id
stringlengths
9
16
title
stringlengths
4
278
categories
stringlengths
5
104
abstract
stringlengths
6
4.09k
1208.0288
Multiple Location Profiling for Users and Relationships from Social Network and Content
cs.DB
Users' locations are important for many applications such as personalized search and localized content delivery. In this paper, we study the problem of profiling Twitter users' locations with their following network and tweets. We propose a multiple location profiling model (MLP), which has three key features: 1) it formally models how likely a user follows another user given their locations and how likely a user tweets a venue given his location, 2) it fundamentally captures that a user has multiple locations and his following relationships and tweeted venues can be related to any of his locations, and some of them are even noisy, and 3) it novelly utilizes the home locations of some users as partial supervision. As a result, MLP not only discovers users' locations accurately and completely, but also "explains" each following relationship by revealing users' true locations in the relationship. Experiments on a large-scale data set demonstrate those advantages. Particularly, 1) for predicting users' home locations, MLP successfully places 62% users and outperforms two state-of-the-art methods by 10% in accuracy, 2) for discovering users' multiple locations, MLP improves the baseline methods by 14% in recall, and 3) for explaining following relationships, MLP achieves 57% accuracy.
1208.0289
Flash-based Extended Cache for Higher Throughput and Faster Recovery
cs.DB
Considering the current price gap between disk and flash memory drives, for applications dealing with large scale data, it will be economically more sensible to use flash memory drives to supplement disk drives rather than to replace them. This paper presents FaCE, which is a new low-overhead caching strategy that uses flash memory as an extension to the DRAM buffer. FaCE aims at improving the transaction throughput as well as shortening the recovery time from a system failure. To achieve the goals, we propose two novel algorithms for flash cache management, namely, Multi-Version FIFO replacement and Group Second Chance. One striking result from FaCE is that using a small flash memory drive as a caching device could deliver even higher throughput than using a large flash memory drive to store the entire database tables. This was possible due to flash write optimization as well as disk access reduction obtained by the FaCE caching methods. In addition, FaCE takes advantage of the non-volatility of flash memory to fully support database recovery by extending the scope of a persistent database to include the data pages stored in the flash cache. We have implemented FaCE in the PostgreSQL open source database server and demonstrated its effectiveness for TPC-C benchmarks.
1208.0290
Don't Thrash: How to Cache Your Hash on Flash
cs.DB
This paper presents new alternatives to the well-known Bloom filter data structure. The Bloom filter, a compact data structure supporting set insertion and membership queries, has found wide application in databases, storage systems, and networks. Because the Bloom filter performs frequent random reads and writes, it is used almost exclusively in RAM, limiting the size of the sets it can represent. This paper first describes the quotient filter, which supports the basic operations of the Bloom filter, achieving roughly comparable performance in terms of space and time, but with better data locality. Operations on the quotient filter require only a small number of contiguous accesses. The quotient filter has other advantages over the Bloom filter: it supports deletions, it can be dynamically resized, and two quotient filters can be efficiently merged. The paper then gives two data structures, the buffered quotient filter and the cascade filter, which exploit the quotient filter advantages and thus serve as SSD-optimized alternatives to the Bloom filter. The cascade filter has better asymptotic I/O performance than the buffered quotient filter, but the buffered quotient filter outperforms the cascade filter on small to medium data sets. Both data structures significantly outperform recently-proposed SSD-optimized Bloom filter variants, such as the elevator Bloom filter, buffered Bloom filter, and forest-structured Bloom filter. In experiments, the cascade filter and buffered quotient filter performed insertions 8.6-11 times faster than the fastest Bloom filter variant and performed lookups 0.94-2.56 times faster.
1208.0291
Learning Expressive Linkage Rules using Genetic Programming
cs.DB
A central problem in data integration and data cleansing is to find entities in different data sources that describe the same real-world object. Many existing methods for identifying such entities rely on explicit linkage rules which specify the conditions that entities must fulfill in order to be considered to describe the same real-world object. In this paper, we present the GenLink algorithm for learning expressive linkage rules from a set of existing reference links using genetic programming. The algorithm is capable of generating linkage rules which select discriminative properties for comparison, apply chains of data transformations to normalize property values, choose appropriate distance measures and thresholds and combine the results of multiple comparisons using non-linear aggregation functions. Our experiments show that the GenLink algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art genetic programming approach to learning linkage rules recently presented by Carvalho et. al. and is capable of learning linkage rules which achieve a similar accuracy as human written rules for the same problem.
1208.0292
Mining Frequent Itemsets over Uncertain Databases
cs.DB
In recent years, due to the wide applications of uncertain data, mining frequent itemsets over uncertain databases has attracted much attention. In uncertain databases, the support of an itemset is a random variable instead of a fixed occurrence counting of this itemset. Thus, unlike the corresponding problem in deterministic databases where the frequent itemset has a unique definition, the frequent itemset under uncertain environments has two different definitions so far. The first definition, referred as the expected support-based frequent itemset, employs the expectation of the support of an itemset to measure whether this itemset is frequent. The second definition, referred as the probabilistic frequent itemset, uses the probability of the support of an itemset to measure its frequency. Thus, existing work on mining frequent itemsets over uncertain databases is divided into two different groups and no study is conducted to comprehensively compare the two different definitions. In addition, since no uniform experimental platform exists, current solutions for the same definition even generate inconsistent results. In this paper, we firstly aim to clarify the relationship between the two different definitions. Through extensive experiments, we verify that the two definitions have a tight connection and can be unified together when the size of data is large enough. Secondly, we provide baseline implementations of eight existing representative algorithms and test their performances with uniform measures fairly. Finally, according to the fair tests over many different benchmark data sets, we clarify several existing inconsistent conclusions and discuss some new findings.
1208.0293
The Distributed Ontology Language (DOL): Use Cases, Syntax, and Extensibility
cs.AI cs.DL cs.LO
The Distributed Ontology Language (DOL) is currently being standardized within the OntoIOp (Ontology Integration and Interoperability) activity of ISO/TC 37/SC 3. It aims at providing a unified framework for (1) ontologies formalized in heterogeneous logics, (2) modular ontologies, (3) links between ontologies, and (4) annotation of ontologies. This paper presents the current state of DOL's standardization. It focuses on use cases where distributed ontologies enable interoperability and reusability. We demonstrate relevant features of the DOL syntax and semantics and explain how these integrate into existing knowledge engineering environments.
1208.0318
Artificial Neural Network Based Prediction of Optimal Pseudo-Damping and Meta-Damping in Oscillatory Fractional Order Dynamical Systems
cs.SY cs.NE
This paper investigates typical behaviors like damped oscillations in fractional order (FO) dynamical systems. Such response occurs due to the presence of, what is conceived as, pseudo-damping and meta-damping in some special class of FO systems. Here, approximation of such damped oscillation in FO systems with the conventional notion of integer order damping and time constant has been carried out using Genetic Algorithm (GA). Next, a multilayer feed-forward Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has been trained using the GA based results to predict the optimal pseudo and meta-damping from knowledge of the maximum order or number of terms in the FO dynamical system.
1208.0326
Logarithmic Lipschitz norms and diffusion-induced instability
cs.SY math.AP
This paper proves that contractive ordinary differential equation systems remain contractive when diffusion is added. Thus, diffusive instabilities, in the sense of the Turing phenomenon, cannot arise for such systems. An important biochemical system is shown to satisfy the required conditions.
1208.0353
Signal Space CoSaMP for Sparse Recovery with Redundant Dictionaries
cs.IT math.IT
Compressive sensing (CS) has recently emerged as a powerful framework for acquiring sparse signals. The bulk of the CS literature has focused on the case where the acquired signal has a sparse or compressible representation in an orthonormal basis. In practice, however, there are many signals that cannot be sparsely represented or approximated using an orthonormal basis, but that do have sparse representations in a redundant dictionary. Standard results in CS can sometimes be extended to handle this case provided that the dictionary is sufficiently incoherent or well-conditioned, but these approaches fail to address the case of a truly redundant or overcomplete dictionary. In this paper we describe a variant of the iterative recovery algorithm CoSaMP for this more challenging setting. We utilize the D-RIP, a condition on the sensing matrix analogous to the well-known restricted isometry property. In contrast to prior work, the method and analysis are "signal-focused"; that is, they are oriented around recovering the signal rather than its dictionary coefficients. Under the assumption that we have a near-optimal scheme for projecting vectors in signal space onto the model family of candidate sparse signals, we provide provable recovery guarantees. Developing a practical algorithm that can provably compute the required near-optimal projections remains a significant open problem, but we include simulation results using various heuristics that empirically exhibit superior performance to traditional recovery algorithms.
1208.0359
An Automat for the Semantic Processing of Structured Information
cs.IR cs.DL
Using the database of the PuertoTerm project, an indexing system based on the cognitive model of Brigitte Enders was built. By analyzing the cognitive strategies of three abstractors, we built an automat that serves to simulate human indexing processes. The automat allows the texts integrated in the system to be assessed, evaluated and grouped by means of the bipartite spectral graph partitioning algorithm, which also permits visualization of the terms and the documents. The system features an ontology and a database to enhance its operativity. As a result of the application, we achieved better rates of exhaustivity in the indexing of documents, as well as greater precision and retrieval of information, with high levels of efficiency.
1208.0378
Fast Planar Correlation Clustering for Image Segmentation
cs.CV cs.DS cs.LG stat.ML
We describe a new optimization scheme for finding high-quality correlation clusterings in planar graphs that uses weighted perfect matching as a subroutine. Our method provides lower-bounds on the energy of the optimal correlation clustering that are typically fast to compute and tight in practice. We demonstrate our algorithm on the problem of image segmentation where this approach outperforms existing global optimization techniques in minimizing the objective and is competitive with the state of the art in producing high-quality segmentations.
1208.0385
A phase-sensitive method for filtering on the sphere
math.RT cs.CV
This paper examines filtering on a sphere, by first examining the roles of spherical harmonic magnitude and phase. We show that phase is more important than magnitude in determining the structure of a spherical function. We examine the properties of linear phase shifts in the spherical harmonic domain, which suggest a mechanism for constructing finite-impulse-response (FIR) filters. We show that those filters have desirable properties, such as being associative, mapping spherical functions to spherical functions, allowing directional filtering, and being defined by relatively simple equations. We provide examples of the filters for both spherical and manifold data.
1208.0393
Classification of a family of completely transitive codes
math.CO cs.IT math.IT
The completely regular codes in Hamming graphs have a high degree of combinatorial symmetry and have attracted a lot of interest since their introduction in 1973 by Delsarte. This paper studies the subfamily of completely transitive codes, those in which an automorphism group is transitive on each part of the distance partition. This family is a natural generalisation of the binary completely transitive codes introduced by Sole in 1990. We take the first step towards a classification of these codes, determining those for which the automorphism group is faithful on entries.
1208.0402
Multidimensional Membership Mixture Models
cs.LG stat.ML
We present the multidimensional membership mixture (M3) models where every dimension of the membership represents an independent mixture model and each data point is generated from the selected mixture components jointly. This is helpful when the data has a certain shared structure. For example, three unique means and three unique variances can effectively form a Gaussian mixture model with nine components, while requiring only six parameters to fully describe it. In this paper, we present three instantiations of M3 models (together with the learning and inference algorithms): infinite, finite, and hybrid, depending on whether the number of mixtures is fixed or not. They are built upon Dirichlet process mixture models, latent Dirichlet allocation, and a combination respectively. We then consider two applications: topic modeling and learning 3D object arrangements. Our experiments show that our M3 models achieve better performance using fewer topics than many classic topic models. We also observe that topics from the different dimensions of M3 models are meaningful and orthogonal to each other.
1208.0414
Grey Power Models Based on Optimization of Initial Condition and Model Parameters
cs.SY math.OC
We propose a novel approach to improve prediction accuracy of grey power models including GM(1,1) and grey Verhulst model through optimization of the initial condition and model parameters in this paper. And we propose a modified grey Verhulst model. The new initial condition consists of the first item and the last item of a sequence generated from applying the first-order accumulative generation operator on the sequence of raw data. Weighted coefficients of the first item and the last item in the combination as the initial condition are derived from a method of minimizing error summation of square. We shows that the newly modified grey power model is an extension of the previous optimized GM(1,1) models and grey Verhulst models. The new optimized initial condition can express the principle of new information priority emphasized on in grey systems theory fully. The result of a numerical example indicates that the modified grey model presented in this paper can obtain a better prediction performance than that from the original grey model.
1208.0432
Efficient Point-to-Subspace Query in $\ell^1$ with Application to Robust Object Instance Recognition
cs.CV cs.LG stat.ML
Motivated by vision tasks such as robust face and object recognition, we consider the following general problem: given a collection of low-dimensional linear subspaces in a high-dimensional ambient (image) space, and a query point (image), efficiently determine the nearest subspace to the query in $\ell^1$ distance. In contrast to the naive exhaustive search which entails large-scale linear programs, we show that the computational burden can be cut down significantly by a simple two-stage algorithm: (1) projecting the query and data-base subspaces into lower-dimensional space by random Cauchy matrix, and solving small-scale distance evaluations (linear programs) in the projection space to locate candidate nearest; (2) with few candidates upon independent repetition of (1), getting back to the high-dimensional space and performing exhaustive search. To preserve the identity of the nearest subspace with nontrivial probability, the projection dimension typically is low-order polynomial of the subspace dimension multiplied by logarithm of number of the subspaces (Theorem 2.1). The reduced dimensionality and hence complexity renders the proposed algorithm particularly relevant to vision application such as robust face and object instance recognition that we investigate empirically.
1208.0435
Outage Probability of Dual-Hop Multiple Antenna AF Relaying Systems with Interference
cs.IT math.IT
This paper presents an analytical investigation on the outage performance of dual-hop multiple antenna amplify-and-forward relaying systems in the presence of interference. For both the fixed-gain and variable-gain relaying schemes, exact analytical expressions for the outage probability of the systems are derived. Moreover, simple outage probability approximations at the high signal to noise ratio regime are provided, and the diversity order achieved by the systems are characterized. Our results suggest that variable-gain relaying systems always outperform the corresponding fixed-gain relaying systems. In addition, the fixed-gain relaying schemes only achieve diversity order of one, while the achievable diversity order of the variable-gain relaying scheme depends on the location of the multiple antennas.
1208.0451
Directed Random Markets: Connectivity determines Money
nlin.AO cs.MA q-fin.TR
Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution arises as the statistical equilibrium probability distribution of money among the agents of a closed economic system where random and undirected exchanges are allowed. When considering a model with uniform savings in the exchanges, the final distribution is close to the gamma family. In this work, we implement these exchange rules on networks and we find that these stationary probability distributions are robust and they are not affected by the topology of the underlying network. We introduce a new family of interactions: random but directed ones. In this case, it is found the topology to be determinant and the mean money per economic agent is related to the degree of the node representing the agent in the network. The relation between the mean money per economic agent and its degree is shown to be linear.
1208.0468
Probabilistic interconnection between interdependent networks promotes cooperation in the public goods game
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.GT cs.SI
Most previous works study the evolution of cooperation in a structured population by commonly employing an isolated single network. However, realistic systems are composed of many interdependent networks coupled with each other, rather than the isolated single one. In this paper, we consider a system including two interacting networks with the same size, entangled with each other by the introduction of probabilistic interconnections. We introduce the public goods game into such system, and study how the probabilistic interconnection influences the evolution of cooperation of the whole system and the coupling effect between two layers of interdependent networks. Simulation results show that there exists an intermediate region of interconnection probability leading to the maximum cooperation level in the whole system. Interestingly, we find that at the optimal interconnection probability the fraction of internal links between cooperators in two layers is maximal. Also, even if initially there are no cooperators in one layer of interdependent networks, cooperation can still be promoted by probabilistic interconnection, and the cooperation levels in both layers can more easily reach an agreement at the intermediate interconnection probability. Our results may be helpful in understanding the cooperative behavior in some realistic interdependent networks and thus highlight the importance of probabilistic interconnection on the evolution of cooperation.
1208.0482
The concurrent evolution of cooperation and the population structures that support it
q-bio.PE cs.SI physics.soc-ph
The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits that affect their population structure to some degree. These traits, such as a group size preference, affect the relatedness of interacting individuals and hence the opportunity for kin or group selection. We argue that models that do not explicitly consider their evolution cannot provide a satisfactory account of the origin of cooperation, because they cannot explain how the prerequisite population structures arise. Here, we consider the concurrent evolution of genetic traits that affect population structure, with those that affect social behavior. We show that not only does population structure drive social evolution, as in previous models, but that the opportunity for cooperation can in turn drive the creation of population structures that support it. This occurs through the generation of linkage disequilibrium between socio-behavioral and population-structuring traits, such that direct kin selection on social behavior creates indirect selection pressure on population structure. We illustrate our argument with a model of the concurrent evolution of group size preference and social behavior.
1208.0526
Optimization hardness as transient chaos in an analog approach to constraint satisfaction
cs.CC cs.NE math.DS nlin.CD physics.comp-ph
Boolean satisfiability [1] (k-SAT) is one of the most studied optimization problems, as an efficient (that is, polynomial-time) solution to k-SAT (for $k\geq 3$) implies efficient solutions to a large number of hard optimization problems [2,3]. Here we propose a mapping of k-SAT into a deterministic continuous-time dynamical system with a unique correspondence between its attractors and the k-SAT solution clusters. We show that beyond a constraint density threshold, the analog trajectories become transiently chaotic [4-7], and the boundaries between the basins of attraction [8] of the solution clusters become fractal [7-9], signaling the appearance of optimization hardness [10]. Analytical arguments and simulations indicate that the system always finds solutions for satisfiable formulae even in the frozen regimes of random 3-SAT [11] and of locked occupation problems [12] (considered among the hardest algorithmic benchmarks); a property partly due to the system's hyperbolic [4,13] character. The system finds solutions in polynomial continuous-time, however, at the expense of exponential fluctuations in its energy function.
1208.0541
A hybrid artificial immune system and Self Organising Map for network intrusion detection
cs.NE cs.CR
Network intrusion detection is the problem of detecting unauthorised use of, or access to, computer systems over a network. Two broad approaches exist to tackle this problem: anomaly detection and misuse detection. An anomaly detection system is trained only on examples of normal connections, and thus has the potential to detect novel attacks. However, many anomaly detection systems simply report the anomalous activity, rather than analysing it further in order to report higher-level information that is of more use to a security officer. On the other hand, misuse detection systems recognise known attack patterns, thereby allowing them to provide more detailed information about an intrusion. However, such systems cannot detect novel attacks. A hybrid system is presented in this paper with the aim of combining the advantages of both approaches. Specifically, anomalous network connections are initially detected using an artificial immune system. Connections that are flagged as anomalous are then categorised using a Kohonen Self Organising Map, allowing higher-level information, in the form of cluster membership, to be extracted. Experimental results on the KDD 1999 Cup dataset show a low false positive rate and a detection and classification rate for Denial-of-Service and User-to-Root attacks that is higher than those in a sample of other works.
1208.0562
Learning the Interference Graph of a Wireless Network
cs.IT math.IT
A key challenge in wireless networking is the management of interference between transmissions. Identifying which transmitters interfere with each other is a crucial first step. In this paper we cast the task of estimating the a wireless interference environment as a graph learning problem. Nodes represent transmitters and edges represent the presence of interference between pairs of transmitters. We passively observe network traffic transmission patterns and collect information on transmission successes and failures. We establish bounds on the number of observations (each a snapshot of a network traffic pattern) required to identify the interference graph reliably with high probability. Our main results are scaling laws that tell us how the number of observations must grow in terms of the total number of nodes $n$ in the network and the maximum number of interfering transmitters $d$ per node (maximum node degree). The effects of hidden terminal interference (i.e., interference not detectable via carrier sensing) on the observation requirements are also quantified. We show that to identify the graph it is necessary and sufficient that the observation period grows like $d^2 \log n$, and we propose a practical algorithm that reliably identifies the graph from this length of observation. The observation requirements scale quite mildly with network size, and networks with sparse interference (small $d$) can be identified more rapidly. Computational experiments based on a realistic simulations of the traffic and protocol lend additional support to these conclusions.
1208.0564
Detection of Deviations in Mobile Applications Network Behavior
cs.CR cs.LG
In this paper a novel system for detecting meaningful deviations in a mobile application's network behavior is proposed. The main goal of the proposed system is to protect mobile device users and cellular infrastructure companies from malicious applications. The new system is capable of: (1) identifying malicious attacks or masquerading applications installed on a mobile device, and (2) identifying republishing of popular applications injected with a malicious code. The detection is performed based on the application's network traffic patterns only. For each application two types of models are learned. The first model, local, represents the personal traffic pattern for each user using an application and is learned on the device. The second model, collaborative, represents traffic patterns of numerous users using an application and is learned on the system server. Machine-learning methods are used for learning and detection purposes. This paper focuses on methods utilized for local (i.e., on mobile device) learning and detection of deviations from the normal application's behavior. These methods were implemented and evaluated on Android devices. The evaluation experiments demonstrate that: (1) various applications have specific network traffic patterns and certain application categories can be distinguishable by their network patterns, (2) different levels of deviations from normal behavior can be detected accurately, and (3) local learning is feasible and has a low performance overhead on mobile devices.
1208.0573
Invariants for Homology Classes with Application to Optimal Search and Planning Problem in Robotics
math.AT cs.RO
We consider planning problems on a punctured Euclidean spaces, $\mathbb{R}^D - \widetilde{\mathcal{O}}$, where $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}$ is a collection of obstacles. Such spaces are of frequent occurrence as configuration spaces of robots, where $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}$ represent either physical obstacles that the robots need to avoid (e.g., walls, other robots, etc.) or illegal states (e.g., all legs off-the-ground). As state-planning is translated to path-planning on a configuration space, we collate equivalent plannings via topologically-equivalent paths. This prompts finding or exploring the different homology classes in such environments and finding representative optimal trajectories in each such class. In this paper we start by considering the problem of finding a complete set of easily computable homology class invariants for $(N-1)$-cycles in $(\mathbb{R}^D - \widetilde{\mathcal{O}})$. We achieve this by finding explicit generators of the $(N-1)^{st}$ de Rham cohomology group of this punctured Euclidean space, and using their integrals to define cocycles. The action of those dual cocycles on $(N-1)$-cycles gives the desired complete set of invariants. We illustrate the computation through examples. We further show that, due to the integral approach, this complete set of invariants is well-suited for efficient search-based planning of optimal robot trajectories with topological constraints. Finally we extend this approach to computation of invariants in spaces derived from $(\mathbb{R}^D - \widetilde{\mathcal{O}})$ by collapsing subspace, thereby permitting application to a wider class of non-Euclidean ambient spaces.
1208.0588
Betweenness Preference: Quantifying Correlations in the Topological Dynamics of Temporal Networks
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI
We study correlations in temporal networks and introduce the notion of betweenness preference. It allows to quantify to what extent paths, existing in time-aggregated representations of temporal networks, are actually realizable based on the sequence of interactions. We show that betweenness preference is present in empirical temporal network data and that it influences the length of shortest time-respecting paths. Using four different data sets, we further argue that neglecting betweenness preference leads to wrong conclusions about dynamical processes on temporal networks.
1208.0593
The green grid saga - a green initiative to data centers: a review
cs.SY cs.DC
Information Technology (IT) significantly impacts the environment throughout its life cycle. Most enterprises have not paid enough attention to this until recently. IT's environmental impact can be significantly reduced by behavioral changes, as well as technology changes. Given the relative energy and materials inefficiency of most IT infrastructures today, many green IT initiatives can be easily tackled at no incremental cost. The Green Grid - a non-profit trade organization of IT professionals is such an initiative, formed to initiate the issues of power and cooling in data centers, scattered world-wide. The Green Grid seeks to define best practices for optimizing the efficient consumption of power at IT equipment and facility levels, as well as the manner in which cooling is delivered at these levels hence, providing promising attitude in bringing down the environmental hazards, as well as proceeding to the new era of green computing. In this paper we review the various analytical aspects of The Green Grid upon the data centers and found green facts.
1208.0631
Economics of Electric Vehicle Charging: A Game Theoretic Approach
cs.GT cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, the problem of grid-to-vehicle energy exchange between a smart grid and plug-in electric vehicle groups (PEVGs) is studied using a noncooperative Stackelberg game. In this game, on the one hand, the smart grid that acts as a leader, needs to decide on its price so as to optimize its revenue while ensuring the PEVGs' participation. On the other hand, the PEVGs, which act as followers, need to decide on their charging strategies so as to optimize a tradeoff between the benefit from battery charging and the associated cost. Using variational inequalities, it is shown that the proposed game possesses a socially optimal Stackelberg equilibrium in which the grid optimizes its price while the PEVGs choose their equilibrium strategies. A distributed algorithm that enables the PEVGs and the smart grid to reach this equilibrium is proposed and assessed by extensive simulations. Further, the model is extended to a time-varying case that can incorporate and handle slowly varying environments.
1208.0645
On the Consistency of AUC Pairwise Optimization
cs.LG stat.ML
AUC (area under ROC curve) is an important evaluation criterion, which has been popularly used in many learning tasks such as class-imbalance learning, cost-sensitive learning, learning to rank, etc. Many learning approaches try to optimize AUC, while owing to the non-convexity and discontinuousness of AUC, almost all approaches work with surrogate loss functions. Thus, the consistency of AUC is crucial; however, it has been almost untouched before. In this paper, we provide a sufficient condition for the asymptotic consistency of learning approaches based on surrogate loss functions. Based on this result, we prove that exponential loss and logistic loss are consistent with AUC, but hinge loss is inconsistent. Then, we derive the $q$-norm hinge loss and general hinge loss that are consistent with AUC. We also derive the consistent bounds for exponential loss and logistic loss, and obtain the consistent bounds for many surrogate loss functions under the non-noise setting. Further, we disclose an equivalence between the exponential surrogate loss of AUC and exponential surrogate loss of accuracy, and one straightforward consequence of such finding is that AdaBoost and RankBoost are equivalent.
1208.0651
Fast and Accurate Algorithms for Re-Weighted L1-Norm Minimization
stat.CO cs.IT math.IT stat.ML
To recover a sparse signal from an underdetermined system, we often solve a constrained L1-norm minimization problem. In many cases, the signal sparsity and the recovery performance can be further improved by replacing the L1 norm with a "weighted" L1 norm. Without any prior information about nonzero elements of the signal, the procedure for selecting weights is iterative in nature. Common approaches update the weights at every iteration using the solution of a weighted L1 problem from the previous iteration. In this paper, we present two homotopy-based algorithms that efficiently solve reweighted L1 problems. First, we present an algorithm that quickly updates the solution of a weighted L1 problem as the weights change. Since the solution changes only slightly with small changes in the weights, we develop a homotopy algorithm that replaces the old weights with the new ones in a small number of computationally inexpensive steps. Second, we propose an algorithm that solves a weighted L1 problem by adaptively selecting the weights while estimating the signal. This algorithm integrates the reweighting into every step along the homotopy path by changing the weights according to the changes in the solution and its support, allowing us to achieve a high quality signal reconstruction by solving a single homotopy problem. We compare the performance of both algorithms, in terms of reconstruction accuracy and computational complexity, against state-of-the-art solvers and show that our methods have smaller computational cost. In addition, we will show that the adaptive selection of the weights inside the homotopy often yields reconstructions of higher quality.
1208.0661
Private Quantum Coding for Quantum Relay Networks
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
The relay encoder is an unreliable probabilistic device which is aimed at helping the communication between the sender and the receiver. In this work we show that in the quantum setting the probabilistic behavior can be completely eliminated. We also show how to combine quantum polar encoding with superactivation-assistance in order to achieve reliable and capacity-achieving private communication over noisy quantum relay channels.
1208.0684
Comparative Evaluation of Data Stream Indexing Models
cs.DB
In recent years, the management and processing of data streams has become a topic of active research in several fields of computer science such as, distributed systems, database systems, and data mining. A data stream can be thought of as a transient, continuously increasing sequence of data. In data streams' applications, because of online monitoring, answering to the user's queries should be time and space efficient. In this paper, we consider the special requirements of indexing to determine the performance of different techniques in data stream processing environments. Stream indexing has main differences with approaches in traditional databases. Also, we compare data stream indexing models analytically that can provide a suitable method for stream indexing.
1208.0690
Semantic Web Requirements through Web Mining Techniques
cs.IR cs.DL
In recent years, Semantic web has become a topic of active research in several fields of computer science and has applied in a wide range of domains such as bioinformatics, life sciences, and knowledge management. The two fast-developing research areas semantic web and web mining can complement each other and their different techniques can be used jointly or separately to solve the issues in both areas. In addition, since shifting from current web to semantic web mainly depends on the enhancement of knowledge, web mining can play a key role in facing numerous challenges of this changing. In this paper, we analyze and classify the application of divers web mining techniques in different challenges of the semantic web in form of an analytical framework.
1208.0782
Wisdom of the Crowd: Incorporating Social Influence in Recommendation Models
cs.IR cs.LG cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Recommendation systems have received considerable attention recently. However, most research has been focused on improving the performance of collaborative filtering (CF) techniques. Social networks, indispensably, provide us extra information on people's preferences, and should be considered and deployed to improve the quality of recommendations. In this paper, we propose two recommendation models, for individuals and for groups respectively, based on social contagion and social influence network theory. In the recommendation model for individuals, we improve the result of collaborative filtering prediction with social contagion outcome, which simulates the result of information cascade in the decision-making process. In the recommendation model for groups, we apply social influence network theory to take interpersonal influence into account to form a settled pattern of disagreement, and then aggregate opinions of group members. By introducing the concept of susceptibility and interpersonal influence, the settled rating results are flexible, and inclined to members whose ratings are "essential".
1208.0787
A Random Walk Based Model Incorporating Social Information for Recommendations
cs.IR cs.LG
Collaborative filtering (CF) is one of the most popular approaches to build a recommendation system. In this paper, we propose a hybrid collaborative filtering model based on a Makovian random walk to address the data sparsity and cold start problems in recommendation systems. More precisely, we construct a directed graph whose nodes consist of items and users, together with item content, user profile and social network information. We incorporate user's ratings into edge settings in the graph model. The model provides personalized recommendations and predictions to individuals and groups. The proposed algorithms are evaluated on MovieLens and Epinions datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed methods perform well compared with other graph-based methods, especially in the cold start case.
1208.0803
A Novel Approach of Color Image Hiding using RGB Color planes and DWT
cs.CR cs.CV
This work proposes a wavelet based Steganographic technique for the color image. The true color cover image and the true color secret image both are decomposed into three separate color planes namely R, G and B. Each plane of the images is decomposed into four sub bands using DWT. Each color plane of the secret image is hidden by alpha blending technique in the corresponding sub bands of the respective color planes of the original image. During embedding, secret image is dispersed within the original image depending upon the alpha value. Extraction of the secret image varies according to the alpha value. In this approach the stego image generated is of acceptable level of imperceptibility and distortion compared to the cover image and the overall security is high.
1208.0805
On the control of abelian group codes with information group of prime order
cs.IT math.GR math.IT
Finite State Machine (FSM) model is widely used in the construction of binary convolutional codes. If Z_2={0,1} is the binary mod-2 addition group and (Z_2)^n is the n-times direct product of Z_2, then a binary convolutional encoder, with rate (k/n)< 1 and memory m, is a FSM with (Z_2)^k as inputs group, (Z_2)^n as outputs group and (Z_2)^m as states group. The next state mapping nu:[(Z_2)^k x (Z_2)^m] --> (Z_2)^m is a surjective group homomorphism. The encoding mapping omega:[(Z_2)^k x (Z_2)^m] --> (Z_2)^n is a homomorphism adequately restricted by the trellis graph produced by nu. The binary convolutional code is the family of bi-infinite sequences produced by the binary convolutional encoder. Thus, a convolutional code can be considered as a dynamical system and it is known that well behaved dynamical systems must be necessarily controllable. The generalization of binary convolutional encoders over arbitrary finite groups is made by using the extension of groups, instead of direct product. In this way, given finite groups U,S and Y, a wide-sense homomorphic encoder (WSHE) is a FSM with U as inputs group, S as states group, and Y as outputs group. By denoting (U x S) as the extension of U by S, the next state homomorphism nu:(U x S) --> S needs to be surjective and the encoding homomorphism omega:(U x S) --> Y has restrictions given by the trellis graph produced by nu. The code produced by a WSHE is known as group code. In this work we will study the case when the extension (U x S) is abelian with U being Z_p, p a positive prime number. We will show that this class of WSHEs will produce controllable codes only if the states group S is isomorphic with (Z_p)^j, for some positive integer j.
1208.0806
Cross-conformal predictors
stat.ML cs.LG
This note introduces the method of cross-conformal prediction, which is a hybrid of the methods of inductive conformal prediction and cross-validation, and studies its validity and predictive efficiency empirically.
1208.0848
Learning Theory Approach to Minimum Error Entropy Criterion
cs.LG stat.ML
We consider the minimum error entropy (MEE) criterion and an empirical risk minimization learning algorithm in a regression setting. A learning theory approach is presented for this MEE algorithm and explicit error bounds are provided in terms of the approximation ability and capacity of the involved hypothesis space when the MEE scaling parameter is large. Novel asymptotic analysis is conducted for the generalization error associated with Renyi's entropy and a Parzen window function, to overcome technical difficulties arisen from the essential differences between the classical least squares problems and the MEE setting. A semi-norm and the involved symmetrized least squares error are introduced, which is related to some ranking algorithms.
1208.0864
Statistical Results on Filtering and Epi-convergence for Learning-Based Model Predictive Control
math.OC cs.LG cs.SY
Learning-based model predictive control (LBMPC) is a technique that provides deterministic guarantees on robustness, while statistical identification tools are used to identify richer models of the system in order to improve performance. This technical note provides proofs that elucidate the reasons for our choice of measurement model, as well as giving proofs concerning the stochastic convergence of LBMPC. The first part of this note discusses simultaneous state estimation and statistical identification (or learning) of unmodeled dynamics, for dynamical systems that can be described by ordinary differential equations (ODE's). The second part provides proofs concerning the epi-convergence of different statistical estimators that can be used with the learning-based model predictive control (LBMPC) technique. In particular, we prove results on the statistical properties of a nonparametric estimator that we have designed to have the correct deterministic and stochastic properties for numerical implementation when used in conjunction with LBMPC.
1208.0874
A Projection Argument for Differential Inclusions, with Applications to Persistence of Mass-Action Kinetics
math.DS cs.SY q-bio.MN
Motivated by questions in mass-action kinetics, we introduce the notion of vertexical family of differential inclusions. Defined on open hypercubes, these families are characterized by particular good behavior under projection maps. The motivating examples are certain families of reaction networks -- including reversible, weakly reversible, endotactic, and strongly endotactic reaction networks -- that give rise to vertexical families of mass-action differential inclusions. We prove that vertexical families are amenable to structural induction. Consequently, a trajectory of a vertexical family approaches the boundary if and only if either the trajectory approaches a vertex of the hypercube, or a trajectory in a lower-dimensional member of the family approaches the boundary. With this technology, we make progress on the global attractor conjecture, a central open problem concerning mass-action kinetics systems. Additionally, we phrase mass-action kinetics as a functor on reaction networks with variable rates.
1208.0946
A Supermodular Optimization Framework for Leader Selection under Link Noise in Linear Multi-Agent Systems
cs.SY math.OC
In many applications of multi-agent systems (MAS), a set of leader agents acts as a control input to the remaining follower agents. In this paper, we introduce an analytical approach to selecting leader agents in order to minimize the total mean-square error of the follower agent states from their desired value in steady-state in the presence of noisy communication links. We show that the problem of choosing leaders in order to minimize this error can be solved using supermodular optimization techniques, leading to efficient algorithms that are within a provable bound of the optimum. We formulate two leader selection problems within our framework, namely the problem of choosing a fixed number of leaders to minimize the error, as well as the problem of choosing the minimum number of leaders to achieve a tolerated level of error. We study both leader selection criteria for different scenarios, including MAS with static topologies, topologies experiencing random link or node failures, switching topologies, and topologies that vary arbitrarily in time due to node mobility. In addition to providing provable bounds for all these cases, simulation results demonstrate that our approach outperforms other leader selection methods, such as node degree-based and random selection methods, and provides comparable performance to current state of the art algorithms.
1208.0959
Recklessly Approximate Sparse Coding
cs.LG cs.CV stat.ML
It has recently been observed that certain extremely simple feature encoding techniques are able to achieve state of the art performance on several standard image classification benchmarks including deep belief networks, convolutional nets, factored RBMs, mcRBMs, convolutional RBMs, sparse autoencoders and several others. Moreover, these "triangle" or "soft threshold" encodings are ex- tremely efficient to compute. Several intuitive arguments have been put forward to explain this remarkable performance, yet no mathematical justification has been offered. The main result of this report is to show that these features are realized as an approximate solution to the a non-negative sparse coding problem. Using this connection we describe several variants of the soft threshold features and demonstrate their effectiveness on two image classification benchmark tasks.
1208.0967
Human Activity Learning using Object Affordances from RGB-D Videos
cs.CV
Human activities comprise several sub-activities performed in a sequence and involve interactions with various objects. This makes reasoning about the object affordances a central task for activity recognition. In this work, we consider the problem of jointly labeling the object affordances and human activities from RGB-D videos. We frame the problem as a Markov Random Field where the nodes represent objects and sub-activities, and the edges represent the relationships between object affordances, their relations with sub-activities, and their evolution over time. We formulate the learning problem using a structural SVM approach, where labeling over various alternate temporal segmentations are considered as latent variables. We tested our method on a dataset comprising 120 activity videos collected from four subjects, and obtained an end-to-end precision of 81.8% and recall of 80.0% for labeling the activities.
1208.0984
APRIL: Active Preference-learning based Reinforcement Learning
cs.LG
This paper focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) with limited prior knowledge. In the domain of swarm robotics for instance, the expert can hardly design a reward function or demonstrate the target behavior, forbidding the use of both standard RL and inverse reinforcement learning. Although with a limited expertise, the human expert is still often able to emit preferences and rank the agent demonstrations. Earlier work has presented an iterative preference-based RL framework: expert preferences are exploited to learn an approximate policy return, thus enabling the agent to achieve direct policy search. Iteratively, the agent selects a new candidate policy and demonstrates it; the expert ranks the new demonstration comparatively to the previous best one; the expert's ranking feedback enables the agent to refine the approximate policy return, and the process is iterated. In this paper, preference-based reinforcement learning is combined with active ranking in order to decrease the number of ranking queries to the expert needed to yield a satisfactory policy. Experiments on the mountain car and the cancer treatment testbeds witness that a couple of dozen rankings enable to learn a competent policy.
1208.1004
Social Trust as a solution to address sparsity-inherent problems of Recommender systems
cs.SI cs.IR
Trust has been explored by many researchers in the past as a successful solution for assisting recommender systems. Even though the approach of using a web-of-trust scheme for assisting the recommendation production is well adopted, issues like the sparsity problem have not been explored adequately so far with regard to this. In this work we are proposing and testing a scheme that uses the existing ratings of users to calculate the hypothetical trust that might exist between them. The purpose is to demonstrate how some basic social networking when applied to an existing system can help in alleviating problems of traditional recommender system schemes. Interestingly, such schemes are also alleviating the cold start problem from which mainly new users are suffering. In order to show how good the system is in that respect, we measure the performance at various times as the system evolves and we also contrast the solution with existing approaches. Finally, we present the results which justify that such schemes undoubtedly work better than a system that makes no use of trust at all.
1208.1011
Credibility in Web Search Engines
cs.IR
Web search engines apply a variety of ranking signals to achieve user satisfaction, i.e., results pages that provide the best-possible results to the user. While these ranking signals implicitly consider credibility (e.g., by measuring popularity), explicit measures of credibility are not applied. In this chapter, credibility in Web search engines is discussed in a broad context: credibility as a measure for including documents in a search engine's index, credibility as a ranking signal, credibility in the context of universal search results, and the possibility of using credibility as an explicit measure for ranking purposes. It is found that while search engines-at least to a certain extent-show credible results to their users, there is no fully integrated credibility framework for Web search engines.
1208.1035
The concavity of R\`enyi entropy power
cs.IT math.FA math.IT
We associate to the p-th R\'enyi entropy a definition of entropy power, which is the natural extension of Shannon's entropy power and exhibits a nice behaviour along solutions to the p-nonlinear heat equation in $R^n$. We show that the R\'enyi entropy power of general probability densities solving such equations is always a concave function of time, whereas it has a linear behaviour in correspondence to the Barenblatt source-type solutions. We then shown that the p-th R\'enyi entropy power of a probability density which solves the nonlinear diffusion of order p, is a concave function of time. This result extends Costa's concavity inequality for Shannon's entropy power to R\'enyi entropies.
1208.1045
Remarks on contractions of reaction-diffusion PDE's on weighted L^2 norms
cs.SY math.AP
In [1], we showed contractivity of reaction-diffusion PDE: \frac{\partial u}{\partial t}({\omega},t) = F(u({\omega},t)) + D\Delta u({\omega},t) with Neumann boundary condition, provided \mu_{p,Q}(J_F (u)) < 0 (uniformly on u), for some 1 \leq p \leq \infty and some positive, diagonal matrix Q, where J_F is the Jacobian matrix of F. This note extends the result for Q weighted L_2 norms, where Q is a positive, symmetric (not merely diagonal) matrix and Q^2D+DQ^2>0.
1208.1056
Sequential Estimation Methods from Inclusion Principle
math.ST cs.LG math.PR stat.TH
In this paper, we propose new sequential estimation methods based on inclusion principle. The main idea is to reformulate the estimation problems as constructing sequential random intervals and use confidence sequences to control the associated coverage probabilities. In contrast to existing asymptotic sequential methods, our estimation procedures rigorously guarantee the pre-specified levels of confidence.
1208.1070
Timing Channels with Multiple Identical Quanta
cs.IT math.IT q-bio.MN
We consider mutual information between release times and capture times for a set of M identical quanta traveling independently from a source to a target. The quanta are immediately captured upon arrival, first-passage times are assumed independent and identically distributed and the quantum emission times are constrained by a deadline. The primary application area is intended to be inter/intracellular molecular signaling in biological systems whereby an organelle, cell or group of cells must deliver some message (such as transcription or developmental instructions) over distance with reasonable certainty to another organelles, cells or group of cells. However, the model can also be applied to communications systems wherein indistinguishable signals have random transit latencies.
1208.1103
System identification and modeling for interacting and non-interacting tank systems using intelligent techniques
cs.AI cs.SY
System identification from the experimental data plays a vital role for model based controller design. Derivation of process model from first principles is often difficult due to its complexity. The first stage in the development of any control and monitoring system is the identification and modeling of the system. Each model is developed within the context of a specific control problem. Thus, the need for a general system identification framework is warranted. The proposed framework should be able to adapt and emphasize different properties based on the control objective and the nature of the behavior of the system. Therefore, system identification has been a valuable tool in identifying the model of the system based on the input and output data for the design of the controller. The present work is concerned with the identification of transfer function models using statistical model identification, process reaction curve method, ARX model, genetic algorithm and modeling using neural network and fuzzy logic for interacting and non interacting tank process. The identification technique and modeling used is prone to parameter change & disturbance. The proposed methods are used for identifying the mathematical model and intelligent model of interacting and non interacting process from the real time experimental data.
1208.1111
Strategies for Distributed Sensor Selection Using Convex Optimization
cs.IT math.IT
Consider the estimation of an unknown parameter vector in a linear measurement model. Centralized sensor selection consists in selecting a set of k_s sensor measurements, from a total number of m potential measurements. The performance of the corresponding selection is measured by the volume of an estimation error covariance matrix. In this work, we consider the problem of selecting these sensors in a distributed or decentralized fashion. In particular, we study the case of two leader nodes that perform naive decentralized selections. We demonstrate that this can degrade the performance severely. Therefore, two heuristics based on convex optimization methods are introduced, where we first allow one leader to make a selection, and then to share a modest amount of information about his selection with the remaining node. We will show that both heuristics clearly outperform the naive decentralized selection, and achieve a performance close to the centralized selection.
1208.1116
Optimal Non-Uniform Mapping for Probabilistic Shaping
cs.IT math.IT
The construction of optimal non-uniform mappings for discrete input memoryless channels (DIMCs) is investigated. An efficient algorithm to find optimal mappings is proposed and the rate by which a target distribution is approached is investigated. The results are applied to non-uniform mappings for additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels with finite signal constellations. The mappings found by the proposed methods outperform those obtained via a central limit theorem approach as suggested in the literature.
1208.1136
Credal nets under epistemic irrelevance
cs.AI math.PR
We present a new approach to credal nets, which are graphical models that generalise Bayesian nets to imprecise probability. Instead of applying the commonly used notion of strong independence, we replace it by the weaker notion of epistemic irrelevance. We show how assessments of epistemic irrelevance allow us to construct a global model out of given local uncertainty models and mention some useful properties. The main results and proofs are presented using the language of sets of desirable gambles, which provides a very general and expressive way of representing imprecise probability models.
1208.1149
Uncertainty-dependent data collection in vehicular sensor networks
cs.NI cs.SY
Vehicular sensor networks (VSNs) are built on top of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) by equipping vehicles with sensing devices. These new technologies create a huge opportunity to extend the sensing capabilities of the existing road traffic control systems and improve their performance. Efficient utilisation of wireless communication channel is one of the basic issues in the vehicular networks development. This paper presents and evaluates data collection algorithms that use uncertainty estimates to reduce data transmission in a VSN-based road traffic control system.
1208.1151
Classical-Quantum Arbitrarily Varying Wiretap Channel
cs.IT math.IT quant-ph
We derive a lower bound on the capacity of classical-quantum arbitrarily varying wiretap channel and determine the capacity of the classicalquantum arbitrarily varying wiretap channel with channel state information at the transmitter.
1208.1180
A Regularized Saddle-Point Algorithm for Networked Optimization with Resource Allocation Constraints
cs.SY math.OC
We propose a regularized saddle-point algorithm for convex networked optimization problems with resource allocation constraints. Standard distributed gradient methods suffer from slow convergence and require excessive communication when applied to problems of this type. Our approach offers an alternative way to address these problems, and ensures that each iterative update step satisfies the resource allocation constraints. We derive step-size conditions under which the distributed algorithm converges geometrically to the regularized optimal value, and show how these conditions are affected by the underlying network topology. We illustrate our method on a robotic network application example where a group of mobile agents strive to maintain a moving target in the barycenter of their positions.
1208.1184
Payment Rules through Discriminant-Based Classifiers
cs.GT cs.AI
In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex post regret, we are able to adapt statistical machine learning techniques to the design of payment rules. This computational approach to mechanism design is applicable to domains with multi-dimensional types and situations where computational efficiency is a concern. Specifically, given an outcome rule and access to a type distribution, we train a support vector machine with a special discriminant function structure such that it implicitly establishes a payment rule with desirable incentive properties. We discuss applications to a multi-minded combinatorial auction with a greedy winner-determination algorithm and to an assignment problem with egalitarian outcome rule. Experimental results demonstrate both that the construction produces payment rules with low ex post regret, and that penalizing classification errors is effective in preventing failures of ex post individual rationality.
1208.1187
Toward an Integrated Framework for Automated Development and Optimization of Online Advertising Campaigns
cs.IR cs.AI
Creating and monitoring competitive and cost-effective pay-per-click advertisement campaigns through the web-search channel is a resource demanding task in terms of expertise and effort. Assisting or even automating the work of an advertising specialist will have an unrivaled commercial value. In this paper we propose a methodology, an architecture, and a fully functional framework for semi- and fully- automated creation, monitoring, and optimization of cost-efficient pay-per-click campaigns with budget constraints. The campaign creation module generates automatically keywords based on the content of the web page to be advertised extended with corresponding ad-texts. These keywords are used to create automatically the campaigns fully equipped with the appropriate values set. The campaigns are uploaded to the auctioneer platform and start running. The optimization module focuses on the learning process from existing campaign statistics and also from applied strategies of previous periods in order to invest optimally in the next period. The objective is to maximize the performance (i.e. clicks, actions) under the current budget constraint. The fully functional prototype is experimentally evaluated on real world Google AdWords campaigns and presents a promising behavior with regards to campaign performance statistics as it outperforms systematically the competing manually maintained campaigns.
1208.1225
Average redundancy of the Shannon code for Markov sources
cs.IT math.IT
It is known that for memoryless sources, the average and maximal redundancy of fixed-to-variable length codes, such as the Shannon and Huffman codes, exhibit two modes of behavior for long blocks. It either converges to a limit or it has an oscillatory pattern, depending on the irrationality or rationality, respectively, of certain parameters that depend on the source. In this paper, we extend these findings, concerning the Shannon code, to the case of a Markov source, which is considerably more involved. While this dichotomy, of convergent vs. oscillatory behavior, is well known in other contexts (including renewal theory, ergodic theory, local limit theorems and large deviations of discrete distributions), in information theory (e.g., in redundancy analysis) it was recognized relatively recently. To the best of our knowledge, no results of this type were reported thus far for Markov sources. We provide a precise characterization of the convergent vs. oscillatory behavior of the Shannon code redundancy for a class of irreducible, periodic and aperiodic, Markov sources. These findings are obtained by analytic methods, such as Fourier/Fejer series analysis and spectral analysis of matrices.
1208.1230
A conservation-law-based modular fluid-flow model for network congestion modeling
cs.NI cs.SY math.CA math.DS math.OC
A modular fluid-flow model for network congestion analysis and control is proposed. The model is derived from an information conservation law stating that the information is either in transit, lost or received. Mathematical models of network elements such as queues, users, and transmission channels, and network description variables, including sending/acknowledgement rates and delays, are inferred from this law and obtained by applying this principle locally. The modularity of the devised model makes it sufficiently generic to describe any network topology, and appealing for building simulators. Previous models in the literature are often not capable of capturing the transient behavior of the network precisely, making the resulting analysis inaccurate in practice. Those models can be recovered from exact reduction or approximation of this new model. An important aspect of this particular modeling approach is the introduction of new tight building blocks that implement mechanisms ignored by the existing ones, notably at the queue and user levels. Comparisons with packet-level simulations corroborate the proposed model.
1208.1231
Building and Maintaining Halls of Fame over a Database
cs.DB
Halls of Fame are fascinating constructs. They represent the elite of an often very large amount of entities---persons, companies, products, countries etc. Beyond their practical use as static rankings, changes to them are particularly interesting---for decision making processes, as input to common media or novel narrative science applications, or simply consumed by users. In this work, we aim at detecting events that can be characterized by changes to a Hall of Fame ranking in an automated way. We describe how the schema and data of a database can be used to generate Halls of Fame. In this database scenario, by Hall of Fame we refer to distinguished tuples; entities, whose characteristics set them apart from the majority. We define every Hall of Fame as one specific instance of an SQL query, such that a change in its result is considered a noteworthy event. Identified changes (i.e., events) are ranked using lexicographic tradeoffs over event and query properties and presented to users or fed in higher-level applications. We have implemented a full-fledged prototype system that uses either database triggers or a Java based middleware for event identification. We report on an experimental evaluation using a real-world dataset of basketball statistics.
1208.1237
Fast and Robust Recursive Algorithms for Separable Nonnegative Matrix Factorization
stat.ML cs.LG math.OC
In this paper, we study the nonnegative matrix factorization problem under the separability assumption (that is, there exists a cone spanned by a small subset of the columns of the input nonnegative data matrix containing all columns), which is equivalent to the hyperspectral unmixing problem under the linear mixing model and the pure-pixel assumption. We present a family of fast recursive algorithms, and prove they are robust under any small perturbations of the input data matrix. This family generalizes several existing hyperspectral unmixing algorithms and hence provides for the first time a theoretical justification of their better practical performance.
1208.1259
One Permutation Hashing for Efficient Search and Learning
cs.LG cs.IR cs.IT math.IT stat.CO stat.ML
Recently, the method of b-bit minwise hashing has been applied to large-scale linear learning and sublinear time near-neighbor search. The major drawback of minwise hashing is the expensive preprocessing cost, as the method requires applying (e.g.,) k=200 to 500 permutations on the data. The testing time can also be expensive if a new data point (e.g., a new document or image) has not been processed, which might be a significant issue in user-facing applications. We develop a very simple solution based on one permutation hashing. Conceptually, given a massive binary data matrix, we permute the columns only once and divide the permuted columns evenly into k bins; and we simply store, for each data vector, the smallest nonzero location in each bin. The interesting probability analysis (which is validated by experiments) reveals that our one permutation scheme should perform very similarly to the original (k-permutation) minwise hashing. In fact, the one permutation scheme can be even slightly more accurate, due to the "sample-without-replacement" effect. Our experiments with training linear SVM and logistic regression on the webspam dataset demonstrate that this one permutation hashing scheme can achieve the same (or even slightly better) accuracies compared to the original k-permutation scheme. To test the robustness of our method, we also experiment with the small news20 dataset which is very sparse and has merely on average 500 nonzeros in each data vector. Interestingly, our one permutation scheme noticeably outperforms the k-permutation scheme when k is not too small on the news20 dataset. In summary, our method can achieve at least the same accuracy as the original k-permutation scheme, at merely 1/k of the original preprocessing cost.
1208.1270
Properties of the Quantum Channel
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
Quantum information processing exploits the quantum nature of information. It offers fundamentally new solutions in the field of computer science and extends the possibilities to a level that cannot be imagined in classical communication systems. For quantum communication channels, many new capacity definitions were developed in comparison to classical counterparts. A quantum channel can be used to realize classical information transmission or to deliver quantum information, such as quantum entanglement. In this paper we overview the properties of the quantum communication channel, the various capacity measures and the fundamental differences between the classical and quantum channels.
1208.1275
Spectra of random graphs with arbitrary expected degrees
cs.SI cond-mat.stat-mech physics.soc-ph
We study random graphs with arbitrary distributions of expected degree and derive expressions for the spectra of their adjacency and modularity matrices. We give a complete prescription for calculating the spectra that is exact in the limit of large network size and large vertex degrees. We also study the effect on the spectra of hubs in the network, vertices of unusually high degree, and show that these produce isolated eigenvalues outside the main spectral band, akin to impurity states in condensed matter systems, with accompanying eigenvectors that are strongly localized around the hubs. We also give numerical results that confirm our analytic expressions.
1208.1290
Scaling Behaviors of Wireless Device-to-Device Communications with Distributed Caching
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT
We analyze a novel architecture for caching popular video content to enable wireless device-to-device collaboration. We focus on the asymptotic scaling characteristics and show how they depends on video content popularity statistics. We identify a fundamental conflict between collaboration distance and interference and show how to optimize the transmission power to maximize frequency reuse. Our main result is a closed form expression of the optimal collaboration distance as a function of the model parameters. Under the common assumption of a Zipf distribution for content reuse, we show that if the Zipf exponent is greater than 1, it is possible to have a number of D2D interference-free collaboration pairs that scales linearly in the number of nodes. If the Zipf exponent is smaller than 1, we identify the best possible scaling in the number of D2D collaborating links. Surprisingly, a very simple distributed caching policy achieves the optimal scaling behavior and therefore there is no need to centrally coordinate what each node is caching.
1208.1315
Data Selection for Semi-Supervised Learning
cs.LG
The real challenge in pattern recognition task and machine learning process is to train a discriminator using labeled data and use it to distinguish between future data as accurate as possible. However, most of the problems in the real world have numerous data, which labeling them is a cumbersome or even an impossible matter. Semi-supervised learning is one approach to overcome these types of problems. It uses only a small set of labeled with the company of huge remain and unlabeled data to train the discriminator. In semi-supervised learning, it is very essential that which data is labeled and depend on position of data it effectiveness changes. In this paper, we proposed an evolutionary approach called Artificial Immune System (AIS) to determine which data is better to be labeled to get the high quality data. The experimental results represent the effectiveness of this algorithm in finding these data points.
1208.1326
Numerical Issues Affecting LDPC Error Floors
cs.IT cs.NA math.IT math.NA
Numerical issues related to the occurrence of error floors in floating-point simulations of belief propagation (BP) decoders are examined. Careful processing of messages corresponding to highly-certain bit values can sometimes reduce error floors by several orders of magnitude. Computational solutions for properly handling such messages are provided for the sum-product algorithm (SPA) and several variants.
1208.1353
A comparative study of two molecular mechanics models based on harmonic potentials
cond-mat.mtrl-sci cs.CE
We show that the two molecular mechanics models, the stick-spiral and the beam models, predict considerably different mechanical properties of materials based on energy equivalence. The difference between the two models is independent of the materials since all parameters of the beam model are obtained from the harmonic potentials. We demonstrate this difference for finite width graphene nanoribbons and a single polyethylene chain comparing results of the molecular dynamics (MD) simulations with harmonic potentials and the finite element method with the beam model. We also find that the difference strongly depends on the loading modes, chirality and width of the graphene nanoribbons, and it increases with decreasing width of the nanoribbons under pure bending condition. The maximum difference of the predicted mechanical properties using the two models can exceed 300% in different loading modes. Comparing the two models with the MD results of AIREBO potential, we find that the stick-spiral model overestimates and the beam model underestimates the mechanical properties in narrow armchair graphene nanoribbons under pure bending condition.
1208.1400
Second-order asymptotics for quantum hypothesis testing
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT math.ST stat.TH
In the asymptotic theory of quantum hypothesis testing, the minimal error probability of the first kind jumps sharply from zero to one when the error exponent of the second kind passes by the point of the relative entropy of the two states in an increasing way. This is well known as the direct part and strong converse of quantum Stein's lemma. Here we look into the behavior of this sudden change and have make it clear how the error of first kind grows smoothly according to a lower order of the error exponent of the second kind, and hence we obtain the second-order asymptotics for quantum hypothesis testing. This actually implies quantum Stein's lemma as a special case. Meanwhile, our analysis also yields tight bounds for the case of finite sample size. These results have potential applications in quantum information theory. Our method is elementary, based on basic linear algebra and probability theory. It deals with the achievability part and the optimality part in a unified fashion.
1208.1401
Study of dynamic and static routing for improvement of the transportation efficiency on small complex networks
physics.soc-ph cs.NI cs.SI
In this paper, we are exploring strategies for the reduction of the congestion in the complex networks. The nodes without buffers are considered, so, if the congestion occurs, the information packets will be dropped. The focus is on the efficient routing. The routing strategies are compared using two generic models, i.e., Barab\`asi-Albert scale-free network and scale-free network on lattice, and the academic router networks of the Netherlands and France. We propose a dynamic deflection routing algorithm which automatically extends path of the packet before it arrives at congested node. The simulation results indicate that the dynamic routing strategy can further reduce number of dropped packets in a combination with the efficient path routing proposed by Yan et al. [Phys. Rev. E 73, 046108 (2006)].
1208.1448
The Best Answers? Think Twice: Online Detection of Commercial Campaigns in the CQA Forums
cs.IR cs.SI
In an emerging trend, more and more Internet users search for information from Community Question and Answer (CQA) websites, as interactive communication in such websites provides users with a rare feeling of trust. More often than not, end users look for instant help when they browse the CQA websites for the best answers. Hence, it is imperative that they should be warned of any potential commercial campaigns hidden behind the answers. However, existing research focuses more on the quality of answers and does not meet the above need. In this paper, we develop a system that automatically analyzes the hidden patterns of commercial spam and raises alarms instantaneously to end users whenever a potential commercial campaign is detected. Our detection method integrates semantic analysis and posters' track records and utilizes the special features of CQA websites largely different from those in other types of forums such as microblogs or news reports. Our system is adaptive and accommodates new evidence uncovered by the detection algorithms over time. Validated with real-world trace data from a popular Chinese CQA website over a period of three months, our system shows great potential towards adaptive online detection of CQA spams.
1208.1544
Guess Who Rated This Movie: Identifying Users Through Subspace Clustering
cs.LG
It is often the case that, within an online recommender system, multiple users share a common account. Can such shared accounts be identified solely on the basis of the user- provided ratings? Once a shared account is identified, can the different users sharing it be identified as well? Whenever such user identification is feasible, it opens the way to possible improvements in personalized recommendations, but also raises privacy concerns. We develop a model for composite accounts based on unions of linear subspaces, and use subspace clustering for carrying out the identification task. We show that a significant fraction of such accounts is identifiable in a reliable manner, and illustrate potential uses for personalized recommendation.
1208.1592
Improved Perfect Space-Time Block Codes
cs.IT math.IT
The perfect space-time block codes (STBCs) are based on four design criteria - full-rateness, non-vanishing determinant, cubic shaping and uniform average transmitted energy per antenna per time slot. Cubic shaping and transmission at uniform average energy per antenna per time slot are important from the perspective of energy efficiency of STBCs. The shaping criterion demands that the {\it generator matrix} of the lattice from which each layer of the perfect STBC is carved be unitary. In this paper, it is shown that unitariness is not a necessary requirement for energy efficiency in the context of space-time coding with finite input constellations, and an alternative criterion is provided that enables one to obtain full-rate (rate of $n_t$ complex symbols per channel use for an $n_t$ transmit antenna system) STBCs with larger {\it normalized minimum determinants} than the perfect STBCs. Further, two such STBCs, one each for 4 and 6 transmit antennas, are presented and they are shown to have larger normalized minimum determinants than the comparable perfect STBCs which hitherto had the best known normalized minimum determinants.
1208.1593
Fast-Decodable MIDO Codes with Large Coding Gain
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, a new method is proposed to obtain full-diversity, rate-2 (rate of 2 complex symbols per channel use) space-time block codes (STBCs) that are full-rate for multiple input, double output (MIDO) systems. Using this method, rate-2 STBCs for $4\times2$, $6 \times 2$, $8\times2$ and $12 \times 2$ systems are constructed and these STBCs are fast ML-decodable, have large coding gains, and STBC-schemes consisting of these STBCs have a non-vanishing determinant (NVD) so that they are DMT-optimal for their respective MIDO systems. It is also shown that the SR-code [R. Vehkalahti, C. Hollanti, and F. Oggier, "Fast-Decodable Asymmetric Space-Time Codes from Division Algebras," IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, Apr. 2012] for the $4\times2$ system, which has the lowest ML-decoding complexity among known rate-2 STBCs for the $4\times2$ MIDO system with a large coding gain for 4-/16-QAM, has the same algebraic structure as the STBC constructed in this paper for the $4\times2$ system. This also settles in positive a previous conjecture that the STBC-scheme that is based on the SR-code has the NVD property and hence is DMT-optimal for the $4\times2$ system.
1208.1613
A Dynamic Phase Selection Strategy for Satisfiability Solvers
cs.LO cs.AI
The phase selection is an important of a SAT Solver based on conflict-driven DPLL. This paper presents a new phase selection strategy, in which the weight of each literal is defined as the sum of its implied-literals static weights. The implied literals of each literal is computed dynamically during the search. Therefore, it is call a dynamic phase selection strategy. In general, computing dynamically a weight is time-consuming. Hence, so far no SAT solver applies successfully a dynamic phase selection. Since the implied literal of our strategy conforms to that of the search process, the usual two watched-literals scheme can be applied here. Thus, the cost of our dynamic phase selection is very low. To improve Glucose 2.0 which won a Gold Medal for application category at SAT 2011 competition, we build five phase selection schemes using the dynamic phase selection policy. On application instances of SAT 2011, Glucose improved by the dynamic phase selection is significantly better than the original Glucose. We conduct also experiments on Lingeling, using the dynamic phase selection policy, and build two phase selection schemes. Experimental results show that the improved Lingeling is better than the original Lingeling.
1208.1661
Fully Proportional Representation as Resource Allocation: Approximability Results
cs.GT cs.MA
We model Monroe's and Chamberlin and Courant's multiwinner voting systems as a certain resource allocation problem. We show that for many restricted variants of this problem, under standard complexity-theoretic assumptions, there are no constant-factor approximation algorithms. Yet, we also show cases where good approximation algorithms exist (briefly put, these variants correspond to optimizing total voter satisfaction under Borda scores, within Monroe's and Chamberlin and Courant's voting systems).
1208.1670
Performance Measurement and Method Analysis (PMMA) for Fingerprint Reconstruction
cs.CV
Fingerprint reconstruction is one of the most well-known and publicized biometrics. Because of their uniqueness and consistency over time, fingerprints have been used for identification over a century, more recently becoming automated due to advancements in computed capabilities. Fingerprint reconstruction is popular because of the inherent ease of acquisition, the numerous sources (e.g. ten fingers) available for collection, and their established use and collections by law enforcement and immigration. Fingerprints have always been the most practical and positive means of identification. Offenders, being well aware of this, have been coming up with ways to escape identification by that means. Erasing left over fingerprints, using gloves, fingerprint forgery; are certain examples of methods tried by them, over the years. Failing to prevent themselves, they moved to an extent of mutilating their finger skin pattern, to remain unidentified. This article is based upon obliteration of finger ridge patterns and discusses some known cases in relation to the same, in chronological order; highlighting the reasons why offenders go to an extent of performing such act. The paper gives an overview of different methods and performance measurement of the fingerprint reconstruction.
1208.1672
An Efficient Automatic Attendance System Using Fingerprint Reconstruction Technique
cs.CV
Biometric time and attendance system is one of the most successful applications of biometric technology. One of the main advantage of a biometric time and attendance system is it avoids "buddy-punching". Buddy punching was a major loophole which will be exploiting in the traditional time attendance systems. Fingerprint recognition is an established field today, but still identifying individual from a set of enrolled fingerprints is a time taking process. Most fingerprint-based biometric systems store the minutiae template of a user in the database. It has been traditionally assumed that the minutiae template of a user does not reveal any information about the original fingerprint. This belief has now been shown to be false; several algorithms have been proposed that can reconstruct fingerprint images from minutiae templates. In this paper, a novel fingerprint reconstruction algorithm is proposed to reconstruct the phase image, which is then converted into the grayscale image. The proposed reconstruction algorithm reconstructs the phase image from minutiae. The proposed reconstruction algorithm is used to automate the whole process of taking attendance, manually which is a laborious and troublesome work and waste a lot of time, with its managing and maintaining the records for a period of time is also a burdensome task. The proposed reconstruction algorithm has been evaluated with respect to the success rates of type-I attack (match the reconstructed fingerprint against the original fingerprint) and type-II attack (match the reconstructed fingerprint against different impressions of the original fingerprint) using a commercial fingerprint recognition system. Given the reconstructed image from our algorithm, we show that both types of attacks can be effectively launched against a fingerprint recognition system.
1208.1676
Mechanism Design for Time Critical and Cost Critical Task Execution via Crowdsourcing
cs.GT cs.MA
An exciting application of crowdsourcing is to use social networks in complex task execution. In this paper, we address the problem of a planner who needs to incentivize agents within a network in order to seek their help in executing an {\em atomic task} as well as in recruiting other agents to execute the task. We study this mechanism design problem under two natural resource optimization settings: (1) cost critical tasks, where the planner's goal is to minimize the total cost, and (2) time critical tasks, where the goal is to minimize the total time elapsed before the task is executed. We identify a set of desirable properties that should ideally be satisfied by a crowdsourcing mechanism. In particular, {\em sybil-proofness} and {\em collapse-proofness} are two complementary properties in our desiderata. We prove that no mechanism can satisfy all the desirable properties simultaneously. This leads us naturally to explore approximate versions of the critical properties. We focus our attention on approximate sybil-proofness and our exploration leads to a parametrized family of payment mechanisms which satisfy collapse-proofness. We characterize the approximate versions of the desirable properties in cost critical and time critical domain.
1208.1679
Color Assessment and Transfer for Web Pages
cs.HC cs.CV cs.GR
Colors play a particularly important role in both designing and accessing Web pages. A well-designed color scheme improves Web pages' visual aesthetic and facilitates user interactions. As far as we know, existing color assessment studies focus on images; studies on color assessment and editing for Web pages are rare. This paper investigates color assessment for Web pages based on existing online color theme-rating data sets and applies this assessment to Web color edit. This study consists of three parts. First, we study the extraction of a Web page's color theme. Second, we construct color assessment models that score the color compatibility of a Web page by leveraging machine learning techniques. Third, we incorporate the learned color assessment model into a new application, namely, color transfer for Web pages. Our study combines techniques from computer graphics, Web mining, computer vision, and machine learning. Experimental results suggest that our constructed color assessment models are effective, and useful in the color transfer for Web pages, which has received little attention in both Web mining and computer graphics communities.
1208.1692
On Finding Optimal Polytrees
cs.DS cs.AI cs.CC
Inferring probabilistic networks from data is a notoriously difficult task. Under various goodness-of-fit measures, finding an optimal network is NP-hard, even if restricted to polytrees of bounded in-degree. Polynomial-time algorithms are known only for rare special cases, perhaps most notably for branchings, that is, polytrees in which the in-degree of every node is at most one. Here, we study the complexity of finding an optimal polytree that can be turned into a branching by deleting some number of arcs or nodes, treated as a parameter. We show that the problem can be solved via a matroid intersection formulation in polynomial time if the number of deleted arcs is bounded by a constant. The order of the polynomial time bound depends on this constant, hence the algorithm does not establish fixed-parameter tractability when parameterized by the number of deleted arcs. We show that a restricted version of the problem allows fixed-parameter tractability and hence scales well with the parameter. We contrast this positive result by showing that if we parameterize by the number of deleted nodes, a somewhat more powerful parameter, the problem is not fixed-parameter tractable, subject to a complexity-theoretic assumption.
1208.1697
Information-Theoretical Security for Several Models of Multiple-Access Channel
cs.IT math.IT
Several security models of multiple-access channel (MAC) are investigated. First, we study the degraded MAC with confidential messages, where two users transmit their confidential messages (no common message) to a destination, and each user obtains a degraded version of the output of the MAC. Each user views the other user as a eavesdropper, and wishes to keep its confidential message as secret as possible from the other user. Measuring each user's uncertainty about the other user's confidential message by equivocation, the inner and outer bounds on the capacity-equivocation region for this model have been provided. The result is further explained via the binary and Gaussian examples. Second, the discrete memoryless multiple-access wiretap channel (MAC-WT) is studied, where two users transmit their corresponding confidential messages (no common message) to a legitimate receiver, while an additional wiretapper wishes to obtain the messages via a wiretap channel. This new model is considered into two cases: the general MAC-WT with cooperative encoders, and the degraded MAC-WT with non-cooperative encoders. The capacity-equivocation region is totally determined for the cooperative case, and inner and outer bounds on the capacity-equivocation region are provided for the non-cooperative case. For both cases, the results are further explained via the binary examples.
1208.1740
On the Relation between Centrality Measures and Consensus Algorithms
cs.SY cs.SI math.OC
This paper introduces some tools from graph theory and distributed consensus algorithms to construct an optimal, yet robust, hierarchical information sharing structure for large-scale decision making and control problems. The proposed method is motivated by the robustness and optimality of leaf-venation patterns. We introduce a new class of centrality measures which are built based on the degree distribution of nodes within network graph. Furthermore, the proposed measure is used to select the appropriate weight of the corresponding consensus algorithm. To this end, an implicit hierarchical structure is derived that control the flow of information in different situations. In addition, the performance analysis of the proposed measure with respect to other standard measures is performed to investigate the convergence and asymptotic behavior of the measure. Gas Transmission Network is served as our test-bed to demonstrate the applicability and the efficiently of the method.
1208.1743
Hybrid systems modeling for gas transmission network
cs.AI
Gas Transmission Networks are large-scale complex systems, and corresponding design and control problems are challenging. In this paper, we consider the problem of control and management of these systems in crisis situations. We present these networks by a hybrid systems framework that provides required analysis models. Further, we discuss decision-making using computational discrete and hybrid optimization methods. In particular, several reinforcement learning methods are employed to explore decision space and achieve the best policy in a specific crisis situation. Simulations are presented to illustrate the efficiency of the method.
1208.1750
Guidelines for a Dynamic Ontology - Integrating Tools of Evolution and Versioning in Ontology
cs.SE cs.AI
Ontologies are built on systems that conceptually evolve over time. In addition, techniques and languages for building ontologies evolve too. This has led to numerous studies in the field of ontology versioning and ontology evolution. This paper presents a new way to manage the lifecycle of an ontology incorporating both versioning tools and evolution process. This solution, called VersionGraph, is integrated in the source ontology since its creation in order to make it possible to evolve and to be versioned. Change management is strongly related to the model in which the ontology is represented. Therefore, we focus on the OWL language in order to take into account the impact of the changes on the logical consistency of the ontology like specified in OWL DL.
1208.1784
Worst-Case Source for Distributed Compression with Quadratic Distortion
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the k-encoder source coding problem with a quadratic distortion measure. We show that among all source distributions with a given covariance matrix K, the jointly Gaussian source requires the highest rates in order to meet a given set of distortion constraints.
1208.1819
Self-Organizing Time Map: An Abstraction of Temporal Multivariate Patterns
cs.LG cs.DS
This paper adopts and adapts Kohonen's standard Self-Organizing Map (SOM) for exploratory temporal structure analysis. The Self-Organizing Time Map (SOTM) implements SOM-type learning to one-dimensional arrays for individual time units, preserves the orientation with short-term memory and arranges the arrays in an ascending order of time. The two-dimensional representation of the SOTM attempts thus twofold topology preservation, where the horizontal direction preserves time topology and the vertical direction data topology. This enables discovering the occurrence and exploring the properties of temporal structural changes in data. For representing qualities and properties of SOTMs, we adapt measures and visualizations from the standard SOM paradigm, as well as introduce a measure of temporal structural changes. The functioning of the SOTM, and its visualizations and quality and property measures, are illustrated on artificial toy data. The usefulness of the SOTM in a real-world setting is shown on poverty, welfare and development indicators.
1208.1829
Metric Learning across Heterogeneous Domains by Respectively Aligning Both Priors and Posteriors
cs.LG
In this paper, we attempts to learn a single metric across two heterogeneous domains where source domain is fully labeled and has many samples while target domain has only a few labeled samples but abundant unlabeled samples. To the best of our knowledge, this task is seldom touched. The proposed learning model has a simple underlying motivation: all the samples in both the source and the target domains are mapped into a common space, where both their priors P(sample)s and their posteriors P(label|sample)s are forced to be respectively aligned as much as possible. We show that the two mappings, from both the source domain and the target domain to the common space, can be reparameterized into a single positive semi-definite(PSD) matrix. Then we develop an efficient Bregman Projection algorithm to optimize the PDS matrix over which a LogDet function is used to regularize. Furthermore, we also show that this model can be easily kernelized and verify its effectiveness in crosslanguage retrieval task and cross-domain object recognition task.
1208.1842
Logic of Non-Monotonic Interactive Proofs (Formal Theory of Temporary Knowledge Transfer)
cs.LO cs.CR cs.DC cs.MA math.LO
We propose a monotonic logic of internalised non-monotonic or instant interactive proofs (LiiP) and reconstruct an existing monotonic logic of internalised monotonic or persistent interactive proofs (LiP) as a minimal conservative extension of LiiP. Instant interactive proofs effect a fragile epistemic impact in their intended communities of peer reviewers that consists in the impermanent induction of the knowledge of their proof goal by means of the knowledge of the proof with the interpreting reviewer: If my peer reviewer knew my proof then she would at least then (in that instant) know that its proof goal is true. Their impact is fragile and their induction of knowledge impermanent in the sense of being the case possibly only at the instant of learning the proof. This accounts for the important possibility of internalising proofs of statements whose truth value can vary, which, as opposed to invariant statements, cannot have persistent proofs. So instant interactive proofs effect a temporary transfer of certain propositional knowledge (knowable ephemeral facts) via the transmission of certain individual knowledge (knowable non-monotonic proofs) in distributed systems of multiple interacting agents.
1208.1846
Margin Distribution Controlled Boosting
cs.LG
Schapire's margin theory provides a theoretical explanation to the success of boosting-type methods and manifests that a good margin distribution (MD) of training samples is essential for generalization. However the statement that a MD is good is vague, consequently, many recently developed algorithms try to generate a MD in their goodness senses for boosting generalization. Unlike their indirect control over MD, in this paper, we propose an alternative boosting algorithm termed Margin distribution Controlled Boosting (MCBoost) which directly controls the MD by introducing and optimizing a key adjustable margin parameter. MCBoost's optimization implementation adopts the column generation technique to ensure fast convergence and small number of weak classifiers involved in the final MCBooster. We empirically demonstrate: 1) AdaBoost is actually also a MD controlled algorithm and its iteration number acts as a parameter controlling the distribution and 2) the generalization performance of MCBoost evaluated on UCI benchmark datasets is validated better than those of AdaBoost, L2Boost, LPBoost, AdaBoost-CG and MDBoost.
1208.1860
Scaling Multiple-Source Entity Resolution using Statistically Efficient Transfer Learning
cs.DB cs.LG
We consider a serious, previously-unexplored challenge facing almost all approaches to scaling up entity resolution (ER) to multiple data sources: the prohibitive cost of labeling training data for supervised learning of similarity scores for each pair of sources. While there exists a rich literature describing almost all aspects of pairwise ER, this new challenge is arising now due to the unprecedented ability to acquire and store data from online sources, features driven by ER such as enriched search verticals, and the uniqueness of noisy and missing data characteristics for each source. We show on real-world and synthetic data that for state-of-the-art techniques, the reality of heterogeneous sources means that the number of labeled training data must scale quadratically in the number of sources, just to maintain constant precision/recall. We address this challenge with a brand new transfer learning algorithm which requires far less training data (or equivalently, achieves superior accuracy with the same data) and is trained using fast convex optimization. The intuition behind our approach is to adaptively share structure learned about one scoring problem with all other scoring problems sharing a data source in common. We demonstrate that our theoretically motivated approach incurs no runtime cost while it can maintain constant precision/recall with the cost of labeling increasing only linearly with the number of sources.
1208.1878
Sets of Zero-Difference Balanced Functions and Their Applications
cs.IT math.CO math.IT
Zero-difference balanced (ZDB) functions can be employed in many applications, e.g., optimal constant composition codes, optimal and perfect difference systems of sets, optimal frequency hopping sequences, etc. In this paper, two results are summarized to characterize ZDB functions, among which a lower bound is used to achieve optimality in applications and determine the size of preimage sets of ZDB functions. As the main contribution, a generic construction of ZDB functions is presented, and many new classes of ZDB functions can be generated. This construction is then extended to construct a set of ZDB functions, in which any two ZDB functions are related uniformly. Furthermore, some applications of such sets of ZDB functions are also introduced.
1208.1880
Stereo Acoustic Perception based on Real Time Video Acquisition for Navigational Assistance
cs.CV cs.MM cs.SD
A smart navigation system (an Electronic Travel Aid) based on an object detection mechanism has been designed to detect the presence of obstacles that immediately impede the path, by means of real time video processing. The algorithm can be used for any general purpose navigational aid. This paper is discussed, keeping in mind the navigation of the visually impaired, and is not limited to the same. A video camera feeds images of the surroundings to a Da- Vinci Digital Media Processor, DM642, which works on the video, frame by frame. The processor carries out image processing techniques whose result contains information about the object in terms of image pixels. The algorithm aims to select the object which, among all others, poses maximum threat to the navigation. A database containing a total of three sounds is constructed. Hence, each image translates to a beep, where every beep informs the navigator of the obstacles directly in front of him. This paper implements an algorithm that is more efficient as compared to its predecessors.
1208.1885
Performance and Detection of M-ary Frequency Shift Keying in Triple Layer Wireless Sensor Network
cs.IT math.IT
This paper proposes an innovative triple layer Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) system, which monitors M-ary events like temperature, pressure, humidity, etc. with the help of geographically distributed sensors. The sensors convey signals to the fusion centre using M-ary Frequency Shift Keying (MFSK)modulation scheme over independent Rayleigh fading channels. At the fusion centre, detection takes place with the help of Selection Combining (SC) diversity scheme, which assures a simple and economical receiver circuitry. With the aid of various simulations, the performance and efficacy of the system has been analyzed by varying modulation levels, number of local sensors and probability of correct detection by the sensors. The study endeavors to prove that triple layer WSN system is an economical and dependable system capable of correct detection of M-ary events by integrating frequency diversity together with antenna diversity.
1208.1886
Semantic Web Techniques for Yellow Page Service Providers
cs.IR
Use of web pages providing unstructured information poses variety of problems to the user, such as use of arbitrary formats, unsuitability for machine processing and likely incompleteness of information. Structured data alleviates these problems but we require more. Very often yellow page systems are implemented using a centralized database. In some cases, human intermediaries accessible over the phone network examine a centralized database and use their reasoning ability to deal with the user's need for information. Scaling up such systems is difficult. This paper explores an alternative - a highly distributed system design meeting a variety of needs - considerably reducing efforts required at a central organization, enabling large numbers of vendors to enter information about their own products and services, enabling end-users to contribute information such as their own ratings, using an ontology to describe each domain of application in a flexible manner for uses foreseen and unforeseen, enabling distributed search and mash-ups, use of vendor independent standards, using reasoning to find the best matches to a given query, geo-spatial reasoning and a simple, interactive, mobile application/interface. We give importance to geo-spatial information and mobile applications because of the very wide-spread use of mobile phones and their inherent ability to provide some information about the current location of the user. We have created a prototype using the Jena Toolkit and geo-spatial extensions to SPARQL. We have tested this prototype by asking a group of typical users to use it and to provide structured feedback. We have summarized this feedback in the paper. We believe that the technology can be applied in many contexts in addition to yellow page systems.
1208.1921
Algorithmic Simplicity and Relevance
cs.AI cs.CC
The human mind is known to be sensitive to complexity. For instance, the visual system reconstructs hidden parts of objects following a principle of maximum simplicity. We suggest here that higher cognitive processes, such as the selection of relevant situations, are sensitive to variations of complexity. Situations are relevant to human beings when they appear simpler to describe than to generate. This definition offers a predictive (i.e. falsifiable) model for the selection of situations worth reporting (interestingness) and for what individuals consider an appropriate move in conversation.
1208.1924
Moderate Deviations in Channel Coding
cs.IT math.IT
We consider block codes whose rate converges to the channel capacity with increasing block length at a certain speed and examine the best possible decay of the probability of error. We prove that a moderate deviation principle holds for all convergence rates between the large deviation and the central limit theorem regimes.