Image Data Cross-Comparison on CPU-GPU Hybrid Systems
cs.DB
As an important application of spatial databases in pathology imaging analysis, cross-comparing the spatial boundaries of a huge amount of segmented micro-anatomic objects demands extremely data- and compute-intensive operations, requiring high throughput at an affordable cost. However, the performance of spatial database systems has not been satisfactory since their implementations of spatial operations cannot fully utilize the power of modern parallel hardware. In this paper, we provide a customized software solution that exploits GPUs and multi-core CPUs to accelerate spatial cross-comparison in a cost-effective way. Our solution consists of an efficient GPU algorithm and a pipelined system framework with task migration support. Extensive experiments with real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution, which improves the performance of spatial cross-comparison by over 18 times compared with a parallelized spatial database approach.
1208.0278
Robust Estimation of Resource Consumption for SQL Queries using Statistical Techniques
cs.DB
The ability to estimate resource consumption of SQL queries is crucial for a number of tasks in a database system such as admission control, query scheduling and costing during query optimization. Recent work has explored the use of statistical techniques for resource estimation in place of the manually constructed cost models used in query optimization. Such techniques, which require as training data examples of resource usage in queries, offer the promise of superior estimation accuracy since they can account for factors such as hardware characteristics of the system or bias in cardinality estimates. However, the proposed approaches lack robustness in that they do not generalize well to queries that are different from the training examples, resulting in significant estimation errors. Our approach aims to address this problem by combining knowledge of database query processing with statistical models. We model resource-usage at the level of individual operators, with different models and features for each operator type, and explicitly model the asymptotic behavior of each operator. This results in significantly better estimation accuracy and the ability to estimate resource usage of arbitrary plans, even when they are very different from the training instances. We validate our approach using various large scale real-life and benchmark workloads on Microsoft SQL Server.
1208.0285
Who Tags What? An Analysis Framework
cs.DB
The rise of Web 2.0 is signaled by sites such as Flickr, del.icio.us, and YouTube, and social tagging is essential to their success. A typical tagging action involves three components, user, item (e.g., photos in Flickr), and tags (i.e., words or phrases). Analyzing how tags are assigned by certain users to certain items has important implications in helping users search for desired information. In this paper, we explore common analysis tasks and propose a dual mining framework for social tagging behavior mining. This framework is centered around two opposing measures, similarity and diversity, being applied to one or more tagging components, and therefore enables a wide range of analysis scenarios such as characterizing similar users tagging diverse items with similar tags, or diverse users tagging similar items with diverse tags, etc. By adopting different concrete measures for similarity and diversity in the framework, we show that a wide range of concrete analysis problems can be defined and they are NP-Complete in general. We design efficient algorithms for solving many of those problems and demonstrate, through comprehensive experiments over real data, that our algorithms significantly out-perform the exact brute-force approach without compromising analysis result quality.
1208.0286
A Generic Framework for Efficient and Effective Subsequence Retrieval
cs.DB
This paper proposes a general framework for matching similar subsequences in both time series and string databases. The matching results are pairs of query subsequences and database subsequences. The framework finds all possible pairs of similar subsequences if the distance measure satisfies the "consistency" property, which is a property introduced in this paper. We show that most popular distance functions, such as the Euclidean distance, DTW, ERP, the Frechet distance for time series, and the Hamming distance and Levenshtein distance for strings, are all "consistent". We also propose a generic index structure for metric spaces named "reference net". The reference net occupies O(n) space, where n is the size of the dataset and is optimized to work well with our framework. The experiments demonstrate the ability of our method to improve retrieval performance when combined with diverse distance measures. The experiments also illustrate that the reference net scales well in terms of space overhead and query time.
1208.0287
Only Aggressive Elephants are Fast Elephants
cs.DB
Yellow elephants are slow. A major reason is that they consume their inputs entirely before responding to an elephant rider's orders. Some clever riders have trained their yellow elephants to only consume parts of the inputs before responding. However, the teaching time to make an elephant do that is high. So high that the teaching lessons often do not pay off. We take a different approach. We make elephants aggressive; only this will make them very fast. We propose HAIL (Hadoop Aggressive Indexing Library), an enhancement of HDFS and Hadoop MapReduce that dramatically improves runtimes of several classes of MapReduce jobs. HAIL changes the upload pipeline of HDFS in order to create different clustered indexes on each data block replica. An interesting feature of HAIL is that we typically create a win-win situation: we improve both data upload to HDFS and the runtime of the actual Hadoop MapReduce job. In terms of data upload, HAIL improves over HDFS by up to 60% with the default replication factor of three. In terms of query execution, we demonstrate that HAIL runs up to 68x faster than Hadoop. In our experiments, we use six clusters including physical and EC2 clusters of up to 100 nodes. A series of scalability experiments also demonstrates the superiority of HAIL.