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1209.2295
Multimodal diffusion geometry by joint diagonalization of Laplacians
cs.CV cs.AI
We construct an extension of diffusion geometry to multiple modalities through joint approximate diagonalization of Laplacian matrices. This naturally extends classical data analysis tools based on spectral geometry, such as diffusion maps and spectral clustering. We provide several synthetic and real examples of manifold learning, retrieval, and clustering demonstrating that the joint diffusion geometry frequently better captures the inherent structure of multi-modal data. We also show that many previous attempts to construct multimodal spectral clustering can be seen as particular cases of joint approximate diagonalization of the Laplacians.
1209.2322
On firm specific characteristics of pharmaceutical generics and incentives to permanence under fuzzy conditions
cs.AI
The aim of this paper is to develop a methodology that is useful for analysing from a microeconomic perspective the incentives to entry, permanence and exit in the market for pharmaceutical generics under fuzzy conditions. In an empirical application of our proposed methodology, the potential towards permanence of labs with different characteristics has been estimated. The case we deal with is set in an open market where global players diversify into different national markets of pharmaceutical generics. Risk issues are significantly important in deterring decision makers from expanding in the generic pharmaceutical business. However, not all players are affected in the same way and/or to the same extent. Small, non-diversified generics labs are in the worse position. We have highlighted that the expected NPV and the number of generics in the portfolio of a pharmaceutical lab are important variables, but that it is also important to consider the degree of diversification. Labs with a higher potential for diversification across markets have an advantage over smaller labs. We have described a fuzzy decision support system based on the Mamdani model in order to determine the incentives for a laboratory to remain in the market both when it is stable and when it is growing.
1209.2341
Leveraging Sentiment to Compute Word Similarity
cs.IR cs.CL
In this paper, we introduce a new WordNet based similarity metric, SenSim, which incorporates sentiment content (i.e., degree of positive or negative sentiment) of the words being compared to measure the similarity between them. The proposed metric is based on the hypothesis that knowing the sentiment is beneficial in measuring the similarity. To verify this hypothesis, we measure and compare the annotator agreement for 2 annotation strategies: 1) sentiment information of a pair of words is considered while annotating and 2) sentiment information of a pair of words is not considered while annotating. Inter-annotator correlation scores show that the agreement is better when the two annotators consider sentiment information while assigning a similarity score to a pair of words. We use this hypothesis to measure the similarity between a pair of words. Specifically, we represent each word as a vector containing sentiment scores of all the content words in the WordNet gloss of the sense of that word. These sentiment scores are derived from a sentiment lexicon. We then measure the cosine similarity between the two vectors. We perform both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation of SenSim and compare the performance with other widely usedWordNet similarity metrics.
1209.2352
Feature Specific Sentiment Analysis for Product Reviews
cs.IR cs.CL
In this paper, we present a novel approach to identify feature specific expressions of opinion in product reviews with different features and mixed emotions. The objective is realized by identifying a set of potential features in the review and extracting opinion expressions about those features by exploiting their associations. Capitalizing on the view that more closely associated words come together to express an opinion about a certain feature, dependency parsing is used to identify relations between the opinion expressions. The system learns the set of significant relations to be used by dependency parsing and a threshold parameter which allows us to merge closely associated opinion expressions. The data requirement is minimal as this is a one time learning of the domain independent parameters. The associations are represented in the form of a graph which is partitioned to finally retrieve the opinion expression describing the user specified feature. We show that the system achieves a high accuracy across all domains and performs at par with state-of-the-art systems despite its data limitations.
1209.2355
Counterfactual Reasoning and Learning Systems
cs.LG cs.AI cs.IR math.ST stat.TH
This work shows how to leverage causal inference to understand the behavior of complex learning systems interacting with their environment and predict the consequences of changes to the system. Such predictions allow both humans and algorithms to select changes that improve both the short-term and long-term performance of such systems. This work is illustrated by experiments carried out on the ad placement system associated with the Bing search engine.
1209.2388
On the Complexity of Bandit and Derivative-Free Stochastic Convex Optimization
cs.LG math.OC stat.ML
The problem of stochastic convex optimization with bandit feedback (in the learning community) or without knowledge of gradients (in the optimization community) has received much attention in recent years, in the form of algorithms and performance upper bounds. However, much less is known about the inherent complexity of these problems, and there are few lower bounds in the literature, especially for nonlinear functions. In this paper, we investigate the attainable error/regret in the bandit and derivative-free settings, as a function of the dimension d and the available number of queries T. We provide a precise characterization of the attainable performance for strongly-convex and smooth functions, which also imply a non-trivial lower bound for more general problems. Moreover, we prove that in both the bandit and derivative-free setting, the required number of queries must scale at least quadratically with the dimension. Finally, we show that on the natural class of quadratic functions, it is possible to obtain a "fast" O(1/T) error rate in terms of T, under mild assumptions, even without having access to gradients. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such rate in a derivative-free stochastic setting, and holds despite previous results which seem to imply the contrary.
1209.2400
Identification of Fertile Translations in Medical Comparable Corpora: a Morpho-Compositional Approach
cs.CL
This paper defines a method for lexicon in the biomedical domain from comparable corpora. The method is based on compositional translation and exploits morpheme-level translation equivalences. It can generate translations for a large variety of morphologically constructed words and can also generate 'fertile' translations. We show that fertile translations increase the overall quality of the extracted lexicon for English to French translation.
1209.2419
The role of caretakers in disease dynamics
physics.soc-ph cs.SI nlin.AO q-bio.PE
One of the key challenges in modeling the dynamics of contagion phenomena is to understand how the structure of social interactions shapes the time course of a disease. Complex network theory has provided significant advances in this context. However, awareness of an epidemic in a population typically yields behavioral changes that correspond to changes in the network structure on which the disease evolves. This feedback mechanism has not been investigated in depth. For example, one would intuitively expect susceptible individuals to avoid other infecteds. However, doctors treating patients or parents tending sick children may also increase the amount of contact made with an infecteds, in an effort to speed up recovery but also exposing themselves to higher risks of infection. We study the role of these caretaker links in an adaptive network models where individuals react to a disease by increasing or decreasing the amount of contact they make with infected individuals. We find that pure avoidance, with only few caretaker links, is the best strategy for curtailing an SIS disease in networks that possess a large topological variability. In more homogeneous networks, disease prevalence is decreased for low concentrations of caretakers whereas a high prevalence emerges if caretaker concentration passes a well defined critical value.
1209.2433
Correlations between Google search data and Mortality Rates
stat.AP cs.IR
Inspired by correlations recently discovered between Google search data and financial markets, we show correlations between Google search data mortality rates. Words with negative connotations may provide for increased mortality rates, while words with positive connotations may provide for decreased mortality rates, and so statistical methods were employed to determine to investigate further.
1209.2434
Query Complexity of Derivative-Free Optimization
stat.ML cs.LG
This paper provides lower bounds on the convergence rate of Derivative Free Optimization (DFO) with noisy function evaluations, exposing a fundamental and unavoidable gap between the performance of algorithms with access to gradients and those with access to only function evaluations. However, there are situations in which DFO is unavoidable, and for such situations we propose a new DFO algorithm that is proved to be near optimal for the class of strongly convex objective functions. A distinctive feature of the algorithm is that it uses only Boolean-valued function comparisons, rather than function evaluations. This makes the algorithm useful in an even wider range of applications, such as optimization based on paired comparisons from human subjects, for example. We also show that regardless of whether DFO is based on noisy function evaluations or Boolean-valued function comparisons, the convergence rate is the same.
1209.2476
Local Dimension of Complex Networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI physics.data-an
Dimensionality is one of the most important properties of complex physical systems. However, only recently this concept has been considered in the context of complex networks. In this paper we further develop the previously introduced definitions of dimension in complex networks by presenting a new method to characterize the dimensionality of individual nodes. The methodology consists in obtaining patterns of dimensionality at different scales for each node, which can be used to detect regions with distinct dimensional structures as well as borders. We also apply this technique to power grid networks, showing, quantitatively, that the continental European power grid is substantially more planar than the network covering the western states of US, which present topological dimension higher than their intrinsic embedding space dimension. Local dimension also successfully revealed how distinct regions of network topologies spreads along the degrees of freedom when it is embedded in a metric space.
1209.2486
On sampling social networking services
stat.AP cs.SI
This article aims at summarizing the existing methods for sampling social networking services and proposing a faster confidence interval for related sampling methods. It also includes comparisons of common network sampling techniques.
1209.2493
WikiSent : Weakly Supervised Sentiment Analysis Through Extractive Summarization With Wikipedia
cs.IR cs.CL
This paper describes a weakly supervised system for sentiment analysis in the movie review domain. The objective is to classify a movie review into a polarity class, positive or negative, based on those sentences bearing opinion on the movie alone. The irrelevant text, not directly related to the reviewer opinion on the movie, is left out of analysis. Wikipedia incorporates the world knowledge of movie-specific features in the system which is used to obtain an extractive summary of the review, consisting of the reviewer's opinions about the specific aspects of the movie. This filters out the concepts which are irrelevant or objective with respect to the given movie. The proposed system, WikiSent, does not require any labeled data for training. The only weak supervision arises out of the usage of resources like WordNet, Part-of-Speech Tagger and Sentiment Lexicons by virtue of their construction. WikiSent achieves a considerable accuracy improvement over the baseline and has a better or comparable accuracy to the existing semi-supervised and unsupervised systems in the domain, on the same dataset. We also perform a general movie review trend analysis using WikiSent to find the trend in movie-making and the public acceptance in terms of movie genre, year of release and polarity.
1209.2495
TwiSent: A Multistage System for Analyzing Sentiment in Twitter
cs.IR cs.CL
In this paper, we present TwiSent, a sentiment analysis system for Twitter. Based on the topic searched, TwiSent collects tweets pertaining to it and categorizes them into the different polarity classes positive, negative and objective. However, analyzing micro-blog posts have many inherent challenges compared to the other text genres. Through TwiSent, we address the problems of 1) Spams pertaining to sentiment analysis in Twitter, 2) Structural anomalies in the text in the form of incorrect spellings, nonstandard abbreviations, slangs etc., 3) Entity specificity in the context of the topic searched and 4) Pragmatics embedded in text. The system performance is evaluated on manually annotated gold standard data and on an automatically annotated tweet set based on hashtags. It is a common practise to show the efficacy of a supervised system on an automatically annotated dataset. However, we show that such a system achieves lesser classification accurcy when tested on generic twitter dataset. We also show that our system performs much better than an existing system.
1209.2501
Performance Evaluation of Predictive Classifiers For Knowledge Discovery From Engineering Materials Data Sets
cs.LG
In this paper, naive Bayesian and C4.5 Decision Tree Classifiers(DTC) are successively applied on materials informatics to classify the engineering materials into different classes for the selection of materials that suit the input design specifications. Here, the classifiers are analyzed individually and their performance evaluation is analyzed with confusion matrix predictive parameters and standard measures, the classification results are analyzed on different class of materials. Comparison of classifiers has found that naive Bayesian classifier is more accurate and better than the C4.5 DTC. The knowledge discovered by the naive bayesian classifier can be employed for decision making in materials selection in manufacturing industries.
1209.2515
Wavelet Based Image Coding Schemes : A Recent Survey
cs.CV
A variety of new and powerful algorithms have been developed for image compression over the years. Among them the wavelet-based image compression schemes have gained much popularity due to their overlapping nature which reduces the blocking artifacts that are common phenomena in JPEG compression and multiresolution character which leads to superior energy compaction with high quality reconstructed images. This paper provides a detailed survey on some of the popular wavelet coding techniques such as the Embedded Zerotree Wavelet (EZW) coding, Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Tree (SPIHT) coding, the Set Partitioned Embedded Block (SPECK) Coder, and the Embedded Block Coding with Optimized Truncation (EBCOT) algorithm. Other wavelet-based coding techniques like the Wavelet Difference Reduction (WDR) and the Adaptive Scanned Wavelet Difference Reduction (ASWDR) algorithms, the Space Frequency Quantization (SFQ) algorithm, the Embedded Predictive Wavelet Image Coder (EPWIC), Compression with Reversible Embedded Wavelet (CREW), the Stack-Run (SR) coding and the recent Geometric Wavelet (GW) coding are also discussed. Based on the review, recommendations and discussions are presented for algorithm development and implementation.
1209.2541
Absence of epidemic thresholds in a growing adaptive network
physics.soc-ph cs.SI nlin.AO
The structure of social contact networks strongly influences the dynamics of epidemic diseases. In particular the scale-free structure of real-world social networks allows unlikely diseases with low infection rates to spread and become endemic. However, in particular for potentially fatal diseases, also the impact of the disease on the social structure cannot be neglected, leading to a complex interplay. Here, we consider the growth of a network by preferential attachment from which nodes are simultaneously removed due to an SIR epidemic. We show that increased infectiousness increases the prevalence of the disease and simultaneously causes a transition from scale-free to exponential topology. Although a transition to a degree distribution with finite variance takes place, the network still exhibits no epidemic threshold in the thermodynamic limit. We illustrate these results using agent-based simulations and analytically tractable approximation schemes.
1209.2542
Joint Detection/Decoding Algorithms for Nonbinary LDPC Codes over ISI Channels
cs.IT math.IT
This paper is concerned with the application of nonbinary low-density parity-check (NB-LDPC) codes to binary input inter-symbol interference (ISI) channels. Two low-complexity joint detection/decoding algorithms are proposed. One is referred to as max-log-MAP/X-EMS algorithm, which is implemented by exchanging soft messages between the max-log-MAP detector and the extended min-sum (EMS) decoder. The max-log-MAP/X-EMS algorithm is applicable to general NB-LDPC codes. The other one, referred to as Viterbi/GMLGD algorithm, is designed in particular for majority-logic decodable NB-LDPC codes. The Viterbi/GMLGD algorithm works in an iterative manner by exchanging hard-decisions between the Viterbi detector and the generalized majority-logic decoder(GMLGD). As a by-product, a variant of the original EMS algorithm is proposed, which is referred to as \mu-EMS algorithm. In the \mu-EMS algorithm, the messages are truncated according to an adaptive threshold, resulting in a more efficient algorithm. Simulations results show that the max-log-MAP/X-EMS algorithm performs as well as the traditional iterative detection/decoding algorithm based on the BCJR algorithm and the QSPA, but with lower complexity. The complexity can be further reduced for majority-logic decodable NB-LDPC codes by executing the Viterbi/GMLGD algorithm with a performance degradation within one dB. Simulation results also confirm that the \mu-EMS algorithm requires lower computational loads than the EMS algorithm with a fixed threshold. These algorithms provide good candidates for trade-offs between performance and complexity.
1209.2548
Training a Feed-forward Neural Network with Artificial Bee Colony Based Backpropagation Method
cs.NE cs.AI
Back-propagation algorithm is one of the most widely used and popular techniques to optimize the feed forward neural network training. Nature inspired meta-heuristic algorithms also provide derivative-free solution to optimize complex problem. Artificial bee colony algorithm is a nature inspired meta-heuristic algorithm, mimicking the foraging or food source searching behaviour of bees in a bee colony and this algorithm is implemented in several applications for an improved optimized outcome. The proposed method in this paper includes an improved artificial bee colony algorithm based back-propagation neural network training method for fast and improved convergence rate of the hybrid neural network learning method. The result is analysed with the genetic algorithm based back-propagation method, and it is another hybridized procedure of its kind. Analysis is performed over standard data sets, reflecting the light of efficiency of proposed method in terms of convergence speed and rate.
1209.2602
Internal joint forces in dynamics of a 3-PRP planar parallel robot
cs.RO
Recursive matrix relations for the complete dynamics of a 3-PRP planar parallel robot are established in this paper. Three identical planar legs connecting to the moving platform are located in the same vertical plane. Knowing the motion of the platform, we develop first the inverse kinematical problem and determine the positions, velocities and accelerations of the robot. Further, the inverse dynamic problem is solved using an approach based on the principle of virtual work. Finally, some graphs of simulation for the input powers of three actuators and the internal joint forces are obtained.
1209.2620
Probabilities on Sentences in an Expressive Logic
cs.LO cs.AI cs.LG math.LO math.PR
Automated reasoning about uncertain knowledge has many applications. One difficulty when developing such systems is the lack of a completely satisfactory integration of logic and probability. We address this problem directly. Expressive languages like higher-order logic are ideally suited for representing and reasoning about structured knowledge. Uncertain knowledge can be modeled by using graded probabilities rather than binary truth-values. The main technical problem studied in this paper is the following: Given a set of sentences, each having some probability of being true, what probability should be ascribed to other (query) sentences? A natural wish-list, among others, is that the probability distribution (i) is consistent with the knowledge base, (ii) allows for a consistent inference procedure and in particular (iii) reduces to deductive logic in the limit of probabilities being 0 and 1, (iv) allows (Bayesian) inductive reasoning and (v) learning in the limit and in particular (vi) allows confirmation of universally quantified hypotheses/sentences. We translate this wish-list into technical requirements for a prior probability and show that probabilities satisfying all our criteria exist. We also give explicit constructions and several general characterizations of probabilities that satisfy some or all of the criteria and various (counter) examples. We also derive necessary and sufficient conditions for extending beliefs about finitely many sentences to suitable probabilities over all sentences, and in particular least dogmatic or least biased ones. We conclude with a brief outlook on how the developed theory might be used and approximated in autonomous reasoning agents. Our theory is a step towards a globally consistent and empirically satisfactory unification of probability and logic.
1209.2641
C-PASS-PC: A Cloud-driven Prototype of Multi-Center Proactive Surveillance System for Prostate Cancer
cs.CE
Currently there are many clinical trials using paper case report forms as the primary data collection tool. Cloud Computing platforms provide big potential for increasing efficiency through a web-based data collection interface, especially for large-scale multi-center trials. Traditionally, clinical and biological data for multi-center trials are stored in one dedicated, centralized database system running at a data coordinating center (DCC). This paper presents C-PASS-PC, a cloud-driven prototype of multi-center proactive surveillance system for prostate cancer. The prototype is developed in PHP, JQuery and CSS with an Oracle backend in a local Web server and database server and deployed on Google App Engine (GAE) and Google Cloud SQL-MySQL. The deploying process is fast and easy to follow. The C-PASS-PC prototype can be accessed through an SSL-enabled web browser. Our approach proves the concept that cloud computing platforms such as GAE is a suitable and flexible solution in the near future for multi-center clinical trials.
1209.2647
Shadow Theory, data model design for data integration
cs.DB
For data integration in information ecosystems, semantic heterogeneity is a known difficulty. In this paper, we propose Shadow Theory as the philosophical foundation to address this issue. It is based on the notion of shadows in Plato's Allegory of the Cave. What we can observe are just shadows, and meanings of shadows are mental entities that only exist in viewers' cognitive structures. With enterprise customer data integration example, we proposed six design principles and algebra to support required operations.
1209.2657
Sparse Representation of Astronomical Images
math-ph cs.CV math.MP
Sparse representation of astronomical images is discussed. It is shown that a significant gain in sparsity is achieved when particular mixed dictionaries are used for approximating these types of images with greedy selection strategies. Experiments are conducted to confirm: i)Effectiveness at producing sparse representations. ii)Competitiveness, with respect to the time required to process large images.The latter is a consequence of the suitability of the proposed dictionaries for approximating images in partitions of small blocks.This feature makes it possible to apply the effective greedy selection technique Orthogonal Matching Pursuit, up to some block size. For blocks exceeding that size a refinement of the original Matching Pursuit approach is considered. The resulting method is termed Self Projected Matching Pursuit, because is shown to be effective for implementing, via Matching Pursuit itself, the optional back-projection intermediate steps in that approach.
1209.2660
Review of strategies for a comprehensive simulation in sputtering devices
cs.CE physics.plasm-ph
The development of sputtering facilities, at the moment, is mainly pursued through experimental tests, or simply by expertise in the field, and relies much less on numerical simulation of the process environment. This leads to great efforts and empirically, roughly optimized solutions: in fact, the simulation of these devices, at the state of art, is quite good in predicting the behavior of single steps of the overall deposition process, but it seems still ahead a full integration among the tools simulating the various phenomena involved in a sputter. We summarize here the techniques and codes already available for problems of interest in sputtering facilities, and we try to outline the possible features of a comprehensive simulation framework. This framework should be able to integrate the single paradigms, dealing with aspects going from the plasma environment up to the distribution and properties of the deposited film, not only on the surface of the substrate, but also on the walls of the process chamber.
1209.2672
New Crosstalk Avoidance Codes Based on a Novel Pattern Classification
cs.IT math.IT
The crosstalk delay associated with global on-chip interconnects becomes more severe in deep submicron technology, and hence can greatly affect the overall system performance. Based on a delay model proposed by Sotiriadis et al., transition patterns over a bus can be classified according to their delays. Using this classification, crosstalk avoidance codes (CACs) have been proposed to alleviate the crosstalk delays by restricting the transition patterns on a bus. In this paper, we first propose a new classification of transition patterns, and then devise a new family of CACs based on this classification. In comparison to the previous classification, our classification has more classes and the delays of its classes do not overlap, both leading to more accurate control of delays. Our new family of CACs includes some previously proposed codes as well as new codes with reduced delays and improved throughput. Thus, this new family of crosstalk avoidance codes provides a wider variety of tradeoffs between bus delay and efficiency. Finally, since our analytical approach to the classification and CACs treats the technology-dependent parameters as variables, our approach can be easily adapted to a wide variety of technology.
1209.2673
Conditional validity of inductive conformal predictors
cs.LG
Conformal predictors are set predictors that are automatically valid in the sense of having coverage probability equal to or exceeding a given confidence level. Inductive conformal predictors are a computationally efficient version of conformal predictors satisfying the same property of validity. However, inductive conformal predictors have been only known to control unconditional coverage probability. This paper explores various versions of conditional validity and various ways to achieve them using inductive conformal predictors and their modifications.
1209.2678
Bad Communities with High Modularity
cs.SI physics.data-an physics.soc-ph
In this paper we discuss some problematic aspects of Newman's modularity function QN. Given a graph G, the modularity of G can be written as QN = Qf -Q0, where Qf is the intracluster edge fraction of G and Q0 is the expected intracluster edge fraction of the null model, i.e., a randomly connected graph with same expected degree distribution as G. It follows that the maximization of QN must accomodate two factors pulling in opposite directions: Qf favors a small number of clusters and Q0 favors many balanced (i.e., with approximately equal degrees) clusters. In certain cases the Q0 term can cause overestimation of the true cluster number; this is the opposite of the well-known under estimation effect caused by the "resolution limit" of modularity. We illustrate the overestimation effect by constructing families of graphs with a "natural" community structure which, however, does not maximize modularity. In fact, we prove that we can always find a graph G with a "natural clustering" V of G and another, balanced clustering U of G such that (i) the pair (G; U) has higher modularity than (G; V) and (ii) V and U are arbitrarily different.
1209.2684
NetSimile: A Scalable Approach to Size-Independent Network Similarity
cs.SI physics.soc-ph stat.AP
Given a set of k networks, possibly with different sizes and no overlaps in nodes or edges, how can we quickly assess similarity between them, without solving the node-correspondence problem? Analogously, how can we extract a small number of descriptive, numerical features from each graph that effectively serve as the graph's "signature"? Having such features will enable a wealth of graph mining tasks, including clustering, outlier detection, visualization, etc. We propose NetSimile -- a novel, effective, and scalable method for solving the aforementioned problem. NetSimile has the following desirable properties: (a) It gives similarity scores that are size-invariant. (b) It is scalable, being linear on the number of edges for "signature" vector extraction. (c) It does not need to solve the node-correspondence problem. We present extensive experiments on numerous synthetic and real graphs from disparate domains, and show NetSimile's superiority over baseline competitors. We also show how NetSimile enables several mining tasks such as clustering, visualization, discontinuity detection, network transfer learning, and re-identification across networks.
1209.2688
Molecular Communication Between Two Populations of Bacteria
cs.IT math.IT q-bio.QM
Molecular communication is an expanding body of research. Recent advances in biology have encouraged using genetically engineered bacteria as the main component in the molecular communication. This has stimulated a new line of research that attempts to study molecular communication among bacteria from an information-theoretic point of view. Due to high randomness in the individual behavior of the bacterium, reliable communication between two bacteria is almost impossible. Therefore, we recently proposed that a population of bacteria in a cluster is considered as a node capable of molecular transmission and reception. This proposition enables us to form a reliable node out of many unreliable bacteria. The bacteria inside a node sense the environment and respond accordingly. In this paper, we study the communication between two nodes, one acting as the transmitter and the other as the receiver. We consider the case in which the information is encoded in the concentration of molecules by the transmitter. The molecules produced by the bacteria in the transmitter node propagate in the environment via the diffusion process. Then, their concentration sensed by the bacteria in the receiver node would decode the information. The randomness in the communication is caused by both the error in the molecular production at the transmitter and the reception of molecules at the receiver. We study the theoretical limits of the information transfer rate in such a setup versus the number of bacteria per node. Finally, we consider M-ary modulation schemes and study the achievable rates and their error probabilities.
1209.2693
Regret Bounds for Restless Markov Bandits
cs.LG math.OC stat.ML
We consider the restless Markov bandit problem, in which the state of each arm evolves according to a Markov process independently of the learner's actions. We suggest an algorithm that after $T$ steps achieves $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret with respect to the best policy that knows the distributions of all arms. No assumptions on the Markov chains are made except that they are irreducible. In addition, we show that index-based policies are necessarily suboptimal for the considered problem.
1209.2696
Visual Tracking with Similarity Matching Ratio
cs.CV cs.RO
This paper presents a novel approach to visual tracking: Similarity Matching Ratio (SMR). The traditional approach of tracking is minimizing some measures of the difference between the template and a patch from the frame. This approach is vulnerable to outliers and drastic appearance changes and an extensive study is focusing on making the approach more tolerant to them. However, this often results in longer, corrective algo- rithms which do not solve the original problem. This paper proposes a novel approach to the definition of the tracking problems, SMR, which turns the differences into a probability measure. Only pixel differences below a threshold count towards deciding the match, the rest are ignored. This approach makes the SMR tracker robust to outliers and points that dramaticaly change appearance. The SMR tracker is tested on challenging video sequences and achieved state-of-the-art performance.
1209.2717
Comparison Study for Clonal Selection Algorithm and Genetic Algorithm
cs.NE
Two metaheuristic algorithms namely Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) and Genetic Algorithms are classified as computational systems inspired by theoretical immunology and genetics mechanisms. In this work we examine the comparative performances of two algorithms. A special selection algorithm, Clonal Selection Algorithm (CLONALG), which is a subset of Artificial Immune Systems, and Genetic Algorithms are tested with certain benchmark functions. It is shown that depending on type of a function Clonal Selection Algorithm and Genetic Algorithm have better performance over each other.
1209.2755
Relaxing the Gaussian AVC
cs.IT math.IT
The arbitrarily varying channel (AVC) is a conservative way of modeling an unknown interference, and the corresponding capacity results are pessimistic. We reconsider the Gaussian AVC by relaxing the classical model and thereby weakening the adversarial nature of the interference. We examine three different relaxations. First, we show how a very small amount of common randomness between transmitter and receiver is sufficient to achieve the rates of fully randomized codes. Second, akin to the dirty paper coding problem, we study the impact of an additional interference known to the transmitter. We provide partial capacity results that differ significantly from the standard AVC. Third, we revisit a Gaussian MIMO AVC in which the interference is arbitrary but of limited dimension.
1209.2759
Multi-track Map Matching
cs.LG cs.DS stat.AP
We study algorithms for matching user tracks, consisting of time-ordered location points, to paths in the road network. Previous work has focused on the scenario where the location data is linearly ordered and consists of fairly dense and regular samples. In this work, we consider the \emph{multi-track map matching}, where the location data comes from different trips on the same route, each with very sparse samples. This captures the realistic scenario where users repeatedly travel on regular routes and samples are sparsely collected, either due to energy consumption constraints or because samples are only collected when the user actively uses a service. In the multi-track problem, the total set of combined locations is only partially ordered, rather than globally ordered as required by previous map-matching algorithms. We propose two methods, the iterative projection scheme and the graph Laplacian scheme, to solve the multi-track problem by using a single-track map-matching subroutine. We also propose a boosting technique which may be applied to either approach to improve the accuracy of the estimated paths. In addition, in order to deal with variable sampling rates in single-track map matching, we propose a method based on a particular regularized cost function that can be adapted for different sampling rates and measurement errors. We evaluate the effectiveness of our techniques for reconstructing tracks under several different configurations of sampling error and sampling rate.
1209.2784
Minimax Multi-Task Learning and a Generalized Loss-Compositional Paradigm for MTL
cs.LG stat.ML
Since its inception, the modus operandi of multi-task learning (MTL) has been to minimize the task-wise mean of the empirical risks. We introduce a generalized loss-compositional paradigm for MTL that includes a spectrum of formulations as a subfamily. One endpoint of this spectrum is minimax MTL: a new MTL formulation that minimizes the maximum of the tasks' empirical risks. Via a certain relaxation of minimax MTL, we obtain a continuum of MTL formulations spanning minimax MTL and classical MTL. The full paradigm itself is loss-compositional, operating on the vector of empirical risks. It incorporates minimax MTL, its relaxations, and many new MTL formulations as special cases. We show theoretically that minimax MTL tends to avoid worst case outcomes on newly drawn test tasks in the learning to learn (LTL) test setting. The results of several MTL formulations on synthetic and real problems in the MTL and LTL test settings are encouraging.
1209.2790
Improving Energy Efficiency in Femtocell Networks: A Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Framework
cs.LG
This paper investigates energy efficiency for two-tier femtocell networks through combining game theory and stochastic learning. With the Stackelberg game formulation, a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework is applied to study the joint average utility maximization of macrocells and femtocells subject to the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio requirements. The macrocells behave as the leaders and the femtocells are followers during the learning procedure. At each time step, the leaders commit to dynamic strategies based on the best responses of the followers, while the followers compete against each other with no further information but the leaders' strategy information. In this paper, we propose two learning algorithms to schedule each cell's stochastic power levels, leading by the macrocells. Numerical experiments are presented to validate the proposed studies and show that the two learning algorithms substantially improve the energy efficiency of the femtocell networks.
1209.2794
Protecting oracle pl/sql source code from a dba user
cs.DB
In this paper we are presenting a new way to disable DDL statements on some specific PL/SQL procedures to a dba user in the Oracle database. Nowadays dba users have access to a lot of data and source code even if they do not have legal permissions to see or modify them. With this method we can disable the ability to execute DDL and DML statements on some specific pl/sql procedures from every Oracle database user even if it has a dba role. Oracle gives to developer the possibility to wrap the pl/sql procedures, functions and packages but those wrapped scripts can be unwrapped by using third party tools. The scripts that we have developed analyzes all database sessions, and if they detect a DML or a DDL statement from an unauthorized user to procedure, function or package which should be protected then the execution of the statement is denied. Furthermore, these scripts do not allow a dba user to drop or disable the scripts themselves. In other words by managing sessions prior to the execution of an eventual statement from a dba user, we can prevent the execution of eventual statements which target our scripts.
1209.2816
Hirarchical Digital Image Inpainting Using Wavelets
cs.CV
Inpainting is the technique of reconstructing unknown or damaged portions of an image in a visually plausible way. Inpainting algorithm automatically fills the damaged region in an image using the information available in undamaged region. Propagation of structure and texture information becomes a challenge as the size of damaged area increases. In this paper, a hierarchical inpainting algorithm using wavelets is proposed. The hierarchical method tries to keep the mask size smaller while wavelets help in handling the high pass structure information and low pass texture information separately. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested using different factors. The results of our algorithm are compared with existing methods such as interpolation, diffusion and exemplar techniques.
1209.2817
Preferential Attachment in the Interaction between Dynamically Generated Interdependent Networks
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI q-fin.RM
We generalize the scale-free network model of Barab\`asi and Albert [Science 286, 509 (1999)] by proposing a class of stochastic models for scale-free interdependent networks in which interdependent nodes are not randomly connected but rather are connected via preferential attachment (PA). Each network grows through the continuous addition of new nodes, and new nodes in each network attach preferentially and simultaneously to (a) well-connected nodes within the same network and (b) well-connected nodes in other networks. We present analytic solutions for the power-law exponents as functions of the number of links both between networks and within networks. We show that a cross-clustering coefficient vs. size of network $N$ follows a power law. We illustrate the models using selected examples from the Internet and finance.
1209.2820
Conditions for a Monotonic Channel Capacity
cs.IT math.IT
Motivated by results in optical communications, where the performance can degrade dramatically if the transmit power is sufficiently increased, the channel capacity is characterized for various kinds of memoryless vector channels. It is proved that for all static point-to-point channels, the channel capacity is a nondecreasing function of power. As a consequence, maximizing the mutual information over all input distributions with a certain power is for such channels equivalent to maximizing it over the larger set of input distributions with upperbounded power. For interference channels such as optical wavelength-division multiplexing systems, the primary channel capacity is always nondecreasing with power if all interferers transmit with identical distributions as the primary user. Also, if all input distributions in an interference channel are optimized jointly, then the achievable sum-rate capacity is again nondecreasing. The results generalizes to the channel capacity as a function of a wide class of costs, not only power.
1209.2868
Spatio-Temporal Small Worlds for Decentralized Information Retrieval in Social Networking
cs.SI cs.IR physics.soc-ph
We discuss foundations and options for alternative, agent-based information retrieval (IR) approaches in Social Networking, especially Decentralized and Mobile Social Networking scenarios. In addition to usual semantic contexts, these approaches make use of long-term social and spatio-temporal contexts in order to satisfy conscious as well as unconscious information needs according to Human IR heuristics. Using a large Twitter dataset, we investigate these approaches and especially investigate the question in how far spatio-temporal contexts can act as a conceptual bracket implicating social and semantic cohesion, giving rise to the concept of Spatio-Temporal Small Worlds.
1209.2873
Extraction of hidden information by efficient community detection in networks
physics.data-an cs.SI physics.bio-ph physics.soc-ph q-bio.MN
Currently, we are overwhelmed by a deluge of experimental data, and network physics has the potential to become an invaluable method to increase our understanding of large interacting datasets. However, this potential is often unrealized for two reasons: uncovering the hidden community structure of a network, known as community detection, is difficult, and further, even if one has an idea of this community structure, it is not a priori obvious how to efficiently use this information. Here, to address both of these issues, we, first, identify optimal community structure of given networks in terms of modularity by utilizing a recently introduced community detection method. Second, we develop an approach to use this community information to extract hidden information from a network. When applied to a protein-protein interaction network, the proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods that use only the local information of a network. The method is generally applicable to networks from many areas.
1209.2883
Control Design for Markov Chains under Safety Constraints: A Convex Approach
cs.SY math.OC
This paper focuses on the design of time-invariant memoryless control policies for fully observed controlled Markov chains, with a finite state space. Safety constraints are imposed through a pre-selected set of forbidden states. A state is qualified as safe if it is not a forbidden state and the probability of it transitioning to a forbidden state is zero. The main objective is to obtain control policies whose closed loop generates the maximal set of safe recurrent states, which may include multiple recurrent classes. A design method is proposed that relies on a finitely parametrized convex program inspired on entropy maximization principles. A numerical example is provided and the adoption of additional constraints is discussed.
1209.2887
Decoding of Subspace Codes, a Problem of Schubert Calculus over Finite Fields
cs.IT math.IT
Schubert calculus provides algebraic tools to solve enumerative problems. There have been several applied problems in systems theory, linear algebra and physics which were studied by means of Schubert calculus. The method is most powerful when the base field is algebraically closed. In this article we first review some of the successes Schubert calculus had in the past. Then we show how the problem of decoding of subspace codes used in random network coding can be formulated as a problem in Schubert calculus. Since for this application the base field has to be assumed to be a finite field new techniques will have to be developed in the future.
1209.2894
Layered Subspace Codes for Network Coding
cs.IT math.IT
Subspace codes were introduced by K\"otter and Kschischang for error control in random linear network coding. In this paper, a layered type of subspace codes is considered, which can be viewed as a superposition of multiple component subspace codes. Exploiting the layered structure, we develop two decoding algorithms for these codes. The first algorithm operates by separately decoding each component code. The second algorithm is similar to the successive interference cancellation (SIC) algorithm for conventional superposition coding, and further permits an iterative version. We show that both algorithms decode not only deterministically up to but also probabilistically beyond the error-correction capability of the overall code. Finally we present possible applications of layered subspace codes in several network coding scenarios.
1209.2903
A Novel Approach of Harris Corner Detection of Noisy Images using Adaptive Wavelet Thresholding Technique
cs.CV
In this paper we propose a method of corner detection for obtaining features which is required to track and recognize objects within a noisy image. Corner detection of noisy images is a challenging task in image processing. Natural images often get corrupted by noise during acquisition and transmission. Though Corner detection of these noisy images does not provide desired results, hence de-noising is required. Adaptive wavelet thresholding approach is applied for the same.
1209.2910
Community Detection in the Labelled Stochastic Block Model
cs.SI cs.LG math.PR physics.soc-ph
We consider the problem of community detection from observed interactions between individuals, in the context where multiple types of interaction are possible. We use labelled stochastic block models to represent the observed data, where labels correspond to interaction types. Focusing on a two-community scenario, we conjecture a threshold for the problem of reconstructing the hidden communities in a way that is correlated with the true partition. To substantiate the conjecture, we prove that the given threshold correctly identifies a transition on the behaviour of belief propagation from insensitive to sensitive. We further prove that the same threshold corresponds to the transition in a related inference problem on a tree model from infeasible to feasible. Finally, numerical results using belief propagation for community detection give further support to the conjecture.
1209.2918
A new class of metrics for spike trains
cs.IT cs.NE math.IT q-bio.NC
The distance between a pair of spike trains, quantifying the differences between them, can be measured using various metrics. Here we introduce a new class of spike train metrics, inspired by the Pompeiu-Hausdorff distance, and compare them with existing metrics. Some of our new metrics (the modulus-metric and the max-metric) have characteristics that are qualitatively different than those of classical metrics like the van Rossum distance or the Victor & Purpura distance. The modulus-metric and the max-metric are particularly suitable for measuring distances between spike trains where information is encoded in bursts, but the number and the timing of spikes inside a burst does not carry information. The modulus-metric does not depend on any parameters and can be computed using a fast algorithm, in a time that depends linearly on the number of spikes in the two spike trains. We also introduce localized versions of the new metrics, which could have the biologically-relevant interpretation of measuring the differences between spike trains as they are perceived at a particular moment in time by a neuron receiving these spike trains.
1209.2946
Technical Report: CSVM Ecosystem
cs.CE cs.DS q-bio.QM
The CSVM format is derived from CSV format and allows the storage of tabular like data with a limited but extensible amount of metadata. This approach could help computer scientists because all information needed to uses subsequently the data is included in the CSVM file and is particularly well suited for handling RAW data in a lot of scientific fields and to be used as a canonical format. The use of CSVM has shown that it greatly facilitates: the data management independently of using databases; the data exchange; the integration of RAW data in dataflows or calculation pipes; the search for best practices in RAW data management. The efficiency of this format is closely related to its plasticity: a generic frame is given for all kind of data and the CSVM parsers don't make any interpretation of data types. This task is done by the application layer, so it is possible to use same format and same parser codes for a lot of purposes. In this document some implementation of CSVM format for ten years and in different laboratories are presented. Some programming examples are also shown: a Python toolkit for using the format, manipulating and querying is available. A first specification of this format (CSVM-1) is now defined, as well as some derivatives such as CSVM dictionaries used for data interchange. CSVM is an Open Format and could be used as a support for Open Data and long term conservation of RAW or unpublished data.
1209.2948
Cultural Algorithm Toolkit for Multi-objective Rule Mining
cs.NE cs.AI
Cultural algorithm is a kind of evolutionary algorithm inspired from societal evolution and is composed of a belief space, a population space and a protocol that enables exchange of knowledge between these sources. Knowledge created in the population space is accepted into the belief space while this collective knowledge from these sources is combined to influence the decisions of the individual agents in solving problems. Classification rules comes under descriptive knowledge discovery in data mining and are the most sought out by users since they represent highly comprehensible form of knowledge. The rules have certain properties which make them useful forms of actionable knowledge to users. The rules are evaluated using these properties namely the rule metrics. In the current study a Cultural Algorithm Toolkit for Classification Rule Mining (CAT-CRM) is proposed which allows the user to control three different set of parameters namely the evolutionary parameters, the rule parameters as well as agent parameters and hence can be used for experimenting with an evolutionary system, a rule mining system or an agent based social system. Results of experiments conducted to observe the effect of different number and type of metrics on the performance of the algorithm on bench mark data sets is reported.
1209.3026
Losing My Revolution: How Many Resources Shared on Social Media Have Been Lost?
cs.DL cs.IR
Social media content has grown exponentially in the recent years and the role of social media has evolved from just narrating life events to actually shaping them. In this paper we explore how many resources shared in social media are still available on the live web or in public web archives. By analyzing six different event-centric datasets of resources shared in social media in the period from June 2009 to March 2012, we found about 11% lost and 20% archived after just a year and an average of 27% lost and 41% archived after two and a half years. Furthermore, we found a nearly linear relationship between time of sharing of the resource and the percentage lost, with a slightly less linear relationship between time of sharing and archiving coverage of the resource. From this model we conclude that after the first year of publishing, nearly 11% of shared resources will be lost and after that we will continue to lose 0.02% per day.
1209.3047
SINR Statistics of Correlated MIMO Linear Receivers
cs.IT math.IT
Linear receivers offer a low complexity option for multi-antenna communication systems. Therefore, understanding the outage behavior of the corresponding SINR is important in a fading mobile environment. In this paper we introduce a large deviations method, valid nominally for a large number M of antennas, which provides the probability density of the SINR of Gaussian channel MIMO Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) and zero-forcing (ZF) receivers, with arbitrary transmission power profiles and in the presence of receiver antenna correlations. This approach extends the Gaussian approximation of the SINR, valid for large M asymptotically close to the center of the distribution, obtaining the non-Gaussian tails of the distribution. Our methodology allows us to calculate the SINR distribution to next-to-leading order (O(1/M)) and showcase the deviations from approximations that have appeared in the literature (e.g. the Gaussian or the generalized Gamma distribution). We also analytically evaluate the outage probability, as well as the uncoded bit-error-rate. We find that our approximation is quite accurate even for the smallest antenna arrays (2x2).
1209.3054
Database Semantics
cs.DB math.CT
This paper, the first step to connect relational databases with systems consequence (Kent: "System Consequence" 2009), is concerned with the semantics of relational databases. It aims to to study system consequence in the logical/semantic system of relational databases. The paper, which was inspired by and which extends a recent set of papers on the theory of relational database systems (Spivak: "Functorial Data Migration" 2012), is linked with work on the Information Flow Framework (IFF) [http://suo.ieee.org/IFF/] connected with the ontology standards effort (SUO), since relational databases naturally embed into first order logic. The database semantics discussed here is concerned with the conceptual level of database architecture. We offer both an intuitive and technical discussion. Corresponding to the notions of primary and foreign keys, relational database semantics takes two forms: a distinguished form where entities are distinguished from relations, and a unified form where relations and entities coincide. The distinguished form corresponds to the theory presented in (Spivak: "Simplicial databases" 2009)[arXiv:0904.2012]. The unified form, a special case of the distinguished form, corresponds to the theory presented in (Spivak: "Functorial Data Migration" 2012). A later paper will discuss various formalisms of relational databases, such as relational algebra and first order logic, and will complete the description of the relational database logical environment.
1209.3056
Parametric Local Metric Learning for Nearest Neighbor Classification
cs.LG
We study the problem of learning local metrics for nearest neighbor classification. Most previous works on local metric learning learn a number of local unrelated metrics. While this "independence" approach delivers an increased flexibility its downside is the considerable risk of overfitting. We present a new parametric local metric learning method in which we learn a smooth metric matrix function over the data manifold. Using an approximation error bound of the metric matrix function we learn local metrics as linear combinations of basis metrics defined on anchor points over different regions of the instance space. We constrain the metric matrix function by imposing on the linear combinations manifold regularization which makes the learned metric matrix function vary smoothly along the geodesics of the data manifold. Our metric learning method has excellent performance both in terms of predictive power and scalability. We experimented with several large-scale classification problems, tens of thousands of instances, and compared it with several state of the art metric learning methods, both global and local, as well as to SVM with automatic kernel selection, all of which it outperforms in a significant manner.
1209.3089
Pattern Detection with Rare Item-set Mining
cs.SE cs.DB
The discovery of new and interesting patterns in large datasets, known as data mining, draws more and more interest as the quantities of available data are exploding. Data mining techniques may be applied to different domains and fields such as computer science, health sector, insurances, homeland security, banking and finance, etc. In this paper we are interested by the discovery of a specific category of patterns, known as rare and non-present patterns. We present a novel approach towards the discovery of non-present patterns using rare item-set mining.
1209.3105
Spectrum Leasing and Cooperative Resource Allocation in Cognitive OFDMA Networks
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers a cooperative OFDMA-based cognitive radio network where the primary system leases some of its subchannels to the secondary system for a fraction of time in exchange for the secondary users (SUs) assisting the transmission of primary users (PUs) as relays. Our aim is to determine the cooperation strategies among the primary and secondary systems so as to maximize the sum-rate of SUs while maintaining quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of PUs. We formulate a joint optimization problem of PU transmission mode selection, SU (or relay) selection, subcarrier assignment, power control, and time allocation. By applying dual method, this mixed integer programming problem is decomposed into parallel per-subcarrier subproblems, with each determining the cooperation strategy between one PU and one SU. We show that, on each leased subcarrier, the optimal strategy is to let a SU exclusively act as a relay or transmit for itself. This result is fundamentally different from the conventional spectrum leasing in single-channel systems where a SU must transmit a fraction of time for itself if it helps the PU's transmission. We then propose a subgradient-based algorithm to find the asymptotically optimal solution to the primal problem in polynomial time. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can significantly enhance the network performance.
1209.3113
Detection and Classification of Viewer Age Range Smart Signs at TV Broadcast
cs.CV
In this paper, the identification and classification of Viewer Age Range Smart Signs, designed by the Radio and Television Supreme Council of Turkey, to give age range information for the TV viewers, are realized. Therefore, the automatic detection at the broadcast will be possible, enabling the manufacturing of TV receivers which are sensible to these signs. The most important step at this process is the pattern recognition. Since the symbols that must be identified are circular, various circle detection techniques can be employed. In our study, first, two different circle segmentation methods for still images are analyzed, their advantages and drawbacks are discussed. A popular neural network structure called Multilayer Perceptron is employed for the classification. Afterwards, the same procedures are carried out for streaming video. All of the steps depicted above are realized on a standard PC.
1209.3117
Development of an e-learning system incorporating semantic web
cs.CY cs.IR
E-Learning is efficient, task relevant and just-in-time learning grown from the learning requirements of the new and dynamically changing world. The term Semantic Web covers the steps to create a new WWW architecture that augments the content with formal semantics enabling better possibilities of navigation through the cyberspace and its contents. In this paper, we present the Semantic Web-Based model for our e-learning system taking into account the learning environment at Saudi Arabian universities. The proposed system is mainly based on ontology-based descriptions of content, context and structure of the learning materials. It further provides flexible and personalized access to these learning materials. The framework has been validated by an interview based qualitative method.
1209.3126
Beyond Stemming and Lemmatization: Ultra-stemming to Improve Automatic Text Summarization
cs.IR cs.CL
In Automatic Text Summarization, preprocessing is an important phase to reduce the space of textual representation. Classically, stemming and lemmatization have been widely used for normalizing words. However, even using normalization on large texts, the curse of dimensionality can disturb the performance of summarizers. This paper describes a new method for normalization of words to further reduce the space of representation. We propose to reduce each word to its initial letters, as a form of Ultra-stemming. The results show that Ultra-stemming not only preserve the content of summaries produced by this representation, but often the performances of the systems can be dramatically improved. Summaries on trilingual corpora were evaluated automatically with Fresa. Results confirm an increase in the performance, regardless of summarizer system used.
1209.3129
Analog readout for optical reservoir computers
cs.ET cs.LG cs.NE physics.optics
Reservoir computing is a new, powerful and flexible machine learning technique that is easily implemented in hardware. Recently, by using a time-multiplexed architecture, hardware reservoir computers have reached performance comparable to digital implementations. Operating speeds allowing for real time information operation have been reached using optoelectronic systems. At present the main performance bottleneck is the readout layer which uses slow, digital postprocessing. We have designed an analog readout suitable for time-multiplexed optoelectronic reservoir computers, capable of working in real time. The readout has been built and tested experimentally on a standard benchmark task. Its performance is better than non-reservoir methods, with ample room for further improvement. The present work thereby overcomes one of the major limitations for the future development of hardware reservoir computers.
1209.3137
Diophantine Approach to Blind Interference Alignment of Homogeneous K-user 2x1 MISO Broadcast Channels
cs.IT math.IT
Although the sufficient condition for a blindly interference-aligned (BIA) 2-user 2x1 broadcast channel (BC) in homogeneous fading to achieve its maximal 4/3 DoF is well understood, its counterpart for the general K-user 2x1 MISO BC in homogeneous block fading to achieve the corresponding 2k/(2+K-1) (DoF) remains unsolved and is, thus, the focus of this paper. An interference channel is said BIA-feasible if it achieves its maximal DoF only via BIA. In this paper, we cast this general feasibility problem in the framework of finding integer solutions for a system of linear Diophantine equations. By assuming independent user links each of the same coherence time and by studying the solvability of the Diophantine system, we derive the sufficient and necessary conditions on the K users' fading block offsets to ensure the BIA feasibility of the K-user BC. If the K offsets are independent and uniformly distributed over a coherence block, we can further prove that 11 users are enough for one to find, with certainty of 95%, 3 users among them to form a BIA-feasible 3-user 2x1 BC.
1209.3150
Agent-based Exploration of Wirings of Biological Neural Networks: Position Paper
cs.NE q-bio.NC
The understanding of human central nervous system depends on knowledge of its wiring. However, there are still gaps in our understanding of its wiring due to technical difficulties. While some information is coming out from human experiments, medical research is lacking of simulation models to put current findings together to obtain the global picture and to predict hypotheses to lead future experiments. Agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) is a strong candidate for the simulation model. In this position paper, we discuss the current status of "neural wiring" and "ABMS in biological systems". In particular, we discuss that the ABMS context provides features required for exploration of biological neural wiring.
1209.3286
Music Recommendation System for Million Song Dataset Challenge
cs.IR cs.SI
In this paper a system that took 8th place in Million Song Dataset challenge is described. Given full listening history for 1 million of users and half of listening history for 110000 users participatints should predict the missing half. The system proposed here uses memory-based collaborative filtering approach and user-based similarity. MAP@500 score of 0.15037 was achieved.
1209.3300
Normal Factor Graphs as Probabilistic Models
cs.IT math.IT
We present a new probabilistic modelling framework based on the recent notion of normal factor graph (NFG). We show that the proposed NFG models and their transformations unify some existing models such as factor graphs, convolutional factor graphs, and cumulative distribution networks. The two subclasses of the NFG models, namely the constrained and generative models, exhibit a duality in their dependence structure. Transformation of NFG models further extends the power of this modelling framework. We point out the well-known NFG representations of parity and generator realizations of a linear code as generative and constrained models, and comment on a more prevailing duality in this context. Finally, we address the algorithmic aspect of computing the exterior function of NFGs and the inference problem on NFGs.
1209.3307
Natural emergence of clusters and bursts in network evolution
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI nlin.AO
Network models with preferential attachment, where new nodes are injected into the network and form links with existing nodes proportional to their current connectivity, have been well studied for some time. Extensions have been introduced where nodes attach proportionally to arbitrary fitness functions. However, in these models, attaching to a node always increases the ability of that node to gain more links in the future. We study network growth where nodes attach proportionally to the clustering coefficients, or local densities of triangles, of existing nodes. Attaching to a node typically lowers its clustering coefficient, in contrast to preferential attachment or rich-get-richer models. This simple modification naturally leads to a variety of rich phenomena, including aging, non-Poissonian bursty dynamics, and community formation. This theoretical model shows that complex network structure can be generated without artificially imposing multiple dynamical mechanisms and may reveal potentially overlooked mechanisms present in complex systems.
1209.3312
Stable Manifold Embeddings with Structured Random Matrices
cs.IT math.DG math.IT
The fields of compressed sensing (CS) and matrix completion have shown that high-dimensional signals with sparse or low-rank structure can be effectively projected into a low-dimensional space (for efficient acquisition or processing) when the projection operator achieves a stable embedding of the data by satisfying the Restricted Isometry Property (RIP). It has also been shown that such stable embeddings can be achieved for general Riemannian submanifolds when random orthoprojectors are used for dimensionality reduction. Due to computational costs and system constraints, the CS community has recently explored the RIP for structured random matrices (e.g., random convolutions, localized measurements, deterministic constructions). The main contribution of this paper is to show that any matrix satisfying the RIP (i.e., providing a stable embedding for sparse signals) can be used to construct a stable embedding for manifold-modeled signals by randomizing the column signs and paying reasonable additional factors in the number of measurements. We demonstrate this result with several new constructions for stable manifold embeddings using structured matrices. This result allows advances in efficient projection schemes for sparse signals to be immediately applied to manifold signal models.
1209.3318
Hessian Schatten-Norm Regularization for Linear Inverse Problems
math.OC cs.CV cs.NA
We introduce a novel family of invariant, convex, and non-quadratic functionals that we employ to derive regularized solutions of ill-posed linear inverse imaging problems. The proposed regularizers involve the Schatten norms of the Hessian matrix, computed at every pixel of the image. They can be viewed as second-order extensions of the popular total-variation (TV) semi-norm since they satisfy the same invariance properties. Meanwhile, by taking advantage of second-order derivatives, they avoid the staircase effect, a common artifact of TV-based reconstructions, and perform well for a wide range of applications. To solve the corresponding optimization problems, we propose an algorithm that is based on a primal-dual formulation. A fundamental ingredient of this algorithm is the projection of matrices onto Schatten norm balls of arbitrary radius. This operation is performed efficiently based on a direct link we provide between vector projections onto $\ell_q$ norm balls and matrix projections onto Schatten norm balls. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods through experimental results on several inverse imaging problems with real and simulated data.
1209.3330
Predator confusion is sufficient to evolve swarming behavior
q-bio.PE cs.NE nlin.AO q-bio.NC
Swarming behaviors in animals have been extensively studied due to their implications for the evolution of cooperation, social cognition, and predator-prey dynamics. An important goal of these studies is discerning which evolutionary pressures favor the formation of swarms. One hypothesis is that swarms arise because the presence of multiple moving prey in swarms causes confusion for attacking predators, but it remains unclear how important this selective force is. Using an evolutionary model of a predator-prey system, we show that predator confusion provides a sufficient selection pressure to evolve swarming behavior in prey. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the evolutionary effect of predator confusion on prey could in turn exert pressure on the structure of the predator's visual field, favoring the frontally oriented, high-resolution visual systems commonly observed in predators that feed on swarming animals. Finally, we provide evidence that when prey evolve swarming in response to predator confusion, there is a change in the shape of the functional response curve describing the predator's consumption rate as prey density increases. Thus, we show that a relatively simple perceptual constraint--predator confusion--could have pervasive evolutionary effects on prey behavior, predator sensory mechanisms, and the ecological interactions between predators and prey.
1209.3331
Outage-based ergodic link adaptation for fading channels with delayed CSIT
cs.IT math.IT
Link adaptation in which the transmission data rate is dynamically adjusted according to channel variation is often used to deal with time-varying nature of wireless channel. When channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) is delayed by more than channel coherence time due to feedback delay, however, the effect of link adaptation can possibly be taken away if this delay is not taken into account. One way to deal with such delay is to predict current channel quality given available observation, but this would inevitably result in prediction error. In this paper, an algorithm with different view point is proposed. By using conditional cdf of current channel given observation, outage probability can be computed for each value of transmission rate $R$. By assuming that the transmission block error rate (BLER) is dominated by outage probability, the expected throughput can also be computed, and $R$ can be determined to maximize it. The proposed scheme is designed to be optimal if channel has ergodicity, and it is shown to considerably outperform conventional schemes in certain Rayleigh fading channel model.
1209.3332
High-throughput Execution of Hierarchical Analysis Pipelines on Hybrid Cluster Platforms
cs.DC cs.SY
We propose, implement, and experimentally evaluate a runtime middleware to support high-throughput execution on hybrid cluster machines of large-scale analysis applications. A hybrid cluster machine consists of computation nodes which have multiple CPUs and general purpose graphics processing units (GPUs). Our work targets scientific analysis applications in which datasets are processed in application-specific data chunks, and the processing of a data chunk is expressed as a hierarchical pipeline of operations. The proposed middleware system combines a bag-of-tasks style execution with coarse-grain dataflow execution. Data chunks and associated data processing pipelines are scheduled across cluster nodes using a demand driven approach, while within a node operations in a given pipeline instance are scheduled across CPUs and GPUs. The runtime system implements several optimizations, including performance aware task scheduling, architecture aware process placement, data locality conscious task assignment, and data prefetching and asynchronous data copy, to maximize utilization of the aggregate computing power of CPUs and GPUs and minimize data copy overheads. The application and performance benefits of the runtime middleware are demonstrated using an image analysis application, which is employed in a brain cancer study, on a state-of-the-art hybrid cluster in which each node has two 6-core CPUs and three GPUs. Our results show that implementing and scheduling application data processing as a set of fine-grain operations provide more opportunities for runtime optimizations and attain better performance than a coarser-grain, monolithic implementation. The proposed runtime system can achieve high-throughput processing of large datasets - we were able to process an image dataset consisting of 36,848 4Kx4K-pixel image tiles at about 150 tiles/second rate on 100 nodes.
1209.3344
Combining Schemes for Hybrid ARQ with Interference-Aware Successive Decoding
cs.IT math.IT
For decades, cellular networks have greatly evolved to support high data rates over reliable communication. Hybrid automatic-repeat-request (ARQ) is one of the techniques to make such improvement possible. However, this advancement is reduced at the cell edge where interference is not negligible. In order to overcome the challenge at the cell edge, the concept of interference-aware receiver has been recently proposed in which both desired and interference signals are successively decoded, called interference-aware successive decoding (IASD). Although IASD is the advanced receiver technology, interference signals are out of the mobile station's control so that they cannot be requested by the mobile station. For this reason, this paper proposes new combining schemes for the IASD receiver, which operate with hybrid ARQ in a bit level or in a symbol level. In addition, this paper compares the memory requirement among the proposed combining schemes and analyzes the impact of discrete modulation on the proposed scheme. Simulation results presents the superiority of the proposed combining schemes and shows the improvement in terms of the number of transmission.
1209.3352
Thompson Sampling for Contextual Bandits with Linear Payoffs
cs.LG cs.DS stat.ML
Thompson Sampling is one of the oldest heuristics for multi-armed bandit problems. It is a randomized algorithm based on Bayesian ideas, and has recently generated significant interest after several studies demonstrated it to have better empirical performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods. However, many questions regarding its theoretical performance remained open. In this paper, we design and analyze a generalization of Thompson Sampling algorithm for the stochastic contextual multi-armed bandit problem with linear payoff functions, when the contexts are provided by an adaptive adversary. This is among the most important and widely studied versions of the contextual bandits problem. We provide the first theoretical guarantees for the contextual version of Thompson Sampling. We prove a high probability regret bound of $\tilde{O}(d^{3/2}\sqrt{T})$ (or $\tilde{O}(d\sqrt{T \log(N)})$), which is the best regret bound achieved by any computationally efficient algorithm available for this problem in the current literature, and is within a factor of $\sqrt{d}$ (or $\sqrt{\log(N)}$) of the information-theoretic lower bound for this problem.
1209.3353
Further Optimal Regret Bounds for Thompson Sampling
cs.LG cs.DS stat.ML
Thompson Sampling is one of the oldest heuristics for multi-armed bandit problems. It is a randomized algorithm based on Bayesian ideas, and has recently generated significant interest after several studies demonstrated it to have better empirical performance compared to the state of the art methods. In this paper, we provide a novel regret analysis for Thompson Sampling that simultaneously proves both the optimal problem-dependent bound of $(1+\epsilon)\sum_i \frac{\ln T}{\Delta_i}+O(\frac{N}{\epsilon^2})$ and the first near-optimal problem-independent bound of $O(\sqrt{NT\ln T})$ on the expected regret of this algorithm. Our near-optimal problem-independent bound solves a COLT 2012 open problem of Chapelle and Li. The optimal problem-dependent regret bound for this problem was first proven recently by Kaufmann et al. [ALT 2012]. Our novel martingale-based analysis techniques are conceptually simple, easily extend to distributions other than the Beta distribution, and also extend to the more general contextual bandits setting [Manuscript, Agrawal and Goyal, 2012].
1209.3358
Computation in Multicast Networks: Function Alignment and Converse Theorems
cs.IT math.IT
The classical problem in network coding theory considers communication over multicast networks. Multiple transmitters send independent messages to multiple receivers which decode the same set of messages. In this work, computation over multicast networks is considered: each receiver decodes an identical function of the original messages. For a countably infinite class of two-transmitter two-receiver single-hop linear deterministic networks, the computing capacity is characterized for a linear function (modulo-2 sum) of Bernoulli sources. Inspired by the geometric concept of interference alignment in networks, a new achievable coding scheme called function alignment is introduced. A new converse theorem is established that is tighter than cut-set based and genie-aided bounds. Computation (vs. communication) over multicast networks requires additional analysis to account for multiple receivers sharing a network's computational resources. We also develop a network decomposition theorem which identifies elementary parallel subnetworks that can constitute an original network without loss of optimality. The decomposition theorem provides a conceptually-simpler algebraic proof of achievability that generalizes to $L$-transmitter $L$-receiver networks.
1209.3366
Implement Blind Interference Alignment over Homogeneous 3-user 2x1 Broadcast Channel
cs.IT math.IT
This paper first studies the homogeneous 3-user 2x1 broadcast channel (BC) with no CSIT. We show a sufficient condition for it to achieve the optimal 3/2 degrees of freedom (DoF) by using Blind Interference Alignment (BIA). BIA refers to the interference alignment method without the need of CSIT. It further studies the 2x1 broadcast network in which there are K>=3 homogeneous single-antenna users, and their coherence time offsets are independently and uniformly distributed. We show that, if K>=11, the two-antenna transmitter can find, with more than 95% certainty, three users to form a BIA-feasible 3-user BC and achieve the optimal 3/2 DoF.
1209.3394
Distribution of the largest eigenvalue for real Wishart and Gaussian random matrices and a simple approximation for the Tracy-Widom distribution
cs.IT math.IT math.ST stat.TH
We derive efficient recursive formulas giving the exact distribution of the largest eigenvalue for finite dimensional real Wishart matrices and for the Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble (GOE). In comparing the exact distribution with the limiting distribution of large random matrices, we also found that the Tracy-Widom law can be approximated by a properly scaled and shifted Gamma distribution, with great accuracy for the values of common interest in statistical applications.
1209.3411
A Computational Model of the Effects of Drug Addiction on Neural Population Dynamics
q-bio.NC cs.SI
Reward processing and derangements thereof, such as drug addiction, involve the coordinated activity of many brain areas. Prior work has identified many behavioral, molecular biological and single neuron changes throughout the mesocorticolimbic system that reflect and drive addictive behavior. Subpopulations in the ventral tegemental area (VTA) encode positive reward prediction error, negative reward prediction error, and the magnitude of the reward. Phasic activity in VTA dopaminergic neurons correlates with hedonic value. Tonic activity of groups in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) can encode antidepressant states. However, little is known about how drug addiction might affect population encoding across larger brain regions. Here, we compare the information content associated with network patterns in naive, acutely intoxicated and chronically addicted states in a plastic attractor network. We found that addiction decreases the network's ability to store and discriminate among patterns of activity. Altered dopaminergic tone flattens the energy landscape and decreases the entropy associated with each network pattern. Altered dmPFC activity produces signal-to-noise deficits similar to computational models of schizophrenia. Our results provide a conceptual framework for interpreting altered neural population dynamics in psychopathological states based on information theory. They also suggest a view of the subtypes of depression as on a continuum of combinations of cortical and subcortical dysfunction. This suggests that patients who suffer from depression with psychotic features will have more cortical than mesolimbic dysfunction. Furthermore, our framework can be applied to other psychiatric illnesses and so may help us, in general, quantitatively understand psychiatric illnesses as disorders in the representation and processing of information by distributed brain networks.
1209.3416
Distributed Resource Allocation Algorithm Design for Multi-Cell Networks Based on Advanced Decomposition Theory
cs.IT math.IT
In this letter, we investigate the resource allocation for downlink multi-cell coordinated OFDMA wireless networks, in which power allocation and subcarrier scheduling are jointly optimized. Aiming at maximizing the weighted sum of the minimal user rates (WSMR) of coordinated cells under individual power constraints at each base station, an effective distributed resource allocation algorithm using a modified decomposition method is proposed, which is suitable by practical implementation due to its low complexity and fast convergence speed. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed decentralized algorithm provides substantial throughput gains with lower computational cost compared to existing schemes.
1209.3419
Tractable Optimization Problems through Hypergraph-Based Structural Restrictions
cs.AI
Several variants of the Constraint Satisfaction Problem have been proposed and investigated in the literature for modelling those scenarios where solutions are associated with some given costs. Within these frameworks computing an optimal solution is an NP-hard problem in general; yet, when restricted over classes of instances whose constraint interactions can be modelled via (nearly-)acyclic graphs, this problem is known to be solvable in polynomial time. In this paper, larger classes of tractable instances are singled out, by discussing solution approaches based on exploiting hypergraph acyclicity and, more generally, structural decomposition methods, such as (hyper)tree decompositions.
1209.3433
A Hajj And Umrah Location Classification System For Video Crowded Scenes
cs.CV cs.CY cs.LG
In this paper, a new automatic system for classifying ritual locations in diverse Hajj and Umrah video scenes is investigated. This challenging subject has mostly been ignored in the past due to several problems one of which is the lack of realistic annotated video datasets. HUER Dataset is defined to model six different Hajj and Umrah ritual locations[26]. The proposed Hajj and Umrah ritual location classifying system consists of four main phases: Preprocessing, segmentation, feature extraction, and location classification phases. The shot boundary detection and background/foregroud segmentation algorithms are applied to prepare the input video scenes into the KNN, ANN, and SVM classifiers. The system improves the state of art results on Hajj and Umrah location classifications, and successfully recognizes the six Hajj rituals with more than 90% accuracy. The various demonstrated experiments show the promising results.
1209.3460
Expander-like Codes based on Finite Projective Geometry
cs.IT math.IT
We present a novel error correcting code and decoding algorithm which have construction similar to expander codes. The code is based on a bipartite graph derived from the subsumption relations of finite projective geometry, and Reed-Solomon codes as component codes. We use a modified version of well-known Zemor's decoding algorithm for expander codes, for decoding our codes. By derivation of geometric bounds rather than eigenvalue bounds, it has been proved that for practical values of the code rate, the random error correction capability of our codes is much better than those derived for previously studied graph codes, including Zemor's bound. MATLAB simulations further reveal that the average case performance of this code is 10 times better than these geometric bounds obtained, in almost 99% of the test cases. By exploiting the symmetry of projective space lattices, we have designed a corresponding decoder that has optimal throughput. The decoder design has been prototyped on Xilinx Virtex 5 FPGA. The codes are designed for potential applications in secondary storage media. As an application, we also discuss usage of these codes to improve the burst error correction capability of CD-ROM decoder.
1209.3487
A framework for large-scale distributed AI search across disconnected heterogeneous infrastructures
cs.DC cs.AI math.CO
We present a framework for a large-scale distributed eScience Artificial Intelligence search. Our approach is generic and can be used for many different problems. Unlike many other approaches, we do not require dedicated machines, homogeneous infrastructure or the ability to communicate between nodes. We give special consideration to the robustness of the framework, minimising the loss of effort even after total loss of infrastructure, and allowing easy verification of every step of the distribution process. In contrast to most eScience applications, the input data and specification of the problem is very small, being easily given in a paragraph of text. The unique challenges our framework tackles are related to the combinatorial explosion of the space that contains the possible solutions and the robustness of long-running computations. Not only is the time required to finish the computations unknown, but also the resource requirements may change during the course of the computation. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework by using it to solve a challenging and hitherto open problem in computational mathematics. The results demonstrate that our approach easily scales to computations of a size that would have been impossible to tackle in practice just a decade ago.
1209.3505
Cognitive Energy Harvesting and Transmission from a Network Perspective
cs.IT math.IT
Wireless networks can be self-sustaining by harvesting energy from radio-frequency (RF) signals. Building on classic cognitive radio networks, we propose a novel method for network coexisting where mobiles from a secondary network, called secondary transmitters (STs), either harvest energy from transmissions by nearby transmitters from a primary network, called primary transmitters (PTs), or transmit information if PTs are sufficiently far away; STs store harvested energy in rechargeable batteries with finite capacity and use all available energy for subsequent transmission when batteries are fully charged. In this model, each PT is centered at a guard zone and a harvesting zone that are disks with given radiuses; a ST harvests energy if it lies in some harvesting zone, transmits fixed-power signals if it is outside all guard zones or else idles. Based on this model, the spatial throughput of the secondary network is maximized using a stochastic-geometry model where PTs and STs are modeled as independent homogeneous Poisson point processes (HPPPs), under the outage constraints for coexisting networks and obtained in a simple closed-form. It is observed from the result that the maximum secondary throughput decreases linearly with the growing PT density, and the optimal ST density is inversely proportional to the derived transmission probability for STs.
1209.3549
Nash Equilibria for Stochastic Games with Asymmetric Information-Part 1: Finite Games
cs.GT cs.SY
A model of stochastic games where multiple controllers jointly control the evolution of the state of a dynamic system but have access to different information about the state and action processes is considered. The asymmetry of information among the controllers makes it difficult to compute or characterize Nash equilibria. Using common information among the controllers, the game with asymmetric information is shown to be equivalent to another game with symmetric information. Further, under certain conditions, a Markov state is identified for the equivalent symmetric information game and its Markov perfect equilibria are characterized. This characterization provides a backward induction algorithm to find Nash equilibria of the original game with asymmetric information in pure or behavioral strategies. Each step of this algorithm involves finding Bayesian Nash equilibria of a one-stage Bayesian game. The class of Nash equilibria of the original game that can be characterized in this backward manner are named common information based Markov perfect equilibria.
1209.3573
A short note on the kissing number of the lattice in Gaussian wiretap coding
cs.CR cs.IT math.IT
We show that on an $n=24m+8k$-dimensional even unimodular lattice, if the shortest vector length is $\geq 2m$, then as the number of vectors of length $2m$ decreases, the secrecy gain increases. We will also prove a similar result on general unimodular lattices. Furthermore, assuming the conjecture by Belfiore and Sol\'e, we will calculate the difference between inverses of secrecy gains as the number of vectors varies. Finally, we will show by an example that there exist two lattices in the same dimension with the same shortest vector length and the same kissing number, but different secrecy gains.
1209.3590
Information Retrieval From Internet Applications For Digital Forensic
cs.CR cs.IR cs.SI
Advanced internet technologies providing services like e-mail, social networking, online banking, online shopping etc., have made day-to-day activities simple and convenient. Increasing dependency on the internet, convenience, and decreasing cost of electronic devices have resulted in frequent use of online services. However, increased indulgence over the internet has also accelerated the pace of digital crimes. The increase in number and complexity of digital crimes has caught the attention of forensic investigators. The Digital Investigators are faced with the challenge of gathering accurate digital evidence from as many sources as possible. In this paper, an attempt was made to recover digital evidence from a system's RAM in the form of information about the most recent browsing session of the user. Four different applications were chosen and the experiment was conducted across two browsers. It was found that crucial information about the target user such as, user name, passwords, etc., was recoverable.
1209.3600
Output Feedback H_2 Model Matching for Decentralized Systems with Delays
cs.SY math.OC
This paper gives a new solution to the output feedback H_2 model matching problem for a large class of delayed information sharing patterns. Existing methods for such problems typically reduce the decentralized problem to a centralized problem of higher state dimension. In contrast, the controller given in this paper is constructed from the solutions to the centralized control and estimation Riccati equations for the original system. The problem is solved by decomposing the controller into two components. One is centralized, but delayed, while the other is decentralized with finite impulse response (FIR). It is then shown that the optimal controller can be constructed through a combination of centralized spectral factorization and quadratic programming.
1209.3607
Some refined results on convergence of curvelet transform
cs.IT math.IT
Article presents proof that M-term non-linear approximation of functions that are C^3 apart from C^3 edges in curvelet frame have squared L^2 approximation bounded by M^(-2).
1209.3650
A survey on social network sites' functional features
cs.HC cs.SI
Through social network sites (SNS) are between the most popular sites in the Web, there is not a formal study on their functional features. This paper introduces a comprehensive list of them. Then, it shows how these features are supported by top 16 social network platforms. Results show some universal features, such as comments support, public sharing of contents, system notifications and profile pages with avatars. A strong tendency in using external services for authentication and contact recognition has been found, which is quite significant in top SNS. Most popular content types include text, pictures and video. The home page is the site for publishing content and following activities, whilst profile pages mainly include owner's contacts and content lists.
1209.3672
1-Bit Matrix Completion
math.ST cs.IT math.IT stat.TH
In this paper we develop a theory of matrix completion for the extreme case of noisy 1-bit observations. Instead of observing a subset of the real-valued entries of a matrix M, we obtain a small number of binary (1-bit) measurements generated according to a probability distribution determined by the real-valued entries of M. The central question we ask is whether or not it is possible to obtain an accurate estimate of M from this data. In general this would seem impossible, but we show that the maximum likelihood estimate under a suitable constraint returns an accurate estimate of M when ||M||_{\infty} <= \alpha, and rank(M) <= r. If the log-likelihood is a concave function (e.g., the logistic or probit observation models), then we can obtain this maximum likelihood estimate by optimizing a convex program. In addition, we also show that if instead of recovering M we simply wish to obtain an estimate of the distribution generating the 1-bit measurements, then we can eliminate the requirement that ||M||_{\infty} <= \alpha. For both cases, we provide lower bounds showing that these estimates are near-optimal. We conclude with a suite of experiments that both verify the implications of our theorems as well as illustrate some of the practical applications of 1-bit matrix completion. In particular, we compare our program to standard matrix completion methods on movie rating data in which users submit ratings from 1 to 5. In order to use our program, we quantize this data to a single bit, but we allow the standard matrix completion program to have access to the original ratings (from 1 to 5). Surprisingly, the approach based on binary data performs significantly better.
1209.3686
Active Learning for Crowd-Sourced Databases
cs.LG cs.DB
Crowd-sourcing has become a popular means of acquiring labeled data for a wide variety of tasks where humans are more accurate than computers, e.g., labeling images, matching objects, or analyzing sentiment. However, relying solely on the crowd is often impractical even for data sets with thousands of items, due to time and cost constraints of acquiring human input (which cost pennies and minutes per label). In this paper, we propose algorithms for integrating machine learning into crowd-sourced databases, with the goal of allowing crowd-sourcing applications to scale, i.e., to handle larger datasets at lower costs. The key observation is that, in many of the above tasks, humans and machine learning algorithms can be complementary, as humans are often more accurate but slow and expensive, while algorithms are usually less accurate, but faster and cheaper. Based on this observation, we present two new active learning algorithms to combine humans and algorithms together in a crowd-sourced database. Our algorithms are based on the theory of non-parametric bootstrap, which makes our results applicable to a broad class of machine learning models. Our results, on three real-life datasets collected with Amazon's Mechanical Turk, and on 15 well-known UCI data sets, show that our methods on average ask humans to label one to two orders of magnitude fewer items to achieve the same accuracy as a baseline that labels random images, and two to eight times fewer questions than previous active learning schemes.
1209.3694
Submodularity in Batch Active Learning and Survey Problems on Gaussian Random Fields
cs.LG cs.AI cs.DS
Many real-world datasets can be represented in the form of a graph whose edge weights designate similarities between instances. A discrete Gaussian random field (GRF) model is a finite-dimensional Gaussian process (GP) whose prior covariance is the inverse of a graph Laplacian. Minimizing the trace of the predictive covariance Sigma (V-optimality) on GRFs has proven successful in batch active learning classification problems with budget constraints. However, its worst-case bound has been missing. We show that the V-optimality on GRFs as a function of the batch query set is submodular and hence its greedy selection algorithm guarantees an (1-1/e) approximation ratio. Moreover, GRF models have the absence-of-suppressor (AofS) condition. For active survey problems, we propose a similar survey criterion which minimizes 1'(Sigma)1. In practice, V-optimality criterion performs better than GPs with mutual information gain criteria and allows nonuniform costs for different nodes.
1209.3702
Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Two-Way Relaying: A Space-Division Approach
cs.IT math.IT
We propose a novel space-division based network-coding scheme for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) two-way relay channels (TWRCs), in which two multi-antenna users exchange information via a multi-antenna relay. In the proposed scheme, the overall signal space at the relay is divided into two subspaces. In one subspace, the spatial streams of the two users have nearly orthogonal directions, and are completely decoded at the relay. In the other subspace, the signal directions of the two users are nearly parallel, and linear functions of the spatial streams are computed at the relay, following the principle of physical-layer network coding (PNC). Based on the recovered messages and message-functions, the relay generates and forwards network-coded messages to the two users. We show that, at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the proposed scheme achieves the asymptotic sum rate capacity of MIMO TWRCs within 1/2log(5/4) = 0.161 bits per user-antenna for any antenna configuration and channel realization. We perform large-system analysis to derive the average sum-rate of the proposed scheme over Rayleigh-fading MIMO TWRCs. We show that the average asymptotic sum rate gap to the capacity upper bound is at most 0.053 bits per relay-antenna. It is demonstrated that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the existing schemes.
1209.3728
Linear Precoding Designs for Amplify-and-Forward Multiuser Two-Way Relay Systems
cs.IT math.IT
Two-way relaying can improve spectral efficiency in two-user cooperative communications. It also has great potential in multiuser systems. A major problem of designing a multiuser two-way relay system (MU-TWRS) is transceiver or precoding design to suppress co-channel interference. This paper aims to study linear precoding designs for a cellular MU-TWRS where a multi-antenna base station (BS) conducts bi-directional communications with multiple mobile stations (MSs) via a multi-antenna relay station (RS) with amplify-and-forward relay strategy. The design goal is to optimize uplink performance, including total mean-square error (Total-MSE) and sum rate, while maintaining individual signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) requirement for downlink signals. We show that the BS precoding design with the RS precoder fixed can be converted to a standard second order cone programming (SOCP) and the optimal solution is obtained efficiently. The RS precoding design with the BS precoder fixed, on the other hand, is non-convex and we present an iterative algorithm to find a local optimal solution. Then, the joint BS-RS precoding is obtained by solving the BS precoding and the RS precoding alternately. Comprehensive simulation is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed precoding designs.
1209.3733
Cascade Failures from Distributed Generation in Power Grids
physics.soc-ph cs.SY
Power grids are nowadays experiencing a transformation due to the introduction of Distributed Generation based on Renewable Sources. At difference with classical Distributed Generation, where local power sources mitigate anomalous user consumption peaks, Renewable Sources introduce in the grid intrinsically erratic power inputs. By introducing a simple schematic (but realistic) model for power grids with stochastic distributed generation, we study the effects of erratic sources on the robustness of several IEEE power grid test networks with up to 2000 buses. We find that increasing the penetration of erratic sources causes the grid to fail with a sharp transition. We compare such results with the case of failures caused by the natural increasing power demand.
1209.3734
RIO: Minimizing User Interaction in Ontology Debugging
cs.AI
Efficient ontology debugging is a cornerstone for many activities in the context of the Semantic Web, especially when automatic tools produce (parts of) ontologies such as in the field of ontology matching. The best currently known interactive debugging systems rely upon some meta information in terms of fault probabilities, which can speed up the debugging procedure in the good case, but can also have negative impact on the performance in the bad case. The problem is that assessment of the meta information is only possible a-posteriori. Consequently, as long as the actual fault is unknown, there is always some risk of suboptimal interactive diagnoses discrimination. As an alternative, one might prefer to rely on a tool which pursues a no-risk strategy. In this case, however, possibly well-chosen meta information cannot be exploited, resulting again in inefficient debugging actions. In this work we present a reinforcement learning strategy that continuously adapts its behavior depending on the performance achieved and minimizes the risk of using low-quality meta information. Therefore, this method is suitable for application scenarios where reliable a-priori fault estimates are difficult to obtain. Using problematic ontologies in the field of ontology matching, we show that the proposed risk-aware query strategy outperforms both active learning approaches and no-risk strategies on average in terms of required amount of user interaction.
1209.3737
Key to Network Controllability
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI q-bio.MN
Liu et al recently proposed a minimum number of driver nodes needed to obtain full structural controllability over a directed network. Driver nodes are unmatched nodes, from which there are directed paths to all matched nodes. Their most important assertion is that a system's controllability is to a great extent encoded by the underlying network's degree distribution, $P(k_{in}, k_{out})$. Is the controllability of a network decided almost completely by the immediate neighbourhood of a node, while, even slightly distant nodes play no role at all? Motivated by the above question, in this communication, we argue that an effective understanding of controllability in directed networks can be reached using distance based measures of closeness centrality and betweenness centrality and may not require the knowledge of local connectivity measures like in-degree and out-degree.
1209.3756
Incomplete Information in RDF
cs.DB
We extend RDF with the ability to represent property values that exist, but are unknown or partially known, using constraints. Following ideas from the incomplete information literature, we develop a semantics for this extension of RDF, called RDFi, and study SPARQL query evaluation in this framework.
1209.3761
Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis for Disparate Data Fusion
stat.ML cs.LG
Manifold matching works to identify embeddings of multiple disparate data spaces into the same low-dimensional space, where joint inference can be pursued. It is an enabling methodology for fusion and inference from multiple and massive disparate data sources. In this paper we focus on a method called Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) and its generalization Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis (GCCA), which belong to the more general Reduced Rank Regression (RRR) framework. We present an efficiency investigation of CCA and GCCA under different training conditions for a particular text document classification task.