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1208.3254
Carrier Frequency Offset Estimation for Two-Way Relaying: Optimal Preamble and Estimator Design
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the problem of carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation for a two-way relaying system based on the amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol. Our contributions are in designing an optimal preamble, and the corresponding estimator, to closely achieve the minimum Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for the CFO. This optimality is asserted with respect to the novel class of preambles, referred to as the block-rotated preambles (BRPs). This class includes the periodic preamble that is used widely in practice, yet it provides an additional degree of design freedom via a block rotation angle. We first identify the catastrophic scenario of an arbitrarily large CRB when a conventional periodic preamble is used. We next resolve this problem by using a BRP with a non-zero block rotation angle. This angle creates, in effect, an artificial frequency offset that separates the desired relayed signal from the self-interference that is introduced in the AF protocol. With appropriate optimization, the CRB incurs only marginal loss from one-way relaying under practical channel conditions. To facilitate implementation, a specific low-complexity class of estimators is examined, and conditions for the estimators to achieve the optimized CRB is established. Numerical results are given which corroborate with theoretical findings.
1208.3261
Analyticity of Entropy Rate of Continuous-State Hidden Markov Chains
math.PR cs.IT math.IT
We prove that under certain mild assumptions, the entropy rate of a hidden Markov chain, observed when passing a finite-state stationary Markov chain through a discrete-time continuous-output channel, is jointly analytic as a function of the input Markov chain parameters and the channel parameters. In particular, as consequences of the main theorems, we obtain analyticity for the entropy rate associated with representative channels: Cauchy and Gaussian.
1208.3279
Structured Prediction Cascades
stat.ML cs.LG
Structured prediction tasks pose a fundamental trade-off between the need for model complexity to increase predictive power and the limited computational resources for inference in the exponentially-sized output spaces such models require. We formulate and develop the Structured Prediction Cascade architecture: a sequence of increasingly complex models that progressively filter the space of possible outputs. The key principle of our approach is that each model in the cascade is optimized to accurately filter and refine the structured output state space of the next model, speeding up both learning and inference in the next layer of the cascade. We learn cascades by optimizing a novel convex loss function that controls the trade-off between the filtering efficiency and the accuracy of the cascade, and provide generalization bounds for both accuracy and efficiency. We also extend our approach to intractable models using tree-decomposition ensembles, and provide algorithms and theory for this setting. We evaluate our approach on several large-scale problems, achieving state-of-the-art performance in handwriting recognition and human pose recognition. We find that structured prediction cascades allow tremendous speedups and the use of previously intractable features and models in both settings.
1208.3290
The building up of individual inflexibility in opinion dynamics
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Two models of opinion dynamics are entangled in order to build a more realistic model of inflexibility. The first one is the Galam Unifying Frame (GUF), which incorporates rational and inflexible agents, and the other one considers the combination of Continuous Opinions and Discrete Actions (CODA). While initially in GUF, inflexibility is a fixed given feature of an agent, it is now the result of an accumulation for a given agent who makes the same choice through repeated updates. Inflexibility thus emerges as an internal property of agents becoming a continuous function of the strength of its opinion. Therefore an agent can be more or less inflexible and can shift from inflexibility along one choice to inflexibility along the opposite choice. These individual dynamics of the building up and falling off of an agent inflexibility are driven by the successive local updates of the associated individual opinions. New results are obtained and discussed in terms of predicting outcomes of public debates.
1208.3291
When to look at a noisy Markov chain in sequential decision making if measurements are costly?
math.OC cs.IT math.IT
A decision maker records measurements of a finite-state Markov chain corrupted by noise. The goal is to decide when the Markov chain hits a specific target state. The decision maker can choose from a finite set of sampling intervals to pick the next time to look at the Markov chain. The aim is to optimize an objective comprising of false alarm, delay cost and cumulative measurement sampling cost. Taking more frequent measurements yields accurate estimates but incurs a higher measurement cost. Making an erroneous decision too soon incurs a false alarm penalty. Waiting too long to declare the target state incurs a delay penalty. What is the optimal sequential strategy for the decision maker? The paper shows that under reasonable conditions, the optimal strategy has the following intuitive structure: when the Bayesian estimate (posterior distribution) of the Markov chain is away from the target state, look less frequently; while if the posterior is close to the target state, look more frequently. Bounds are derived for the optimal strategy. Also the achievable optimal cost of the sequential detector as a function of transition dynamics and observation distribution is analyzed. The sensitivity of the optimal achievable cost to parameter variations is bounded in terms of the Kullback divergence. To prove the results in this paper, novel stochastic dominance results on the Bayesian filtering recursion are derived. The formulation in this paper generalizes quickest time change detection to consider optimal sampling and also yields useful results in sensor scheduling (active sensing).
1208.3307
Impedance mismatch is not an "Objects vs. Relations" problem
cs.DB
A problem of impedance mismatch between applications written in OO languages and relational DB is not a problem of discrepancy between object-oriented and relational approaches themselves. Its real causes can be found in usual implementation of the OO approach. Direct comparison of the two approaches cannot be used as a base for the conclusion that they are discrepant or mismatched. Experimental proof of absence of contradiction between object-oriented paradigm and relational data model is also presented
1208.3390
A Unified Linear MSE Minimization MIMO Beamforming Design Based on Quadratic Matrix Programming
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we investigate a unified linear transceiver design with mean-square-error (MSE) as the objective function for a wide range of wireless systems. The unified design is based on an elegant mathematical programming technology namely quadratic matrix programming (QMP). It is revealed that for different wireless systems such as multi-cell coordination systems, multi-user MIMO systems, MIMO cognitive radio systems, amplify-and-forward MIMO relaying systems, the MSE minimization beamforming design problems can always be solved by solving a number of QMP problems. A comprehensive framework on how to solve QMP problems is also given.
1208.3398
How Agreement and Disagreement Evolve over Random Dynamic Networks
cs.SI cs.MA cs.SY math.OC
The dynamics of an agreement protocol interacting with a disagreement process over a common random network is considered. The model can represent the spreading of true and false information over a communication network, the propagation of faults in a large-scale control system, or the development of trust and mistrust in a society. At each time instance and with a given probability, a pair of network nodes are selected to interact. At random each of the nodes then updates its state towards the state of the other node (attraction), away from the other node (repulsion), or sticks to its current state (neglect). Agreement convergence and disagreement divergence results are obtained for various strengths of the updates for both symmetric and asymmetric update rules. Impossibility theorems show that a specific level of attraction is required for almost sure asymptotic agreement and a specific level of repulsion is required for almost sure asymptotic disagreement. A series of sufficient and/or necessary conditions are then established for agreement convergence or disagreement divergence. In particular, under symmetric updates, a critical convergence measure in the attraction and repulsion update strength is found, in the sense that the asymptotic property of the network state evolution transits from agreement convergence to disagreement divergence when this measure goes from negative to positive. The result can be interpreted as a tight bound on how much bad action needs to be injected in a dynamic network in order to consistently steer its overall behavior away from consensus.
1208.3422
Distance Metric Learning for Kernel Machines
stat.ML cs.LG
Recent work in metric learning has significantly improved the state-of-the-art in k-nearest neighbor classification. Support vector machines (SVM), particularly with RBF kernels, are amongst the most popular classification algorithms that uses distance metrics to compare examples. This paper provides an empirical analysis of the efficacy of three of the most popular Mahalanobis metric learning algorithms as pre-processing for SVM training. We show that none of these algorithms generate metrics that lead to particularly satisfying improvements for SVM-RBF classification. As a remedy we introduce support vector metric learning (SVML), a novel algorithm that seamlessly combines the learning of a Mahalanobis metric with the training of the RBF-SVM parameters. We demonstrate the capabilities of SVML on nine benchmark data sets of varying sizes and difficulties. In our study, SVML outperforms all alternative state-of-the-art metric learning algorithms in terms of accuracy and establishes itself as a serious alternative to the standard Euclidean metric with model selection by cross validation.
1208.3428
Comparative Bi-stochastizations and Associated Clusterings/Regionalizations of the 1995-2000 U. S. Intercounty Migration Network
cs.SI physics.soc-ph stat.AP
Wang, Li and Konig have recently compared the cluster-theoretic properties of bi-stochasticized symmetric data similarity (e. g. kernel) matrices, produced by minimizing two different forms of Bregman divergences. We extend their investigation to non-symmetric matrices, specifically studying the 1995-2000 U. S. 3,107 x 3,107 intercounty migration matrix. A particular bi-stochastized form of it had been obtained (arXiv:1207.0437), using the well-established Sinkhorn-Knopp (SK) (biproportional) algorithm--which minimizes the Kullback-Leibler form of the divergence. This matrix has but a single entry equal to (the maximal possible value of) 1. Highly contrastingly, the bi-stochastic matrix obtained here, implementing the Wang-Li-Konig-algorithm for the minimum of the alternative, squared-norm form of the divergence, has 2,707 such unit entries. The corresponding 3,107-vertex, 2,707-link directed graph has 2,352 strong components. These consist of 1,659 single/isolated counties, 654 doublets (thirty-one interstate in nature), 22 triplets (one being interstate), 13 quartets (one being interstate), three quintets and one septet. Not manifest in these graph-theoretic results, however, are the five-county states of Hawaii and Rhode Island and the eight-county state of Connecticut. These--among other regional configurations--appealingly emerged as well-defined entities in the SK-based strong-component hierarchical clustering.
1208.3432
A Novel Strategy Selection Method for Multi-Objective Clustering Algorithms Using Game Theory
cs.GT cs.AI
The most important factors which contribute to the efficiency of game-theoretical algorithms are time and game complexity. In this study, we have offered an elegant method to deal with high complexity of game theoretic multi-objective clustering methods in large-sized data sets. Here, we have developed a method which selects a subset of strategies from strategies profile for each player. In this case, the size of payoff matrices reduces significantly which has a remarkable impact on time complexity. Therefore, practical problems with more data are tractable with less computational complexity. Although strategies set may grow with increasing the number of data points, the presented model of strategy selection reduces the strategy space, considerably, where clusters are subdivided into several sub-clusters in each local game. The remarkable results demonstrate the efficiency of the presented approach in reducing computational complexity of the problem of concern.
1208.3512
Contour Completion Around a Fixation Point
cs.CV
The paper presents two edge grouping algorithms for finding a closed contour starting from a particular edge point and enclosing a fixation point. Both algorithms search a shortest simple cycle in \textit{an angularly ordered graph} derived from an edge image where a vertex is an end point of a contour fragment and an undirected arc is drawn between a pair of end-points whose visual angle from the fixation point is less than a threshold value, which is set to $\pi/2$ in our experiments. The first algorithm restricts the search space by disregarding arcs that cross the line extending from the fixation point to the starting point. The second algorithm improves the solution of the first algorithm in a greedy manner. The algorithms were tested with a large number of natural images with manually placed fixation and starting points. The results are promising.
1208.3530
Leveraging Subjective Human Annotation for Clustering Historic Newspaper Articles
cs.IR cs.CL cs.DL
The New York Public Library is participating in the Chronicling America initiative to develop an online searchable database of historically significant newspaper articles. Microfilm copies of the newspapers are scanned and high resolution Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software is run on them. The text from the OCR provides a wealth of data and opinion for researchers and historians. However, categorization of articles provided by the OCR engine is rudimentary and a large number of the articles are labeled editorial without further grouping. Manually sorting articles into fine-grained categories is time consuming if not impossible given the size of the corpus. This paper studies techniques for automatic categorization of newspaper articles so as to enhance search and retrieval on the archive. We explore unsupervised (e.g. KMeans) and semi-supervised (e.g. constrained clustering) learning algorithms to develop article categorization schemes geared towards the needs of end-users. A pilot study was designed to understand whether there was unanimous agreement amongst patrons regarding how articles can be categorized. It was found that the task was very subjective and consequently automated algorithms that could deal with subjective labels were used. While the small scale pilot study was extremely helpful in designing machine learning algorithms, a much larger system needs to be developed to collect annotations from users of the archive. The "BODHI" system currently being developed is a step in that direction, allowing users to correct wrongly scanned OCR and providing keywords and tags for newspaper articles used frequently. On successful implementation of the beta version of this system, we hope that it can be integrated with existing software being developed for the Chronicling America project.
1208.3533
DisC Diversity: Result Diversification based on Dissimilarity and Coverage
cs.DB
Recently, result diversification has attracted a lot of attention as a means to improve the quality of results retrieved by user queries. In this paper, we propose a new, intuitive definition of diversity called DisC diversity. A DisC diverse subset of a query result contains objects such that each object in the result is represented by a similar object in the diverse subset and the objects in the diverse subset are dissimilar to each other. We show that locating a minimum DisC diverse subset is an NP-hard problem and provide heuristics for its approximation. We also propose adapting DisC diverse subsets to a different degree of diversification. We call this operation zooming. We present efficient implementations of our algorithms based on the M-tree, a spatial index structure, and experimentally evaluate their performance.
1208.3546
Identifiability of multivariate logistic mixture models
math.PR cs.IT math.IT
Mixture models have been widely used in modeling of continuous observations. For the possibility to estimate the parameters of a mixture model consistently on the basis of observations from the mixture, identifiability is a necessary condition. In this study, we give some results on the identifiability of multivariate logistic mixture models.
1208.3549
Explicit Simplicial Discretization of Distributed-Parameter Port-Hamiltonian Systems
cs.SY math.OC
Simplicial Dirac structures as finite analogues of the canonical Stokes-Dirac structure, capturing the topological laws of the system, are defined on simplicial manifolds in terms of primal and dual cochains related by the coboundary operators. These finite-dimensional Dirac structures offer a framework for the formulation of standard input-output finite-dimensional port-Hamiltonian systems that emulate the behavior of distributed-parameter port-Hamiltonian systems. This paper elaborates on the matrix representations of simplicial Dirac structures and the resulting port-Hamiltonian systems on simplicial manifolds. Employing these representations, we consider the existence of structural invariants and demonstrate how they pertain to the energy shaping of port-Hamiltonian systems on simplicial manifolds.
1208.3561
Efficient Active Learning of Halfspaces: an Aggressive Approach
cs.LG
We study pool-based active learning of half-spaces. We revisit the aggressive approach for active learning in the realizable case, and show that it can be made efficient and practical, while also having theoretical guarantees under reasonable assumptions. We further show, both theoretically and experimentally, that it can be preferable to mellow approaches. Our efficient aggressive active learner of half-spaces has formal approximation guarantees that hold when the pool is separable with a margin. While our analysis is focused on the realizable setting, we show that a simple heuristic allows using the same algorithm successfully for pools with low error as well. We further compare the aggressive approach to the mellow approach, and prove that there are cases in which the aggressive approach results in significantly better label complexity compared to the mellow approach. We demonstrate experimentally that substantial improvements in label complexity can be achieved using the aggressive approach, for both realizable and low-error settings.
1208.3598
Improved Successive Cancellation Decoding of Polar Codes
cs.IT math.IT
As improved versions of successive cancellation (SC) decoding algorithm, successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding and successive cancellation stack (SCS) decoding are used to improve the finite-length performance of polar codes. Unified descriptions of SC, SCL and SCS decoding algorithms are given as path searching procedures on the code tree of polar codes. Combining the ideas of SCL and SCS, a new decoding algorithm named successive cancellation hybrid (SCH) is proposed, which can achieve a better trade-off between computational complexity and space complexity. Further, to reduce the complexity, a pruning technique is proposed to avoid unnecessary path searching operations. Performance and complexity analysis based on simulations show that, with proper configurations, all the three improved successive cancellation (ISC) decoding algorithms can have a performance very close to that of maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding with acceptable complexity. Moreover, with the help of the proposed pruning technique, the complexities of ISC decoders can be very close to that of SC decoder in the moderate and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime.
1208.3600
Modeling and Control of CSTR using Model based Neural Network Predictive Control
cs.AI cs.NE nlin.AO
This paper presents a predictive control strategy based on neural network model of the plant is applied to Continuous Stirred Tank Reactor (CSTR). This system is a highly nonlinear process; therefore, a nonlinear predictive method, e.g., neural network predictive control, can be a better match to govern the system dynamics. In the paper, the NN model and the way in which it can be used to predict the behavior of the CSTR process over a certain prediction horizon are described, and some comments about the optimization procedure are made. Predictive control algorithm is applied to control the concentration in a continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR), whose parameters are optimally determined by solving quadratic performance index using the optimization algorithm. An efficient control of the product concentration in cstr can be achieved only through accurate model. Here an attempt is made to alleviate the modeling difficulties using Artificial Intelligent technique such as Neural Network. Simulation results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the NNMPC technique.
1208.3619
SASeq: A Selective and Adaptive Shrinkage Approach to Detect and Quantify Active Transcripts using RNA-Seq
q-bio.QM cs.CE q-bio.GN
Identification and quantification of condition-specific transcripts using RNA-Seq is vital in transcriptomics research. While initial efforts using mathematical or statistical modeling of read counts or per-base exonic signal have been successful, they may suffer from model overfitting since not all the reference transcripts in a database are expressed under a specific biological condition. Standard shrinkage approaches, such as Lasso, shrink all the transcript abundances to zero in a non-discriminative manner. Thus it does not necessarily yield the set of condition-specific transcripts. Informed shrinkage approaches, using the observed exonic coverage signal, are thus desirable. Motivated by ubiquitous uncovered exonic regions in RNA-Seq data, termed as "naked exons", we propose a new computational approach that first filters out the reference transcripts not supported by splicing and paired-end reads, then followed by fitting a new mathematical model of per-base exonic coverage signal and the underlying transcripts structure. We introduce a tuning parameter to penalize the specific regions of the selected transcripts that were not supported by the naked exons. Our approach compares favorably with the selected competing methods in terms of both time complexity and accuracy using simulated and real-world data. Our method is implemented in SAMMate, a GUI software suite freely available from http://sammate.sourceforge.net
1208.3623
Content-based Text Categorization using Wikitology
cs.IR cs.AI
A major computational burden, while performing document clustering, is the calculation of similarity measure between a pair of documents. Similarity measure is a function that assign a real number between 0 and 1 to a pair of documents, depending upon the degree of similarity between them. A value of zero means that the documents are completely dissimilar whereas a value of one indicates that the documents are practically identical. Traditionally, vector-based models have been used for computing the document similarity. The vector-based models represent several features present in documents. These approaches to similarity measures, in general, cannot account for the semantics of the document. Documents written in human languages contain contexts and the words used to describe these contexts are generally semantically related. Motivated by this fact, many researchers have proposed semantic-based similarity measures by utilizing text annotation through external thesauruses like WordNet (a lexical database). In this paper, we define a semantic similarity measure based on documents represented in topic maps. Topic maps are rapidly becoming an industrial standard for knowledge representation with a focus for later search and extraction. The documents are transformed into a topic map based coded knowledge and the similarity between a pair of documents is represented as a correlation between the common patterns. The experimental studies on the text mining datasets reveal that this new similarity measure is more effective as compared to commonly used similarity measures in text clustering.
1208.3653
Using Location-Based Social Networks to Validate Human Mobility and Relationships Models
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We propose to use social networking data to validate mobility models for pervasive mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) and delay tolerant networks (DTNs). The Random Waypoint (RWP) and Erdos-Renyi (ER) models have been a popular choice among researchers for generating mobility traces of nodes and relationships between them. Not only RWP and ER are useful in evaluating networking protocols in a simulation environment, but they are also used for theoretical analysis of such dynamic networks. However, it has been observed that neither relationships among people nor their movements are random. Instead, human movements frequently contain repeated patterns and friendship is bounded by distance. We used social networking site Gowalla to collect, create and validate models of human mobility and relationships for analysis and evaluations of applications in opportunistic networks such as sensor networks and transportation models in civil engineering. In doing so, we hope to provide more human-like movements and social relationship models to researchers to study problems in complex and mobile networks.
1208.3665
An Evaluation of Popular Copy-Move Forgery Detection Approaches
cs.CV
A copy-move forgery is created by copying and pasting content within the same image, and potentially post-processing it. In recent years, the detection of copy-move forgeries has become one of the most actively researched topics in blind image forensics. A considerable number of different algorithms have been proposed focusing on different types of postprocessed copies. In this paper, we aim to answer which copy-move forgery detection algorithms and processing steps (e.g., matching, filtering, outlier detection, affine transformation estimation) perform best in various postprocessing scenarios. The focus of our analysis is to evaluate the performance of previously proposed feature sets. We achieve this by casting existing algorithms in a common pipeline. In this paper, we examined the 15 most prominent feature sets. We analyzed the detection performance on a per-image basis and on a per-pixel basis. We created a challenging real-world copy-move dataset, and a software framework for systematic image manipulation. Experiments show, that the keypoint-based features SIFT and SURF, as well as the block-based DCT, DWT, KPCA, PCA and Zernike features perform very well. These feature sets exhibit the best robustness against various noise sources and downsampling, while reliably identifying the copied regions.
1208.3667
2.5K-Graphs: from Sampling to Generation
cs.SI physics.data-an physics.soc-ph
Understanding network structure and having access to realistic graphs plays a central role in computer and social networks research. In this paper, we propose a complete, and practical methodology for generating graphs that resemble a real graph of interest. The metrics of the original topology we target to match are the joint degree distribution (JDD) and the degree-dependent average clustering coefficient ($\bar{c}(k)$). We start by developing efficient estimators for these two metrics based on a node sample collected via either independence sampling or random walks. Then, we process the output of the estimators to ensure that the target properties are realizable. Finally, we propose an efficient algorithm for generating topologies that have the exact target JDD and a $\bar{c}(k)$ close to the target. Extensive simulations using real-life graphs show that the graphs generated by our methodology are similar to the original graph with respect to, not only the two target metrics, but also a wide range of other topological metrics; furthermore, our generator is order of magnitudes faster than state-of-the-art techniques.
1208.3670
A Survey of Recent View-based 3D Model Retrieval Methods
cs.CV
Extensive research efforts have been dedicated to 3D model retrieval in recent decades. Recently, view-based methods have attracted much research attention due to the high discriminative property of multi-views for 3D object representation. In this report, we summarize the view-based 3D model methods and provide the further research trends. This paper focuses on the scheme for matching between multiple views of 3D models and the application of bag-of-visual-words method in 3D model retrieval. For matching between multiple views, the many-to-many matching, probabilistic matching and semisupervised learning methods are introduced. For bag-of-visual-words application in 3D model retrieval, we first briefly review the bag-of-visual-words works on multimedia and computer vision tasks, where the visual dictionary has been detailed introduced. Then a series of 3D model retrieval methods by using bag-of-visual-words description are surveyed in this paper. At last, we summarize the further research content in view-based 3D model retrieval.
1208.3681
Calculations of Frequency Response Functions (FRF) Using Computer Smart Office Software and Nyquist Plot under Gyroscopic Effect Rotation
cs.CE
Regenerated (FRF curves), synthesis of (FRF) curves there are two main requirement in the form of response model, The first being that of regenerating "Theoretical" curve for the frequency response function actually measured and analysis and the second being that of synthesising the other functions which were not measured,(FRF) that isolates the inherent dynamic properties of a mechanical structure. Experimental modal parameters (frequency, damping, and mode shape) are also obtained from a set of (FRF) measurements. The (FRF) describes the input-output relationship between two points on a structure as a function of frequency. Therefore, an (FRF) is actually defined between a single input DOF (point & direction), and a single output (DOF), although the FRF was previously defined as a ratio of the Fourier transforms of an output and input signal. In this paper we detection FRF curve using Nyquist plot under gyroscopic effect in revolving structure using computer smart office software. Keywords - FRF curve; modal test; Nyquist plot; software engineering; gyroscopic effect; smart office.
1208.3687
Information-theoretic Dictionary Learning for Image Classification
cs.CV cs.IT math.IT stat.ML
We present a two-stage approach for learning dictionaries for object classification tasks based on the principle of information maximization. The proposed method seeks a dictionary that is compact, discriminative, and generative. In the first stage, dictionary atoms are selected from an initial dictionary by maximizing the mutual information measure on dictionary compactness, discrimination and reconstruction. In the second stage, the selected dictionary atoms are updated for improved reconstructive and discriminative power using a simple gradient ascent algorithm on mutual information. Experiments using real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for image classification tasks.
1208.3689
An improvement direction for filter selection techniques using information theory measures and quadratic optimization
cs.LG cs.IT math.IT
Filter selection techniques are known for their simplicity and efficiency. However this kind of methods doesn't take into consideration the features inter-redundancy. Consequently the un-removed redundant features remain in the final classification model, giving lower generalization performance. In this paper we propose to use a mathematical optimization method that reduces inter-features redundancy and maximize relevance between each feature and the target variable.
1208.3691
On the genericity properties in networked estimation: Topology design and sensor placement
cs.MA cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we consider networked estimation of linear, discrete-time dynamical systems monitored by a network of agents. In order to minimize the power requirement at the (possibly, battery-operated) agents, we require that the agents can exchange information with their neighbors only \emph{once per dynamical system time-step}; in contrast to consensus-based estimation where the agents exchange information until they reach a consensus. It can be verified that with this restriction on information exchange, measurement fusion alone results in an unbounded estimation error at every such agent that does not have an observable set of measurements in its neighborhood. To over come this challenge, state-estimate fusion has been proposed to recover the system observability. However, we show that adding state-estimate fusion may not recover observability when the system matrix is structured-rank ($S$-rank) deficient. In this context, we characterize the state-estimate fusion and measurement fusion under both full $S$-rank and $S$-rank deficient system matrices.
1208.3700
Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging and Motion Estimation via Robust Principle Component Analysis
cs.IT math.IT math.NA
We consider the problem of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging and motion estimation of complex scenes. By complex we mean scenes with multiple targets, stationary and in motion. We use the usual setup with one moving antenna emitting and receiving signals. We address two challenges: (1) the detection of moving targets in the complex scene and (2) the separation of the echoes from the stationary targets and those from the moving targets. Such separation allows high resolution imaging of the stationary scene and motion estimation with the echoes from the moving targets alone. We show that the robust principal component analysis (PCA) method which decomposes a matrix in two parts, one low rank and one sparse, can be used for motion detection and data separation. The matrix that is decomposed is the pulse and range compressed SAR data indexed by two discrete time variables: the slow time, which parametrizes the location of the antenna, and the fast time, which parametrizes the echoes received between successive emissions from the antenna. We present an analysis of the rank of the data matrix to motivate the use of the robust PCA method. We also show with numerical simulations that successful data separation with robust PCA requires proper data windowing. Results of motion estimation and imaging with the separated data are presented, as well.
1208.3716
Improved Total Variation based Image Compressive Sensing Recovery by Nonlocal Regularization
cs.CV
Recently, total variation (TV) based minimization algorithms have achieved great success in compressive sensing (CS) recovery for natural images due to its virtue of preserving edges. However, the use of TV is not able to recover the fine details and textures, and often suffers from undesirable staircase artifact. To reduce these effects, this letter presents an improved TV based image CS recovery algorithm by introducing a new nonlocal regularization constraint into CS optimization problem. The nonlocal regularization is built on the well known nonlocal means (NLM) filtering and takes advantage of self-similarity in images, which helps to suppress the staircase effect and restore the fine details. Furthermore, an efficient augmented Lagrangian based algorithm is developed to solve the above combined TV and nonlocal regularization constrained problem. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art TV based algorithm in both PSNR and visual perception.
1208.3719
Auto-WEKA: Combined Selection and Hyperparameter Optimization of Classification Algorithms
cs.LG
Many different machine learning algorithms exist; taking into account each algorithm's hyperparameters, there is a staggeringly large number of possible alternatives overall. We consider the problem of simultaneously selecting a learning algorithm and setting its hyperparameters, going beyond previous work that addresses these issues in isolation. We show that this problem can be addressed by a fully automated approach, leveraging recent innovations in Bayesian optimization. Specifically, we consider a wide range of feature selection techniques (combining 3 search and 8 evaluator methods) and all classification approaches implemented in WEKA, spanning 2 ensemble methods, 10 meta-methods, 27 base classifiers, and hyperparameter settings for each classifier. On each of 21 popular datasets from the UCI repository, the KDD Cup 09, variants of the MNIST dataset and CIFAR-10, we show classification performance often much better than using standard selection/hyperparameter optimization methods. We hope that our approach will help non-expert users to more effectively identify machine learning algorithms and hyperparameter settings appropriate to their applications, and hence to achieve improved performance.
1208.3723
Image Super-Resolution via Dual-Dictionary Learning And Sparse Representation
cs.CV
Learning-based image super-resolution aims to reconstruct high-frequency (HF) details from the prior model trained by a set of high- and low-resolution image patches. In this paper, HF to be estimated is considered as a combination of two components: main high-frequency (MHF) and residual high-frequency (RHF), and we propose a novel image super-resolution method via dual-dictionary learning and sparse representation, which consists of the main dictionary learning and the residual dictionary learning, to recover MHF and RHF respectively. Extensive experimental results on test images validate that by employing the proposed two-layer progressive scheme, more image details can be recovered and much better results can be achieved than the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both PSNR and visual perception.
1208.3728
Online Learning with Predictable Sequences
stat.ML cs.LG
We present methods for online linear optimization that take advantage of benign (as opposed to worst-case) sequences. Specifically if the sequence encountered by the learner is described well by a known "predictable process", the algorithms presented enjoy tighter bounds as compared to the typical worst case bounds. Additionally, the methods achieve the usual worst-case regret bounds if the sequence is not benign. Our approach can be seen as a way of adding prior knowledge about the sequence within the paradigm of online learning. The setting is shown to encompass partial and side information. Variance and path-length bounds can be seen as particular examples of online learning with simple predictable sequences. We further extend our methods and results to include competing with a set of possible predictable processes (models), that is "learning" the predictable process itself concurrently with using it to obtain better regret guarantees. We show that such model selection is possible under various assumptions on the available feedback. Our results suggest a promising direction of further research with potential applications to stock market and time series prediction.
1208.3774
Graphical Query Builder in Opportunistic Sensor Networks to discover Sensor Information
cs.IR
A lot of sensor network applications are data-driven. We believe that query is the most preferred way to discover sensor services. Normally users are unaware of available sensors. Thus users need to pose different types of query over the sensor network to get the desired information. Even users may need to input more complicated queries with higher levels of aggregations, and requires more complex interactions with the system. As the users have no prior knowledge of the sensor data or services our aim is to develop a visual query interface where users can feed more user friendly queries and machine can understand those. In this paper work, we have developed an Interactive visual query interface for the users. To accomplish this we have considered several use cases and we have derived graphical representation of query from their text based format for those use case scenario. We have facilitated the user by extracting class, subclass and properties from Ontology. To do so we have parsed OWL file in the user interface and based upon the parsed information users build visual query. Later on we have translated the visual query languages into SPARQL query, a machine understandable format which helps the machine to communicate with the underlying technology.
1208.3779
Multiple graph regularized protein domain ranking
cs.LG cs.CE cs.IR q-bio.QM
Background Protein domain ranking is a fundamental task in structural biology. Most protein domain ranking methods rely on the pairwise comparison of protein domains while neglecting the global manifold structure of the protein domain database. Recently, graph regularized ranking that exploits the global structure of the graph defined by the pairwise similarities has been proposed. However, the existing graph regularized ranking methods are very sensitive to the choice of the graph model and parameters, and this remains a difficult problem for most of the protein domain ranking methods. Results To tackle this problem, we have developed the Multiple Graph regularized Ranking algorithm, MultiG- Rank. Instead of using a single graph to regularize the ranking scores, MultiG-Rank approximates the intrinsic manifold of protein domain distribution by combining multiple initial graphs for the regularization. Graph weights are learned with ranking scores jointly and automatically, by alternately minimizing an ob- jective function in an iterative algorithm. Experimental results on a subset of the ASTRAL SCOP protein domain database demonstrate that MultiG-Rank achieves a better ranking performance than single graph regularized ranking methods and pairwise similarity based ranking methods. Conclusion The problem of graph model and parameter selection in graph regularized protein domain ranking can be solved effectively by combining multiple graphs. This aspect of generalization introduces a new frontier in applying multiple graphs to solving protein domain ranking applications.
1208.3789
On Global Stability of Financial Networks
q-fin.GN cs.CE
The recent financial crisis have generated renewed interests in fragilities of global financial networks among economists and regulatory authorities. In particular, a potential vulnerability of the financial networks is the "financial contagion" process in which insolvencies of individual entities propagate through the "web of dependencies" to affect the entire system. In this paper, we formalize an extension of a financial network model originally proposed by Nier et al. for scenarios such as the OTC derivatives market, define a suitable global stability measure for this model, and perform a comprehensive empirical evaluation of this stability measure over more than 700,000 combinations of networks types and parameter combinations. Based on our evaluations, we discover many interesting implications of our evaluations of this stability measure, and derive topological properties and parameters combinations that may be used to flag the network as a possible fragile network. An interactive software FIN-STAB for computing the stability is available from the website www2.cs.uic.edu/~dasgupta/financial-simulator-files
1208.3790
Secret Key Generation from Sparse Wireless Channels: Ergodic Capacity and Secrecy Outage
cs.CR cs.IT math.IT
This paper investigates generation of a secret key from a reciprocal wireless channel. In particular we consider wireless channels that exhibit sparse structure in the wideband regime and the impact of the sparsity on the secret key capacity. We explore this problem in two steps. First, we study key generation from a state-dependent discrete memoryless multiple source. The state of source captures the effect of channel sparsity. Secondly, we consider a wireless channel model that captures channel sparsity and correlation between the legitimate users' channel and the eavesdropper's channel. Such dependency can significantly reduce the secret key capacity. According to system delay requirements, two performance measures are considered: (i) ergodic secret key capacity and (ii) outage probability. We show that in the wideband regime when a white sounding sequence is adopted, a sparser channel can achieve a higher ergodic secret key rate than a richer channel can. For outage performance, we show that if the users generate secret keys at a fraction of the ergodic capacity, the outage probability will decay exponentially in signal bandwidth. Moreover, a larger exponent is achieved by a richer channel.
1208.3802
OntoAna: Domain Ontology for Human Anatomy
cs.AI
Today, we can find many search engines which provide us with information which is more operational in nature. None of the search engines provide domain specific information. This becomes very troublesome to a novice user who wishes to have information in a particular domain. In this paper, we have developed an ontology which can be used by a domain specific search engine. We have developed an ontology on human anatomy, which captures information regarding cardiovascular system, digestive system, skeleton and nervous system. This information can be used by people working in medical and health care domain.
1208.3806
Dynamic Rate Adaptation for Improved Throughput and Delay in Wireless Network Coded Broadcast
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper we provide theoretical and simulation-based study of the delivery delay performance of a number of existing throughput optimal coding schemes and use the results to design a new dynamic rate adaptation scheme that achieves improved overall throughput-delay performance. Under a baseline rate control scheme, the receivers' delay performance is examined. Based on their Markov states, the knowledge difference between the sender and receiver, three distinct methods for packet delivery are identified: zero state, leader state and coefficient-based delivery. We provide analyses of each of these and show that, in many cases, zero state delivery alone presents a tractable approximation of the expected packet delivery behaviour. Interestingly, while coefficient-based delivery has so far been treated as a secondary effect in the literature, we find that the choice of coefficients is extremely important in determining the delay, and a well chosen encoding scheme can, in fact, contribute a significant improvement to the delivery delay. Based on our delivery delay model, we develop a dynamic rate adaptation scheme which uses performance prediction models to determine the sender transmission rate. Surprisingly, taking this approach leads us to the simple conclusion that the sender should regulate its addition rate based on the total number of undelivered packets stored at the receivers. We show that despite its simplicity, our proposed dynamic rate adaptation scheme results in noticeably improved throughput-delay performance over existing schemes in the literature.
1208.3809
Lifted Variable Elimination: A Novel Operator and Completeness Results
cs.AI
Various methods for lifted probabilistic inference have been proposed, but our understanding of these methods and the relationships between them is still limited, compared to their propositional counterparts. The only existing theoretical characterization of lifting is for weighted first-order model counting (WFOMC), which was shown to be complete domain-lifted for the class of 2-logvar models. This paper makes two contributions to lifted variable elimination (LVE). First, we introduce a novel inference operator called group inversion. Second, we prove that LVE augmented with this operator is complete in the same sense as WFOMC.
1208.3811
State distributions and minimum relative entropy noise sequences in uncertain stochastic systems: the discrete time case
cs.SY cs.IT math.IT math.OC math.PR
The paper is concerned with a dissipativity theory and robust performance analysis of discrete-time stochastic systems driven by a statistically uncertain random noise. The uncertainty is quantified by the conditional relative entropy of the actual probability law of the noise with respect to a nominal product measure corresponding to a white noise sequence. We discuss a balance equation, dissipation inequality and superadditivity property for the corresponding conditional relative entropy supply as a function of time. The problem of minimizing the supply required to drive the system between given state distributions over a specified time horizon is considered. Such variational problems, involving entropy and probabilistic boundary conditions, are known in the literature as Schroedinger bridge problems. In application to control systems, this minimum required conditional relative entropy supply characterizes the robustness of the system with respect to an uncertain noise. We obtain a dynamic programming Bellman equation for the minimum required conditional relative entropy supply and establish a Markov property of the worst-case noise with respect to the state of the system. For multivariable linear systems with a Gaussian white noise sequence as the nominal noise model and Gaussian initial and terminal state distributions, the minimum required supply is obtained using an algebraic Riccati equation which admits a closed-form solution. We propose a computable robustness index for such systems in the framework of an entropy theoretic formulation of uncertainty and provide an example to illustrate this approach.
1208.3812
Algorithms for Efficient Mining of Statistically Significant Attribute Association Information
cs.DB
Knowledge of the association information between the attributes in a data set provides insight into the underlying structure of the data and explains the relationships (independence, synergy, redundancy) between the attributes and class (if present). Complex models learnt computationally from the data are more interpretable to a human analyst when such interdependencies are known. In this paper, we focus on mining two types of association information among the attributes - correlation information and interaction information for both supervised (class attribute present) and unsupervised analysis (class attribute absent). Identifying the statistically significant attribute associations is a computationally challenging task - the number of possible associations increases exponentially and many associations contain redundant information when a number of correlated attributes are present. In this paper, we explore efficient data mining methods to discover non-redundant attribute sets that contain significant association information indicating the presence of informative patterns in the data.
1208.3815
Hardy-Schatten Norms of Systems, Output Energy Cumulants and Linear Quadro-Quartic Gaussian Control
cs.SY math.OC math.PR
This paper is concerned with linear stochastic control systems in state space. The integral of the squared norm of the system output over a bounded time interval is interpreted as energy. The cumulants of the output energy in the infinite-horizon limit are related to Schatten norms of the system in the Hardy space of transfer functions and the risk-sensitive performance index. We employ a novel performance criterion which seeks to minimize a combination of the average value and the variance of the output energy of the system per unit time. The resulting linear quadro-quartic Gaussian control problem involves the H2 and H4-norms of the closed-loop system. We obtain equations for the optimal controller and outline a homotopy method which reduces the solution of the problem to the numerical integration of a differential equation initialized by the standard linear quadratic Gaussian controller.
1208.3822
Joint-ViVo: Selecting and Weighting Visual Words Jointly for Bag-of-Features based Tissue Classification in Medical Images
cs.CV stat.ML
Automatically classifying the tissues types of Region of Interest (ROI) in medical imaging has been an important application in Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD), such as classification of breast parenchymal tissue in the mammogram, classify lung disease patterns in High-Resolution Computed Tomography (HRCT) etc. Recently, bag-of-features method has shown its power in this field, treating each ROI as a set of local features. In this paper, we investigate using the bag-of-features strategy to classify the tissue types in medical imaging applications. Two important issues are considered here: the visual vocabulary learning and weighting. Although there are already plenty of algorithms to deal with them, all of them treat them independently, namely, the vocabulary learned first and then the histogram weighted. Inspired by Auto-Context who learns the features and classifier jointly, we try to develop a novel algorithm that learns the vocabulary and weights jointly. The new algorithm, called Joint-ViVo, works in an iterative way. In each iteration, we first learn the weights for each visual word by maximizing the margin of ROI triplets, and then select the most discriminate visual words based on the learned weights for the next iteration. We test our algorithm on three tissue classification tasks: identifying brain tissue type in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), classifying lung tissue in HRCT images, and classifying breast tissue density in mammograms. The results show that Joint-ViVo can perform effectively for classifying tissues.
1208.3830
On the Stability of Receding Horizon Control for Continuous-Time Stochastic Systems
math.OC cs.SY
We study the stability of receding horizon control for continuous-time non-linear stochastic differential equations. We illustrate the results with a simulation example in which we employ receding horizon control to design an investment strategy to repay a debt.
1208.3839
Discriminative Sparse Coding on Multi-Manifold for Data Representation and Classification
cs.CV cs.LG stat.ML
Sparse coding has been popularly used as an effective data representation method in various applications, such as computer vision, medical imaging and bioinformatics, etc. However, the conventional sparse coding algorithms and its manifold regularized variants (graph sparse coding and Laplacian sparse coding), learn the codebook and codes in a unsupervised manner and neglect the class information available in the training set. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a novel discriminative sparse coding method based on multi-manifold, by learning discriminative class-conditional codebooks and sparse codes from both data feature space and class labels. First, the entire training set is partitioned into multiple manifolds according to the class labels. Then, we formulate the sparse coding as a manifold-manifold matching problem and learn class-conditional codebooks and codes to maximize the manifold margins of different classes. Lastly, we present a data point-manifold matching error based strategy to classify the unlabeled data point. Experimental results on somatic mutations identification and breast tumors classification in ultrasonic images tasks demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed data representation-classification approach.
1208.3845
Adaptive Graph via Multiple Kernel Learning for Nonnegative Matrix Factorization
cs.LG cs.CV stat.ML
Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) has been continuously evolving in several areas like pattern recognition and information retrieval methods. It factorizes a matrix into a product of 2 low-rank non-negative matrices that will define parts-based, and linear representation of nonnegative data. Recently, Graph regularized NMF (GrNMF) is proposed to find a compact representation,which uncovers the hidden semantics and simultaneously respects the intrinsic geometric structure. In GNMF, an affinity graph is constructed from the original data space to encode the geometrical information. In this paper, we propose a novel idea which engages a Multiple Kernel Learning approach into refining the graph structure that reflects the factorization of the matrix and the new data space. The GrNMF is improved by utilizing the graph refined by the kernel learning, and then a novel kernel learning method is introduced under the GrNMF framework. Our approach shows encouraging results of the proposed algorithm in comparison to the state-of-the-art clustering algorithms like NMF, GrNMF, SVD etc.
1208.3848
Modelling the effect of gap junctions on tissue-level cardiac electrophysiology
cs.CE physics.bio-ph q-bio.CB q-bio.TO
When modelling tissue-level cardiac electrophysiology, continuum approximations to the discrete cell-level equations are used to maintain computational tractability. One of the most commonly used models is represented by the bidomain equations, the derivation of which relies on a homogenisation technique to construct a suitable approximation to the discrete model. This derivation does not explicitly account for the presence of gap junctions connecting one cell to another. It has been seen experimentally [Rohr, Cardiovasc. Res. 2004] that these gap junctions have a marked effect on the propagation of the action potential, specifically as the upstroke of the wave passes through the gap junction. In this paper we explicitly include gap junctions in a both a 2D discrete model of cardiac electrophysiology, and the corresponding continuum model, on a simplified cell geometry. Using these models we compare the results of simulations using both continuum and discrete systems. We see that the form of the action potential as it passes through gap junctions cannot be replicated using a continuum model, and that the underlying propagation speed of the action potential ceases to match up between models when gap junctions are introduced. In addition, the results of the discrete simulations match the characteristics of those shown in Rohr 2004. From this, we suggest that a hybrid model -- a discrete system following the upstroke of the action potential, and a continuum system elsewhere -- may give a more accurate description of cardiac electrophysiology.
1208.3849
Analysis of parametric biological models with non-linear dynamics
cs.CE
In this paper we present recent results on parametric analysis of biological models. The underlying method is based on the algorithms for computing trajectory sets of hybrid systems with polynomial dynamics. The method is then applied to two case studies of biological systems: one is a cardiac cell model for studying the conditions for cardiac abnormalities, and the second is a model of insect nest-site choice.
1208.3850
A subsystems approach for parameter estimation of ODE models of hybrid systems
cs.CE q-bio.QM
We present a new method for parameter identification of ODE system descriptions based on data measurements. Our method works by splitting the system into a number of subsystems and working on each of them separately, thereby being easily parallelisable, and can also deal with noise in the observations.
1208.3851
A Model of the Cellular Iron Homeostasis Network Using Semi-Formal Methods for Parameter Space Exploration
cs.CE q-bio.MN q-bio.QM
This paper presents a novel framework for the modeling of biological networks. It makes use of recent tools analyzing the robust satisfaction of properties of (hybrid) dynamical systems. The main challenge of this approach as applied to biological systems is to get access to the relevant parameter sets despite gaps in the available knowledge. An initial estimate of useful parameters was sought by formalizing the known behavior of the biological network in the STL logic using the tool Breach. Then, once a set of parameter values consistent with known biological properties was found, we tried to locally expand it into the largest possible valid region. We applied this methodology in an effort to model and better understand the complex network regulating iron homeostasis in mammalian cells. This system plays an important role in many biological functions, including erythropoiesis, resistance against infections, and proliferation of cancer cells.
1208.3852
Hybrid Automata and \epsilon-Analysis on a Neural Oscillator
cs.CE cs.LO cs.SC
In this paper we propose a hybrid model of a neural oscillator, obtained by partially discretizing a well-known continuous model. Our construction points out that in this case the standard techniques, based on replacing sigmoids with step functions, is not satisfactory. Then, we study the hybrid model through both symbolic methods and approximation techniques. This last analysis, in particular, allows us to show the differences between the considered approximation approaches. Finally, we focus on approximations via epsilon-semantics, proving how these can be computed in practice.
1208.3853
On Expressing and Monitoring Oscillatory Dynamics
cs.CE cs.LO cs.NA cs.SY
To express temporal properties of dense-time real-valued signals, the Signal Temporal Logic (STL) has been defined by Maler et al. The work presented a monitoring algorithm deciding the satisfiability of STL formulae on finite discrete samples of continuous signals. The logic has been used to express and analyse biological systems, but it is not expressive enough to sufficiently distinguish oscillatory properties important in biology. In this paper we define the extended logic STL* in which STL is augmented with a signal-value freezing operator allowing us to express (and distinguish) detailed properties of biological oscillations. The logic is supported by a monitoring algorithm prototyped in Matlab. The monitoring procedure of STL* is evaluated on a biologically-relevant case study.
1208.3854
Hybrid models of the cell cycle molecular machinery
cs.CE cs.SY q-bio.QM
Piecewise smooth hybrid systems, involving continuous and discrete variables, are suitable models for describing the multiscale regulatory machinery of the biological cells. In hybrid models, the discrete variables can switch on and off some molecular interactions, simulating cell progression through a series of functioning modes. The advancement through the cell cycle is the archetype of such an organized sequence of events. We present an approach, inspired from tropical geometry ideas, allowing to reduce, hybridize and analyse cell cycle models consisting of polynomial or rational ordinary differential equations.
1208.3855
Effects of delayed immune-response in tumor immune-system interplay
cs.CE q-bio.CB
Tumors constitute a wide family of diseases kinetically characterized by the co-presence of multiple spatio-temporal scales. So, tumor cells ecologically interplay with other kind of cells, e.g. endothelial cells or immune system effectors, producing and exchanging various chemical signals. As such, tumor growth is an ideal object of hybrid modeling where discrete stochastic processes model agents at low concentrations, and mean-field equations model chemical signals. In previous works we proposed a hybrid version of the well-known Panetta-Kirschner mean-field model of tumor cells, effector cells and Interleukin-2. Our hybrid model suggested -at variance of the inferences from its original formulation- that immune surveillance, i.e. tumor elimination by the immune system, may occur through a sort of side-effect of large stochastic oscillations. However, that model did not account that, due to both chemical transportation and cellular differentiation/division, the tumor-induced recruitment of immune effectors is not instantaneous but, instead, it exhibits a lag period. To capture this, we here integrate a mean-field equation for Interleukins-2 with a bi-dimensional delayed stochastic process describing such delayed interplay. An algorithm to realize trajectories of the underlying stochastic process is obtained by coupling the Piecewise Deterministic Markov process (for the hybrid part) with a Generalized Semi-Markovian clock structure (to account for delays). We (i) relate tumor mass growth with delays via simulations and via parametric sensitivity analysis techniques, (ii) we quantitatively determine probabilistic eradication times, and (iii) we prove, in the oscillatory regime, the existence of a heuristic stochastic bifurcation resulting in delay-induced tumor eradication, which is neither predicted by the mean-field nor by the hybrid non-delayed models.
1208.3856
Statistical Model Checking for Stochastic Hybrid Systems
cs.CE cs.SE
This paper presents novel extensions and applications of the UPPAAL-SMC model checker. The extensions allow for statistical model checking of stochastic hybrid systems. We show how our race-based stochastic semantics extends to networks of hybrid systems, and indicate the integration technique applied for implementing this semantics in the UPPAAL-SMC simulation engine. We report on two applications of the resulting tool-set coming from systems biology and energy aware buildings.
1208.3857
Towards Cancer Hybrid Automata
cs.SY cs.FL
This paper introduces Cancer Hybrid Automata (CHAs), a formalism to model the progression of cancers through discrete phenotypes. The classification of cancer progression using discrete states like stages and hallmarks has become common in the biology literature, but primarily as an organizing principle, and not as an executable formalism. The precise computational model developed here aims to exploit this untapped potential, namely, through automatic verification of progression models (e.g., consistency, causal connections, etc.), classification of unreachable or unstable states and computer-generated (individualized or universal) therapy plans. The paper builds on a phenomenological approach, and as such does not need to assume a model for the biochemistry of the underlying natural progression. Rather, it abstractly models transition timings between states as well as the effects of drugs and clinical tests, and thus allows formalization of temporal statements about the progression as well as notions of timed therapies. The model proposed here is ultimately based on hybrid automata, and we show how existing controller synthesis algorithms can be generalized to CHA models, so that therapies can be generated automatically. Throughout this paper we use cancer hallmarks to represent the discrete states through which cancer progresses, but other notions of discretely or continuously varying state formalisms could also be used to derive similar therapies.
1208.3858
Disease processes as hybrid dynamical systems
cs.LO cs.CE cs.SY q-bio.QM
We investigate the use of hybrid techniques in complex processes of infectious diseases. Since predictive disease models in biomedicine require a multiscale approach for understanding the molecule-cell-tissue-organ-body interactions, heterogeneous methodologies are often employed for describing the different biological scales. Hybrid models provide effective means for complex disease modelling where the action and dosage of a drug or a therapy could be meaningfully investigated: the infection dynamics can be classically described in a continuous fashion, while the scheduling of multiple treatment discretely. We define an algebraic language for specifying general disease processes and multiple treatments, from which a semantics in terms of hybrid dynamical system can be derived. Then, the application of control-theoretic tools is proposed in order to compute the optimal scheduling of multiple therapies. The potentialities of our approach are shown in the case study of the SIR epidemic model and we discuss its applicability on osteomyelitis, a bacterial infection affecting the bone remodelling system in a specific and multiscale manner. We report that formal languages are helpful in giving a general homogeneous formulation for the different scales involved in a multiscale disease process; and that the combination of hybrid modelling and control theory provides solid grounds for computational medicine.
1208.3876
Digging Deeper into Deep Web Databases by Breaking Through the Top-k Barrier
cs.DB
A large number of web databases are only accessible through proprietary form-like interfaces which require users to query the system by entering desired values for a few attributes. A key restriction enforced by such an interface is the top-k output constraint - i.e., when there are a large number of matching tuples, only a few (top-k) of them are preferentially selected and returned by the website, often according to a proprietary ranking function. Since most web database owners set k to be a small value, the top-k output constraint prevents many interesting third-party (e.g., mashup) services from being developed over real-world web databases. In this paper we consider the novel problem of "digging deeper" into such web databases. Our main contribution is the meta-algorithm GetNext that can retrieve the next ranked tuple from the hidden web database using only the restrictive interface of a web database without any prior knowledge of its ranking function. This algorithm can then be called iteratively to retrieve as many top ranked tuples as necessary. We develop principled and efficient algorithms that are based on generating and executing multiple reformulated queries and inferring the next ranked tuple from their returned results. We provide theoretical analysis of our algorithms, as well as extensive experimental results over synthetic and real-world databases that illustrate the effectiveness of our techniques.
1208.3901
Trace transform based method for color image domain identification
cs.CV
Context categorization is a fundamental pre-requisite for multi-domain multimedia content analysis applications in order to manage contextual information in an efficient manner. In this paper, we introduce a new color image context categorization method (DITEC) based on the trace transform. The problem of dimensionality reduction of the obtained trace transform signal is addressed through statistical descriptors that keep the underlying information. These extracted features offer a highly discriminant behavior for content categorization. The theoretical properties of the method are analyzed and validated experimentally through two different datasets.
1208.3943
Performance Tuning Of J48 Algorithm For Prediction Of Soil Fertility
cs.LG cs.DB cs.PF stat.ML
Data mining involves the systematic analysis of large data sets, and data mining in agricultural soil datasets is exciting and modern research area. The productive capacity of a soil depends on soil fertility. Achieving and maintaining appropriate levels of soil fertility, is of utmost importance if agricultural land is to remain capable of nourishing crop production. In this research, Steps for building a predictive model of soil fertility have been explained. This paper aims at predicting soil fertility class using decision tree algorithms in data mining . Further, it focuses on performance tuning of J48 decision tree algorithm with the help of meta-techniques such as attribute selection and boosting.
1208.3952
Dealing with Sparse Document and Topic Representations: Lab Report for CHiC 2012
cs.IR
We will report on the participation of GESIS at the first CHiC workshop (Cultural Heritage in CLEF). Being held for the first time, no prior experience with the new data set, a document dump of Europeana with ca. 23 million documents, exists. The most prominent issues that arose from pretests with this test collection were the very unspecific topics and sparse document representations. Only half of the topics (26/50) contained a description and the titles were usually short with just around two words. Therefore we focused on three different term suggestion and query expansion mechanisms to surpass the sparse topical description. We used two methods that build on concept extraction from Wikipedia and on a method that applied co-occurrence statistics on the available Europeana corpus. In the following paper we will present the approaches and preliminary results from their assessments.
1208.3966
Network Coding Based on Chinese Remainder Theorem
cs.IT math.IT
Random linear network code has to sacrifice part of bandwidth to transfer the coding vectors, thus a head of size k log|T| is appended to each packet. We present a distributed random network coding approach based on the Chinese remainder theorem for general multicast networks. It uses a couple of modulus as the head, thus reduces the size of head to O(log k). This makes it more suitable for scenarios where the number of source nodes is large and the bandwidth is limited. We estimate the multicast rate and show it is satisfactory in performance for randomly designed networks.
1208.3981
Minimum Relative Entropy State Transitions in Linear Stochastic Systems: the Continuous Time Case
math.OC cs.IT cs.SY math.DS math.IT math.PR
This paper is concerned with a dissipativity theory for dynamical systems governed by linear Ito stochastic differential equations driven by random noise with an uncertain drift. The deviation of the noise from a standard Wiener process in the nominal model is quantified by relative entropy. We discuss a dissipation inequality for the noise relative entropy supply. The problem of minimizing the supply required to drive the system between given Gaussian state distributions over a specified time horizon is considered. This problem, known in the literature as the Schroedinger bridge, was treated previously in the context of reciprocal processes. A closed-form smooth solution is obtained for a Hamilton-Jacobi equation for the minimum required relative entropy supply by using nonlinear algebraic techniques.
1208.3984
On the Capacity of the Cognitive Interference Channel with a Common Cognitive Message
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper the cognitive interference channel with a common message, a variation of the classical cognitive interference channel in which the cognitive message is decoded at both receivers, is studied. For this channel model new outer and inner bounds are developed as well as new capacity results for both the discrete memoryless and the Gaussian case. The outer bounds are derived using bounding techniques originally developed by Sato for the classical interference channel and Nair and El Gamal for the broadcast channel. A general inner bound is obtained combining rate-splitting, superposition coding and binning. Inner and outer bounds are shown to coincide in the "very strong interference" and the "primary decodes cognitive" regimes. The first regime consists of channels in which there is no loss of optimality in having both receivers decode both messages while in the latter regime interference pre-cancellation at the cognitive receiver achieves capacity. Capacity for the Gaussian channel is shown to within a constant additive gap and a constant multiplicative factor.
1208.3994
Coordination in Network Security Games: a Monotone Comparative Statics Approach
cs.GT cs.NI cs.SI
Malicious softwares or malwares for short have become a major security threat. While originating in criminal behavior, their impact are also influenced by the decisions of legitimate end users. Getting agents in the Internet, and in networks in general, to invest in and deploy security features and protocols is a challenge, in particular because of economic reasons arising from the presence of network externalities. In this paper, we focus on the question of incentive alignment for agents of a large network towards a better security. We start with an economic model for a single agent, that determines the optimal amount to invest in protection. The model takes into account the vulnerability of the agent to a security breach and the potential loss if a security breach occurs. We derive conditions on the quality of the protection to ensure that the optimal amount spent on security is an increasing function of the agent's vulnerability and potential loss. We also show that for a large class of risks, only a small fraction of the expected loss should be invested. Building on these results, we study a network of interconnected agents subject to epidemic risks. We derive conditions to ensure that the incentives of all agents are aligned towards a better security. When agents are strategic, we show that security investments are always socially inefficient due to the network externalities. Moreover alignment of incentives typically implies a coordination problem, leading to an equilibrium with a very high price of anarchy.
1208.4009
Learning sparse messages in networks of neural cliques
cs.NE
An extension to a recently introduced binary neural network is proposed in order to allow the learning of sparse messages, in large numbers and with high memory efficiency. This new network is justified both in biological and informational terms. The learning and retrieval rules are detailed and illustrated by various simulation results.
1208.4016
Concept driven framework for Latent Table Discovery
cs.DB
Database systems have to cater to the growing demands of the information age. The growth of the new age information retrieval powerhouses like search engines has thrown a challenge to the data management community to come up with novel mechanisms for feeding information to end users. The burgeoning use of natural language query interfaces compels system designers to present meaningful and customised information. Conventional query languages like SQL do not cater to these requirements due to syntax oriented design. Providing a semantic cover over these systems was the aim of latent table discovery focusing on semantically connecting unrelated tables that were not syntactically related by design and document the discovered knowledge. This paper throws a new direction towards improving the semantic capabilities of database systems by introducing a concept driven framework over the latent table discovery method.
1208.4037
Viability of an elementary syntactic structure in a population playing Naming Games
physics.soc-ph cs.SI physics.comp-ph
We explore how the social dynamics of communication and learning can bring about the rise of a syntactic communication in a population of speakers. Our study is developed starting from a version of the Naming Game model where an elementary syntactic structure is introduced. This analysis shows how the transition from non-syntactic to syntactic communication is socially favored in communities which need to exchange a large number of concepts.
1208.4042
Measuring quality, reputation and trust in online communities
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
In the Internet era the information overload and the challenge to detect quality content has raised the issue of how to rank both resources and users in online communities. In this paper we develop a general ranking method that can simultaneously evaluate users' reputation and objects' quality in an iterative procedure, and that exploits the trust relationships and social acquaintances of users as an additional source of information. We test our method on two real online communities, the EconoPhysics forum and the Last.fm music catalogue, and determine how different variants of the algorithm influence the resultant ranking. We show the benefits of considering trust relationships, and define the form of the algorithm better apt to common situations.
1208.4043
Dynamic Anomalography: Tracking Network Anomalies via Sparsity and Low Rank
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT
In the backbone of large-scale networks, origin-to-destination (OD) traffic flows experience abrupt unusual changes known as traffic volume anomalies, which can result in congestion and limit the extent to which end-user quality of service requirements are met. As a means of maintaining seamless end-user experience in dynamic environments, as well as for ensuring network security, this paper deals with a crucial network monitoring task termed dynamic anomalography. Given link traffic measurements (noisy superpositions of unobserved OD flows) periodically acquired by backbone routers, the goal is to construct an estimated map of anomalies in real time, and thus summarize the network `health state' along both the flow and time dimensions. Leveraging the low intrinsic-dimensionality of OD flows and the sparse nature of anomalies, a novel online estimator is proposed based on an exponentially-weighted least-squares criterion regularized with the sparsity-promoting $\ell_1$-norm of the anomalies, and the nuclear norm of the nominal traffic matrix. After recasting the non-separable nuclear norm into a form amenable to online optimization, a real-time algorithm for dynamic anomalography is developed and its convergence established under simplifying technical assumptions. For operational conditions where computational complexity reductions are at a premium, a lightweight stochastic gradient algorithm based on Nesterov's acceleration technique is developed as well. Comprehensive numerical tests with both synthetic and real network data corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed online algorithms and their tracking capabilities, and demonstrate that they outperform state-of-the-art approaches developed to diagnose traffic anomalies.
1208.4048
Degrees of Freedom for MIMO Two-Way X Relay Channel
cs.IT math.IT
We study the degrees of freedom (DOF) of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) two-way X relay channel, where there are two groups of source nodes and one relay node, each equipped with multiple antennas, and each of the two source nodes in one group exchanges independent messages with the two source nodes in the other group via the relay node. It is assumed that every source node is equipped with M antennas while the relay is equipped with N antennas. We first show that the upper bound on the total DOF for this network is 2min{2M,N} and then focus on the case of N \leq 2M so that the DOF is upper bounded by the number of antennas at the relay. By applying signal alignment for network coding and joint transceiver design for interference cancellation, we show that this upper bound can be achieved when N \leq8M/5. We also show that with signal alignment only but no joint transceiver design, the upper bound is achievable when N\leq4M/3. Simulation results are provided to corroborate the theoretical results and to demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme in the finite signal-to-noise ratio regime.
1208.4079
Recent Technological Advances in Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence
cs.CL
A recent advance in computer technology has permitted scientists to implement and test algorithms that were known from quite some time (or not) but which were computationally expensive. Two such projects are IBM's Jeopardy as a part of its DeepQA project [1] and Wolfram's Wolframalpha[2]. Both these methods implement natural language processing (another goal of AI scientists) and try to answer questions as asked by the user. Though the goal of the two projects is similar, both of them have a different procedure at it's core. In the following sections, the mechanism and history of IBM's Jeopardy and Wolfram alpha has been explained followed by the implications of these projects in realizing Ray Kurzweil's [3] dream of passing the Turing test by 2029. A recipe of taking the above projects to a new level is also explained.
1208.4080
A Simple Proof of Threshold Saturation for Coupled Vector Recursions
cs.IT math.IT
Convolutional low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes (or spatially-coupled codes) have now been shown to achieve capacity on binary-input memoryless symmetric channels. The principle behind this surprising result is the threshold-saturation phenomenon, which is defined by the belief-propagation threshold of the spatially-coupled ensemble saturating to a fundamental threshold defined by the uncoupled system. Previously, the authors demonstrated that potential functions can be used to provide a simple proof of threshold saturation for coupled scalar recursions. In this paper, we present a simple proof of threshold saturation that applies to a wide class of coupled vector recursions. The conditions of the theorem are verified for the density-evolution equations of: (i) joint decoding of irregular LDPC codes for a Slepian-Wolf problem with erasures, (ii) joint decoding of irregular LDPC codes on an erasure multiple-access channel, and (iii) general protograph codes on the BEC. This proves threshold saturation for these systems.
1208.4081
Anisotropic Norm Bounded Real Lemma for Linear Discrete Time Varying Systems
cs.SY cs.IT math.IT math.OC
We consider a finite horizon linear discrete time varying system whose input is a random noise with an imprecisely known probability law. The statistical uncertainty is described by a nonnegative parameter a which constrains the anisotropy of the noise as an entropy theoretic measure of deviation of the actual noise distribution from Gaussian white noise laws with scalar covariance matrices. The worst-case disturbance attenuation capabilities of the system with respect to the statistically uncertain random inputs are quantified by the a-anisotropic norm which is an appropriately constrained operator norm of the system. We establish an anisotropic norm bounded real lemma which provides a state-space criterion for the a-anisotropic norm of the system not to exceed a given threshold. The criterion is organized as an inequality on the determinants of matrices associated with a difference Riccati equation and extends the Bounded Real Lemma of the H-infinity-control theory. We also provide a necessary background on the anisotropy-based robust performance analysis.
1208.4138
Semi-supervised Clustering Ensemble by Voting
cs.LG stat.ML
Clustering ensemble is one of the most recent advances in unsupervised learning. It aims to combine the clustering results obtained using different algorithms or from different runs of the same clustering algorithm for the same data set, this is accomplished using on a consensus function, the efficiency and accuracy of this method has been proven in many works in literature. In the first part of this paper we make a comparison among current approaches to clustering ensemble in literature. All of these approaches consist of two main steps: the ensemble generation and consensus function. In the second part of the paper, we suggest engaging supervision in the clustering ensemble procedure to get more enhancements on the clustering results. Supervision can be applied in two places: either by using semi-supervised algorithms in the clustering ensemble generation step or in the form of a feedback used by the consensus function stage. Also, we introduce a flexible two parameter weighting mechanism, the first parameter describes the compatibility between the datasets under study and the semi-supervised clustering algorithms used to generate the base partitions, the second parameter is used to provide the user feedback on the these partitions. The two parameters are engaged in a "relabeling and voting" based consensus function to produce the final clustering.
1208.4145
Injecting Uncertainty in Graphs for Identity Obfuscation
cs.DB
Data collected nowadays by social-networking applications create fascinating opportunities for building novel services, as well as expanding our understanding about social structures and their dynamics. Unfortunately, publishing social-network graphs is considered an ill-advised practice due to privacy concerns. To alleviate this problem, several anonymization methods have been proposed, aiming at reducing the risk of a privacy breach on the published data, while still allowing to analyze them and draw relevant conclusions. In this paper we introduce a new anonymization approach that is based on injecting uncertainty in social graphs and publishing the resulting uncertain graphs. While existing approaches obfuscate graph data by adding or removing edges entirely, we propose using a finer-grained perturbation that adds or removes edges partially: this way we can achieve the same desired level of obfuscation with smaller changes in the data, thus maintaining higher utility. Our experiments on real-world networks confirm that at the same level of identity obfuscation our method provides higher usefulness than existing randomized methods that publish standard graphs.
1208.4147
Generating ordered list of Recommended Items: a Hybrid Recommender System of Microblog
cs.IR cs.LG cs.SI
Precise recommendation of followers helps in improving the user experience and maintaining the prosperity of twitter and microblog platforms. In this paper, we design a hybrid recommender system of microblog as a solution of KDD Cup 2012, track 1 task, which requires predicting users a user might follow in Tencent Microblog. We describe the background of the problem and present the algorithm consisting of keyword analysis, user taxonomy, (potential)interests extraction and item recommendation. Experimental result shows the high performance of our algorithm. Some possible improvements are discussed, which leads to further study.
1208.4161
Robust Distributed Maximum Likelihood Estimation with Dependent Quantized Data
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we consider distributed maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) with dependent quantized data under the assumption that the structure of the joint probability density function (pdf) is known, but it contains unknown deterministic parameters. The parameters may include different vector parameters corresponding to marginal pdfs and parameters that describe dependence of observations across sensors. Since MLE with a single quantizer is sensitive to the choice of thresholds due to the uncertainty of pdf, we concentrate on MLE with multiple groups of quantizers (which can be determined by the use of prior information or some heuristic approaches) to fend off against the risk of a poor/outlier quantizer. The asymptotic efficiency of the MLE scheme with multiple quantizers is proved under some regularity conditions and the asymptotic variance is derived to be the inverse of a weighted linear combination of Fisher information matrices based on multiple different quantizers which can be used to show the robustness of our approach. As an illustrative example, we consider an estimation problem with a bivariate non-Gaussian pdf that has applications in distributed constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection systems. Simulations show the robustness of the proposed MLE scheme especially when the number of quantized measurements is small.
1208.4165
The MADlib Analytics Library or MAD Skills, the SQL
cs.DB
MADlib is a free, open source library of in-database analytic methods. It provides an evolving suite of SQL-based algorithms for machine learning, data mining and statistics that run at scale within a database engine, with no need for data import/export to other tools. The goal is for MADlib to eventually serve a role for scalable database systems that is similar to the CRAN library for R: a community repository of statistical methods, this time written with scale and parallelism in mind. In this paper we introduce the MADlib project, including the background that led to its beginnings, and the motivation for its open source nature. We provide an overview of the library's architecture and design patterns, and provide a description of various statistical methods in that context. We include performance and speedup results of a core design pattern from one of those methods over the Greenplum parallel DBMS on a modest-sized test cluster. We then report on two initial efforts at incorporating academic research into MADlib, which is one of the project's goals. MADlib is freely available at http://madlib.net, and the project is open for contributions of both new methods, and ports to additional database platforms.
1208.4166
Can the Elephants Handle the NoSQL Onslaught?
cs.DB
In this new era of "big data", traditional DBMSs are under attack from two sides. At one end of the spectrum, the use of document store NoSQL systems (e.g. MongoDB) threatens to move modern Web 2.0 applications away from traditional RDBMSs. At the other end of the spectrum, big data DSS analytics that used to be the domain of parallel RDBMSs is now under attack by another class of NoSQL data analytics systems, such as Hive on Hadoop. So, are the traditional RDBMSs, aka "big elephants", doomed as they are challenged from both ends of this "big data" spectrum? In this paper, we compare one representative NoSQL system from each end of this spectrum with SQL Server, and analyze the performance and scalability aspects of each of these approaches (NoSQL vs. SQL) on two workloads (decision support analysis and interactive data-serving) that represent the two ends of the application spectrum. We present insights from this evaluation and speculate on potential trends for the future.
1208.4167
Solving Big Data Challenges for Enterprise Application Performance Management
cs.DB
As the complexity of enterprise systems increases, the need for monitoring and analyzing such systems also grows. A number of companies have built sophisticated monitoring tools that go far beyond simple resource utilization reports. For example, based on instrumentation and specialized APIs, it is now possible to monitor single method invocations and trace individual transactions across geographically distributed systems. This high-level of detail enables more precise forms of analysis and prediction but comes at the price of high data rates (i.e., big data). To maximize the benefit of data monitoring, the data has to be stored for an extended period of time for ulterior analysis. This new wave of big data analytics imposes new challenges especially for the application performance monitoring systems. The monitoring data has to be stored in a system that can sustain the high data rates and at the same time enable an up-to-date view of the underlying infrastructure. With the advent of modern key-value stores, a variety of data storage systems have emerged that are built with a focus on scalability and high data rates as predominant in this monitoring use case. In this work, we present our experience and a comprehensive performance evaluation of six modern (open-source) data stores in the context of application performance monitoring as part of CA Technologies initiative. We evaluated these systems with data and workloads that can be found in application performance monitoring, as well as, on-line advertisement, power monitoring, and many other use cases. We present our insights not only as performance results but also as lessons learned and our experience relating to the setup and configuration complexity of these data stores in an industry setting.
1208.4168
M3R: Increased performance for in-memory Hadoop jobs
cs.DB
Main Memory Map Reduce (M3R) is a new implementation of the Hadoop Map Reduce (HMR) API targeted at online analytics on high mean-time-to-failure clusters. It does not support resilience, and supports only those workloads which can fit into cluster memory. In return, it can run HMR jobs unchanged -- including jobs produced by compilers for higher-level languages such as Pig, Jaql, and SystemML and interactive front-ends like IBM BigSheets -- while providing significantly better performance than the Hadoop engine on several workloads (e.g. 45x on some input sizes for sparse matrix vector multiply). M3R also supports extensions to the HMR API which can enable Map Reduce jobs to run faster on the M3R engine, while not affecting their performance under the Hadoop engine.
1208.4169
A Storage Advisor for Hybrid-Store Databases
cs.DB
With the SAP HANA database, SAP offers a high-performance in-memory hybrid-store database. Hybrid-store databases---that is, databases supporting row- and column-oriented data management---are getting more and more prominent. While the columnar management offers high-performance capabilities for analyzing large quantities of data, the row-oriented store can handle transactional point queries as well as inserts and updates more efficiently. To effectively take advantage of both stores at the same time the novel question whether to store the given data row- or column-oriented arises. We tackle this problem with a storage advisor tool that supports database administrators at this decision. Our proposed storage advisor recommends the optimal store based on data and query characteristics; its core is a cost model to estimate and compare query execution times for the different stores. Besides a per-table decision, our tool also considers to horizontally and vertically partition the data and manage the partitions on different stores. We evaluated the storage advisor for the use in the SAP HANA database; we show the recommendation quality as well as the benefit of having the data in the optimal store with respect to increased query performance.
1208.4170
From Cooperative Scans to Predictive Buffer Management
cs.DB
In analytical applications, database systems often need to sustain workloads with multiple concurrent scans hitting the same table. The Cooperative Scans (CScans) framework, which introduces an Active Buffer Manager (ABM) component into the database architecture, has been the most effective and elaborate response to this problem, and was initially developed in the X100 research prototype. We now report on the the experiences of integrating Cooperative Scans into its industrial-strength successor, the Vectorwise database product. During this implementation we invented a simpler optimization of concurrent scan buffer management, called Predictive Buffer Management (PBM). PBM is based on the observation that in a workload with long-running scans, the buffer manager has quite a bit of information on the workload in the immediate future, such that an approximation of the ideal OPT algorithm becomes feasible. In the evaluation on both synthetic benchmarks as well as a TPC-H throughput run we compare the benefits of naive buffer management (LRU) versus CScans, PBM and OPT; showing that PBM achieves benefits close to Cooperative Scans, while incurring much lower architectural impact.
1208.4171
The Unified Logging Infrastructure for Data Analytics at Twitter
cs.DB
In recent years, there has been a substantial amount of work on large-scale data analytics using Hadoop-based platforms running on large clusters of commodity machines. A less-explored topic is how those data, dominated by application logs, are collected and structured to begin with. In this paper, we present Twitter's production logging infrastructure and its evolution from application-specific logging to a unified "client events" log format, where messages are captured in common, well-formatted, flexible Thrift messages. Since most analytics tasks consider the user session as the basic unit of analysis, we pre-materialize "session sequences", which are compact summaries that can answer a large class of common queries quickly. The development of this infrastructure has streamlined log collection and data analysis, thereby improving our ability to rapidly experiment and iterate on various aspects of the service.
1208.4172
Transaction Log Based Application Error Recovery and Point In-Time Query
cs.DB
Database backups have traditionally been used as the primary mechanism to recover from hardware and user errors. High availability solutions maintain redundant copies of data that can be used to recover from most failures except user or application errors. Database backups are neither space nor time efficient for recovering from user errors which typically occur in the recent past and affect a small portion of the database. Moreover periodic full backups impact user workload and increase storage costs. In this paper we present a scheme that can be used for both user and application error recovery starting from the current state and rewinding the database back in time using the transaction log. While we provide a consistent view of the entire database as of a point in time in the past, the actual prior versions are produced only for data that is accessed. We make the as of data accessible to arbitrary point in time queries by integrating with the database snapshot feature in Microsoft SQL Server.
1208.4173
The Vertica Analytic Database: C-Store 7 Years Later
cs.DB
This paper describes the system architecture of the Vertica Analytic Database (Vertica), a commercialization of the design of the C-Store research prototype. Vertica demonstrates a modern commercial RDBMS system that presents a classical relational interface while at the same time achieving the high performance expected from modern "web scale" analytic systems by making appropriate architectural choices. Vertica is also an instructive lesson in how academic systems research can be directly commercialized into a successful product.
1208.4174
Interactive Analytical Processing in Big Data Systems: A Cross-Industry Study of MapReduce Workloads
cs.DB
Within the past few years, organizations in diverse industries have adopted MapReduce-based systems for large-scale data processing. Along with these new users, important new workloads have emerged which feature many small, short, and increasingly interactive jobs in addition to the large, long-running batch jobs for which MapReduce was originally designed. As interactive, large-scale query processing is a strength of the RDBMS community, it is important that lessons from that field be carried over and applied where possible in this new domain. However, these new workloads have not yet been described in the literature. We fill this gap with an empirical analysis of MapReduce traces from six separate business-critical deployments inside Facebook and at Cloudera customers in e-commerce, telecommunications, media, and retail. Our key contribution is a characterization of new MapReduce workloads which are driven in part by interactive analysis, and which make heavy use of query-like programming frameworks on top of MapReduce. These workloads display diverse behaviors which invalidate prior assumptions about MapReduce such as uniform data access, regular diurnal patterns, and prevalence of large jobs. A secondary contribution is a first step towards creating a TPC-like data processing benchmark for MapReduce.
1208.4175
Muppet: MapReduce-Style Processing of Fast Data
cs.DB
MapReduce has emerged as a popular method to process big data. In the past few years, however, not just big data, but fast data has also exploded in volume and availability. Examples of such data include sensor data streams, the Twitter Firehose, and Facebook updates. Numerous applications must process fast data. Can we provide a MapReduce-style framework so that developers can quickly write such applications and execute them over a cluster of machines, to achieve low latency and high scalability? In this paper we report on our investigation of this question, as carried out at Kosmix and WalmartLabs. We describe MapUpdate, a framework like MapReduce, but specifically developed for fast data. We describe Muppet, our implementation of MapUpdate. Throughout the description we highlight the key challenges, argue why MapReduce is not well suited to address them, and briefly describe our current solutions. Finally, we describe our experience and lessons learned with Muppet, which has been used extensively at Kosmix and WalmartLabs to power a broad range of applications in social media and e-commerce.
1208.4176
Building User-defined Runtime Adaptation Routines for Stream Processing Applications
cs.DB
Stream processing applications are deployed as continuous queries that run from the time of their submission until their cancellation. This deployment mode limits developers who need their applications to perform runtime adaptation, such as algorithmic adjustments, incremental job deployment, and application-specific failure recovery. Currently, developers do runtime adaptation by using external scripts and/or by inserting operators into the stream processing graph that are unrelated to the data processing logic. In this paper, we describe a component called orchestrator that allows users to write routines for automatically adapting the application to runtime conditions. Developers build an orchestrator by registering and handling events as well as specifying actuations. Events can be generated due to changes in the system state (e.g., application component failures), built-in system metrics (e.g., throughput of a connection), or custom application metrics (e.g., quality score). Once the orchestrator receives an event, users can take adaptation actions by using the orchestrator actuation APIs. We demonstrate the use of the orchestrator in IBM's System S in the context of three different applications, illustrating application adaptation to changes on the incoming data distribution, to application failures, and on-demand dynamic composition.
1208.4178
MOIST: A Scalable and Parallel Moving Object Indexer with School Tracking
cs.DB
Location-Based Service (LBS) is rapidly becoming the next ubiquitous technology for a wide range of mobile applications. To support applications that demand nearest-neighbor and history queries, an LBS spatial indexer must be able to efficiently update, query, archive and mine location records, which can be in contention with each other. In this work, we propose MOIST, whose baseline is a recursive spatial partitioning indexer built upon BigTable. To reduce update and query contention, MOIST groups nearby objects of similar trajectory into the same school, and keeps track of only the history of school leaders. This dynamic clustering scheme can eliminate redundant updates and hence reduce update latency. To improve history query processing, MOIST keeps some history data in memory, while it flushes aged data onto parallel disks in a locality-preserving way. Through experimental studies, we show that MOIST can support highly efficient nearest-neighbor and history queries and can scale well with an increasing number of users and update frequency.
1208.4179
Serializable Snapshot Isolation in PostgreSQL
cs.DB
This paper describes our experience implementing PostgreSQL's new serializable isolation level. It is based on the recently-developed Serializable Snapshot Isolation (SSI) technique. This is the first implementation of SSI in a production database release as well as the first in a database that did not previously have a lock-based serializable isolation level. We reflect on our experience and describe how we overcame some of the resulting challenges, including the implementation of a new lock manager, a technique for ensuring memory usage is bounded, and integration with other PostgreSQL features. We also introduce an extension to SSI that improves performance for read-only transactions. We evaluate PostgreSQL's serializable isolation level using several benchmarks and show that it achieves performance only slightly below that of snapshot isolation, and significantly outperforms the traditional two-phase locking approach on read-intensive workloads.
1208.4188
Network information theory for classical-quantum channels
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
Network information theory is the study of communication problems involving multiple senders, multiple receivers and intermediate relay stations. The purpose of this thesis is to extend the main ideas of classical network information theory to the study of classical-quantum channels. We prove coding theorems for quantum multiple access channels, quantum interference channels, quantum broadcast channels and quantum relay channels. A quantum model for a communication channel describes more accurately the channel's ability to transmit information. By using physically faithful models for the channel outputs and the detection procedure, we obtain better communication rates than would be possible using a classical strategy. In this thesis, we are interested in the transmission of classical information, so we restrict our attention to the study of classical-quantum channels. These are channels with classical inputs and quantum outputs, and so the coding theorems we present will use classical encoding and quantum decoding. We study the asymptotic regime where many copies of the channel are used in parallel, and the uses are assumed to be independent. In this context, we can exploit information-theoretic techniques to calculate the maximum rates for error-free communication for any channel, given the statistics of the noise on that channel. These theoretical bounds can be used as a benchmark to evaluate the rates achieved by practical communication protocols. Most of the results in this thesis consider classical-quantum channels with finite dimensional output systems, which are analogous to classical discrete memoryless channels. In the last chapter, we will show some applications of our results to a practical optical communication scenario, in which the information is encoded in continuous quantum degrees of freedom, which are analogous to classical channels with Gaussian noise.
1208.4208
Reciprocity of weighted networks
physics.data-an cs.SI physics.soc-ph
All types of networks arise as intricate combinations of dyadic building blocks formed by pairs of vertices. In directed networks, the dyadic patterns are entirely determined by reciprocity, i.e. the tendency to form, or to avoid, mutual links. Reciprocity has dramatic effects on every networks dynamical processes and the emergence of structures like motifs and communities. The binary reciprocity has been extensively studied: that of weighted networks is still poorly understood. We introduce a general approach to it, by defining quantities capturing the observed patterns (from dyad-specific to vertex-specific and network-wide) and introducing analytically solved models (Exponential Random Graphs-type). Counter-intuitively, the previous reciprocity measures based on the similarity of the mutual links-weights are uninformative. By contrast, our measures can classify different weighted networks, track the temporal evolution of a networks reciprocity, identify patterns. We show that in some networks the local reciprocity structure can be inferred from the global one.
1208.4269
Spreaders in the Network SIR Model: An Empirical Study
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We use the susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model for disease spread over a network, and empirically study how well various centrality measures perform at identifying which nodes in a network will be the best spreaders of disease on 10 real-world networks. We find that the relative performance of degree, shell number and other centrality measures can be sensitive to B, the probability that an infected node will transmit the disease to a susceptible node. We also find that eigenvector centrality performs very well in general for values of B above the epidemic threshold.
1208.4270
ODYS: A Massively-Parallel Search Engine Using a DB-IR Tightly-Integrated Parallel DBMS
cs.DB
Recently, parallel search engines have been implemented based on scalable distributed file systems such as Google File System. However, we claim that building a massively-parallel search engine using a parallel DBMS can be an attractive alternative since it supports a higher-level (i.e., SQL-level) interface than that of a distributed file system for easy and less error-prone application development while providing scalability. In this paper, we propose a new approach of building a massively-parallel search engine using a DB-IR tightly-integrated parallel DBMS and demonstrate its commercial-level scalability and performance. In addition, we present a hybrid (i.e., analytic and experimental) performance model for the parallel search engine. We have built a five-node parallel search engine according to the proposed architecture using a DB-IR tightly-integrated DBMS. Through extensive experiments, we show the correctness of the model by comparing the projected output with the experimental results of the five-node engine. Our model demonstrates that ODYS is capable of handling 1 billion queries per day (81 queries/sec) for 30 billion web pages by using only 43,472 nodes with an average query response time of 211 ms, which is equivalent to or better than those of commercial search engines. We also show that, by using twice as many (86,944) nodes, ODYS can provide an average query response time of 162 ms, which is significantly lower than those of commercial search engines.
1208.4289
A Quantitative Study of Social Organisation in Open Source Software Communities
cs.SE cs.SI nlin.AO physics.soc-ph
The success of open source projects crucially depends on the voluntary contributions of a sufficiently large community of users. Apart from the mere size of the community, interesting questions arise when looking at the evolution of structural features of collaborations between community members. In this article, we discuss several network analytic proxies that can be used to quantify different aspects of the social organisation in social collaboration networks. We particularly focus on measures that can be related to the cohesiveness of the communities, the distribution of responsibilities and the resilience against turnover of community members. We present a comparative analysis on a large-scale dataset that covers the full history of collaborations between users of 14 major open source software communities. Our analysis covers both aggregate and time-evolving measures and highlights differences in the social organisation across communities. We argue that our results are a promising step towards the definition of suitable, potentially multi-dimensional, resilience and risk indicators for open source software communities.
1208.4290
A Learning Theoretic Approach to Energy Harvesting Communication System Optimization
cs.LG cs.NI
A point-to-point wireless communication system in which the transmitter is equipped with an energy harvesting device and a rechargeable battery, is studied. Both the energy and the data arrivals at the transmitter are modeled as Markov processes. Delay-limited communication is considered assuming that the underlying channel is block fading with memory, and the instantaneous channel state information is available at both the transmitter and the receiver. The expected total transmitted data during the transmitter's activation time is maximized under three different sets of assumptions regarding the information available at the transmitter about the underlying stochastic processes. A learning theoretic approach is introduced, which does not assume any a priori information on the Markov processes governing the communication system. In addition, online and offline optimization problems are studied for the same setting. Full statistical knowledge and causal information on the realizations of the underlying stochastic processes are assumed in the online optimization problem, while the offline optimization problem assumes non-causal knowledge of the realizations in advance. Comparing the optimal solutions in all three frameworks, the performance loss due to the lack of the transmitter's information regarding the behaviors of the underlying Markov processes is quantified.