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1304.7971
Adaptive Mode Selection and Power Allocation in Bidirectional Buffer-aided Relay Networks
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we consider the problem of sum rate maximization in a bidirectional relay network with fading. Hereby, user 1 and user 2 communicate with each other only through a relay, i.e., a direct link between user 1 and user 2 is not present. In this network, there exist six possible transmission modes: four point-to-point modes (user 1-to-relay, user 2-to-relay, relay-to-user 1, relay-to-user 2), a multiple access mode (both users to the relay), and a broadcast mode (the relay to both users). Most existing protocols assume a fixed schedule of using a subset of the aforementioned transmission modes, as a result, the sum rate is limited by the capacity of the weakest link associated with the relay in each time slot. Motivated by this limitation, we develop a protocol which is not restricted to adhere to a predefined schedule for using the transmission modes. Therefore, all transmission modes of the bidirectional relay network can be used adaptively based on the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) of the involved links. To this end, the relay has to be equipped with two buffers for the storage of the information received from users 1 and 2, respectively. For the considered network, given a total average power budget for all nodes, we jointly optimize the transmission mode selection and power allocation based on the instantaneous CSI in each time slot for sum rate maximization. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms existing protocols for all signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Specifically, we obtain a considerable gain at low SNRs due to the adaptive power allocation and at high SNRs due to the adaptive mode selection.
1304.7984
GeoDBLP: Geo-Tagging DBLP for Mining the Sociology of Computer Science
cs.SI cs.DL physics.soc-ph
Many collective human activities have been shown to exhibit universal patterns. However, the possibility of universal patterns across timing events of researcher migration has barely been explored at global scale. Here, we show that timing events of migration within different countries exhibit remarkable similarities. Specifically, we look at the distribution governing the data of researcher migration inferred from the web. Compiling the data in itself represents a significant advance in the field of quantitative analysis of migration patterns. Official and commercial records are often access restricted, incompatible between countries, and especially not registered across researchers. Instead, we introduce GeoDBLP where we propagate geographical seed locations retrieved from the web across the DBLP database of 1,080,958 authors and 1,894,758 papers. But perhaps more important is that we are able to find statistical patterns and create models that explain the migration of researchers. For instance, we show that the science job market can be treated as a Poisson process with individual propensities to migrate following a log-normal distribution over the researcher's career stage. That is, although jobs enter the market constantly, researchers are generally not "memoryless" but have to care greatly about their next move. The propensity to make k>1 migrations, however, follows a gamma distribution suggesting that migration at later career stages is "memoryless". This aligns well but actually goes beyond scientometric models typically postulated based on small case studies. On a very large, transnational scale, we establish the first general regularities that should have major implications on strategies for education and research worldwide.
1304.7992
Fast Reconstruction of Compact Context-Specific Metabolic Network Models
q-bio.MN cs.CE math.OC
Systemic approaches to the study of a biological cell or tissue rely increasingly on the use of context-specific metabolic network models. The reconstruction of such a model from high-throughput data can routinely involve large numbers of tests under different conditions and extensive parameter tuning, which calls for fast algorithms. We present FASTCORE, a generic algorithm for reconstructing context-specific metabolic network models from global genome-wide metabolic network models such as Recon X. FASTCORE takes as input a core set of reactions that are known to be active in the context of interest (e.g., cell or tissue), and it searches for a flux consistent subnetwork of the global network that contains all reactions from the core set and a minimal set of additional reactions. Our key observation is that a minimal consistent reconstruction can be defined via a set of sparse modes of the global network, and FASTCORE iteratively computes such a set via a series of linear programs. Experiments on liver data demonstrate speedups of several orders of magnitude, and significantly more compact reconstructions, over a chief rival method. Given its simplicity and its excellent performance, FASTCORE can form the backbone of many future metabolic network reconstruction algorithms.
1304.7993
Digenes: genetic algorithms to discover conjectures about directed and undirected graphs
cs.DM cs.NE
We present Digenes, a new discovery system that aims to help researchers in graph theory. While its main task is to find extremal graphs for a given (function of) invariants, it also provides some basic support in proof conception. This has already been proved to be very useful to find new conjectures since the AutoGraphiX system of Caporossi and Hansen (Discrete Math. 212-2000). However, unlike existing systems, Digenes can be used both with directed or undirected graphs. In this paper, we present the principles and functionality of Digenes, describe the genetic algorithms that have been designed to achieve them, and give some computational results and open questions. This do arise some interesting questions regarding genetic algorithms design particular to this field, such as crossover definition.
1304.8016
On Semantic Word Cloud Representation
cs.DS cs.CL
We study the problem of computing semantic-preserving word clouds in which semantically related words are close to each other. While several heuristic approaches have been described in the literature, we formalize the underlying geometric algorithm problem: Word Rectangle Adjacency Contact (WRAC). In this model each word is associated with rectangle with fixed dimensions, and the goal is to represent semantically related words by ensuring that the two corresponding rectangles touch. We design and analyze efficient polynomial-time algorithms for some variants of the WRAC problem, show that several general variants are NP-hard, and describe a number of approximation algorithms. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate that our theoretically-sound algorithms outperform the early heuristics.
1304.8019
Recursive Estimation of Orientation Based on the Bingham Distribution
cs.SY cs.RO
Directional estimation is a common problem in many tracking applications. Traditional filters such as the Kalman filter perform poorly because they fail to take the periodic nature of the problem into account. We present a recursive filter for directional data based on the Bingham distribution in two dimensions. The proposed filter can be applied to circular filtering problems with 180 degree symmetry, i.e., rotations by 180 degrees cannot be distinguished. It is easily implemented using standard numerical techniques and suitable for real-time applications. The presented approach is extensible to quaternions, which allow tracking arbitrary three-dimensional orientations. We evaluate our filter in a challenging scenario and compare it to a traditional Kalman filtering approach.
1304.8020
Semi-Supervised Information-Maximization Clustering
cs.LG stat.ML
Semi-supervised clustering aims to introduce prior knowledge in the decision process of a clustering algorithm. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised clustering algorithm based on the information-maximization principle. The proposed method is an extension of a previous unsupervised information-maximization clustering algorithm based on squared-loss mutual information to effectively incorporate must-links and cannot-links. The proposed method is computationally efficient because the clustering solution can be obtained analytically via eigendecomposition. Furthermore, the proposed method allows systematic optimization of tuning parameters such as the kernel width, given the degree of belief in the must-links and cannot-links. The usefulness of the proposed method is demonstrated through experiments.
1304.8029
Cooperative Synchronization in Wireless Networks
cs.DC cs.IT math.IT
Synchronization is a key functionality in wireless network, enabling a wide variety of services. We consider a Bayesian inference framework whereby network nodes can achieve phase and skew synchronization in a fully distributed way. In particular, under the assumption of Gaussian measurement noise, we derive two message passing methods (belief propagation and mean field), analyze their convergence behavior, and perform a qualitative and quantitative comparison with a number of competing algorithms. We also show that both methods can be applied in networks with and without master nodes. Our performance results are complemented by, and compared with, the relevant Bayesian Cram\'er-Rao bounds.
1304.8046
Sophistication vs Logical Depth
cs.IT cs.CC math.IT
Sophistication and logical depth are two measures that express how complicated the structure in a string is. Sophistication is defined as the minimal complexity of a computable function that defines a two-part description for the string that is shortest within some precision; the second can be defined as the minimal computation time of a program that is shortest within some precision. We show that the Busy Beaver function of the sophistication of a string exceeds its logical depth with logarithmically bigger precision, and that logical depth exceeds the Busy Beaver function of sophistication with logarithmically bigger precision. We also show that this is not true if the precision is only increased by a constant (when the notions are defined with plain Kolmogorov complexity). Finally we show that sophistication is unstable in its precision: constant variations can change its value by a linear term in the length of the string.
1304.8052
Registration of Images with Outliers Using Joint Saliency Map
cs.CV
Mutual information (MI) is a popular similarity measure for image registration, whereby good registration can be achieved by maximizing the compactness of the clusters in the joint histogram. However, MI is sensitive to the "outlier" objects that appear in one image but not the other, and also suffers from local and biased maxima. We propose a novel joint saliency map (JSM) to highlight the corresponding salient structures in the two images, and emphatically group those salient structures into the smoothed compact clusters in the weighted joint histogram. This strategy could solve both the outlier and the local maxima problems. Experimental results show that the JSM-MI based algorithm is not only accurate but also robust for registration of challenging image pairs with outliers.
1304.8083
Adaptive Video Streaming for Wireless Networks with Multiple Users and Helpers
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT math.OC
We consider the optimal design of a scheduling policy for adaptive video streaming in a wireless network formed by several users and helpers. A feature of such networks is that any user is typically in the range of multiple helpers. Hence, in order to cope with user-helper association, load balancing and inter-cell interference, an efficient streaming policy should allow the users to dynamically select the helper node to download from, and determine adaptively the video quality level of the download. In order to obtain a tractable formulation, we follow a "divide and conquer" approach: i) Assuming that each video packet (chunk) is delivered within its playback delay ("smooth streaming regime"), the problem is formulated as a network utility maximization (NUM), subject to queue stability, where the network utility function is a concave and componentwise non-decreasing function of the users' video quality measure. ii) We solve the NUM problem by using a Lyapunov Drift Plus Penalty approach, obtaining a scheme that naturally decomposes into two sub-policies referred to as "congestion control" (adaptive video quality and helper station selection) and "transmission scheduling" (dynamic allocation of the helper-user physical layer transmission rates).Our solution is provably optimal with respect to the proposed NUM problem, in a strong per-sample path sense. iii) Finally, we propose a method to adaptively estimate the maximum queuing delays, such that each user can calculate its pre-buffering and re-buffering time in order to cope with the fluctuations of the queuing delays. Through simulations, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm under realistic assumptions of a network with densely deployed helper nodes, and demonstrate the per-sample path optimality of the proposed solution by considering a non-stationary non-ergodic scenario with user mobility, VBR video coding.
1304.8087
Uniqueness of Tensor Decompositions with Applications to Polynomial Identifiability
cs.DS cs.LG math.ST stat.TH
We give a robust version of the celebrated result of Kruskal on the uniqueness of tensor decompositions: we prove that given a tensor whose decomposition satisfies a robust form of Kruskal's rank condition, it is possible to approximately recover the decomposition if the tensor is known up to a sufficiently small (inverse polynomial) error. Kruskal's theorem has found many applications in proving the identifiability of parameters for various latent variable models and mixture models such as Hidden Markov models, topic models etc. Our robust version immediately implies identifiability using only polynomially many samples in many of these settings. This polynomial identifiability is an essential first step towards efficient learning algorithms for these models. Recently, algorithms based on tensor decompositions have been used to estimate the parameters of various hidden variable models efficiently in special cases as long as they satisfy certain "non-degeneracy" properties. Our methods give a way to go beyond this non-degeneracy barrier, and establish polynomial identifiability of the parameters under much milder conditions. Given the importance of Kruskal's theorem in the tensor literature, we expect that this robust version will have several applications beyond the settings we explore in this work.
1304.8092
Fractal-Based Detection of Microcalcification Clusters in Digital Mammograms
cs.CV
In this paper, a novel method for edge detection of microcalcification clusters in mammogram images is presented using the concept of Fractal Dimension and Hurst co-efficient that enables to locate the microcalcifications in the mammograms. This technique detects the edges accurately than the ones obtained by the conventional Sobel method. Generally, Sobel method detects the edges of the regions/objects in an image using the Fudge factor that assumes its value as 0.5, by default. In this proposed technique, the Fudge factor is suitably replaced with Hurst Co-efficient, which is computed as the difference of Fractal dimension and the topological dimension of a given input image. These two dimensions are image-dependent, and hence the respective Hurst co-efficient too varies with respect to images. Hence, the image-dependent Hurst co-efficient based Sobel method is proved to produce better results than the Fudge factor based Sobel method. The results of the proposed method substantiate the merit of the proposed technique.
1304.8102
On Convexity of Error Rates in Digital Communications
cs.IT math.IT
Convexity properties of error rates of a class of decoders, including the ML/min-distance one as a special case, are studied for arbitrary constellations, bit mapping and coding. Earlier results obtained for the AWGN channel are extended to a wide class of noise densities, including unimodal and spherically-invariant noise. Under these broad conditions, symbol and bit error rates are shown to be convex functions of the SNR in the high-SNR regime with an explicitly-determined threshold, which depends only on the constellation dimensionality and minimum distance, thus enabling an application of the powerful tools of convex optimization to such digital communication systems in a rigorous way. It is the decreasing nature of the noise power density around the decision region boundaries that insures the convexity of symbol error rates in the general case. The known high/low SNR bounds of the convexity/concavity regions are tightened and no further improvement is shown to be possible in general. The high SNR bound fits closely into the channel coding theorem: all codes, including capacity-achieving ones, whose decision regions include the hardened noise spheres (from the noise sphere hardening argument in the channel coding theorem) satisfies this high SNR requirement and thus has convex error rates in both SNR and noise power. We conjecture that all capacity-achieving codes have convex error rates. Convexity properties in signal amplitude and noise power are also investigated. Some applications of the results are discussed. In particular, it is shown that fading is convexity-preserving and is never good in low dimensions under spherically-invariant noise, which may also include any linear diversity combining.
1304.8125
On Discrete Preferences and Coordination
cs.GT cs.SI physics.soc-ph
An active line of research has considered games played on networks in which payoffs depend on both a player's individual decision and also the decisions of her neighbors. Such games have been used to model issues including the formation of opinions and the adoption of technology. A basic question that has remained largely open in this area is to consider games where the strategies available to the players come from a fixed, discrete set, and where players may have different intrinsic preferences among the possible strategies. It is natural to model the tension among these different preferences by positing a distance function on the strategy set that determines a notion of "similarity" among strategies; a player's payoff is determined by the distance from her chosen strategy to her preferred strategy and to the strategies chosen by her network neighbors. Even when there are only two strategies available, this framework already leads to natural open questions about a version of the classical Battle of the Sexes problem played on a graph. We develop a set of techniques for analyzing this class of games, which we refer to as discrete preference games. We parametrize the games by the relative extent to which a player takes into account the effect of her preferred strategy and the effect of her neighbors' strategies, allowing us to interpolate between network coordination games and unilateral decision-making. When these two effects are balanced, we show that the price of stability is equal to 1 for any discrete preference game in which the distance function on the strategies is a tree metric; as a special case, this includes the Battle of the Sexes on a graph. We also show that trees form the maximal family of metrics for which the price of stability is 1, and produce a collection of metrics on which the price of stability converges to a tight bound of 2.
1304.8126
Robust Spectral Compressed Sensing via Structured Matrix Completion
cs.IT cs.SY math.IT math.NA stat.ML
The paper explores the problem of \emph{spectral compressed sensing}, which aims to recover a spectrally sparse signal from a small random subset of its $n$ time domain samples. The signal of interest is assumed to be a superposition of $r$ multi-dimensional complex sinusoids, while the underlying frequencies can assume any \emph{continuous} values in the normalized frequency domain. Conventional compressed sensing paradigms suffer from the basis mismatch issue when imposing a discrete dictionary on the Fourier representation. To address this issue, we develop a novel algorithm, called \emph{Enhanced Matrix Completion (EMaC)}, based on structured matrix completion that does not require prior knowledge of the model order. The algorithm starts by arranging the data into a low-rank enhanced form exhibiting multi-fold Hankel structure, and then attempts recovery via nuclear norm minimization. Under mild incoherence conditions, EMaC allows perfect recovery as soon as the number of samples exceeds the order of $r\log^{4}n$, and is stable against bounded noise. Even if a constant portion of samples are corrupted with arbitrary magnitude, EMaC still allows exact recovery, provided that the sample complexity exceeds the order of $r^{2}\log^{3}n$. Along the way, our results demonstrate the power of convex relaxation in completing a low-rank multi-fold Hankel or Toeplitz matrix from minimal observed entries. The performance of our algorithm and its applicability to super resolution are further validated by numerical experiments.
1304.8129
Local Correctability of Expander Codes
cs.IT math.IT
In this work, we present the first local-decoding algorithm for expander codes. This yields a new family of constant-rate codes that can recover from a constant fraction of errors in the codeword symbols, and where any symbol of the codeword can be recovered with high probability by reading $N^\epsilon$ symbols from the corrupted codeword, where $N$ is the block-length of the code. Expander codes, introduced by Sipser and Spielman, are formed from an expander graph $G = (V,E)$ of degree $d$, and an inner code of block-length $d$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$. Each edge of the expander graph is associated with a symbol in $\Sigma$. A string in $\Sigma^{E}$ will be a codeword if for each vertex in $V$, the symbols on the adjacent edges form a codeword in the inner code. We show that if the inner code has a smooth reconstruction algorithm in the noiseless setting, then the corresponding expander code has an efficient local-correction algorithm in the noisy setting. Instantiating our construction with inner codes based on finite geometries, we obtain novel locally decodable codes with rate approaching one. This provides an alternative to the multiplicity codes of Kopparty, Saraf and Yekhanin (STOC '11) and the lifted codes of Guo, Kopparty and Sudan (ITCS '13).
1304.8132
Local Graph Clustering Beyond Cheeger's Inequality
cs.DS cs.LG stat.ML
Motivated by applications of large-scale graph clustering, we study random-walk-based LOCAL algorithms whose running times depend only on the size of the output cluster, rather than the entire graph. All previously known such algorithms guarantee an output conductance of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{\phi(A)})$ when the target set $A$ has conductance $\phi(A)\in[0,1]$. In this paper, we improve it to $$\tilde{O}\bigg( \min\Big\{\sqrt{\phi(A)}, \frac{\phi(A)}{\sqrt{\mathsf{Conn}(A)}} \Big\} \bigg)\enspace, $$ where the internal connectivity parameter $\mathsf{Conn}(A) \in [0,1]$ is defined as the reciprocal of the mixing time of the random walk over the induced subgraph on $A$. For instance, using $\mathsf{Conn}(A) = \Omega(\lambda(A) / \log n)$ where $\lambda$ is the second eigenvalue of the Laplacian of the induced subgraph on $A$, our conductance guarantee can be as good as $\tilde{O}(\phi(A)/\sqrt{\lambda(A)})$. This builds an interesting connection to the recent advance of the so-called improved Cheeger's Inequality [KKL+13], which says that global spectral algorithms can provide a conductance guarantee of $O(\phi_{\mathsf{opt}}/\sqrt{\lambda_3})$ instead of $O(\sqrt{\phi_{\mathsf{opt}}})$. In addition, we provide theoretical guarantee on the clustering accuracy (in terms of precision and recall) of the output set. We also prove that our analysis is tight, and perform empirical evaluation to support our theory on both synthetic and real data. It is worth noting that, our analysis outperforms prior work when the cluster is well-connected. In fact, the better it is well-connected inside, the more significant improvement (both in terms of conductance and accuracy) we can obtain. Our results shed light on why in practice some random-walk-based algorithms perform better than its previous theory, and help guide future research about local clustering.
1305.0015
Inferring ground truth from multi-annotator ordinal data: a probabilistic approach
stat.ML cs.LG
A popular approach for large scale data annotation tasks is crowdsourcing, wherein each data point is labeled by multiple noisy annotators. We consider the problem of inferring ground truth from noisy ordinal labels obtained from multiple annotators of varying and unknown expertise levels. Annotation models for ordinal data have been proposed mostly as extensions of their binary/categorical counterparts and have received little attention in the crowdsourcing literature. We propose a new model for crowdsourced ordinal data that accounts for instance difficulty as well as annotator expertise, and derive a variational Bayesian inference algorithm for parameter estimation. We analyze the ordinal extensions of several state-of-the-art annotator models for binary/categorical labels and evaluate the performance of all the models on two real world datasets containing ordinal query-URL relevance scores, collected through Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Our results indicate that the proposed model performs better or as well as existing state-of-the-art methods and is more resistant to `spammy' annotators (i.e., annotators who assign labels randomly without actually looking at the instance) than popular baselines such as mean, median, and majority vote which do not account for annotator expertise.
1305.0020
Image Compression By Embedding Five Modulus Method Into JPEG
cs.CV cs.MM
The standard JPEG format is almost the optimum format in image compression. The compression ratio in JPEG sometimes reaches 30:1. The compression ratio of JPEG could be increased by embedding the Five Modulus Method (FMM) into the JPEG algorithm. The novel algorithm gives twice the time as the standard JPEG algorithm or more. The novel algorithm was called FJPEG (Five-JPEG). The quality of the reconstructed image after compression is approximately approaches the JPEG. Standard test images have been used to support and implement the suggested idea in this paper and the error metrics have been computed and compared with JPEG.
1305.0032
Construction of PMDS and SD Codes extending RAID 5
cs.IT math.IT
A construction of Partial Maximum Distance Separable (PMDS) and Sector-Disk (SD) codes extending RAID 5 with two extra parities is given, solving an open problem. Previous constructions relied on computer searches, while our constructions provide a theoretical solution to the problem.
1305.0034
Regret Minimization in Non-Zero-Sum Games with Applications to Building Champion Multiplayer Computer Poker Agents
cs.GT cs.MA
In two-player zero-sum games, if both players minimize their average external regret, then the average of the strategy profiles converges to a Nash equilibrium. For n-player general-sum games, however, theoretical guarantees for regret minimization are less understood. Nonetheless, Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR), a popular regret minimization algorithm for extensive-form games, has generated winning three-player Texas Hold'em agents in the Annual Computer Poker Competition (ACPC). In this paper, we provide the first set of theoretical properties for regret minimization algorithms in non-zero-sum games by proving that solutions eliminate iterative strict domination. We formally define \emph{dominated actions} in extensive-form games, show that CFR avoids iteratively strictly dominated actions and strategies, and demonstrate that removing iteratively dominated actions is enough to win a mock tournament in a small poker game. In addition, for two-player non-zero-sum games, we bound the worst case performance and show that in practice, regret minimization can yield strategies very close to equilibrium. Our theoretical advancements lead us to a new modification of CFR for games with more than two players that is more efficient and may be used to generate stronger strategies than previously possible. Furthermore, we present a new three-player Texas Hold'em poker agent that was built using CFR and a novel game decomposition method. Our new agent wins the three-player events of the 2012 ACPC and defeats the winning three-player programs from previous competitions while requiring less resources to generate than the 2011 winner. Finally, we show that our CFR modification computes a strategy of equal quality to our new agent in a quarter of the time of standard CFR using half the memory.
1305.0051
Revealing social networks of spammers through spectral clustering
cs.SI cs.LG physics.soc-ph stat.ML
To date, most studies on spam have focused only on the spamming phase of the spam cycle and have ignored the harvesting phase, which consists of the mass acquisition of email addresses. It has been observed that spammers conceal their identity to a lesser degree in the harvesting phase, so it may be possible to gain new insights into spammers' behavior by studying the behavior of harvesters, which are individuals or bots that collect email addresses. In this paper, we reveal social networks of spammers by identifying communities of harvesters with high behavioral similarity using spectral clustering. The data analyzed was collected through Project Honey Pot, a distributed system for monitoring harvesting and spamming. Our main findings are (1) that most spammers either send only phishing emails or no phishing emails at all, (2) that most communities of spammers also send only phishing emails or no phishing emails at all, and (3) that several groups of spammers within communities exhibit coherent temporal behavior and have similar IP addresses. Our findings reveal some previously unknown behavior of spammers and suggest that there is indeed social structure between spammers to be discovered.
1305.0060
Complexity penalized hydraulic fracture localization and moment tensor estimation under limited model information
physics.geo-ph cs.IT math.IT stat.AP
In this paper we present a novel technique for micro-seismic localization using a group sparse penalization that is robust to the focal mechanism of the source and requires only a velocity model of the stratigraphy rather than a full Green's function model of the earth's response. In this technique we construct a set of perfect delta detector responses, one for each detector in the array, to a seismic event at a given location and impose a group sparsity across the array. This scheme is independent of the moment tensor and exploits the time compactness of the incident seismic signal. Furthermore we present a method for improving the inversion of the moment tensor and Green's function when the geometry of seismic array is limited. In particular we demonstrate that both Tikhonov regularization and truncated SVD can improve the recovery of the moment tensor and be robust to noise. We evaluate our algorithm on synthetic data and present error bounds for both estimation of the moment tensor as well as localization. Furthermore we discuss the estimated moment tensor accuracy as a function of both array geometry and fault orientation.
1305.0061
Optimal Ternary Cyclic Codes from Monomials
cs.IT math.IT
Cyclic codes are a subclass of linear codes and have applications in consumer electronics, data storage systems, and communication systems as they have efficient encoding and decoding algorithms. Perfect nonlinear monomials were employed to construct optimal ternary cyclic codes with parameters $[3^m-1, 3^m-1-2m, 4]$ by Carlet, Ding and Yuan in 2005. In this paper, almost perfect nonlinear monomials, and a number of other monomials over $\gf(3^m)$ are used to construct optimal ternary cyclic codes with the same parameters. Nine open problems on such codes are also presented.
1305.0062
Distilled Single Cell Genome Sequencing and De Novo Assembly for Sparse Microbial Communities
q-bio.GN cs.CE
Identification of every single genome present in a microbial sample is an important and challenging task with crucial applications. It is challenging because there are typically millions of cells in a microbial sample, the vast majority of which elude cultivation. The most accurate method to date is exhaustive single cell sequencing using multiple displacement amplification, which is simply intractable for a large number of cells. However, there is hope for breaking this barrier as the number of different cell types with distinct genome sequences is usually much smaller than the number of cells. Here, we present a novel divide and conquer method to sequence and de novo assemble all distinct genomes present in a microbial sample with a sequencing cost and computational complexity proportional to the number of genome types, rather than the number of cells. The method is implemented in a tool called Squeezambler. We evaluated Squeezambler on simulated data. The proposed divide and conquer method successfully reduces the cost of sequencing in comparison with the naive exhaustive approach. Availability: Squeezambler and datasets are available under http://compbio.cs.wayne.edu/software/squeezambler/.
1305.0103
Clustering Unclustered Data: Unsupervised Binary Labeling of Two Datasets Having Different Class Balances
cs.LG
We consider the unsupervised learning problem of assigning labels to unlabeled data. A naive approach is to use clustering methods, but this works well only when data is properly clustered and each cluster corresponds to an underlying class. In this paper, we first show that this unsupervised labeling problem in balanced binary cases can be solved if two unlabeled datasets having different class balances are available. More specifically, estimation of the sign of the difference between probability densities of two unlabeled datasets gives the solution. We then introduce a new method to directly estimate the sign of the density difference without density estimation. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method against several clustering methods on various toy problems and real-world datasets.
1305.0153
Convergence Analysis of Mixed Timescale Cross-Layer Stochastic Optimization
cs.SY cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers a cross-layer optimization problem driven by multi-timescale stochastic exogenous processes in wireless communication networks. Due to the hierarchical information structure in a wireless network, a mixed timescale stochastic iterative algorithm is proposed to track the time-varying optimal solution of the cross-layer optimization problem, where the variables are partitioned into short-term controls updated in a faster timescale, and long-term controls updated in a slower timescale. We focus on establishing a convergence analysis framework for such multi-timescale algorithms, which is difficult due to the timescale separation of the algorithm and the time-varying nature of the exogenous processes. To cope with this challenge, we model the algorithm dynamics using stochastic differential equations (SDEs) and show that the study of the algorithm convergence is equivalent to the study of the stochastic stability of a virtual stochastic dynamic system (VSDS). Leveraging the techniques of Lyapunov stability, we derive a sufficient condition for the algorithm stability and a tracking error bound in terms of the parameters of the multi-timescale exogenous processes. Based on these results, an adaptive compensation algorithm is proposed to enhance the tracking performance. Finally, we illustrate the framework by an application example in wireless heterogeneous network.
1305.0185
A 2.0 Gb/s Throughput Decoder for QC-LDPC Convolutional Codes
cs.IT cs.AR math.IT
This paper propose a decoder architecture for low-density parity-check convolutional code (LDPCCC). Specifically, the LDPCCC is derived from a quasi-cyclic (QC) LDPC block code. By making use of the quasi-cyclic structure, the proposed LDPCCC decoder adopts a dynamic message storage in the memory and uses a simple address controller. The decoder efficiently combines the memories in the pipelining processors into a large memory block so as to take advantage of the data-width of the embedded memory in a modern field-programmable gate array (FPGA). A rate-5/6 QC-LDPCCC has been implemented on an Altera Stratix FPGA. It achieves up to 2.0 Gb/s throughput with a clock frequency of 100 MHz. Moreover, the decoder displays an excellent error performance of lower than $10^{-13}$ at a bit-energy-to-noise-power-spectral-density ratio ($E_b/N_0$) of 3.55 dB.
1305.0187
A Community Based Algorithm for Large Scale Web Service Composition
cs.AI cs.SE
Web service composition is the process of synthesizing a new composite service using a set of available Web services in order to satisfy a client request that cannot be treated by any available Web services. The Web services space is a dynamic environment characterized by a huge number of elements. Furthermore, many Web services are offering similar functionalities. In this paper we propose a model for Web service composition designed to address the scale effect and the redundancy issue. The Web services space is represented by a two-layered network architecture. A concrete similarity network layer organizes the Web services operations into communities of functionally similar operations. An abstract interaction network layer represents the composition relationships between the sets of communities. Composition synthesis is performed by a two-phased graph search algorithm. First, the interaction network is mined in order to discover abstract solutions to the request goal. Then, the abstract compositions are instantiated with concrete operations selected from the similarity network. This strategy allows an efficient exploration of the Web services space. Furthermore, operations grouped in a community can be easily substituted if necessary during the composition's synthesis's process.
1305.0191
Benefits of Semantics on Web Service Composition from a Complex Network Perspective
cs.SI cs.AI cs.SE
The number of publicly available Web services (WS) is continuously growing, and in parallel, we are witnessing a rapid development in semantic-related web technologies. The intersection of the semantic web and WS allows the development of semantic WS. In this work, we adopt a complex network perspective to perform a comparative analysis of the syntactic and semantic approaches used to describe WS. From a collection of publicly available WS descriptions, we extract syntactic and semantic WS interaction networks. We take advantage of tools from the complex network field to analyze them and determine their properties. We show that WS interaction networks exhibit some of the typical characteristics observed in real-world networks, such as short average distance between nodes and community structure. By comparing syntactic and semantic networks through their properties, we show the introduction of semantics in WS descriptions should improve the composition process.
1305.0194
MATAWS: A Multimodal Approach for Automatic WS Semantic Annotation
cs.SE cs.CL cs.IR
Many recent works aim at developing methods and tools for the processing of semantic Web services. In order to be properly tested, these tools must be applied to an appropriate benchmark, taking the form of a collection of semantic WS descriptions. However, all of the existing publicly available collections are limited by their size or their realism (use of randomly generated or resampled descriptions). Larger and realistic syntactic (WSDL) collections exist, but their semantic annotation requires a certain level of automation, due to the number of operations to be processed. In this article, we propose a fully automatic method to semantically annotate such large WS collections. Our approach is multimodal, in the sense it takes advantage of the latent semantics present not only in the parameter names, but also in the type names and structures. Concept-to-word association is performed by using Sigma, a mapping of WordNet to the SUMO ontology. After having described in details our annotation method, we apply it to the larger collection of real-world syntactic WS descriptions we could find, and assess its efficiency.
1305.0196
Topological Properties of Web Services Similarity Networks
cs.IR cs.SI
The number of publicly available Web services (WS) is continuously growing. To perform efficient WS discovery, it is desirable to organize the WS space. Works in this direction propose to group WS according to certain shared properties. Such groups commonly called communities are based either on similarity or on interaction between WS. In this paper we focus on the former, and propose a new network-based approach to extract communities from a WS collection. This process is three-stepped: first we define several similarity functions able to compare WS operations, second we use them to build so-called similarity networks, and third we identify communities under the form of specific structures in these networks. We apply our method on a collection of real-world WS and comment the resulting communities. Finally, we additionally provide an analysis and an interpretation of our similarity networks with a complex networks perspective.
1305.0205
The effect of the initial network configuration on preferential attachment
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI physics.data-an
The classical preferential attachment model is sensitive to the choice of the initial configuration of the network. As the number of initial nodes and their degree grow, so does the time needed for an equilibrium degree distribution to be established. We study this phenomenon, provide estimates of the equilibration time, and characterize the degree distribution cutoff observed at finite times. When the initial network is dense and exceeds a certain small size, there is no equilibration and a suitable statistical test can always discern the produced degree distribution from the equilibrium one. As a by-product, the weighted Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic is demonstrated to be more suitable for statistical analysis of power-law distributions with cutoff when the data is ample.
1305.0208
Perceptron Mistake Bounds
cs.LG
We present a brief survey of existing mistake bounds and introduce novel bounds for the Perceptron or the kernel Perceptron algorithm. Our novel bounds generalize beyond standard margin-loss type bounds, allow for any convex and Lipschitz loss function, and admit a very simple proof.
1305.0213
Recovering Graph-Structured Activations using Adaptive Compressive Measurements
stat.ML cs.IT math.IT
We study the localization of a cluster of activated vertices in a graph, from adaptively designed compressive measurements. We propose a hierarchical partitioning of the graph that groups the activated vertices into few partitions, so that a top-down sensing procedure can identify these partitions, and hence the activations, using few measurements. By exploiting the cluster structure, we are able to provide localization guarantees at weaker signal to noise ratios than in the unstructured setting. We complement this performance guarantee with an information theoretic lower bound, providing a necessary signal-to-noise ratio for any algorithm to successfully localize the cluster. We verify our analysis with some simulations, demonstrating the practicality of our algorithm.
1305.0218
Video Segmentation via Diffusion Bases
cs.CV cs.MM
Identifying moving objects in a video sequence, which is produced by a static camera, is a fundamental and critical task in many computer-vision applications. A common approach performs background subtraction, which identifies moving objects as the portion of a video frame that differs significantly from a background model. A good background subtraction algorithm has to be robust to changes in the illumination and it should avoid detecting non-stationary background objects such as moving leaves, rain, snow, and shadows. In addition, the internal background model should quickly respond to changes in background such as objects that start to move or stop. We present a new algorithm for video segmentation that processes the input video sequence as a 3D matrix where the third axis is the time domain. Our approach identifies the background by reducing the input dimension using the \emph{diffusion bases} methodology. Furthermore, we describe an iterative method for extracting and deleting the background. The algorithm has two versions and thus covers the complete range of backgrounds: one for scenes with static backgrounds and the other for scenes with dynamic (moving) backgrounds.
1305.0261
Web Services Dependency Networks Analysis
cs.IR cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Along with a continuously growing number of publicly available Web services (WS), we are witnessing a rapid development in semantic-related web technologies, which lead to the apparition of semantically described WS. In this work, we perform a comparative analysis of the syntactic and semantic approaches used to describe WS, from a complex network perspective. First, we extract syntactic and semantic WS dependency networks from a collection of publicly available WS descriptions. Then, we take advantage of tools from the complex network field to analyze them and determine their topological properties. We show WS dependency networks exhibit some of the typical characteristics observed in real-world networks, such as small world and scale free properties, as well as community structure. By comparing syntactic and semantic networks through their topological properties, we show the introduction of semantics in WS description allows modeling more accurately the dependencies between parameters, which in turn could lead to improved composition mining methods.
1305.0297
The operad of wiring diagrams: formalizing a graphical language for databases, recursion, and plug-and-play circuits
cs.DB math.CT math.LO
Wiring diagrams, as seen in digital circuits, can be nested hierarchically and thus have an aspect of self-similarity. We show that wiring diagrams form the morphisms of an operad $\mcT$, capturing this self-similarity. We discuss the algebra $\Rel$ of mathematical relations on $\mcT$, and in so doing use wiring diagrams as a graphical language with which to structure queries on relational databases. We give the example of circuit diagrams as a special case. We move on to show how plug-and-play devices and also recursion can be formulated in the operadic framework as well. Throughout we include many examples and figures.
1305.0311
An Adaptive Descriptor Design for Object Recognition in the Wild
cs.CV
Digital images nowadays have various styles of appearance, in the aspects of color tones, contrast, vignetting, and etc. These 'picture styles' are directly related to the scene radiance, image pipeline of the camera, and post processing functions. Due to the complexity and nonlinearity of these causes, popular gradient-based image descriptors won't be invariant to different picture styles, which will decline the performance of object recognition. Given that images shared online or created by individual users are taken with a wide range of devices and may be processed by various post processing functions, to find a robust object recognition system is useful and challenging. In this paper, we present the first study on the influence of picture styles for object recognition, and propose an adaptive approach based on the kernel view of gradient descriptors and multiple kernel learning, without estimating or specifying the styles of images used in training and testing. We conduct experiments on Domain Adaptation data set and Oxford Flower data set. The experiments also include several variants of the flower data set by processing the images with popular photo effects. The results demonstrate that our proposed method improve from standard descriptors in all cases.
1305.0321
Hidden Markov Model Identifiability via Tensors
cs.IT math.IT
The prevalence of hidden Markov models (HMMs) in various applications of statistical signal processing and communications is a testament to the power and flexibility of the model. In this paper, we link the identifiability problem with tensor decomposition, in particular, the Canonical Polyadic decomposition. Using recent results in deriving uniqueness conditions for tensor decomposition, we are able to provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the identification of the parameters of discrete time finite alphabet HMMs. This result resolves a long standing open problem regarding the derivation of a necessary and sufficient condition for uniquely identifying an HMM. We then further extend recent preliminary work on the identification of HMMs with multiple observers by deriving necessary and sufficient conditions for identifiability in this setting.
1305.0355
Model Selection for High-Dimensional Regression under the Generalized Irrepresentability Condition
math.ST cs.IT cs.LG math.IT stat.ME stat.ML stat.TH
In the high-dimensional regression model a response variable is linearly related to $p$ covariates, but the sample size $n$ is smaller than $p$. We assume that only a small subset of covariates is `active' (i.e., the corresponding coefficients are non-zero), and consider the model-selection problem of identifying the active covariates. A popular approach is to estimate the regression coefficients through the Lasso ($\ell_1$-regularized least squares). This is known to correctly identify the active set only if the irrelevant covariates are roughly orthogonal to the relevant ones, as quantified through the so called `irrepresentability' condition. In this paper we study the `Gauss-Lasso' selector, a simple two-stage method that first solves the Lasso, and then performs ordinary least squares restricted to the Lasso active set. We formulate `generalized irrepresentability condition' (GIC), an assumption that is substantially weaker than irrepresentability. We prove that, under GIC, the Gauss-Lasso correctly recovers the active set.
1305.0357
Relevance distributions across Bradford Zones: Can Bradfordizing improve search?
cs.IR cs.DL
The purpose of this paper is to describe the evaluation of the effectiveness of the bibliometric technique Bradfordizing in an information retrieval (IR) scenario. Bradfordizing is used to re-rank topical document sets from conventional abstracting & indexing (A&I) databases into core and more peripheral document zones. Bradfordized lists of journal articles and monographs will be tested in a controlled scenario consisting of different A&I databases from social and political sciences, economics, psychology and medical science, 164 standardized IR topics and intellectual assessments of the listed documents. Does Bradfordizing improve the ratio of relevant documents in the first third (core) compared to the second and last third (zone 2 and zone 3, respectively)? The IR tests show that relevance distributions after re-ranking improve at a significant level if documents in the core are compared with documents in the succeeding zones. After Bradfordizing of document pools, the core has a significant better average precision than zone 2, zone 3 and baseline. This paper should be seen as an argument in favour of alternative non-textual (bibliometric) re-ranking methods which can be simply applied in text-based retrieval systems and in particular in A&I databases.
1305.0361
Braess's Paradox in Epidemic Game: Better Condition Results in Less Payoff
physics.soc-ph cs.SI q-bio.PE
Facing the threats of infectious diseases, we take various actions to protect ourselves, but few studies considered an evolving system with competing strategies. In view of that, we propose an evolutionary epidemic model coupled with human behaviors, where individuals have three strategies: vaccination, self-protection and laissez faire, and could adjust their strategies according to their neighbors' strategies and payoffs at the beginning of each new season of epidemic spreading. We found a counter-intuitive phenomenon analogous to the well-known \emph{Braess's Paradox}, namely a better condition may lead to worse performance. Specifically speaking, increasing the successful rate of self-protection does not necessarily reduce the epidemic size or improve the system payoff. This phenomenon is insensitive to the network topologies, and can be well explained by a mean-field approximation. Our study demonstrates an important fact that a better condition for individuals may yield a worse outcome for the society.
1305.0384
Optimal Distributed Scheduling in Wireless Networks under the SINR interference model
cs.IT math.IT
Radio resource sharing mechanisms are key to ensuring good performance in wireless networks. In their seminal paper \cite{tassiulas1}, Tassiulas and Ephremides introduced the Maximum Weighted Scheduling algorithm, and proved its throughput-optimality. Since then, there have been extensive research efforts to devise distributed implementations of this algorithm. Recently, distributed adaptive CSMA scheduling schemes \cite{jiang08} have been proposed and shown to be optimal, without the need of message passing among transmitters. However their analysis relies on the assumption that interference can be accurately modelled by a simple interference graph. In this paper, we consider the more realistic and challenging SINR interference model. We present {\it the first distributed scheduling algorithms that (i) are optimal under the SINR interference model, and (ii) that do not require any message passing}. They are based on a combination of a simple and efficient power allocation strategy referred to as {\it Power Packing} and randomization techniques. We first devise algorithms that are rate-optimal in the sense that they perform as well as the best centralized scheduling schemes in scenarios where each transmitter is aware of the rate at which it should send packets to the corresponding receiver. We then extend these algorithms so that they reach throughput-optimality.
1305.0395
Tensor Decompositions: A New Concept in Brain Data Analysis?
cs.NA cs.LG q-bio.NC stat.ML
Matrix factorizations and their extensions to tensor factorizations and decompositions have become prominent techniques for linear and multilinear blind source separation (BSS), especially multiway Independent Component Analysis (ICA), NonnegativeMatrix and Tensor Factorization (NMF/NTF), Smooth Component Analysis (SmoCA) and Sparse Component Analysis (SCA). Moreover, tensor decompositions have many other potential applications beyond multilinear BSS, especially feature extraction, classification, dimensionality reduction and multiway clustering. In this paper, we briefly overview new and emerging models and approaches for tensor decompositions in applications to group and linked multiway BSS/ICA, feature extraction, classification andMultiway Partial Least Squares (MPLS) regression problems. Keywords: Multilinear BSS, linked multiway BSS/ICA, tensor factorizations and decompositions, constrained Tucker and CP models, Penalized Tensor Decompositions (PTD), feature extraction, classification, multiway PLS and CCA.
1305.0412
Filter Design with Secrecy Constraints: The MIMO Gaussian Wiretap Channel
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers the problem of filter design with secrecy constraints, where two legitimate parties (Alice and Bob) communicate in the presence of an eavesdropper (Eve), over a Gaussian multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel. This problem involves designing, subject to a power constraint, the transmit and the receive filters which minimize the mean-squared error (MSE) between the legitimate parties whilst assuring that the eavesdropper MSE remains above a certain threshold. We consider a general MIMO Gaussian wiretap scenario, where the legitimate receiver uses a linear Zero-Forcing (ZF) filter and the eavesdropper receiver uses either a ZF or an optimal linear Wiener filter. We provide a characterization of the optimal filter designs by demonstrating the convexity of the optimization problems. We also provide generalizations of the filter designs from the scenario where the channel state is known to all the parties to the scenario where there is uncertainty in the channel state. A set of numerical results illustrates the performance of the novel filter designs, including the robustness to channel modeling errors. In particular, we assess the efficacy of the designs in guaranteeing not only a certain MSE level at the eavesdropper, but also in limiting the error probability at the eavesdropper. We also assess the impact of the filter designs on the achievable secrecy rates. The penalty induced by the fact that the eavesdropper may use the optimal non-linear receive filter rather than the optimal linear one is also explored in the paper.
1305.0423
Testing Hypotheses by Regularized Maximum Mean Discrepancy
cs.LG cs.AI stat.ML
Do two data samples come from different distributions? Recent studies of this fundamental problem focused on embedding probability distributions into sufficiently rich characteristic Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHSs), to compare distributions by the distance between their embeddings. We show that Regularized Maximum Mean Discrepancy (RMMD), our novel measure for kernel-based hypothesis testing, yields substantial improvements even when sample sizes are small, and excels at hypothesis tests involving multiple comparisons with power control. We derive asymptotic distributions under the null and alternative hypotheses, and assess power control. Outstanding results are obtained on: challenging EEG data, MNIST, the Berkley Covertype, and the Flare-Solar dataset.
1305.0445
Deep Learning of Representations: Looking Forward
cs.LG
Deep learning research aims at discovering learning algorithms that discover multiple levels of distributed representations, with higher levels representing more abstract concepts. Although the study of deep learning has already led to impressive theoretical results, learning algorithms and breakthrough experiments, several challenges lie ahead. This paper proposes to examine some of these challenges, centering on the questions of scaling deep learning algorithms to much larger models and datasets, reducing optimization difficulties due to ill-conditioning or local minima, designing more efficient and powerful inference and sampling procedures, and learning to disentangle the factors of variation underlying the observed data. It also proposes a few forward-looking research directions aimed at overcoming these challenges.
1305.0458
From the Grid to the Smart Grid, Topologically
physics.soc-ph cs.CE cs.CY cs.SI
The Smart Grid is not just about the digitalization of the Power Grid. In its more visionary acceptation, it is a model of energy management in which the users are engaged in producing energy as well as consuming it, while having information systems fully aware of the energy demand-response of the network and of dynamically varying prices. A natural question is then: to make the Smart Grid a reality will the Distribution Grid have to be updated? We assume a positive answer to the question and we consider the lower layers of Medium and Low Voltage to be the most affected by the change. In our previous work, we have analyzed samples of the Dutch Distribution Grid in our previous work and we have considered possible evolutions of these using synthetic topologies modeled after studies of complex systems in other technological domains in another previous work. In this paper, we take an extra important further step by defining a methodology for evolving any existing physical Power Grid to a good Smart Grid model thus laying the foundations for a decision support system for utilities and governmental organizations. In doing so, we consider several possible evolution strategies and apply then to the Dutch Distribution Grid. We show how more connectivity is beneficial in realizing more efficient and reliable networks. Our proposal is topological in nature, and enhanced with economic considerations of the costs of such evolutions in terms of cabling expenses and economic benefits of evolving the Grid.
1305.0471
Community Structure in Interaction Web Service Networks
cs.SI cs.NI physics.soc-ph
Many real-world complex systems such as social, biological, information as well as technological systems results of a decentralized and unplanned evolution which leads to a common structuration. Irrespective of their origin, these so-called complex networks typically exhibit small-world and scale-free properties. Another common feature is their organisation into communities. In this paper, we introduce models of interaction networks based on the composition process of syntactic and semantic Web services. An extensive experimental study conducted on a benchmark of real Web services shows that these networks possess the typical properties of complex networks (small-world, scale-free). Unlike most social networks, they are not transitive. Using a representative sample of community detection algorithms, a community structuration is revealed. The comparative evaluation of the discovered community structures shows that they are very similar in terms of content. Furthermore, the analysis performed on the community structures and on the communities themselves, leads us to conclude that their topological properties are consistent.
1305.0502
Simple, Fast, and Scalable Reachability Oracle
cs.DB
A reachability oracle (or hop labeling) assigns each vertex v two sets of vertices: Lout(v) and Lin(v), such that u reaches v iff Lout(u) \cap Lin(v) \neq \emptyset. Despite their simplicity and elegance, reachability oracles have failed to achieve efficiency in more than ten years since their introduction: the main problem is high construction cost, which stems from a set-cover framework and the need to materialize transitive closure. In this paper, we present two simple and efficient labeling algorithms, Hierarchical-Labeling and Distribution-Labeling, which can work onmassive real-world graphs: their construction time is an order of magnitude faster than the setcover based labeling approach, and transitive closure materialization is not needed. On large graphs, their index sizes and their query performance can now beat the state-of-the-art transitive closure compression and online search approaches.
1305.0503
Graph-Theoretic Characterization of The Feasibility of The Precoding-Based 3-Unicast Interference Alignment Scheme
cs.IT math.IT
A new precoding-based intersession network coding (NC) scheme has recently been proposed, which applies the interference alignment technique, originally devised for wireless interference channels, to the 3-unicast problem of directed acyclic networks. The main result of this work is a graph-theoretic characterization of the feasibility of the 3-unicast interference alignment scheme. To that end, we first investigate several key relationships between the point-to-point network channel gains and the underlying graph structure. Such relationships turn out to be critical when characterizing graph-theoretically the feasibility of precoding-based solutions.
1305.0507
Hub-Accelerator: Fast and Exact Shortest Path Computation in Large Social Networks
cs.SI cs.DB physics.soc-ph
Shortest path computation is one of the most fundamental operations for managing and analyzing large social networks. Though existing techniques are quite effective for finding the shortest path on large but sparse road networks, social graphs have quite different characteristics: they are generally non-spatial, non-weighted, scale-free, and they exhibit small-world properties in addition to their massive size. In particular, the existence of hubs, those vertices with a large number of connections, explodes the search space, making the shortest path computation surprisingly challenging. In this paper, we introduce a set of novel techniques centered around hubs, collectively referred to as the Hub-Accelerator framework, to compute the k-degree shortest path (finding the shortest path between two vertices if their distance is within k). These techniques enable us to significantly reduce the search space by either greatly limiting the expansion scope of hubs (using the novel distance- preserving Hub-Network concept) or completely pruning away the hubs in the online search (using the Hub2-Labeling approach). The Hub-Accelerator approaches are more than two orders of magnitude faster than BFS and the state-of-the-art approximate shortest path method Sketch for the shortest path computation. The Hub- Network approach does not introduce additional index cost with light pre-computation cost; the index size and index construction cost of Hub2-Labeling are also moderate and better than or comparable to the approximation indexing Sketch method.
1305.0513
Limiting the Neighborhood: De-Small-World Network for Outbreak Prevention
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
In this work, we study a basic and practically important strategy to help prevent and/or delay an outbreak in the context of network: limiting the contact between individuals. In this paper, we introduce the average neighborhood size as a new measure for the degree of being small-world and utilize it to formally define the desmall- world network problem. We also prove the NP-hardness of the general reachable pair cut problem and propose a greedy edge betweenness based approach as the benchmark in selecting the candidate edges for solving our problem. Furthermore, we transform the de-small-world network problem as an OR-AND Boolean function maximization problem, which is also an NP-hardness problem. In addition, we develop a numerical relaxation approach to solve the Boolean function maximization and the de-small-world problem. Also, we introduce the short-betweenness, which measures the edge importance in terms of all short paths with distance no greater than a certain threshold, and utilize it to speed up our numerical relaxation approach. The experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of our approaches.
1305.0540
Privacy Preserving Recommendation System Based on Groups
cs.IR
Recommendation systems have received considerable attention in the recent decades. Yet with the development of information technology and social media, the risk in revealing private data to service providers has been a growing concern to more and more users. Trade-offs between quality and privacy in recommendation systems naturally arise. In this paper, we present a privacy preserving recommendation framework based on groups. The main idea is to use groups as a natural middleware to preserve users' privacy. A distributed preference exchange algorithm is proposed to ensure the anonymity of data, wherein the effective size of the anonymity set asymptotically approaches the group size with time. We construct a hybrid collaborative filtering model based on Markov random walks to provide recommendations and predictions to group members. Experimental results on the MovieLens and Epinions datasets show that our proposed methods outperform the baseline methods, L+ and ItemRank, two state-of-the-art personalized recommendation algorithms, for both recommendation precision and hit rate despite the absence of personal preference information.
1305.0543
Burstiness and spreading on temporal networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI q-bio.PE
We discuss how spreading processes on temporal networks are impacted by the shape of their inter-event time distributions. Through simple mathematical arguments and toy examples, we find that the key factor is the ordering in which events take place, a property that tends to be affected by the bulk of the distributions and not only by their tail, as usually considered in the literature. We show that a detailed modeling of the temporal patterns observed in complex networks can change dramatically the properties of a spreading process, such as the ergodicity of a random walk process or the persistence of an epidemic.
1305.0547
On Achievable Rates for Channels with Mismatched Decoding
cs.IT math.IT
The problem of mismatched decoding for discrete memoryless channels is addressed. A mismatched cognitive multiple-access channel is introduced, and an inner bound on its capacity region is derived using two alternative encoding methods: superposition coding and random binning. The inner bounds are derived by analyzing the average error probability of the code ensemble for both methods and by a tight characterization of the resulting error exponents. Random coding converse theorems are also derived. A comparison of the achievable regions shows that in the matched case, random binning performs as well as superposition coding, i.e., the region achievable by random binning is equal to the capacity region. The achievability results are further specialized to obtain a lower bound on the mismatch capacity of the single-user channel by investigating a cognitive multiple access channel whose achievable sum-rate serves as a lower bound on the single-user channel's capacity. In certain cases, for given auxiliary random variables this bound strictly improves on the achievable rate derived by Lapidoth.
1305.0552
Self-organization of progress across the century of physics
physics.soc-ph cs.DL cs.SI physics.data-an
We make use of information provided in the titles and abstracts of over half a million publications that were published by the American Physical Society during the past 119 years. By identifying all unique words and phrases and determining their monthly usage patterns, we obtain quantifiable insights into the trends of physics discovery from the end of the 19th century to today. We show that the magnitudes of upward and downward trends yield heavy-tailed distributions, and that their emergence is due to the Matthew effect. This indicates that both the rise and fall of scientific paradigms is driven by robust principles of self-organization. Data also confirm that periods of war decelerate scientific progress, and that the later is very much subject to globalization.
1305.0556
A quantum teleportation inspired algorithm produces sentence meaning from word meaning and grammatical structure
cs.CL quant-ph
We discuss an algorithm which produces the meaning of a sentence given meanings of its words, and its resemblance to quantum teleportation. In fact, this protocol was the main source of inspiration for this algorithm which has many applications in the area of Natural Language Processing.
1305.0574
Extending Modern SAT Solvers for Enumerating All Models
cs.AI
In this paper, we address the problem of enumerating all models of a Boolean formula in conjunctive normal form (CNF). We propose an extension of CDCL-based SAT solvers to deal with this fundamental problem. Then, we provide an experimental evaluation of our proposed SAT model enumeration algorithms on both satisfiable SAT instances taken from the last SAT challenge and on instances from the SAT-based encoding of sequence mining problems.
1305.0585
Design and Stability of Load-Side Primary Frequency Control in Power Systems
cs.SY math.OC
We present a systematic method to design ubiquitous continuous fast-acting distributed load control for primary frequency regulation in power networks, by formulating an optimal load control (OLC) problem where the objective is to minimize the aggregate cost of tracking an operating point subject to power balance over the network. We prove that the swing dynamics and the branch power flows, coupled with frequency-based load control, serve as a distributed primal-dual algorithm to solve OLC. We establish the global asymptotic stability of a multimachine network under such type of load-side primary frequency control. These results imply that the local frequency deviations at each bus convey exactly the right information about the global power imbalance for the loads to make individual decisions that turn out to be globally optimal. Simulations confirm that the proposed algorithm can rebalance power and resynchronize bus frequencies after a disturbance with significantly improved transient performance.
1305.0596
An Empirical Investigation of V-I Trajectory based Load Signatures for Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring
cs.CE
Choice of load signature or feature space is one of the most fundamental design choices for non-intrusive load monitoring or energy disaggregation problem. Electrical power quantities, harmonic load characteristics, canonical transient and steady-state waveforms are some of the typical choices of load signature or load signature basis for current research addressing appliance classification and prediction. This paper expands and evaluates appliance load signatures based on V-I trajectory - the mutual locus of instantaneous voltage and current waveforms - for precision and robustness of prediction in classification algorithms used to disaggregate residential overall energy use and predict constituent appliance profiles. We also demonstrate the use of variants of differential evolution as a novel strategy for selection of optimal load models in context of energy disaggregation. A publicly available benchmark dataset REDD is employed for evaluation purposes. Our experimental evaluations indicate that these load signatures, in conjunction with a number of popular classification algorithms, offer better or generally comparable overall precision of prediction, robustness and reliability against dynamic, noisy and highly similar load signatures with reference to electrical power quantities and harmonic content. Herein, wave-shape features are found to be an effective new basis of classification and prediction for semi-automated energy disaggregation and monitoring.
1305.0606
Results from a Practical Deployment of the MyZone Decentralized P2P Social Network
cs.CR cs.DC cs.SI
This paper presents MyZone, a private online social network for relatively small, closely-knit communities. MyZone has three important distinguishing features. First, users keep the ownership of their data and have complete control over maintaining their privacy. Second, MyZone is free from any possibility of content censorship and is highly resilient to any single point of disconnection. Finally, MyZone minimizes deployment cost by minimizing its computation, storage and network bandwidth requirements. It incorporates both a P2P architecture and a centralized architecture in its design ensuring high availability, security and privacy. A prototype of MyZone was deployed over a period of 40 days with a membership of more than one hundred users. The paper provides a detailed evaluation of the results obtained from this deployment.
1305.0619
Resource Allocation for Downlink Channel Transmission Based on Superposition Coding
cs.IT math.IT
We analyze the problem of transmitting information to multiple users over a shared wireless channel. The problem of resource allocation (RA) for the users with the knowledge of their channel state information has been treated extensively in the literature where various approaches trading off the users' throughput and fairness were proposed. The emphasis was mostly on the time-sharing (TS) approach, where the resource allocated to the user is equivalent to its time share of the channel access. In this work, we propose to take advantage of the broadcast nature of the channel and we adopt superposition coding (SC)-known to outperform TS in multiple users broadcasting scenarios. In SC, users' messages are simultaneously transmitted by superposing their codewords with different power fractions under a total power constraint. The main challenge is to find a simple way to allocate these power fractions to all users taking into account the fairness/throughput tradeoff. We present an algorithm with this purpose and we apply it in the case of popular proportional fairness (PF). The obtained results using SC are illustrated with various numerical examples where, comparing to TS, a rate increase between 20% and 300% is observed.
1305.0625
CONATION: English Command Input/Output System for Computers
cs.HC cs.CL
In this information technology age, a convenient and user friendly interface is required to operate the computer system on very fast rate. In the human being, speech being a natural mode of communication has potential to being a fast and convenient mode of interaction with computer. Speech recognition will play an important role in taking technology to them. It is the need of this era to access the information within seconds. This paper describes the design and development of speaker independent and English command interpreted system for computers. HMM model is used to represent the phoneme like speech commands. Experiments have been done on real world data and system has been trained in normal condition for real world subject.
1305.0626
An Improved EM algorithm
cs.LG cs.AI stat.ML
In this paper, we firstly give a brief introduction of expectation maximization (EM) algorithm, and then discuss the initial value sensitivity of expectation maximization algorithm. Subsequently, we give a short proof of EM's convergence. Then, we implement experiments with the expectation maximization algorithm (We implement all the experiments on Gaussion mixture model (GMM)). Our experiment with expectation maximization is performed in the following three cases: initialize randomly; initialize with result of K-means; initialize with result of K-medoids. The experiment result shows that expectation maximization algorithm depend on its initial state or parameters. And we found that EM initialized with K-medoids performed better than both the one initialized with K-means and the one initialized randomly.
1305.0638
Feature Selection Based on Term Frequency and T-Test for Text Categorization
cs.LG cs.IR stat.ML
Much work has been done on feature selection. Existing methods are based on document frequency, such as Chi-Square Statistic, Information Gain etc. However, these methods have two shortcomings: one is that they are not reliable for low-frequency terms, and the other is that they only count whether one term occurs in a document and ignore the term frequency. Actually, high-frequency terms within a specific category are often regards as discriminators. This paper focuses on how to construct the feature selection function based on term frequency, and proposes a new approach based on $t$-test, which is used to measure the diversity of the distributions of a term between the specific category and the entire corpus. Extensive comparative experiments on two text corpora using three classifiers show that our new approach is comparable to or or slightly better than the state-of-the-art feature selection methods (i.e., $\chi^2$, and IG) in terms of macro-$F_1$ and micro-$F_1$.
1305.0664
Practical Implementation of Spatial Modulation
cs.IT math.IT
In this work we seek to characterise the performance of spatial modulation (SM) and spatial multiplexing (SMX) with an experimental test bed. Two National Instruments (NI)-PXIe devices are used for the system testing, one for the transmitter and one for the receiver. The digital signal processing that formats the information data in preparation of transmission is described along with the digital signal processing that recovers the information data. In addition, the hardware limitations of the system are also analysed. The average bit error ratio (ABER) of the system is validated through both theoretical analysis and simulation results for SM and SMX under line of sight (LoS) channel conditions.
1305.0665
Spectral Classification Using Restricted Boltzmann Machine
cs.LG
In this study, a novel machine learning algorithm, restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), is introduced. The algorithm is applied for the spectral classification in astronomy. RBM is a bipartite generative graphical model with two separate layers (one visible layer and one hidden layer), which can extract higher level features to represent the original data. Despite generative, RBM can be used for classification when modified with a free energy and a soft-max function. Before spectral classification, the original data is binarized according to some rule. Then we resort to the binary RBM to classify cataclysmic variables (CVs) and non-CVs (one half of all the given data for training and the other half for testing). The experiment result shows state-of-the-art accuracy of 100%, which indicates the efficiency of the binary RBM algorithm.
1305.0688
On Flexible Web Services Composition Networks
cs.SE cs.IR
The semantic Web service community develops efforts to bring semantics to Web service descriptions and allow automatic discovery and composition. However, there is no widespread adoption of such descriptions yet, because semantically defining Web services is highly complicated and costly. As a result, production Web services still rely on syntactic descriptions, key-word based discovery and predefined compositions. Hence, more advanced research on syntactic Web services is still ongoing. In this work we build syntactic composition Web services networks with three well known similarity metrics, namely Levenshtein, Jaro and Jaro-Winkler. We perform a comparative study on the metrics performance by studying the topological properties of networks built from a test collection of real-world descriptions. It appears Jaro-Winkler finds more appropriate similarities and can be used at higher thresholds. For lower thresholds, the Jaro metric would be preferable because it detect less irrelevant relationships.
1305.0698
Learning from Imprecise and Fuzzy Observations: Data Disambiguation through Generalized Loss Minimization
cs.LG
Methods for analyzing or learning from "fuzzy data" have attracted increasing attention in recent years. In many cases, however, existing methods (for precise, non-fuzzy data) are extended to the fuzzy case in an ad-hoc manner, and without carefully considering the interpretation of a fuzzy set when being used for modeling data. Distinguishing between an ontic and an epistemic interpretation of fuzzy set-valued data, and focusing on the latter, we argue that a "fuzzification" of learning algorithms based on an application of the generic extension principle is not appropriate. In fact, the extension principle fails to properly exploit the inductive bias underlying statistical and machine learning methods, although this bias, at least in principle, offers a means for "disambiguating" the fuzzy data. Alternatively, we therefore propose a method which is based on the generalization of loss functions in empirical risk minimization, and which performs model identification and data disambiguation simultaneously. Elaborating on the fuzzification of specific types of losses, we establish connections to well-known loss functions in regression and classification. We compare our approach with related methods and illustrate its use in logistic regression for binary classification.
1305.0699
Fast, Incremental Inverted Indexing in Main Memory for Web-Scale Collections
cs.IR cs.DB
For text retrieval systems, the assumption that all data structures reside in main memory is increasingly common. In this context, we present a novel incremental inverted indexing algorithm for web-scale collections that directly constructs compressed postings lists in memory. Designing efficient in-memory algorithms requires understanding modern processor architectures and memory hierarchies: in this paper, we explore the issue of postings lists contiguity. Naturally, postings lists that occupy contiguous memory regions are preferred for retrieval, but maintaining contiguity increases complexity and slows indexing. On the other hand, allowing discontiguous index segments simplifies index construction but decreases retrieval performance. Understanding this tradeoff is our main contribution: We find that co-locating small groups of inverted list segments yields query evaluation performance that is statistically indistinguishable from fully-contiguous postings lists. In other words, it is not necessary to lay out in-memory data structures such that all postings for a term are contiguous; we can achieve ideal performance with a relatively small amount of effort.
1305.0735
Increasing Smart Meter Privacy Through Energy Harvesting and Storage Devices
cs.IT math.IT
Smart meters are key elements for the operation of smart grids. By providing near realtime information on the energy consumption of individual users, smart meters increase the efficiency in generation, distribution and storage of energy in a smart grid. The ability of the utility provider to track users energy consumption inevitably leads to important threats to privacy. In this paper, privacy in a smart metering system is studied from an information theoretic perspective in the presence of energy harvesting and storage units. It is shown that energy harvesting provides increased privacy by diversifying the energy source, while a storage device can be used to increase both the energy efficiency and the privacy of the user. For given input load and energy harvesting rates, it is shown that there exists a trade-off between the information leakage rate, which is used to measure the privacy of the user, and the wasted energy rate, which is a measure of the energy-efficiency. The impact of the energy harvesting rate and the size of the storage device on this trade-off is also studied.
1305.0751
Marginal AMP Chain Graphs
stat.ML cs.AI
We present a new family of models that is based on graphs that may have undirected, directed and bidirected edges. We name these new models marginal AMP (MAMP) chain graphs because each of them is Markov equivalent to some AMP chain graph under marginalization of some of its nodes. However, MAMP chain graphs do not only subsume AMP chain graphs but also multivariate regression chain graphs. We describe global and pairwise Markov properties for MAMP chain graphs and prove their equivalence for compositional graphoids. We also characterize when two MAMP chain graphs are Markov equivalent. For Gaussian probability distributions, we also show that every MAMP chain graph is Markov equivalent to some directed and acyclic graph with deterministic nodes under marginalization and conditioning on some of its nodes. This is important because it implies that the independence model represented by a MAMP chain graph can be accounted for by some data generating process that is partially observed and has selection bias. Finally, we modify MAMP chain graphs so that they are closed under marginalization for Gaussian probability distributions. This is a desirable feature because it guarantees parsimonious models under marginalization.
1305.0757
Hierarchies of Predominantly Connected Communities
cs.DS cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We consider communities whose vertices are predominantly connected, i.e., the vertices in each community are stronger connected to other community members of the same community than to vertices outside the community. Flake et al. introduced a hierarchical clustering algorithm that finds such predominantly connected communities of different coarseness depending on an input parameter. We present a simple and efficient method for constructing a clustering hierarchy according to Flake et al. that supersedes the necessity of choosing feasible parameter values and guarantees the completeness of the resulting hierarchy, i.e., the hierarchy contains all clusterings that can be constructed by the original algorithm for any parameter value. However, predominantly connected communities are not organized in a single hierarchy. Thus, we develop a framework that, after precomputing at most $2(n-1)$ maximum flows, admits a linear time construction of a clustering $\C(S)$ of predominantly connected communities that contains a given community $S$ and is maximum in the sense that any further clustering of predominantly connected communities that also contains $S$ is hierarchically nested in $\C(S)$. We further generalize this construction yielding a clustering with similar properties for $k$ given communities in $O(kn)$ time. This admits the analysis of a network's structure with respect to various communities in different hierarchies.
1305.0763
Quantifying the Impact of Parameter Tuning on Nature-Inspired Algorithms
cs.NE
The problem of parameterization is often central to the effective deployment of nature-inspired algorithms. However, finding the optimal set of parameter values for a combination of problem instance and solution method is highly challenging, and few concrete guidelines exist on how and when such tuning may be performed. Previous work tends to either focus on a specific algorithm or use benchmark problems, and both of these restrictions limit the applicability of any findings. Here, we examine a number of different algorithms, and study them in a "problem agnostic" fashion (i.e., one that is not tied to specific instances) by considering their performance on fitness landscapes with varying characteristics. Using this approach, we make a number of observations on which algorithms may (or may not) benefit from tuning, and in which specific circumstances.
1305.0817
Optimal Relay Selection for Physical-Layer Security in Cooperative Wireless Networks
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we explore the physical-layer security in cooperative wireless networks with multiple relays where both amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) protocols are considered. We propose the AF and DF based optimal relay selection (i.e., AFbORS and DFbORS) schemes to improve the wireless security against eavesdropping attack. For the purpose of comparison, we examine the traditional AFbORS and DFbORS schemes, denoted by T-AFbORS and TDFbORS, respectively. We also investigate a so-called multiple relay combining (MRC) framework and present the traditional AF and DF based MRC schemes, called T-AFbMRC and TDFbMRC, where multiple relays participate in forwarding the source signal to destination which then combines its received signals from the multiple relays. We derive closed-form intercept probability expressions of the proposed AFbORS and DFbORS (i.e., P-AFbORS and P-DFbORS) as well as the T-AFbORS, TDFbORS, T-AFbMRC and T-DFbMRC schemes in the presence of eavesdropping attack. We further conduct an asymptotic intercept probability analysis to evaluate the diversity order performance of relay selection schemes and show that no matter which relaying protocol is considered (i.e., AF and DF), the traditional and proposed optimal relay selection approaches both achieve the diversity order M where M represents the number of relays. In addition, numerical results show that for both AF and DF protocols, the intercept probability performance of proposed optimal relay selection is strictly better than that of the traditional relay selection and multiple relay combining methods.
1305.0842
Time Invariant Error Bounds for Modified-CS based Sparse Signal Sequence Recovery
cs.IT math.IT
In this work, we obtain performance guarantees for modified-CS and for its improved version, modified-CS-Add-LS-Del, for recursive reconstruction of a time sequence of sparse signals from a reduced set of noisy measurements available at each time. Under mild assumptions, we show that the support recovery error of both algorithms is bounded by a time-invariant and small value at all times. The same is also true for the reconstruction error. Under a slow support change assumption, (i) the support recovery error bound is small compared to the support size; and (ii) our results hold under weaker assumptions on the number of measurements than what $\ell_1$ minimization for noisy data needs. We first give a general result that only assumes a bound on support size, number of support changes and number of small magnitude nonzero entries at each time. Later, we specialize the main idea of these results for two sets of signal change assumptions that model the class of problems in which a new element that is added to the support either gets added at a large initial magnitude or its magnitude slowly increases to a large enough value within a finite delay. Simulation experiments are shown to back up our claims.
1305.0848
Bound entangled states with a private key and their classical counterpart
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
Entanglement is a fundamental resource for quantum information processing. In its pure form, it allows quantum teleportation and sharing classical secrets. Realistic quantum states are noisy and their usefulness is only partially understood. Bound-entangled states are central to this question---they have no distillable entanglement, yet sometimes still have a private classical key. We present a construction of bound-entangled states with private key based on classical probability distributions. From this emerge states possessing a new classical analogue of bound entanglement, distinct from the long-sought bound information. We also find states of smaller dimensions and higher key rates than previously known. Our construction has implications for classical cryptography: we show that existing protocols are insufficient for extracting private key from our distributions due to their "bound-entangled" nature. We propose a simple extension of existing protocols that can extract key from them.
1305.0860
Nonlinearity Computation for Sparse Boolean Functions
cs.IT math.IT
An algorithm for computing the nonlinearity of a Boolean function from its algebraic normal form (ANF) is proposed. By generalizing the expression of the weight of a Boolean function in terms of its ANF coefficients, a formulation of the distances to linear functions is obtained. The special structure of these distances can be exploited to reduce the task of nonlinearity computation to solving an associated binary integer programming problem. The proposed algorithm can be used in cases where applying the Fast Walsh transform is infeasible, typically when the number of input variables exceeds 40.
1305.0868
Precoding-Based Network Alignment For Three Unicast Sessions
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the problem of network coding across three unicast sessions over a directed acyclic graph, where each sender and the receiver is connected to the network via a single edge of unit capacity. We consider a network model in which the middle of the network only performs random linear network coding, and restrict our approaches to precoding-based linear schemes, where the senders use precoding matrices to encode source symbols. We adapt a precoding-based interference alignment technique, originally developed for the wireless interference channel, to construct a precoding-based linear scheme, which we refer to as as a {\em precoding-based network alignment scheme (PBNA)}. A primary difference between this setting and the wireless interference channel is that the network topology can introduce dependencies between elements of the transfer matrix, which we refer to as coupling relations, and can potentially affect the achievable rate of PBNA. We identify all possible such coupling relations, and interpret these coupling relations in terms of network topology and present polynomial-time algorithms to check the presence of these coupling relations. Finally, we show that, depending on the coupling relations present in the network, the optimal symmetric rate achieved by precoding-based linear scheme can take only three possible values, all of which can be achieved by PBNA.
1305.0870
Computing a k-sparse n-length Discrete Fourier Transform using at most 4k samples and O(k log k) complexity
cs.DS cs.IT cs.MM math.IT
Given an $n$-length input signal $\mbf{x}$, it is well known that its Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), $\mbf{X}$, can be computed in $O(n \log n)$ complexity using a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). If the spectrum $\mbf{X}$ is exactly $k$-sparse (where $k<<n$), can we do better? We show that asymptotically in $k$ and $n$, when $k$ is sub-linear in $n$ (precisely, $k \propto n^{\delta}$ where $0 < \delta <1$), and the support of the non-zero DFT coefficients is uniformly random, we can exploit this sparsity in two fundamental ways (i) {\bf {sample complexity}}: we need only $M=rk$ deterministically chosen samples of the input signal $\mbf{x}$ (where $r < 4$ when $0 < \delta < 0.99$); and (ii) {\bf {computational complexity}}: we can reliably compute the DFT $\mbf{X}$ using $O(k \log k)$ operations, where the constants in the big Oh are small and are related to the constants involved in computing a small number of DFTs of length approximately equal to the sparsity parameter $k$. Our algorithm succeeds with high probability, with the probability of failure vanishing to zero asymptotically in the number of samples acquired, $M$.
1305.0871
Dictionary learning based image enhancement for rarity detection
cs.CV
Image enhancement is an important image processing technique that processes images suitably for a specific application e.g. image editing. The conventional solutions of image enhancement are grouped into two categories which are spatial domain processing method and transform domain processing method such as contrast manipulation, histogram equalization, homomorphic filtering. This paper proposes a new image enhance method based on dictionary learning. Particularly, the proposed method adjusts the image by manipulating the rarity of dictionary atoms. Firstly, learn the dictionary through sparse coding algorithms on divided sub-image blocks. Secondly, compute the rarity of dictionary atoms on statistics of the corresponding sparse coefficients. Thirdly, adjust the rarity according to specific application and form a new dictionary. Finally, reconstruct the image using the updated dictionary and sparse coefficients. Compared with the traditional techniques, the proposed method enhances image based on the image content not on distribution of pixel grey value or frequency. The advantages of the proposed method lie in that it is in better correspondence with the response of the human visual system and more suitable for salient objects extraction. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed image enhance method.
1305.0900
Mathematical practice, crowdsourcing, and social machines
cs.SI cs.DL math.HO physics.soc-ph
The highest level of mathematics has traditionally been seen as a solitary endeavour, to produce a proof for review and acceptance by research peers. Mathematics is now at a remarkable inflexion point, with new technology radically extending the power and limits of individuals. Crowdsourcing pulls together diverse experts to solve problems; symbolic computation tackles huge routine calculations; and computers check proofs too long and complicated for humans to comprehend. Mathematical practice is an emerging interdisciplinary field which draws on philosophy and social science to understand how mathematics is produced. Online mathematical activity provides a novel and rich source of data for empirical investigation of mathematical practice - for example the community question answering system {\it mathoverflow} contains around 40,000 mathematical conversations, and {\it polymath} collaborations provide transcripts of the process of discovering proofs. Our preliminary investigations have demonstrated the importance of "soft" aspects such as analogy and creativity, alongside deduction and proof, in the production of mathematics, and have given us new ways to think about the roles of people and machines in creating new mathematical knowledge. We discuss further investigation of these resources and what it might reveal. Crowdsourced mathematical activity is an example of a "social machine", a new paradigm, identified by Berners-Lee, for viewing a combination of people and computers as a single problem-solving entity, and the subject of major international research endeavours. We outline a future research agenda for mathematics social machines, a combination of people, computers, and mathematical archives to create and apply mathematics, with the potential to change the way people do mathematics, and to transform the reach, pace, and impact of mathematics research.
1305.0904
What does mathoverflow tell us about the production of mathematics?
cs.SI cs.DL math.HO physics.soc-ph
The highest level of mathematics research is traditionally seen as a solitary activity. Yet new innovations by mathematicians themselves are starting to harness the power of social computation to create new modes of mathematical production. We study the effectiveness of one such system, and make proposals for enhancement, drawing on AI and computer based mathematics. We analyse the content of a sample of questions and responses in the community question answering system for research mathematicians, math-overflow. We find that mathoverflow is very effective, with 90% of our sample of questions answered completely or in part. A typical response is an informal dialogue, allowing error and speculation, rather than rigorous mathematical argument: 37% of our sample discussions acknowledged error. Responses typically present information known to the respondent, and readily checked by other users: thus the effectiveness of mathoverflow comes from information sharing. We conclude that extending and the power and reach of mathoverflow through a combination of people and machines raises new challenges for artificial intelligence and computational mathematics, in particular how to handle error, analogy and informal reasoning.
1305.0909
An Asymptotically Efficient Backlog Estimate for Dynamic Frame Aloha
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper we investigate backlog estimation procedures for Dynamic Frame Aloha (DFA) in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) environment. In particular, we address the tag identification efficiency with any tag number $N$, including $N\rightarrow\infty$. Although in the latter case efficiency $e^{-1}$ is possible, none of the solution proposed in the literature has been shown to reach such value. We analyze Schoute's backlog estimate, which is very attractive for its simplicity, and formally show that its asymptotic efficiency is 0.311. Leveraging the analysis, we propose the Asymptotic Efficient backlog Estimate (AE$^2$) an improvement of the Schoute's backlog estimate, whose efficiency reaches $e^{-1}$ asymptotically. We further show that AE$^2$ can be optimized in order to present an efficiency very close to $e^{-1}$ for practically any value of the population size. We also evaluate the loss of efficiency when the frame size is constrained to be a power of two, as required by RFID standards for DFA, and theoretically show that the asymptotic efficiency becomes 0.356.
1305.0918
Primer and Recent Developments on Fountain Codes
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
In this paper we survey the various erasure codes which had been proposed and patented recently, and along the survey we provide introductory tutorial on many of the essential concepts and readings in erasure and Fountain codes. Packet erasure is a fundamental characteristic inherent in data storage and data transmission system. Traditionally replication/ retransmission based techniques had been employed to deal with packet erasures in such systems. While the Reed-Solomon (RS) erasure codes had been known for quite some time to improve system reliability and reduce data redundancy, the high decoding computation cost of RS codes has offset wider implementation of RS codes. However recent exponential growth in data traffic and demand for larger data storage capacity has simmered interest in erasure codes. Recent results have shown promising results to address the decoding computation complexity and redundancy tradeoff inherent in erasure codes.
1305.0922
On Comparison between Evolutionary Programming Network-based Learning and Novel Evolution Strategy Algorithm-based Learning
cs.NE cs.LG
This paper presents two different evolutionary systems - Evolutionary Programming Network (EPNet) and Novel Evolutions Strategy (NES) Algorithm. EPNet does both training and architecture evolution simultaneously, whereas NES does a fixed network and only trains the network. Five mutation operators proposed in EPNet to reflect the emphasis on evolving ANNs behaviors. Close behavioral links between parents and their offspring are maintained by various mutations, such as partial training and node splitting. On the other hand, NES uses two new genetic operators - subpopulation-based max-mean arithmetical crossover and time-variant mutation. The above-mentioned two algorithms have been tested on a number of benchmark problems, such as the medical diagnosis problems (breast cancer, diabetes, and heart disease). The results and the comparison between them are also presented in this paper.
1305.0935
The physics of custody
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI
Divorced individuals face complex situations when they have children with different ex-partners, or even more, when their new partners have children of their own. In such cases, and when kids spend every other weekend with each parent, a practical problem emerges: Is it possible to have such a custody arrangement that every couple has either all of the kids together or no kids at all? We show that in general, it is not possible, but that the number of couples that do can be maximized. The problem turns out to be equivalent to finding the ground state of a spin glass system, which is known to be equivalent to what is called a weighted max-cut problem in graph theory, and hence it is NP-Complete.
1305.0939
Intelligent Agent Based Semantic Web in Cloud Computing Environment
cs.IR
Considering today's web scenario, there is a need of effective and meaningful search over the web which is provided by Semantic Web. Existing search engines are keyword based. They are vulnerable in answering intelligent queries from the user due to the dependence of their results on information available in web pages. While semantic search engines provides efficient and relevant results as the semantic web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well defined meaning. MetaCrawler is a search tool that uses several existing search engines and provides combined results by using their own page ranking algorithm. This paper proposes development of a meta-semantic-search engine called SemanTelli which works within cloud. SemanTelli fetches results from different semantic search engines such as Hakia, DuckDuckGo, SenseBot with the help of intelligent agents that eliminate the limitations of existing search engines.
1305.0943
Weighted Electoral Control
cs.GT cs.CC cs.MA
Although manipulation and bribery have been extensively studied under weighted voting, there has been almost no work done on election control under weighted voting. This is unfortunate, since weighted voting appears in many important natural settings. In this paper, we study the complexity of controlling the outcome of weighted elections through adding and deleting voters. We obtain polynomial-time algorithms, NP-completeness results, and for many NP-complete cases, approximation algorithms. In particular, for scoring rules we completely characterize the complexity of weighted voter control. Our work shows that for quite a few important cases, either polynomial-time exact algorithms or polynomial-time approximation algorithms exist.
1305.0947
A Versatile Dependent Model for Heterogeneous Cellular Networks
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT
We propose a new model for heterogeneous cellular networks that incorporates dependencies between the layers. In particular, it places lower-tier base stations at locations that are poorly covered by the macrocells, and it includes a small-cell model for the case where the goal is to enhance network capacity.
1305.0978
Optimization Approach to Parametric Tuning of Power System Stabilizer Based on Trajectory Sensitivity Analysis
cs.SY
This paper proposed an transient-based optimal parametric tuning method for power system stabilizer (PSS) based on trajectory sensitivity (TS) analysis of hybrid system, such as hybrid power system (HPS). The main objective is to explore a systematic optimization approach of PSS under large disturbance of HPS, where its nonlinear features cannot be ignored, which, however, the traditional eigenvalue-based small signal optimizations do neglect the higher order terms of Taylor series of the system state equations. In contrast to previous work, the proposed TS optimal method focuses on the gradient information of objective function with respect to decision variables by means of the trajectory sensitivity of HPS to the PSS parameters, and optimizes the PSS parameters in terms of the conjugate gradient method. Firstly, the traditional parametric tuning methods of PSS are introduced. Then, the systematic mathematical models and transient trajectory simulation are presented by introducing switching/reset events in terms of triggering hypersurfaces so as to formulate the optimization problem using TS analysis. Finally, a case study of IEEE three-machine-nine-bus standard test system is discussed in detail to exemplify the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed optimal method.
1305.0983
Real-Time Welfare-Maximizing Regulation Allocation in Dynamic Aggregator-EVs System
cs.SY cs.PF math.OC
The concept of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) has gained recent interest as more and more electric vehicles (EVs) are put to use. In this paper, we consider a dynamic aggregator-EVs system, where an aggregator centrally coordinates a large number of dynamic EVs to perform regulation service. We propose a Welfare-Maximizing Regulation Allocation (WMRA) algorithm for the aggregator to fairly allocate the regulation amount among its EVs. Compared to previous works, WMRA accommodates a wide spectrum of vital system characteristics, including dynamics of EV, limited EV battery size, EV battery degradation cost, and the cost of using external energy sources for the aggregator. The algorithm operates in real time and does not require any prior knowledge of the statistical information of the system. Theoretically, we demonstrate that WMRA is away from the optimum by O(1/V), where V is a controlling parameter depending on EV's battery size. In addition, our simulation results indicate that WMRA can substantially outperform a suboptimal greedy algorithm.
1305.1002
Efficient Estimation of the number of neighbours in Probabilistic K Nearest Neighbour Classification
cs.LG stat.ML
Probabilistic k-nearest neighbour (PKNN) classification has been introduced to improve the performance of original k-nearest neighbour (KNN) classification algorithm by explicitly modelling uncertainty in the classification of each feature vector. However, an issue common to both KNN and PKNN is to select the optimal number of neighbours, $k$. The contribution of this paper is to incorporate the uncertainty in $k$ into the decision making, and in so doing use Bayesian model averaging to provide improved classification. Indeed the problem of assessing the uncertainty in $k$ can be viewed as one of statistical model selection which is one of the most important technical issues in the statistics and machine learning domain. In this paper, a new functional approximation algorithm is proposed to reconstruct the density of the model (order) without relying on time consuming Monte Carlo simulations. In addition, this algorithm avoids cross validation by adopting Bayesian framework. The performance of this algorithm yielded very good performance on several real experimental datasets.
1305.1012
Low Complexity Delay-Constrained Beamforming for Multi-User MIMO Systems with Imperfect CSIT
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we consider the delay-constrained beamforming control for downlink multi-user MIMO (MU- MIMO) systems with imperfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). The delay-constrained control problem is formulated as an infinite horizon average cost partially observed Markov decision process. To deal with the curse of dimensionality, we introduce a virtual continuous time system and derive a closed-form approximate value function using perturbation analysis w.r.t. the CSIT errors. To deal with the challenge of the conditional packet error rate (PER), we build a tractable closed- form approximation using a Bernstein-type inequality. Based on the closed-form approximations of the relative value function and the conditional PER, we propose a conservative formulation of the original beamforming control problem. The conservative problem is non-convex and we transform it into a convex problem using the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique. We then propose an alternating iterative algorithm to solve the SDR problem. Finally, the proposed scheme is compared with various baselines through simulations and it is shown that significant performance gain can be achieved.
1305.1019
Simple Deep Random Model Ensemble
cs.LG
Representation learning and unsupervised learning are two central topics of machine learning and signal processing. Deep learning is one of the most effective unsupervised representation learning approach. The main contributions of this paper to the topics are as follows. (i) We propose to view the representative deep learning approaches as special cases of the knowledge reuse framework of clustering ensemble. (ii) We propose to view sparse coding when used as a feature encoder as the consensus function of clustering ensemble, and view dictionary learning as the training process of the base clusterings of clustering ensemble. (ii) Based on the above two views, we propose a very simple deep learning algorithm, named deep random model ensemble (DRME). It is a stack of random model ensembles. Each random model ensemble is a special k-means ensemble that discards the expectation-maximization optimization of each base k-means but only preserves the default initialization method of the base k-means. (iv) We propose to select the most powerful representation among the layers by applying DRME to clustering where the single-linkage is used as the clustering algorithm. Moreover, the DRME based clustering can also detect the number of the natural clusters accurately. Extensive experimental comparisons with 5 representation learning methods on 19 benchmark data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of DRME.
1305.1027
Regret Bounds for Reinforcement Learning with Policy Advice
stat.ML cs.LG
In some reinforcement learning problems an agent may be provided with a set of input policies, perhaps learned from prior experience or provided by advisors. We present a reinforcement learning with policy advice (RLPA) algorithm which leverages this input set and learns to use the best policy in the set for the reinforcement learning task at hand. We prove that RLPA has a sub-linear regret of \tilde O(\sqrt{T}) relative to the best input policy, and that both this regret and its computational complexity are independent of the size of the state and action space. Our empirical simulations support our theoretical analysis. This suggests RLPA may offer significant advantages in large domains where some prior good policies are provided.
1305.1040
On the Convergence and Consistency of the Blurring Mean-Shift Process
stat.ML cs.LG
The mean-shift algorithm is a popular algorithm in computer vision and image processing. It can also be cast as a minimum gamma-divergence estimation. In this paper we focus on the "blurring" mean shift algorithm, which is one version of the mean-shift process that successively blurs the dataset. The analysis of the blurring mean-shift is relatively more complicated compared to the nonblurring version, yet the algorithm convergence and the estimation consistency have not been well studied in the literature. In this paper we prove both the convergence and the consistency of the blurring mean-shift. We also perform simulation studies to compare the efficiency of the blurring and the nonblurring versions of the mean-shift algorithms. Our results show that the blurring mean-shift has more efficiency.