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1303.5752
About Updating
cs.AI
Survey of several forms of updating, with a practical illustrative example. We study several updating (conditioning) schemes that emerge naturally from a common scenarion to provide some insights into their meaning. Updating is a subtle operation and there is no single method, no single 'good' rule. The choice of the appropriate rule must always be given due consideration. Planchet (1989) presents a mathematical survey of many rules. We focus on the practical meaning of these rules. After summarizing the several rules for conditioning, we present an illustrative example in which the various forms of conditioning can be explained.
1303.5753
Compressed Constraints in Probabilistic Logic and Their Revision
cs.AI
In probabilistic logic entailments, even moderate size problems can yield linear constraint systems with so many variables that exact methods are impractical. This difficulty can be remedied in many cases of interest by introducing a three valued logic (true, false, and "don't care"). The three-valued approach allows the construction of "compressed" constraint systems which have the same solution sets as their two-valued counterparts, but which may involve dramatically fewer variables. Techniques to calculate point estimates for the posterior probabilities of entailed sentences are discussed.
1303.5754
Detecting Causal Relations in the Presence of Unmeasured Variables
cs.AI
The presence of latent variables can greatly complicate inferences about causal relations between measured variables from statistical data. In many cases, the presence of latent variables makes it impossible to determine for two measured variables A and B, whether A causes B, B causes A, or there is some common cause. In this paper I present several theorems that state conditions under which it is possible to reliably infer the causal relation between two measured variables, regardless of whether latent variables are acting or not.
1303.5755
A Method for Integrating Utility Analysis into an Expert System for Design Evaluation
cs.AI
In mechanical design, there is often unavoidable uncertainty in estimates of design performance. Evaluation of design alternatives requires consideration of the impact of this uncertainty. Expert heuristics embody assumptions regarding the designer's attitude towards risk and uncertainty that might be reasonable in most cases but inaccurate in others. We present a technique to allow designers to incorporate their own unique attitude towards uncertainty as opposed to those assumed by the domain expert's rules. The general approach is to eliminate aspects of heuristic rules which directly or indirectly include assumptions regarding the user's attitude towards risk, and replace them with explicit, user-specified probabilistic multi attribute utility and probability distribution functions. We illustrate the method in a system for material selection for automobile bumpers.
1303.5756
From Relational Databases to Belief Networks
cs.AI
The relationship between belief networks and relational databases is examined. Based on this analysis, a method to construct belief networks automatically from statistical relational data is proposed. A comparison between our method and other methods shows that our method has several advantages when generalization or prediction is deeded.
1303.5757
A Monte-Carlo Algorithm for Dempster-Shafer Belief
cs.AI
A very computationally-efficient Monte-Carlo algorithm for the calculation of Dempster-Shafer belief is described. If Bel is the combination using Dempster's Rule of belief functions Bel, ..., Bel,7, then, for subset b of the frame C), Bel(b) can be calculated in time linear in 1(31 and m (given that the weight of conflict is bounded). The algorithm can also be used to improve the complexity of the Shenoy-Shafer algorithms on Markov trees, and be generalised to calculate Dempster-Shafer Belief over other logics.
1303.5758
Compatibility of Quantitative and Qualitative Representations of Belief
cs.AI
The compatibility of quantitative and qualitative representations of beliefs was studied extensively in probability theory. It is only recently that this important topic is considered in the context of belief functions. In this paper, the compatibility of various quantitative belief measures and qualitative belief structures is investigated. Four classes of belief measures considered are: the probability function, the monotonic belief function, Shafer's belief function, and Smets' generalized belief function. The analysis of their individual compatibility with different belief structures not only provides a sound b<msis for these quantitative measures, but also alleviates some of the difficulties in the acquisition and interpretation of numeric belief numbers. It is shown that the structure of qualitative probability is compatible with monotonic belief functions. Moreover, a belief structure slightly weaker than that of qualitative belief is compatible with Smets' generalized belief functions.
1303.5759
An Efficient Implementation of Belief Function Propagation
cs.AI
The local computation technique (Shafer et al. 1987, Shafer and Shenoy 1988, Shenoy and Shafer 1986) is used for propagating belief functions in so called a Markov Tree. In this paper, we describe an efficient implementation of belief function propagation on the basis of the local computation technique. The presented method avoids all the redundant computations in the propagation process, and so makes the computational complexity decrease with respect to other existing implementations (Hsia and Shenoy 1989, Zarley et al. 1988). We also give a combined algorithm for both propagation and re-propagation which makes the re-propagation process more efficient when one or more of the prior belief functions is changed.
1303.5760
A Non-Numeric Approach to Multi-Criteria/Multi-Expert Aggregation Based on Approximate Reasoning
cs.AI
We describe a technique that can be used for the fusion of multiple sources of information as well as for the evaluation and selection of alternatives under multi-criteria. Three important properties contribute to the uniqueness of the technique introduced. The first is the ability to do all necessary operations and aggregations with information that is of a nonnumeric linguistic nature. This facility greatly reduces the burden on the providers of information, the experts. A second characterizing feature is the ability assign, again linguistically, differing importance to the criteria or in the case of information fusion to the individual sources of information. A third significant feature of the approach is its ability to be used as method to find a consensus of the opinion of multiple experts on the issue of concern. The techniques used in this approach are base on ideas developed from the theory of approximate reasoning. We illustrate the approach with a problem of project selection.
1303.5761
Why Do We Need Foundations for Modelling Uncertainties?
cs.AI
Surely we want solid foundations. What kind of castle can we build on sand? What is the point of devoting effort to balconies and minarets, if the foundation may be so weak as to allow the structure to collapse of its own weight? We want our foundations set on bedrock, designed to last for generations. Who would want an architect who cannot certify the soundness of the foundations of his buildings?
1303.5778
Speech Recognition with Deep Recurrent Neural Networks
cs.NE cs.CL
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are a powerful model for sequential data. End-to-end training methods such as Connectionist Temporal Classification make it possible to train RNNs for sequence labelling problems where the input-output alignment is unknown. The combination of these methods with the Long Short-term Memory RNN architecture has proved particularly fruitful, delivering state-of-the-art results in cursive handwriting recognition. However RNN performance in speech recognition has so far been disappointing, with better results returned by deep feedforward networks. This paper investigates \emph{deep recurrent neural networks}, which combine the multiple levels of representation that have proved so effective in deep networks with the flexible use of long range context that empowers RNNs. When trained end-to-end with suitable regularisation, we find that deep Long Short-term Memory RNNs achieve a test set error of 17.7% on the TIMIT phoneme recognition benchmark, which to our knowledge is the best recorded score.
1303.5802
Sparsity-leveraging Reconfiguration of Smart Distribution Systems
math.OC cs.SY
A system reconfiguration problem is considered for three-phase power distribution networks featuring distributed generation. In lieu of binary line selection variables, the notion of group sparsity is advocated to re-formulate the nonconvex distribution system reconfiguration (DSR) problem into a convex one. Using the duality theory, it is shown that the line selection task boils down to a shrinkage and thresholding operation on the line currents. Further, numerical tests illustrate the ability of the proposed scheme to identify meshed, weakly-meshed, or even radial configurations by adjusting a sparsity-tuning parameter in the DSR cost. Constraints on the voltages are investigated, and incorporated in the novel DSR problem to effect voltage regulation.
1303.5805
Optimal Placement of Distributed Energy Storage in Power Networks
math.OC cs.SY
We formulate the optimal placement, sizing and control of storage devices in a power network to minimize generation costs with the intent of load shifting. We assume deterministic demand, a linearized DC approximated power flow model and a fixed available storage budget. Our main result proves that when the generation costs are convex and nondecreasing, there always exists an optimal storage capacity allocation that places zero storage at generation-only buses that connect to the rest of the network via single links. This holds regardless of the demand profiles, generation capacities, line-flow limits and characteristics of the storage technologies. Through a counterexample, we illustrate that this result is not generally true for generation buses with multiple connections. For specific network topologies, we also characterize the dependence of the optimal generation cost on the available storage budget, generation capacities and flow constraints.
1303.5841
Adaptive-Gain Second Order Sliding Mode Observer Design for Switching Power Converters
cs.SY
In this paper, a novel adaptive-gain Second Order Sliding Mode (SOSM) observer is proposed for multicell converters by considering it as a class of hybrid systems. The aim is to reduce the number of voltage sensors by estimating the capacitor voltages only from the measurement of load current. The proposed observer is proven to be robust in the presence of perturbations with \emph{unknown} boundary. However, the states of the system are only partially observable in the sense of observability rank condition. Due to its switching behavior, a recent concept of $Z(T_N)$ observability is used to analysis its hybrid observability, since its observability depends upon the switching control signals. Under certain condition of the switching sequences, the voltage across each capacitor becomes observable. Simulation results and comparisons with Luenberger switched observer highlight the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed observer with respect to output measurement noise and system uncertainties (load variations).
1303.5842
Observer-Based High Order Sliding Mode Control of Unity Power Factor in Three-Phase AC/DC Converter for Hybrid Electric Vehicle Applications
math.OC cs.SY
In this paper, a full-bridge boost power converter topology is studied for power factor control, using output high order sliding mode control. The AC/DC converters are used for charging the battery and super-capacitor in hybrid electric vehicles from the utility. The proposed control forces the input currents to track the desired values, which can controls the output voltage while keeping the power factor close to one. Super-twisting sliding mode observer is employed to estimate the input currents and load resistance only from the measurement of output voltage. Lyapunov analysis shows the asymptotic convergence of the closed loop system to zero. Simulation results show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed controller.
1303.5844
Correlations and Scaling Laws in Human Mobility
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Human mobility patterns deeply affect the dynamics of many social systems. In this paper, we empirically analyze the real-world human movements based GPS records, and observe rich scaling properties in the temporal-spatial patterns as well as an abnormal transition in the speed-displacement patterns. We notice that the displacements at the population level show significant positive correlation, indicating a cascade-like nature in human movements. Furthermore, our analysis at the individual level finds that the displacement distributions of users with strong correlation of displacements are closer to power laws, implying a relationship between the positive correlation of the series of displacements and the form of an individual's displacement distribution. These findings from our empirical analysis show a factor directly relevant to the origin of the scaling properties in human mobility.
1303.5855
Overlapping Community Detection in Complex Networks using Symmetric Binary Matrix Factorization
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Discovering overlapping community structures is a crucial step to understanding the structure and dynamics of many networks. In this paper we develop a symmetric binary matrix factorization model (SBMF) to identify overlapping communities. Our model allows us not only to assign community memberships explicitly to nodes, but also to distinguish outliers from overlapping nodes. In addition, we propose a modified partition density to evaluate the quality of community structures. We use this to determine the most appropriate number of communities. We evaluate our methods using both synthetic benchmarks and real world networks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.
1303.5857
Model of complex networks based on citation dynamics
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Complex networks of real-world systems are believed to be controlled by common phenomena, producing structures far from regular or random. These include scale-free degree distributions, small-world structure and assortative mixing by degree, which are also the properties captured by different random graph models proposed in the literature. However, many (non-social) real-world networks are in fact disassortative by degree. Thus, we here propose a simple evolving model that generates networks with most common properties of real-world networks including degree disassortativity. Furthermore, the model has a natural interpretation for citation networks with different practical applications.
1303.5867
Similarity based Dynamic Web Data Extraction and Integration System from Search Engine Result Pages for Web Content Mining
cs.IR cs.DB
There is an explosive growth of information in the World Wide Web thus posing a challenge to Web users to extract essential knowledge from the Web. Search engines help us to narrow down the search in the form of Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). Web Content Mining is one of the techniques that help users to extract useful information from these SERPs. In this paper, we propose two similarity based mechanisms; WDES, to extract desired SERPs and store them in the local depository for offline browsing and WDICS, to integrate the requested contents and enable the user to perform the intended analysis and extract the desired information. Our experimental results show that WDES and WDICS outperform DEPTA [1] in terms of Precision and Recall.
1303.5887
A Behavioural Foundation for Natural Computing and a Programmability Test
cs.IT cs.AI cs.CC math.IT
What does it mean to claim that a physical or natural system computes? One answer, endorsed here, is that computing is about programming a system to behave in different ways. This paper offers an account of what it means for a physical system to compute based on this notion. It proposes a behavioural characterisation of computing in terms of a measure of programmability, which reflects a system's ability to react to external stimuli. The proposed measure of programmability is useful for classifying computers in terms of the apparent algorithmic complexity of their evolution in time. I make some specific proposals in this connection and discuss this approach in the context of other behavioural approaches, notably Turing's test of machine intelligence. I also anticipate possible objections and consider the applicability of these proposals to the task of relating abstract computation to nature-like computation.
1303.5903
How Do We Find Early Adopters Who Will Guide a Resource Constrained Network Towards a Desired Distribution of Behaviors?
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We identify influential early adopters that achieve a target behavior distribution for a resource constrained social network with multiple costly behaviors. This problem is important for applications ranging from collective behavior change to corporate viral marketing campaigns. In this paper, we propose a model of diffusion of multiple behaviors when individual participants have resource constraints. Individuals adopt the set of behaviors that maximize their utility subject to available resources. We show that the problem of influence maximization for multiple behaviors is NP-complete. Thus we propose heuristics, which are based on node degree and expected immediate adoption, to select early adopters. We evaluate the effectiveness under three metrics: unique number of participants, total number of active behaviors and network resource utilization. We also propose heuristics to distribute the behaviors amongst the early adopters to achieve a target distribution in the population. We test our approach on synthetic and real-world topologies with excellent results. Our heuristics produce 15-51\% increase in resource utilization over the na\"ive approach.
1303.5909
Genetic Algorithm with a Local Search Strategy for Discovering Communities in Complex Networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
In order to further improve the performance of current genetic algorithms aiming at discovering communities, a local search based genetic algorithm GALS is here proposed. The core of GALS is a local search based mutation technique. In order to overcome the drawbacks of traditional mutation methods, the paper develops the concept of marginal gene and then the local monotonicity of modularity function Q is deduced from each nodes local view. Based on these two elements, a new mutation method combined with a local search strategy is presented. GALS has been evaluated on both synthetic benchmarks and several real networks, and compared with some presently competing algorithms. Experimental results show that GALS is highly effective and efficient for discovering community structure.
1303.5910
Ant Colony Optimization with a New Random Walk Model for Community Detection in Complex Networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Detecting communities from complex networks has recently triggered great interest. Aiming at this problem, a new ant colony optimization strategy building on the Markov random walks theory, which is named as MACO, is proposed in this paper. The framework of ant colony optimization is taken as the basic framework in this algorithm. In each iteration, a Markov random walk model is employed as heuristic rule; all of the ants local solutions are aggregated to a global one through an idea of clustering ensemble, which then will be used to update a pheromone matrix. The strategy relies on the progressive strengthening of within-community links and the weakening of between-community links. Gradually this converges to a solution where the underlying community structure of the complex network will become clearly visible. The proposed MACO has been evaluated both on synthetic benchmarks and on some real-world networks, and compared with some present competing algorithms. Experimental result has shown that MACO is highly effective for discovering communities.
1303.5912
Fast Complex Network Clustering Algorithm Using Agents
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Recently, the sizes of networks are always very huge, and they take on distributed nature. Aiming at this kind of network clustering problem, in the sight of local view, this paper proposes a fast network clustering algorithm in which each node is regarded as an agent, and each agent tries to maximize its local function in order to optimize network modularity defined by function Q, rather than optimize function Q from the global view as traditional methods. Both the efficiency and effectiveness of this algorithm are tested against computer-generated and real-world networks. Experimental result shows that this algorithm not only has the ability of clustering large-scale networks, but also can attain very good clustering quality compared with the existing algorithms. Furthermore, the parameters of this algorithm are analyzed.
1303.5913
A Diffusion Process on Riemannian Manifold for Visual Tracking
cs.CV cs.LG cs.RO stat.ML
Robust visual tracking for long video sequences is a research area that has many important applications. The main challenges include how the target image can be modeled and how this model can be updated. In this paper, we model the target using a covariance descriptor, as this descriptor is robust to problems such as pixel-pixel misalignment, pose and illumination changes, that commonly occur in visual tracking. We model the changes in the template using a generative process. We introduce a new dynamical model for the template update using a random walk on the Riemannian manifold where the covariance descriptors lie in. This is done using log-transformed space of the manifold to free the constraints imposed inherently by positive semidefinite matrices. Modeling template variations and poses kinetics together in the state space enables us to jointly quantify the uncertainties relating to the kinematic states and the template in a principled way. Finally, the sequential inference of the posterior distribution of the kinematic states and the template is done using a particle filter. Our results shows that this principled approach can be robust to changes in illumination, poses and spatial affine transformation. In the experiments, our method outperformed the current state-of-the-art algorithm - the incremental Principal Component Analysis method, particularly when a target underwent fast poses changes and also maintained a comparable performance in stable target tracking cases.
1303.5919
Heart Disease Prediction System using Associative Classification and Genetic Algorithm
cs.AI stat.AP
Associative classification is a recent and rewarding technique which integrates association rule mining and classification to a model for prediction and achieves maximum accuracy. Associative classifiers are especially fit to applications where maximum accuracy is desired to a model for prediction. There are many domains such as medical where the maximum accuracy of the model is desired. Heart disease is a single largest cause of death in developed countries and one of the main contributors to disease burden in developing countries. Mortality data from the registrar general of India shows that heart disease are a major cause of death in India, and in Andhra Pradesh coronary heart disease cause about 30%of deaths in rural areas. Hence there is a need to develop a decision support system for predicting heart disease of a patient. In this paper we propose efficient associative classification algorithm using genetic approach for heart disease prediction. The main motivation for using genetic algorithm in the discovery of high level prediction rules is that the discovered rules are highly comprehensible, having high predictive accuracy and of high interestingness values. Experimental Results show that most of the classifier rules help in the best prediction of heart disease which even helps doctors in their diagnosis decisions.
1303.5929
DLOLIS-A: Description Logic based Text Ontology Learning
cs.AI
Ontology Learning has been the subject of intensive study for the past decade. Researchers in this field have been motivated by the possibility of automatically building a knowledge base on top of text documents so as to support reasoning based knowledge extraction. While most works in this field have been primarily statistical (known as light-weight Ontology Learning) not much attempt has been made in axiomatic Ontology Learning (called heavy-weight Ontology Learning) from Natural Language text documents. Heavy-weight Ontology Learning supports more precise formal logic-based reasoning when compared to statistical ontology learning. In this paper we have proposed a sound Ontology Learning tool DLOL_(IS-A) that maps English language IS-A sentences into their equivalent Description Logic (DL) expressions in order to automatically generate a consistent pair of T-box and A-box thereby forming both regular (definitional form) and generalized (axiomatic form) DL ontology. The current scope of the paper is strictly limited to IS-A sentences that exclude the possible structures of: (i) implicative IS-A sentences, and (ii) "Wh" IS-A questions. Other linguistic nuances that arise out of pragmatics and epistemic of IS-A sentences are beyond the scope of this present work. We have adopted Gold Standard based Ontology Learning evaluation on chosen IS-A rich Wikipedia documents.
1303.5942
Exact simulation of the GHZ distribution
cs.IT math.IT quant-ph
John Bell has shown that the correlations entailed by quantum mechanics cannot be reproduced by a classical process involving non-communicating parties. But can they be simulated with the help of bounded communication? This problem has been studied for more than two decades and it is now well understood in the case of bipartite entanglement. However, the issue was still widely open for multipartite entanglement, even for the simplest case, which is the tripartite Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state. We give an exact simulation of arbitrary independent von Neumann measurements on general n-partite GHZ states. Our protocol requires O(n^2) bits of expected communication between the parties, and O(n log n) expected time is sufficient to carry it out in parallel. Furthermore, we need only an expectation of O(n) independent unbiased random bits, with no need for the generation of continuous real random variables nor prior shared random variables. In the case of equatorial measurements, we improve on the prior art with a protocol that needs only O(n log n) bits of communication and O(log^2 n) parallel time. At the cost of a slight increase in the number of bits communicated, these tasks can be accomplished with a constant expected number of rounds.
1303.5947
Effect of Receive Spatial Diversity on the Degrees of Freedom Region in Multi-Cell Random Beamforming
cs.IT math.IT
The random beamforming (RBF) scheme, jointly applied with multi-user diversity based scheduling, is able to achieve virtually interference-free downlink transmissions with only partial channel state information (CSI) available at the transmitter. However, the impact of receive spatial diversity on the rate performance of RBF is not fully characterized yet even in a single-cell setup. In this paper, we study a multi-cell multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast system with RBF applied at each base station (BS) and either the minimum-mean-square-error (MMSE), matched filter (MF), or antenna selection (AS) based spatial receiver employed at each mobile terminal. We investigate the effect of different spatial diversity receivers on the achievable sum-rate of multi-cell RBF systems subject to both the intra- and inter-cell interferences. We first derive closed-form expressions for the distributions of the receiver signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) with different spatial diversity techniques, based on which we compare their rate performances at finite signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). We then investigate the asymptotically high-SNR regime and for a tractable analysis assume that the number of users in each cell scales in a certain order with the per-cell SNR as SNR goes to infinity. Under this setup, we characterize the degrees of freedom (DoF) region for multi-cell RBF systems with different types of spatial receivers, which consists of all the achievable DoF tuples for the individual sum-rate of all the cells. The DoF region analysis provides a succinct characterization of the interplays among the receive spatial diversity, multiuser diversity, spatial multiplexing gain, inter-/intra-cell interferences, and BSs' collaborative transmission.
1303.5960
SYNTAGMA. A Linguistic Approach to Parsing
cs.CL
SYNTAGMA is a rule-based parsing system, structured on two levels: a general parsing engine and a language specific grammar. The parsing engine is a language independent program, while grammar and language specific rules and resources are given as text files, consisting in a list of constituent structuresand a lexical database with word sense related features and constraints. Since its theoretical background is principally Tesniere's Elements de syntaxe, SYNTAGMA's grammar emphasizes the role of argument structure (valency) in constraint satisfaction, and allows also horizontal bounds, for instance treating coordination. Notions such as Pro, traces, empty categories are derived from Generative Grammar and some solutions are close to Government&Binding Theory, although they are the result of an autonomous research. These properties allow SYNTAGMA to manage complex syntactic configurations and well known weak points in parsing engineering. An important resource is the semantic network, which is used in disambiguation tasks. Parsing process follows a bottom-up, rule driven strategy. Its behavior can be controlled and fine-tuned.
1303.5966
Time varying networks and the weakness of strong ties
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
In most social and information systems the activity of agents generates rapidly evolving time-varying networks. The temporal variation in networks' connectivity patterns and the ongoing dynamic processes are usually coupled in ways that still challenge our mathematical or computational modelling. Here we analyse a mobile call dataset and find a simple statistical law that characterize the temporal evolution of users' egocentric networks. We encode this observation in a reinforcement process defining a time-varying network model that exhibits the emergence of strong and weak ties. We study the effect of time-varying and heterogeneous interactions on the classic rumour spreading model in both synthetic, and real-world networks. We observe that strong ties severely inhibit information diffusion by confining the spreading process among agents with recurrent communication patterns. This provides the counterintuitive evidence that strong ties may have a negative role in the spreading of information across networks.
1303.5976
On Learnability, Complexity and Stability
stat.ML cs.LG
We consider the fundamental question of learnability of a hypotheses class in the supervised learning setting and in the general learning setting introduced by Vladimir Vapnik. We survey classic results characterizing learnability in term of suitable notions of complexity, as well as more recent results that establish the connection between learnability and stability of a learning algorithm.
1303.5984
Efficient Reinforcement Learning for High Dimensional Linear Quadratic Systems
stat.ML cs.LG math.OC
We study the problem of adaptive control of a high dimensional linear quadratic (LQ) system. Previous work established the asymptotic convergence to an optimal controller for various adaptive control schemes. More recently, for the average cost LQ problem, a regret bound of ${O}(\sqrt{T})$ was shown, apart form logarithmic factors. However, this bound scales exponentially with $p$, the dimension of the state space. In this work we consider the case where the matrices describing the dynamic of the LQ system are sparse and their dimensions are large. We present an adaptive control scheme that achieves a regret bound of ${O}(p \sqrt{T})$, apart from logarithmic factors. In particular, our algorithm has an average cost of $(1+\eps)$ times the optimum cost after $T = \polylog(p) O(1/\eps^2)$. This is in comparison to previous work on the dense dynamics where the algorithm requires time that scales exponentially with dimension in order to achieve regret of $\eps$ times the optimal cost. We believe that our result has prominent applications in the emerging area of computational advertising, in particular targeted online advertising and advertising in social networks.
1303.5988
Reinforcement Ranking
cs.IR cs.SI
We introduce a new framework for web page ranking -- reinforcement ranking -- that improves the stability and accuracy of Page Rank while eliminating the need for computing the stationary distribution of random walks. Instead of relying on teleportation to ensure a well defined Markov chain, we develop a reverse-time reinforcement learning framework that determines web page authority based on the solution of a reverse Bellman equation. In particular, for a given reward function and surfing policy we recover a well defined authority score from a reverse-time perspective: looking back from a web page, what is the total incoming discounted reward brought by the surfer from the page's predecessors? This results in a novel form of reverse-time dynamic-programming/reinforcement-learning problem that achieves several advantages over Page Rank based methods: First, stochasticity, ergodicity, and irreducibility of the underlying Markov chain is no longer required for well-posedness. Second, the method is less sensitive to graph topology and more stable in the presence of dangling pages. Third, not only does the reverse Bellman iteration yield a more efficient power iteration, it allows for faster updating in the presence of graph changes. Finally, our experiments demonstrate improvements in ranking quality.
1303.6001
Generalizing k-means for an arbitrary distance matrix
cs.LG cs.CV stat.ML
The original k-means clustering method works only if the exact vectors representing the data points are known. Therefore calculating the distances from the centroids needs vector operations, since the average of abstract data points is undefined. Existing algorithms can be extended for those cases when the sole input is the distance matrix, and the exact representing vectors are unknown. This extension may be named relational k-means after a notation for a similar algorithm invented for fuzzy clustering. A method is then proposed for generalizing k-means for scenarios when the data points have absolutely no connection with a Euclidean space.
1303.6017
Scrambling Code Planning in TD-SCDMA Systems
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to a crucial sign error in equation 2.
1303.6020
Multi-Group Testing for Items with Real-Valued Status under Standard Arithmetic
cs.IT math.CO math.IT
This paper proposes a novel generalization of group testing, called multi-group testing, which relaxes the notion of "testing subset" in group testing to "testing multi-set". The generalization aims to learn more information of each item to be tested rather than identify only defectives as was done in conventional group testing. This paper provides efficient nonadaptive strategies for the multi-group testing problem. The major tool is a new structure, $q$-ary additive $(w,d)$-disjunct matrix, which is a generalization of the well-known binary disjunct matrix introduced by Kautz and Singleton in 1964.
1303.6021
Spatio-Temporal Covariance Descriptors for Action and Gesture Recognition
cs.CV cs.HC
We propose a new action and gesture recognition method based on spatio-temporal covariance descriptors and a weighted Riemannian locality preserving projection approach that takes into account the curved space formed by the descriptors. The weighted projection is then exploited during boosting to create a final multiclass classification algorithm that employs the most useful spatio-temporal regions. We also show how the descriptors can be computed quickly through the use of integral video representations. Experiments on the UCF sport, CK+ facial expression and Cambridge hand gesture datasets indicate superior performance of the proposed method compared to several recent state-of-the-art techniques. The proposed method is robust and does not require additional processing of the videos, such as foreground detection, interest-point detection or tracking.
1303.6025
Robust Stability Analysis of an Optical Parametric Amplifier Quantum System
quant-ph cs.SY math.OC
This paper considers the problem of robust stability for a class of uncertain nonlinear quantum systems subject to unknown perturbations in the system Hamiltonian. The case of a nominal linear quantum system is considered with non-quadratic perturbations to the system Hamiltonian. The paper extends recent results on the robust stability of nonlinear quantum systems to allow for non-quadratic perturbations to the Hamiltonian which depend on multiple parameters. A robust stability condition is given in terms of a strict bounded real condition. This result is then applied to the robust stability analysis of a nonlinear quantum system which is a model of an optical parametric amplifier.
1303.6046
Optimized-Cost Repair in Multi-hop Distributed Storage Systems with Network Coding
cs.IT math.IT
In distributed storage systems reliability is achieved through redundancy stored at different nodes in the network. Then a data collector can reconstruct source information even though some nodes fail. To maintain reliability, an autonomous and efficient protocol should be used to repair the failed node. The repair process causes traffic and consequently transmission cost in the network. Recent results found the optimal trafficstorage tradeoff, and proposed regenerating codes to achieve the optimality. We aim at minimizing the transmission cost in the repair process. We consider the network topology in the repair, and accordingly modify information flow graphs. Then we analyze the cut requirement and based on the results, we formulate the minimum-cost as a linear programming problem for linear costs. We show that the solution of the linear problem establishes a fundamental lower bound of the repair-cost. We also show that this bound is achievable for minimum storage regenerating, which uses the optimal-cost minimum-storage regenerating (OCMSR) code. We propose surviving node cooperation which can efficiently reduce the repair cost. Further, the field size for the construction of OCMSR codes is discussed. We show the gain of optimal-cost repair in tandem, star, grid and fully connected networks.
1303.6066
Asymmetric Pruning for Learning Cascade Detectors
cs.CV
Cascade classifiers are one of the most important contributions to real-time object detection. Nonetheless, there are many challenging problems arising in training cascade detectors. One common issue is that the node classifier is trained with a symmetric classifier. Having a low misclassification error rate does not guarantee an optimal node learning goal in cascade classifiers, i.e., an extremely high detection rate with a moderate false positive rate. In this work, we present a new approach to train an effective node classifier in a cascade detector. The algorithm is based on two key observations: 1) Redundant weak classifiers can be safely discarded; 2) The final detector should satisfy the asymmetric learning objective of the cascade architecture. To achieve this, we separate the classifier training into two steps: finding a pool of discriminative weak classifiers/features and training the final classifier by pruning weak classifiers which contribute little to the asymmetric learning criterion (asymmetric classifier construction). Our model reduction approach helps accelerate the learning time while achieving the pre-determined learning objective. Experimental results on both face and car data sets verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. On the FDDB face data sets, our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance, which demonstrates the advantage of our approach.
1303.6086
On Sparsity Inducing Regularization Methods for Machine Learning
cs.LG stat.ML
During the past years there has been an explosion of interest in learning methods based on sparsity regularization. In this paper, we discuss a general class of such methods, in which the regularizer can be expressed as the composition of a convex function $\omega$ with a linear function. This setting includes several methods such the group Lasso, the Fused Lasso, multi-task learning and many more. We present a general approach for solving regularization problems of this kind, under the assumption that the proximity operator of the function $\omega$ is available. Furthermore, we comment on the application of this approach to support vector machines, a technique pioneered by the groundbreaking work of Vladimir Vapnik.
1303.6088
Graphical Analysis of Social Group Dynamics
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Identifying communities in social networks becomes an increasingly important research problem. Several methods for identifying such groups have been developed, however, qualitative analysis (taking into account the scale of the problem) still poses serious problems. This paper describes a tool for facilitating such an analysis, allowing to visualize the dynamics and supporting localization of different events (such as creation or merging of groups). In the final part of the paper, the experimental results performed using the benchmark data (Enron emails) provide an insight into usefulness of the proposed tool.
1303.6091
Agent-based modelling of social organisations
cs.SI cs.MA physics.soc-ph
In the paper, the model of the society represented by a social network and the model of a multi-agent system built on the basis of this, is presented. The particular aim of the system is to predict the evolution of a society and an analysis of the communities that appear, their characteristic features and reasons for coming into being. As an example of application, an analysis was made of a social portal which makes it possible to offer and reserve places in rooms for travelling tourists
1303.6092
A Polyhedral Approximation Framework for Convex and Robust Distributed Optimization
cs.SY cs.DC math.OC
In this paper we consider a general problem set-up for a wide class of convex and robust distributed optimization problems in peer-to-peer networks. In this set-up convex constraint sets are distributed to the network processors who have to compute the optimizer of a linear cost function subject to the constraints. We propose a novel fully distributed algorithm, named cutting-plane consensus, to solve the problem, based on an outer polyhedral approximation of the constraint sets. Processors running the algorithm compute and exchange linear approximations of their locally feasible sets. Independently of the number of processors in the network, each processor stores only a small number of linear constraints, making the algorithm scalable to large networks. The cutting-plane consensus algorithm is presented and analyzed for the general framework. Specifically, we prove that all processors running the algorithm agree on an optimizer of the global problem, and that the algorithm is tolerant to node and link failures as long as network connectivity is preserved. Then, the cutting plane consensus algorithm is specified to three different classes of distributed optimization problems, namely (i) inequality constrained problems, (ii) robust optimization problems, and (iii) almost separable optimization problems with separable objective functions and coupling constraints. For each one of these problem classes we solve a concrete problem that can be expressed in that framework and present computational results. That is, we show how to solve: position estimation in wireless sensor networks, a distributed robust linear program and, a distributed microgrid control problem.
1303.6094
Modelling and analysing relations between entities using the multi-agents and social network approaches
cs.SI cs.MA physics.soc-ph
In this work, the concept of a system for analysing social relations between entities using the social network analysis and multi-agent system approaches is presented. The following problems especially appear within the domain of our interests: identification of the most influential individuals in a given society, identification of roles played by the given individuals in that society and the recognition of groups of individuals strongly connected with one another. For the analysis of these problems, two application domains are selected: an analysis of data regarding phone calls and analysis of Internet Weblogs.
1303.6106
Agent-based environment for knowledge integration
cs.MA
Representing knowledge with the use of ontology description languages offers several advantages arising from knowledge reusability, possibilities of carrying out reasoning processes and the use of existing concepts of knowledge integration. In this work we are going to present an environment for the integration of knowledge expressed in such a way. Guaranteeing knowledge integration is an important element during the development of the Semantic Web. Thanks to this, it is possible to obtain access to services which offer knowledge contained in various distributed databases associated with semantically described web portals. We will present the advantages of the multi-agent approach while solving this problem. Then, we will describe an example of its application in systems supporting company management knowledge in the process of constructing supply-chains.
1303.6120
Reliability and efficiency of generalized rumor spreading model on complex social networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
We introduce the generalized rumor spreading model and investigate some properties of this model on different complex social networks. Despite pervious rumor models that both the spreader-spreader ($SS$) and the spreader-stifler ($SR$) interactions have the same rate $\alpha$, we define $\alpha^{(1)}$ and $\alpha^{(2)}$ for $SS$ and $SR$ interactions, respectively. The effect of variation of $\alpha^{(1)}$ and $\alpha^{(2)}$ on the final density of stiflers is investigated. Furthermore, the influence of the topological structure of the network in rumor spreading is studied by analyzing the behavior of several global parameters such as reliability and efficiency. Our results show that while networks with homogeneous connectivity patterns reach a higher reliability, scale-free topologies need a less time to reach a steady state with respect the rumor.
1303.6135
Model-Based Calibration of Filter Imperfections in the Random Demodulator for Compressive Sensing
cs.IT math.IT
The random demodulator is a recent compressive sensing architecture providing efficient sub-Nyquist sampling of sparse band-limited signals. The compressive sensing paradigm requires an accurate model of the analog front-end to enable correct signal reconstruction in the digital domain. In practice, hardware devices such as filters deviate from their desired design behavior due to component variations. Existing reconstruction algorithms are sensitive to such deviations, which fall into the more general category of measurement matrix perturbations. This paper proposes a model-based technique that aims to calibrate filter model mismatches to facilitate improved signal reconstruction quality. The mismatch is considered to be an additive error in the discretized impulse response. We identify the error by sampling a known calibrating signal, enabling least-squares estimation of the impulse response error. The error estimate and the known system model are used to calibrate the measurement matrix. Numerical analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the calibration method even for highly deviating low-pass filter responses. The proposed method performance is also compared to a state of the art method based on discrete Fourier transform trigonometric interpolation.
1303.6138
About the survey of propagandistic messages in contemporary social media
cs.SI cs.CY physics.soc-ph
This paper presents the research results that have identified a set of characteristic parameters of propagandistic messages. Later these parameters can be used in the algorithm creating special user-oriented propagandistic messages to improve distribution and assimilation of information by users.
1303.6145
Particles Prefer Walking Along the Axes: Experimental Insights into the Behavior of a Particle Swarm
cs.NE cs.AI
Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a widely used nature-inspired meta-heuristic for solving continuous optimization problems. However, when running the PSO algorithm, one encounters the phenomenon of so-called stagnation, that means in our context, the whole swarm starts to converge to a solution that is not (even a local) optimum. The goal of this work is to point out possible reasons why the swarm stagnates at these non-optimal points. To achieve our results, we use the newly defined potential of a swarm. The total potential has a portion for every dimension of the search space, and it drops when the swarm approaches the point of convergence. As it turns out experimentally, the swarm is very likely to come sometimes into "unbalanced" states, i. e., almost all potential belongs to one axis. Therefore, the swarm becomes blind for improvements still possible in any other direction. Finally, we show how in the light of the potential and these observations, a slightly adapted PSO rebalances the potential and therefore increases the quality of the solution.
1303.6149
Adaptivity of averaged stochastic gradient descent to local strong convexity for logistic regression
math.ST cs.LG math.OC stat.TH
In this paper, we consider supervised learning problems such as logistic regression and study the stochastic gradient method with averaging, in the usual stochastic approximation setting where observations are used only once. We show that after $N$ iterations, with a constant step-size proportional to $1/R^2 \sqrt{N}$ where $N$ is the number of observations and $R$ is the maximum norm of the observations, the convergence rate is always of order $O(1/\sqrt{N})$, and improves to $O(R^2 / \mu N)$ where $\mu$ is the lowest eigenvalue of the Hessian at the global optimum (when this eigenvalue is greater than $R^2/\sqrt{N}$). Since $\mu$ does not need to be known in advance, this shows that averaged stochastic gradient is adaptive to \emph{unknown local} strong convexity of the objective function. Our proof relies on the generalized self-concordance properties of the logistic loss and thus extends to all generalized linear models with uniformly bounded features.
1303.6163
Machine learning of hierarchical clustering to segment 2D and 3D images
cs.CV cs.LG
We aim to improve segmentation through the use of machine learning tools during region agglomeration. We propose an active learning approach for performing hierarchical agglomerative segmentation from superpixels. Our method combines multiple features at all scales of the agglomerative process, works for data with an arbitrary number of dimensions, and scales to very large datasets. We advocate the use of variation of information to measure segmentation accuracy, particularly in 3D electron microscopy (EM) images of neural tissue, and using this metric demonstrate an improvement over competing algorithms in EM and natural images.
1303.6166
Mismatched Decoding: Error Exponents, Second-Order Rates and Saddlepoint Approximations
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers the problem of channel coding with a given (possibly suboptimal) maximum-metric decoding rule. A cost-constrained random-coding ensemble with multiple auxiliary costs is introduced, and is shown to achieve error exponents and second-order coding rates matching those of constant-composition random coding, while being directly applicable to channels with infinite or continuous alphabets. The number of auxiliary costs required to match the error exponents and second-order rates of constant-composition coding is studied, and is shown to be at most two. For i.i.d. random coding, asymptotic estimates of two well-known non-asymptotic bounds are given using saddlepoint approximations. Each expression is shown to characterize the asymptotic behavior of the corresponding random-coding bound at both fixed and varying rates, thus unifying the regimes characterized by error exponents, second-order rates and moderate deviations. For fixed rates, novel exact asymptotics expressions are obtained to within a multiplicative 1+o(1) term. Using numerical examples, it is shown that the saddlepoint approximations are highly accurate even at short block lengths.
1303.6167
Second-Order Rate Region of Constant-Composition Codes for the Multiple-Access Channel
cs.IT math.IT
This paper studies the second-order asymptotics of coding rates for the discrete memoryless multiple-access channel with a fixed target error probability. Using constant-composition random coding, coded time-sharing, and a variant of Hoeffding's combinatorial central limit theorem, an inner bound on the set of locally achievable second-order coding rates is given for each point on the boundary of the capacity region. It is shown that the inner bound for constant-composition random coding includes that recovered by i.i.d. random coding, and that the inclusion may be strict. The inner bound is extended to the Gaussian multiple-access channel via an increasingly fine quantization of the inputs.
1303.6170
Maximum Likelihood Fusion of Stochastic Maps
stat.AP cs.RO
The fusion of independently obtained stochastic maps by collaborating mobile agents is considered. The proposed approach includes two parts: matching of stochastic maps and maximum likelihood alignment. In particular, an affine invariant hypergraph is constructed for each stochastic map, and a bipartite matching via a linear program is used to establish landmark correspondence between stochastic maps. A maximum likelihood alignment procedure is proposed to determine rotation and translation between common landmarks in order to construct a global map within a common frame of reference. A main feature of the proposed approach is its scalability with respect to the number of landmarks: the matching step has polynomial complexity and the maximum likelihood alignment is obtained in closed form. Experimental validation of the proposed fusion approach is performed using the Victoria Park benchmark dataset.
1303.6175
Compression as a universal principle of animal behavior
q-bio.NC cs.CL cs.IT math.IT physics.data-an q-bio.QM
A key aim in biology and psychology is to identify fundamental principles underpinning the behavior of animals, including humans. Analyses of human language and the behavior of a range of non-human animal species have provided evidence for a common pattern underlying diverse behavioral phenomena: words follow Zipf's law of brevity (the tendency of more frequently used words to be shorter), and conformity to this general pattern has been seen in the behavior of a number of other animals. It has been argued that the presence of this law is a sign of efficient coding in the information theoretic sense. However, no strong direct connection has been demonstrated between the law and compression, the information theoretic principle of minimizing the expected length of a code. Here we show that minimizing the expected code length implies that the length of a word cannot increase as its frequency increases. Furthermore, we show that the mean code length or duration is significantly small in human language, and also in the behavior of other species in all cases where agreement with the law of brevity has been found. We argue that compression is a general principle of animal behavior, that reflects selection for efficiency of coding.
1303.6224
Limited benefit of cooperation in distributed relative localization
cs.SY math.OC
Important applications in robotic and sensor networks require distributed algorithms to solve the so-called relative localization problem: a node-indexed vector has to be reconstructed from measurements of differences between neighbor nodes. In a recent note, we have studied the estimation error of a popular gradient descent algorithm showing that the mean square error has a minimum at a finite time, after which the performance worsens. This paper proposes a suitable modification of this algorithm incorporating more realistic "a priori" information on the position. The new algorithm presents a performance monotonically decreasing to the optimal one. Furthermore, we show that the optimal performance is approximated, up to a 1 + \eps factor, within a time which is independent of the graph and of the number of nodes. This convergence time is very much related to the minimum exhibited by the previous algorithm and both lead to the following conclusion: in the presence of noisy data, cooperation is only useful till a certain limit.
1303.6241
Structure of complex networks: Quantifying edge-to-edge relations by failure-induced flow redistribution
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
The analysis of complex networks has so far revolved mainly around the role of nodes and communities of nodes. However, the dynamics of interconnected systems is commonly focalised on edge processes, and a dual edge-centric perspective can often prove more natural. Here we present graph-theoretical measures to quantify edge-to-edge relations inspired by the notion of flow redistribution induced by edge failures. Our measures, which are related to the pseudo-inverse of the Laplacian of the network, are global and reveal the dynamical interplay between the edges of a network, including potentially non-local interactions. Our framework also allows us to define the embeddedness of an edge, a measure of how strongly an edge features in the weighted cuts of the network. We showcase the general applicability of our edge-centric framework through analyses of the Iberian Power grid, traffic flow in road networks, and the C. elegans neuronal network.
1303.6249
A Derivation of the Source-Channel Error Exponent using Non-identical Product Distributions
cs.IT math.IT
This paper studies the random-coding exponent of joint source-channel coding for a scheme where source messages are assigned to disjoint subsets (referred to as classes), and codewords are independently generated according to a distribution that depends on the class index of the source message. For discrete memoryless systems, two optimally chosen classes and product distributions are found to be sufficient to attain the sphere-packing exponent in those cases where it is tight.
1303.6271
Preferential Attachment in Online Networks: Measurement and Explanations
physics.soc-ph cs.SI physics.data-an
We perform an empirical study of the preferential attachment phenomenon in temporal networks and show that on the Web, networks follow a nonlinear preferential attachment model in which the exponent depends on the type of network considered. The classical preferential attachment model for networks by Barab\'asi and Albert (1999) assumes a linear relationship between the number of neighbors of a node in a network and the probability of attachment. Although this assumption is widely made in Web Science and related fields, the underlying linearity is rarely measured. To fill this gap, this paper performs an empirical longitudinal (time-based) study on forty-seven diverse Web network datasets from seven network categories and including directed, undirected and bipartite networks. We show that contrary to the usual assumption, preferential attachment is nonlinear in the networks under consideration. Furthermore, we observe that the deviation from linearity is dependent on the type of network, giving sublinear attachment in certain types of networks, and superlinear attachment in others. Thus, we introduce the preferential attachment exponent $\beta$ as a novel numerical network measure that can be used to discriminate different types of networks. We propose explanations for the behavior of that network measure, based on the mechanisms that underly the growth of the network in question.
1303.6310
A hybrid bat algorithm
cs.NE
Swarm intelligence is a very powerful technique to be used for optimization purposes. In this paper we present a new swarm intelligence algorithm, based on the bat algorithm. The Bat algorithm is hybridized with differential evolution strategies. Besides showing very promising results of the standard benchmark functions, this hybridization also significantly improves the original bat algorithm.
1303.6314
Numerical model of elastic laminated glass beams under finite strain
cs.CE
Laminated glass structures are formed by stiff layers of glass connected with a compliant plastic interlayer. Due to their slenderness and heterogeneity, they exhibit a complex mechanical response that is difficult to capture by single-layer models even in the elastic range. The purpose of this paper is to introduce an efficient and reliable finite element approach to the simulation of the immediate response of laminated glass beams. It proceeds from a refined plate theory due to Mau (1973), as we treat each layer independently and enforce the compatibility by the Lagrange multipliers. At the layer level, we adopt the finite-strain shear deformable formulation of Reissner (1972) and the numerical framework by Ibrahimbegovi\'{c} and Frey (1993). The resulting system is solved by the Newton method with consistent linearization. By comparing the model predictions against available experimental data, analytical methods and two-dimensional finite element simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed formulation is reliable and provides accuracy comparable to the detailed two-dimensional finite element analyzes. As such, it offers a convenient basis to incorporate more refined constitutive description of the interlayer.
1303.6361
Video Face Matching using Subset Selection and Clustering of Probabilistic Multi-Region Histograms
cs.CV cs.IR
Balancing computational efficiency with recognition accuracy is one of the major challenges in real-world video-based face recognition. A significant design decision for any such system is whether to process and use all possible faces detected over the video frames, or whether to select only a few "best" faces. This paper presents a video face recognition system based on probabilistic Multi-Region Histograms to characterise performance trade-offs in: (i) selecting a subset of faces compared to using all faces, and (ii) combining information from all faces via clustering. Three face selection metrics are evaluated for choosing a subset: face detection confidence, random subset, and sequential selection. Experiments on the recently introduced MOBIO dataset indicate that the usage of all faces through clustering always outperformed selecting only a subset of faces. The experiments also show that the face selection metric based on face detection confidence generally provides better recognition performance than random or sequential sampling. Moreover, the optimal number of faces varies drastically across selection metric and subsets of MOBIO. Given the trade-offs between computational effort, recognition accuracy and robustness, it is recommended that face feature clustering would be most advantageous in batch processing (particularly for video-based watchlists), whereas face selection methods should be limited to applications with significant computational restrictions.
1303.6369
Extracting the information backbone in online system
cs.IR cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Information overload is a serious problem in modern society and many solutions such as recommender system have been proposed to filter out irrelevant information. In the literature, researchers mainly dedicated to improve the recommendation performance (accuracy and diversity) of the algorithms while overlooked the influence of topology of the online user-object bipartite networks. In this paper, we find that some information provided by the bipartite networks is not only redundant but also misleading. With such "less can be more" feature, we design some algorithms to improve the recommendation performance by eliminating some links from the original networks. Moreover, we propose a hybrid method combining the time-aware and topology-aware link removal algorithms to extract the backbone which contains the essential information for the recommender systems. From the practical point of view, our method can improve the performance and reduce the computational time of the recommendation system, thus improve both of their effectiveness and efficiency.
1303.6370
Convex Tensor Decomposition via Structured Schatten Norm Regularization
stat.ML cs.LG cs.NA
We discuss structured Schatten norms for tensor decomposition that includes two recently proposed norms ("overlapped" and "latent") for convex-optimization-based tensor decomposition, and connect tensor decomposition with wider literature on structured sparsity. Based on the properties of the structured Schatten norms, we mathematically analyze the performance of "latent" approach for tensor decomposition, which was empirically found to perform better than the "overlapped" approach in some settings. We show theoretically that this is indeed the case. In particular, when the unknown true tensor is low-rank in a specific mode, this approach performs as good as knowing the mode with the smallest rank. Along the way, we show a novel duality result for structures Schatten norms, establish the consistency, and discuss the identifiability of this approach. We confirm through numerical simulations that our theoretical prediction can precisely predict the scaling behavior of the mean squared error.
1303.6372
Detecting Friendship Within Dynamic Online Interaction Networks
cs.SI cs.CY cs.HC physics.soc-ph
In many complex social systems, the timing and frequency of interactions between individuals are observable but friendship ties are hidden. Recovering these hidden ties, particularly for casual users who are relatively less active, would enable a wide variety of friendship-aware applications in domains where labeled data are often unavailable, including online advertising and national security. Here, we investigate the accuracy of multiple statistical features, based either purely on temporal interaction patterns or on the cooperative nature of the interactions, for automatically extracting latent social ties. Using self-reported friendship and non-friendship labels derived from an anonymous online survey, we learn highly accurate predictors for recovering hidden friendships within a massive online data set encompassing 18 billion interactions among 17 million individuals of the popular online game Halo: Reach. We find that the accuracy of many features improves as more data accumulates, and cooperative features are generally reliable. However, periodicities in interaction time series are sufficient to correctly classify 95% of ties, even for casual users. These results clarify the nature of friendship in online social environments and suggest new opportunities and new privacy concerns for friendship-aware applications that do not require the disclosure of private friendship information.
1303.6377
Simulation of Fractional Brownian Surfaces via Spectral Synthesis on Manifolds
cs.CG cs.CV math.PR
Using the spectral decomposition of the Laplace-Beltrami operator we simulate fractal surfaces as random series of eigenfunctions. This approach allows us to generate random fields over smooth manifolds of arbitrary dimension, generalizing previous work with fractional Brownian motion with multi-dimensional parameter. We give examples of surfaces with and without boundary and discuss implementation.
1303.6378
Linear complexity of generalized cyclotomic sequences of order 4 over F_l
cs.IT math.IT
Generalized cyclotomic sequences of period pq have several desirable randomness properties if the two primes p and q are chosen properly. In particular,Ding deduced the exact formulas for the autocorrelation and the linear complexity of these sequences of order 2. In this paper, we consider the generalized sequences of order 4. Under certain conditions, the linear complexity of these sequences of order 4 is developed over a finite field F_l. Results show that in many cases they have high linear complexity.
1303.6385
Dynamics of Trust Reciprocation in Heterogenous MMOG Networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Understanding the dynamics of reciprocation is of great interest in sociology and computational social science. The recent growth of Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOGs) has provided unprecedented access to large-scale data which enables us to study such complex human behavior in a more systematic manner. In this paper, we consider three different networks in the EverQuest2 game: chat, trade, and trust. The chat network has the highest level of reciprocation (33%) because there are essentially no barriers to it. The trade network has a lower rate of reciprocation (27%) because it has the obvious barrier of requiring more goods or money for exchange; morever, there is no clear benefit to returning a trade link except in terms of social connections. The trust network has the lowest reciprocation (14%) because this equates to sharing certain within-game assets such as weapons, and so there is a high barrier for such connections because they require faith in the players that are granted such high access. In general, we observe that reciprocation rate is inversely related to the barrier level in these networks. We also note that reciprocation has connections across the heterogeneous networks. Our experiments indicate that players make use of the medium-barrier reciprocations to strengthen a relationship. We hypothesize that lower-barrier interactions are an important component to predicting higher-barrier ones. We verify our hypothesis using predictive models for trust reciprocations using features from trade interactions. Using the number of trades (both before and after the initial trust link) boosts our ability to predict if the trust will be reciprocated up to 11% with respect to the AUC.
1303.6387
Message Passing Algorithm for Distributed Downlink Regularized Zero-forcing Beamforming with Cooperative Base Stations
cs.IT math.IT
Base station (BS) cooperation can turn unwanted interference to useful signal energy for enhancing system performance. In the cooperative downlink, zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) with a simple scheduler is well known to obtain nearly the performance of the capacity-achieving dirty-paper coding. However, the centralized ZFBF approach is prohibitively complex as the network size grows. In this paper, we devise message passing algorithms for realizing the regularized ZFBF (RZFBF) in a distributed manner using belief propagation. In the proposed methods, the overall computational cost is decomposed into many smaller computation tasks carried out by groups of neighboring BSs and communications is only required between neighboring BSs. More importantly, some exchanged messages can be computed based on channel statistics rather than instantaneous channel state information, leading to significant reduction in computational complexity. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms converge quickly to the exact RZFBF and much faster compared to conventional methods.
1303.6388
Phase Transition Analysis of Sparse Support Detection from Noisy Measurements
cs.IT math.IT
This paper investigates the problem of sparse support detection (SSD) via a detection-oriented algorithm named Bayesian hypothesis test via belief propagation (BHT-BP). Our main focus is to compare BHT-BP to an estimation-based algorithm, called CS-BP, and show its superiority in the SSD problem. For this investigation, we perform a phase transition (PT) analysis over the plain of the noise level and signal magnitude on the signal support. This PT analysis sharply specifies the required signal magnitude for the detection under a certain noise level. In addition, we provide an experimental validation to assure the PT analysis. Our analytical and experimental results show the fact that BHT-BP detects the signal support against additive noise more robustly than CS-BP does.
1303.6390
A Note on k-support Norm Regularized Risk Minimization
cs.LG
The k-support norm has been recently introduced to perform correlated sparsity regularization. Although Argyriou et al. only reported experiments using squared loss, here we apply it to several other commonly used settings resulting in novel machine learning algorithms with interesting and familiar limit cases. Source code for the algorithms described here is available.
1303.6397
Conditions for detectability in distributed consensus-based observer networks
cs.SY
The paper discusses fundamental detectability properties associated with the problem of distributed state estimation using networked observers. The main result of the paper establishes connections between detectability of the plant through measurements, observability of the node filters through interconnections, and algebraic properties of the underlying communication graph, to ensure the interconnected filtering error dynamics are stabilizable via output injection.
1303.6409
Information Measures for Deterministic Input-Output Systems
cs.IT math.IT
In this work the information loss in deterministic, memoryless systems is investigated by evaluating the conditional entropy of the input random variable given the output random variable. It is shown that for a large class of systems the information loss is finite, even if the input is continuously distributed. Based on this finiteness, the problem of perfectly reconstructing the input is addressed and Fano-type bounds between the information loss and the reconstruction error probability are derived. For systems with infinite information loss a relative measure is defined and shown to be tightly related to R\'{e}nyi information dimension. Employing another Fano-type argument, the reconstruction error probability is bounded by the relative information loss from below. In view of developing a system theory from an information-theoretic point-of-view, the theoretical results are illustrated by a few example systems, among them a multi-channel autocorrelation receiver.
1303.6454
Partial Transfer Entropy on Rank Vectors
stat.ME cs.IT math.IT nlin.CD physics.data-an
For the evaluation of information flow in bivariate time series, information measures have been employed, such as the transfer entropy (TE), the symbolic transfer entropy (STE), defined similarly to TE but on the ranks of the components of the reconstructed vectors, and the transfer entropy on rank vectors (TERV), similar to STE but forming the ranks for the future samples of the response system with regard to the current reconstructed vector. Here we extend TERV for multivariate time series, and account for the presence of confounding variables, called partial transfer entropy on ranks (PTERV). We investigate the asymptotic properties of PTERV, and also partial STE (PSTE), construct parametric significance tests under approximations with Gaussian and gamma null distributions, and show that the parametric tests cannot achieve the power of the randomization test using time-shifted surrogates. Using simulations on known coupled dynamical systems and applying parametric and randomization significance tests, we show that PTERV performs better than PSTE but worse than the partial transfer entropy (PTE). However, PTERV, unlike PTE, is robust to the presence of drifts in the time series and it is also not affected by the level of detrending.
1303.6455
Performance Evaluation of Edge-Directed Interpolation Methods for Images
cs.CV
Many interpolation methods have been developed for high visual quality, but fail for inability to preserve image structures. Edges carry heavy structural information for detection, determination and classification. Edge-adaptive interpolation approaches become a center of focus. In this paper, performance of four edge-directed interpolation methods comparing with two traditional methods is evaluated on two groups of images. These methods include new edge-directed interpolation (NEDI), edge-guided image interpolation (EGII), iterative curvature-based interpolation (ICBI), directional cubic convolution interpolation (DCCI) and two traditional approaches, bi-linear and bi-cubic. Meanwhile, no parameters are mentioned to measure edge-preserving ability of edge-adaptive interpolation approaches and we proposed two. One evaluates accuracy and the other measures robustness of edge-preservation ability. Performance evaluation is based on six parameters. Objective assessment and visual analysis are illustrated and conclusions are drawn from theoretical backgrounds and practical results.
1303.6460
Social and place-focused communities in location-based online social networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Thanks to widely available, cheap Internet access and the ubiquity of smartphones, millions of people around the world now use online location-based social networking services. Understanding the structural properties of these systems and their dependence upon users' habits and mobility has many potential applications, including resource recommendation and link prediction. Here, we construct and characterise social and place-focused graphs by using longitudinal information about declared social relationships and about users' visits to physical places collected from a popular online location-based social service. We show that although the social and place-focused graphs are constructed from the same data set, they have quite different structural properties. We find that the social and location-focused graphs have different global and meso-scale structure, and in particular that social and place-focused communities have negligible overlap. Consequently, group inference based on community detection performed on the social graph alone fails to isolate place-focused groups, even though these do exist in the network. By studying the evolution of tie structure within communities, we show that the time period over which location data are aggregated has a substantial impact on the stability of place-focused communities, and that information about place-based groups may be more useful for user-centric applications than that obtained from the analysis of social communities alone.
1303.6544
Sketching Sparse Matrices
cs.IT math.IT math.OC
This paper considers the problem of recovering an unknown sparse p\times p matrix X from an m\times m matrix Y=AXB^T, where A and B are known m \times p matrices with m << p. The main result shows that there exist constructions of the "sketching" matrices A and B so that even if X has O(p) non-zeros, it can be recovered exactly and efficiently using a convex program as long as these non-zeros are not concentrated in any single row/column of X. Furthermore, it suffices for the size of Y (the sketch dimension) to scale as m = O(\sqrt{# nonzeros in X} \times log p). The results also show that the recovery is robust and stable in the sense that if X is equal to a sparse matrix plus a perturbation, then the convex program we propose produces an approximation with accuracy proportional to the size of the perturbation. Unlike traditional results on sparse recovery, where the sensing matrix produces independent measurements, our sensing operator is highly constrained (it assumes a tensor product structure). Therefore, proving recovery guarantees require non-standard techniques. Indeed our approach relies on a novel result concerning tensor products of bipartite graphs, which may be of independent interest. This problem is motivated by the following application, among others. Consider a p\times n data matrix D, consisting of n observations of p variables. Assume that the correlation matrix X:=DD^{T} is (approximately) sparse in the sense that each of the p variables is significantly correlated with only a few others. Our results show that these significant correlations can be detected even if we have access to only a sketch of the data S=AD with A \in R^{m\times p}.
1303.6609
Exploiting Opportunistic Physical Design in Large-scale Data Analytics
cs.DB cs.DC cs.DS
Large-scale systems, such as MapReduce and Hadoop, perform aggressive materialization of intermediate job results in order to support fault tolerance. When jobs correspond to exploratory queries submitted by data analysts, these materializations yield a large set of materialized views that typically capture common computation among successive queries from the same analyst, or even across queries of different analysts who test similar hypotheses. We propose to treat these views as an opportunistic physical design and use them for the purpose of query optimization. We develop a novel query-rewrite algorithm that addresses the two main challenges in this context: how to search the large space of rewrites, and how to reason about views that contain UDFs (a common feature in large-scale data analytics). The algorithm, which provably finds the minimum-cost rewrite, is inspired by nearest-neighbor searches in non-metric spaces. We present an extensive experimental study on real-world datasets with a prototype data-analytics system based on Hive. The results demonstrate that our approach can result in dramatic performance improvements on complex data-analysis queries, reducing total execution time by an average of 61% and up to two orders of magnitude.
1303.6619
An N-dimensional approach towards object based classification of remotely sensed imagery
cs.CV
Remote sensing techniques are widely used for land cover classification and urban analysis. The availability of high resolution remote sensing imagery limits the level of classification accuracy attainable from pixel-based approach. In this paper object-based classification scheme based on a hierarchical support vector machine is introduced. By combining spatial and spectral information, the amount of overlap between classes can be decreased; thereby yielding higher classification accuracy and more accurate land cover maps. We have adopted certain automatic approaches based on the advanced techniques as Cellular automata and Genetic Algorithm for kernel and tuning parameter selection. Performance evaluation of the proposed methodology in comparison with the existing approaches is performed with reference to the Bhopal city study area.
1303.6672
Living on the edge: Phase transitions in convex programs with random data
cs.IT math.IT
Recent research indicates that many convex optimization problems with random constraints exhibit a phase transition as the number of constraints increases. For example, this phenomenon emerges in the $\ell_1$ minimization method for identifying a sparse vector from random linear measurements. Indeed, the $\ell_1$ approach succeeds with high probability when the number of measurements exceeds a threshold that depends on the sparsity level; otherwise, it fails with high probability. This paper provides the first rigorous analysis that explains why phase transitions are ubiquitous in random convex optimization problems. It also describes tools for making reliable predictions about the quantitative aspects of the transition, including the location and the width of the transition region. These techniques apply to regularized linear inverse problems with random measurements, to demixing problems under a random incoherence model, and also to cone programs with random affine constraints. The applied results depend on foundational research in conic geometry. This paper introduces a summary parameter, called the statistical dimension, that canonically extends the dimension of a linear subspace to the class of convex cones. The main technical result demonstrates that the sequence of intrinsic volumes of a convex cone concentrates sharply around the statistical dimension. This fact leads to accurate bounds on the probability that a randomly rotated cone shares a ray with a fixed cone.
1303.6674
Consensus Algorithms and the Decomposition-Separation Theorem
math.DS cs.SY eess.SY math.OC
Convergence properties of time inhomogeneous Markov chain based discrete and continuous time linear consensus algorithms are analyzed. Provided that a so-called infinite jet flow property is satisfied by the underlying chains, necessary conditions for both consensus and multiple consensus are established. A recenet extension by Sonin of the classical Kolmogorov-Doeblin decomposition-separation for homogeneous Markov chains to the inhomogeneous case is then employed to show that the obtained necessary conditions are also sufficient when the chain is of Class P*, as defined by Touri and Nedic. It is also shown that Sonin's theorem leads to a rediscovery and generalization of most of the existing related consensus results in the literature.
1303.6682
Anatomy of the chase
cs.DB
A lot of research activity has recently taken place around the chase procedure, due to its usefulness in data integration, data exchange, query optimization, peer data exchange and data correspondence, to mention a few. As the chase has been investigated and further developed by a number of research groups and authors, many variants of the chase have emerged and associated results obtained. Due to the heterogeneous nature of the area it is frequently difficult to verify the scope of each result. In this paper we take closer look at recent developments, and provide additional results. Our analysis allows us create a taxonomy of the chase variations and the properties they satisfy. Two of the most central problems regarding the chase is termination, and discovery of restricted classes of sets of dependencies that guarantee termination of the chase. The search for the restricted classes has been motivated by a fairly recent result that shows that it is undecidable to determine whether the chase with a given dependency set will terminate on a given instance. There is a small dissonance here, since the quest has been for classes of sets of dependencies guaranteeing termination of the chase on all instances, even though the latter problem was not known to be undecidable. We resolve the dissonance in this paper by showing that determining whether the chase with a given set of dependencies terminates on all instances is coRE-complete. Our reduction also gives us the aforementioned instance-dependent RE-completeness result as a byproduct. For one of the restricted classes, the stratified sets dependencies, we provide new complexity results for the problem of testing whether a given set of dependencies belongs to it. These results rectify some previous claims that have occurred in the literature.
1303.6711
An intelligent approach towards automatic shape modeling and object extraction from satellite images using cellular automata based algorithm
cs.CV
Automatic feature extraction domain has witnessed the application of many intelligent methodologies over past decade; however detection accuracy of these approaches were limited as object geometry and contextual knowledge were not given enough consideration. In this paper, we propose a frame work for accurate detection of features along with automatic interpolation, and interpretation by modeling feature shape as well as contextual knowledge using advanced techniques such as SVRF, Cellular Neural Network, Core set, and MACA. Developed methodology has been compared with contemporary methods using different statistical measures. Investigations over various satellite images revealed that considerable success was achieved with the CNN approach. CNN has been effective in modeling different complex features effectively and complexity of the approach has been considerably reduced using corset optimization. The system has dynamically used spectral and spatial information for representing contextual knowledge using CNN-prolog approach. System has been also proved to be effective in providing intelligent interpolation and interpretation of random features.
1303.6719
Blind Identification of ARX Models with Piecewise Constant Inputs
cs.SY
Blind system identification is known to be a hard ill-posed problem and without further assumptions, no unique solution is at hand. In this contribution, we are concerned with the task of identifying an ARX model from only output measurements. Driven by the task of identifying systems that are turned on and off at unknown times, we seek a piecewise constant input and a corresponding ARX model which approximates the measured outputs. We phrase this as a rank minimization problem and present a relaxed convex formulation to approximate its solution. The proposed method was developed to model power consumption of electrical appliances and is now a part of a bigger energy disaggregation framework. Code will be made available online.
1303.6746
Exploiting correlation and budget constraints in Bayesian multi-armed bandit optimization
stat.ML cs.LG
We address the problem of finding the maximizer of a nonlinear smooth function, that can only be evaluated point-wise, subject to constraints on the number of permitted function evaluations. This problem is also known as fixed-budget best arm identification in the multi-armed bandit literature. We introduce a Bayesian approach for this problem and show that it empirically outperforms both the existing frequentist counterpart and other Bayesian optimization methods. The Bayesian approach places emphasis on detailed modelling, including the modelling of correlations among the arms. As a result, it can perform well in situations where the number of arms is much larger than the number of allowed function evaluation, whereas the frequentist counterpart is inapplicable. This feature enables us to develop and deploy practical applications, such as automatic machine learning toolboxes. The paper presents comprehensive comparisons of the proposed approach, Thompson sampling, classical Bayesian optimization techniques, more recent Bayesian bandit approaches, and state-of-the-art best arm identification methods. This is the first comparison of many of these methods in the literature and allows us to examine the relative merits of their different features.
1303.6750
Sequential testing over multiple stages and performance analysis of data fusion
stat.ML cs.LG
We describe a methodology for modeling the performance of decision-level data fusion between different sensor configurations, implemented as part of the JIEDDO Analytic Decision Engine (JADE). We first discuss a Bayesian network formulation of classical probabilistic data fusion, which allows elementary fusion structures to be stacked and analyzed efficiently. We then present an extension of the Wald sequential test for combining the outputs of the Bayesian network over time. We discuss an algorithm to compute its performance statistics and illustrate the approach on some examples. This variant of the sequential test involves multiple, distinct stages, where the evidence accumulated from each stage is carried over into the next one, and is motivated by a need to keep certain sensors in the network inactive unless triggered by other sensors.
1303.6771
Optimal Power Allocation over Multiple Identical Gilbert-Elliott Channels
cs.IT math.IT
We study the fundamental problem of power allocation over multiple Gilbert-Elliott communication channels. In a communication system with time varying channel qualities, it is important to allocate the limited transmission power to channels that will be in good state. However, it is very challenging to do so because channel states are usually unknown when the power allocation decision is made. In this paper, we derive an optimal power allocation policy that can maximize the expected discounted number of bits transmitted over an infinite time span by allocating the transmission power only to those channels that are believed to be good in the coming time slot. We use the concept belief to represent the probability that a channel will be good and derive an optimal power allocation policy that establishes a mapping from the channel belief to an allocation decision. Specifically, we first model this problem as a partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP), and analytically investigate the structure of the optimal policy. Then a simple threshold-based policy is derived for a three-channel communication system. By formulating and solving a linear programming formulation of this power allocation problem, we further verified the derived structure of the optimal policy.
1303.6775
Dynamic Provisioning in Next-Generation Data Centers with On-site Power Production
cs.DS cs.SY
The critical need for clean and economical sources of energy is transforming data centers that are primarily energy consumers to also energy producers. We focus on minimizing the operating costs of next-generation data centers that can jointly optimize the energy supply from on-site generators and the power grid, and the energy demand from servers as well as power conditioning and cooling systems. We formulate the cost minimization problem and present an offline optimal algorithm. For "on-grid" data centers that use only the grid, we devise a deterministic online algorithm that achieves the best possible competitive ratio of $2-\alpha_{s}$, where $\alpha_{s}$ is a normalized look-ahead window size. For "hybrid" data centers that have on-site power generation in addition to the grid, we develop an online algorithm that achieves a competitive ratio of at most \textmd{\normalsize {\small $\frac{P_{\max} (2-\alpha_{s})}{c_{o}+c_{m}/L} [1+2\frac{P_{\max}-c_{o}}{P_{\max}(1+\alpha_{g})}]$}}, where $\alpha_{s}$ and $\alpha_{g}$ are normalized look-ahead window sizes, $P_{\max}$ is the maximum grid power price, and $L$, $c_{o}$, and $c_{m}$ are parameters of an on-site generator. Using extensive workload traces from Akamai with the corresponding grid power prices, we simulate our offline and online algorithms in a realistic setting. Our offline (resp., online) algorithm achieves a cost reduction of 25.8% (resp., 20.7%) for a hybrid data center and 12.3% (resp., 7.3%) for an on-grid data center. The cost reductions are quite significant and make a strong case for a joint optimization of energy supply and energy demand in a data center. A hybrid data center provides about 13% additional cost reduction over an on-grid data center representing the additional cost benefits that on-site power generation provides over using the grid alone.
1303.6777
A Graphical Language for Real-Time Critical Robot Commands
cs.RO cs.PL cs.SE
Industrial robotics is characterized by sophisticated mechanical components and highly-developed real-time control algorithms. However, the efficient use of robotic systems is very much limited by existing proprietary programming methods. In the research project SoftRobot, a software architecture was developed that enables the programming of complex real-time critical robot tasks with an object-oriented general purpose language. On top of this architecture, a graphical language was developed to ease the specification of complex robot commands, which can then be used as part of robot application workflows. This paper gives an overview about the design and implementation of this graphical language and illustrates its usefulness with some examples.
1303.6784
Measuring the likelihood of models for network evolution
stat.AP cs.SI
Many researchers have hypothesised models which explain the evolution of the topology of a target network. The framework described in this paper gives the likelihood that the target network arose from the hypothesised model. This allows rival hypothesised models to be compared for their ability to explain the target network. A null model (of random evolution) is proposed as a baseline for comparison. The framework also considers models made from linear combinations of model components. A method is given for the automatic optimisation of component weights. The framework is tested on simulated networks with known parameters and also on real data.
1303.6785
Latency-Bounded Target Set Selection in Social Networks
cs.DS cs.SI math.CO
Motivated by applications in sociology, economy and medicine, we study variants of the Target Set Selection problem, first proposed by Kempe, Kleinberg and Tardos. In our scenario one is given a graph $G=(V,E)$, integer values $t(v)$ for each vertex $v$ (\emph{thresholds}), and the objective is to determine a small set of vertices (\emph{target set}) that activates a given number (or a given subset) of vertices of $G$ \emph{within} a prescribed number of rounds. The activation process in $G$ proceeds as follows: initially, at round 0, all vertices in the target set are activated; subsequently at each round $r\geq 1$ every vertex of $G$ becomes activated if at least $t(v)$ of its neighbors are already active by round $r-1$. It is known that the problem of finding a minimum cardinality Target Set that eventually activates the whole graph $G$ is hard to approximate to a factor better than $O(2^{\log^{1-\epsilon}|V|})$. In this paper we give \emph{exact} polynomial time algorithms to find minimum cardinality Target Sets in graphs of bounded clique-width, and \emph{exact} linear time algorithms for trees.
1303.6794
A likelihood based framework for assessing network evolution models tested on real network data
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
This paper presents a statistically sound method for using likelihood to assess potential models of network evolution. The method is tested on data from five real networks. Data from the internet autonomous system network, from two photo sharing sites and from a co-authorship network are tested using this framework.
1303.6801
Enumerating Some Fractional Repetition Codes
cs.IT math.IT
In a distributed storage systems (DSS), regenerating codes are used to optimize bandwidth in the repair process of a failed node. To optimize other DSS parameters such as computation and disk I/O, Distributed Replication-based Simple Storage (Dress) Codes consisting of an inner Fractional Repetition (FR) code and an outer MDS code are commonly used. Thus constructing FR codes is an important research problem, and several constructions using graphs and designs have been proposed. In this paper, we present an algorithm for constructing the node-packet distribution matrix of FR codes and thus enumerate some FR codes up to a given number of nodes n. We also present algorithms for constructing regular graphs which give rise to FR codes.
1303.6837
Deterministic and Stochastic Approaches to Supervisory Control Design for Networked Systems with Time-Varying Communication Delays
cs.SY math.OC
This paper proposes a supervisory control structure for networked systems with time-varying delays. The control structure, in which a supervisor triggers the most appropriate controller from a multi-controller unit, aims at improving the closed-loop performance relative to what can be obtained using a single robust controller. Our analysis considers average dwell-time switching and is based on a novel multiple Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional. We develop stability conditions that can be verified by semi-definite programming, and show that the associated state feedback synthesis problem also can be solved using convex optimization tools. Extensions of the analysis and synthesis procedures to the case when the evolution of the delay mode is described by a Markov chain are also developed. Simulations on small and large-scale networked control systems are used to illustrate the effectiveness of our approach.
1303.6859
A practical system for improved efficiency in frequency division multiplexed wireless networks
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT
Spectral efficiency is a key design issue for all wireless communication systems. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a very well-known technique for efficient data transmission over many carriers overlapped in frequency. Recently, several papers have appeared which describe spectrally efficient variations of multi-carrier systems where the condition of orthogonality is dropped. Proposed techniques suffer from two weaknesses: Firstly, the complexity of generating the signal is increased. Secondly, the signal detection is computationally demanding. Known methods suffer either unusably high complexity or high error rates because of the inter-carrier interference. This work addresses both problems by proposing new transmitter and receiver arch itectures whose design is based on using the simplification that a rational Spectrally Efficient Frequency Division Multiplexing (SEFDM) system can be treated as a set of overlapped and interleaving OFDM systems. The efficacy of the proposed designs is shown through detailed simulation of sys tems with different signal types and carrier dimensions. The decoder is heuristic but in practice produces very good results which are close to the theoretical best performance in a variety of settings. The system is able to produce efficiency gains of up to 20% with negligible impact on the required signal to noise ratio.
1303.6880
Multi-sample Receivers Increase Information Rates for Wiener Phase Noise Channels
cs.IT math.IT
A waveform channel is considered where the transmitted signal is corrupted by Wiener phase noise and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). A discrete-time channel model is introduced that is based on a multi-sample receiver. Tight lower bounds on the information rates achieved by the multi-sample receiver are computed by means of numerical simulations. The results show that oversampling at the receiver is beneficial for both strong and weak phase noise at high signal-to-noise ratios. The results are compared with results obtained when using other discrete-time models.
1303.6906
Large scale citation matching using Apache Hadoop
cs.IR cs.DL
During the process of citation matching links from bibliography entries to referenced publications are created. Such links are indicators of topical similarity between linked texts, are used in assessing the impact of the referenced document and improve navigation in the user interfaces of digital libraries. In this paper we present a citation matching method and show how to scale it up to handle great amounts of data using appropriate indexing and a MapReduce paradigm in the Hadoop environment.
1303.6907
Parameterized Approximability of Maximizing the Spread of Influence in Networks
cs.DS cs.SI
In this paper, we consider the problem of maximizing the spread of influence through a social network. Given a graph with a threshold value~$thr(v)$ attached to each vertex~$v$, the spread of influence is modeled as follows: A vertex~$v$ becomes "active" (influenced) if at least $thr(v)$ of its neighbors are active. In the corresponding optimization problem the objective is then to find a fixed number of vertices to activate such that the number of activated vertices at the end of the propagation process is maximum. We show that this problem is strongly inapproximable in fpt-time with respect to (w.r.t.) parameter $k$ even for very restrictive thresholds. In the case that the threshold of each vertex equals its degree, we prove that the problem is inapproximable in polynomial time and it becomes $r(n)$-approximable in fpt-time w.r.t. parameter $k$ for any strictly increasing function $r$. Moreover, we show that the decision version is W[1]-hard w.r.t. parameter $k$ but becomes fixed-parameter tractable on bounded degree graphs.