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1305.1044
Optimal Fully Electric Vehicle load balancing with an ADMM algorithm in Smartgrids
cs.SY cs.DC
In this paper we present a system architecture and a suitable control methodology for the load balancing of Fully Electric Vehicles at Charging Station (CS). Within the proposed architecture, control methodologies allow to adapt Distributed Energy Resources (DER) generation profiles and active loads to ensure economic benefits to each actor. The key aspect is the organization in two levels of control: at local level a Load Area Controller (LAC) optimally calculates the FEVs charging sessions, while at higher level a Macro Load Area Aggregator (MLAA) provides DER with energy production profiles, and LACs with energy withdrawal profiles. Proposed control methodologies involve the solution of a Walrasian market equilibrium and the design of a distributed algorithm.
1305.1052
Hybridization of Otsu Method and Median Filter for Color Image Segmentation
cs.CV
In this article a novel algorithm for color image segmentation has been developed. The proposed algorithm based on combining two existing methods in such a novel way to obtain a significant method to partition the color image into significant regions. On the first phase, the traditional Otsu method for gray channel image segmentation were applied for each of the R,G, and B channels separately to determine the suitable automatic threshold for each channel. After that, the new modified channels are integrated again to formulate a new color image. The resulted image suffers from some kind of distortion. To get rid of this distortion, the second phase is arise which is the median filter to smooth the image and increase the segmented regions. This process looks very significant by the ocular eye. Experimental results were presented on a variety of test images to support the proposed algorithm.
1305.1060
On Rational Closure in Description Logics of Typicality
cs.AI
We define the notion of rational closure in the context of Description Logics extended with a tipicality operator. We start from ALC+T, an extension of ALC with a typicality operator T: intuitively allowing to express concepts of the form T(C), meant to select the "most normal" instances of a concept C. The semantics we consider is based on rational model. But we further restrict the semantics to minimal models, that is to say, to models that minimise the rank of domain elements. We show that this semantics captures exactly a notion of rational closure which is a natural extension to Description Logics of Lehmann and Magidor's original one. We also extend the notion of rational closure to the Abox component. We provide an ExpTime algorithm for computing the rational closure of an Abox and we show that it is sound and complete with respect to the minimal model semantics.
1305.1082
Random Linear Network Codes for Secrecy over Wireless Broadcast Channels
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
We consider a set of $n$ messages and a group of $k$ clients. Each client is privileged for receiving an arbitrary subset of the messages over a broadcast erasure channel, which generalizes scenario of a previous work. We propose a method for secretly delivering each message to its privileged recipients in a way that each receiver can decode its own messages but not the others'. Our method is based on combining the messages using linear network coding and hiding the decoding coefficients from the unprivileged clients. We provide an information theoretic proof for the secrecy of the proposed method. In particular we show that an unprivileged client cannot obtain any meaningful information even if it holds the entire set of coded data packets transmitted over the channel. Moreover, in our method, the decoding complexity is desirably low at the receiver side.
1305.1091
Further improvements on the Feng-Rao bound for dual codes
cs.IT math.AC math.AG math.IT
Salazar, Dunn and Graham in [Salazar et. al., 2006] presented an improved Feng-Rao bound for the minimum distance of dual codes. In this work we take the improvement a step further. Both the original bound by Salazar et. al., as well as our improvement are lifted so that they deal with generalized Hamming weights. We also demonstrate the advantage of working with one-way well-behaving pairs rather than weakly well-behaving or well-behaving pairs.
1305.1102
Incremental Sampling-based Algorithm for Minimum-violation Motion Planning
cs.RO
This paper studies the problem of control strategy synthesis for dynamical systems with differential constraints to fulfill a given reachability goal while satisfying a set of safety rules. Particular attention is devoted to goals that become feasible only if a subset of the safety rules are violated. The proposed algorithm computes a control law, that minimizes the level of unsafety while the desired goal is guaranteed to be reached. This problem is motivated by an autonomous car navigating an urban environment while following rules of the road such as "always travel in right lane'' and "do not change lanes frequently''. Ideas behind sampling based motion-planning algorithms, such as Probabilistic Road Maps (PRMs) and Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRTs), are employed to incrementally construct a finite concretization of the dynamics as a durational Kripke structure. In conjunction with this, a weighted finite automaton that captures the safety rules is used in order to find an optimal trajectory that minimizes the violation of safety rules. We prove that the proposed algorithm guarantees asymptotic optimality, i.e., almost-sure convergence to optimal solutions. We present results of simulation experiments and an implementation on an autonomous urban mobility-on-demand system.
1305.1112
json2run: a tool for experiment design & analysis
cs.CE
json2run is a tool to automate the running, storage and analysis of experiments. The main advantage of json2run is that it allows to describe a set of experiments concisely as a JSON-formatted parameter tree. It also supports parallel execution of experiments, automatic parameter tuning through the F-Race framework and storage and analysis of experiments with MongoDB and R.
1305.1114
Towards User Profile Modelling in Recommender System
cs.IR
The notion of profile appeared in the 1970s decade, which was mainly due to the need to create custom applications that could be adapted to the user. In this paper, we treat the different aspects of the user's profile, defining it, profile, its features and its indicators of interest, and then we describe the different approaches of modelling and acquiring the user's interests.
1305.1120
The predictability of consumer visitation patterns
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
We consider hundreds of thousands of individual economic transactions to ask: how predictable are consumers in their merchant visitation patterns? Our results suggest that, in the long-run, much of our seemingly elective activity is actually highly predictable. Notwithstanding a wide range of individual preferences, shoppers share regularities in how they visit merchant locations over time. Yet while aggregate behavior is largely predictable, the interleaving of shopping events introduces important stochastic elements at short time scales. These short- and long-scale patterns suggest a theoretical upper bound on predictability, and describe the accuracy of a Markov model in predicting a person's next location. We incorporate population-level transition probabilities in the predictive models, and find that in many cases these improve accuracy. While our results point to the elusiveness of precise predictions about where a person will go next, they suggest the existence, at large time-scales, of regularities across the population.
1305.1145
Techniques for Feature Extraction In Speech Recognition System : A Comparative Study
cs.SD cs.CL
The time domain waveform of a speech signal carries all of the auditory information. From the phonological point of view, it little can be said on the basis of the waveform itself. However, past research in mathematics, acoustics, and speech technology have provided many methods for converting data that can be considered as information if interpreted correctly. In order to find some statistically relevant information from incoming data, it is important to have mechanisms for reducing the information of each segment in the audio signal into a relatively small number of parameters, or features. These features should describe each segment in such a characteristic way that other similar segments can be grouped together by comparing their features. There are enormous interesting and exceptional ways to describe the speech signal in terms of parameters. Though, they all have their strengths and weaknesses, we have presented some of the most used methods with their importance.
1305.1163
A Computer Vision System for Attention Mapping in SLAM based 3D Models
cs.CV
The study of human factors in the frame of interaction studies has been relevant for usability engi-neering and ergonomics for decades. Today, with the advent of wearable eye-tracking and Google glasses, monitoring of human factors will soon become ubiquitous. This work describes a computer vision system that enables pervasive mapping and monitoring of human attention. The key contribu-tion is that our methodology enables full 3D recovery of the gaze pointer, human view frustum and associated human centred measurements directly into an automatically computed 3D model in real-time. We apply RGB-D SLAM and descriptor matching methodologies for the 3D modelling, locali-zation and fully automated annotation of ROIs (regions of interest) within the acquired 3D model. This innovative methodology will open new avenues for attention studies in real world environments, bringing new potential into automated processing for human factors technologies.
1305.1169
Multi-Objective AI Planning: Comparing Aggregation and Pareto Approaches
cs.AI
Most real-world Planning problems are multi-objective, trying to minimize both the makespan of the solution plan, and some cost of the actions involved in the plan. But most, if not all existing approaches are based on single-objective planners, and use an aggregation of the objectives to remain in the single-objective context. Divide and Evolve (DaE) is an evolutionary planner that won the temporal deterministic satisficing track at the last International Planning Competitions (IPC). Like all Evolutionary Algorithms (EA), it can easily be turned into a Pareto-based Multi-Objective EA. It is however important to validate the resulting algorithm by comparing it with the aggregation approach: this is the goal of this paper. The comparative experiments on a recently proposed benchmark set that are reported here demonstrate the usefulness of going Pareto-based in AI Planning.
1305.1172
Gromov-Hausdorff Approximation of Metric Spaces with Linear Structure
cs.CG cs.LG math.MG
In many real-world applications data come as discrete metric spaces sampled around 1-dimensional filamentary structures that can be seen as metric graphs. In this paper we address the metric reconstruction problem of such filamentary structures from data sampled around them. We prove that they can be approximated, with respect to the Gromov-Hausdorff distance by well-chosen Reeb graphs (and some of their variants) and we provide an efficient and easy to implement algorithm to compute such approximations in almost linear time. We illustrate the performances of our algorithm on a few synthetic and real data sets.
1305.1175
IMDB network revisited: unveiling fractal and modular properties from a typical small-world network
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
We study a subset of the movie collaboration network, imdb.com, where only adult movies are included. We show that there are many benefits in using such a network, which can serve as a prototype for studying social interactions. We find that the strength of links, i.e., how many times two actors have collaborated with each other, is an important factor that can significantly influence the network topology. We see that when we link all actors in the same movie with each other, the network becomes small-world, lacking a proper modular structure. On the other hand, by imposing a threshold on the minimum number of links two actors should have to be in our studied subset, the network topology becomes naturally fractal. This occurs due to a large number of meaningless links, namely, links connecting actors that did not actually interact. We focus our analysis on the fractal and modular properties of this resulting network, and show that the renormalization group analysis can characterize the self-similar structure of these networks.
1305.1187
Calculation of the Performance of Communication Systems from Measured Oscillator Phase Noise
cs.IT math.IT
Oscillator phase noise (PN) is one of the major problems that affect the performance of communication systems. In this paper, a direct connection between oscillator measurements, in terms of measured single-side band PN spectrum, and the optimal communication system performance, in terms of the resulting error vector magnitude (EVM) due to PN, is mathematically derived and analyzed. First, a statistical model of the PN, considering the effect of white and colored noise sources, is derived. Then, we utilize this model to derive the modified Bayesian Cramer-Rao bound on PN estimation, and use it to find an EVM bound for the system performance. Based on our analysis, it is found that the influence from different noise regions strongly depends on the communication bandwidth, i.e., the symbol rate. For high symbol rate communication systems, cumulative PN that appears near carrier is of relatively low importance compared to the white PN far from carrier. Our results also show that 1/f^3 noise is more predictable compared to 1/f^2 noise and in a fair comparison it affects the performance less.
1305.1193
Canonical Forms and Automorphisms in the Projective Space
cs.IT cs.DM math.CO math.IT
Let $\C$ be a sequence of multisets of subspaces of a vector space $\F_q^k$. We describe a practical algorithm which computes a canonical form and the stabilizer of $\C$ under the group action of the general semilinear group. It allows us to solve canonical form problems in coding theory, i.e. we are able to compute canonical forms of linear codes, $\F_{q}$-linear block codes over the alphabet $\F_{q^s}$ and random network codes under their natural notion of equivalence. The algorithm that we are going to develop is based on the partition refinement method and generalizes a previous work by the author on the computation of canonical forms of linear codes.
1305.1199
How to find real-world applications for compressive sensing
cs.CV
The potential of compressive sensing (CS) has spurred great interest in the research community and is a fast growing area of research. However, research translating CS theory into practical hardware and demonstrating clear and significant benefits with this hardware over current, conventional imaging techniques has been limited. This article helps researchers to find those niche applications where the CS approach provides substantial gain over conventional approaches by articulating lessons learned in finding one such application; sea skimming missile detection. As a proof of concept, it is demonstrated that a simplified CS missile detection architecture and algorithm provides comparable results to the conventional imaging approach but using a smaller FPA. The primary message is that all of the excitement surrounding CS is necessary and appropriate for encouraging our creativity but we all must also take off our "rose colored glasses" and critically judge our ideas, methods and results relative to conventional imaging approaches.
1305.1206
A Contrario Selection of Optimal Partitions for Image Segmentation
cs.CV
We present a novel segmentation algorithm based on a hierarchical representation of images. The main contribution of this work is to explore the capabilities of the A Contrario reasoning when applied to the segmentation problem, and to overcome the limitations of current algorithms within that framework. This exploratory approach has three main goals. Our first goal is to extend the search space of greedy merging algorithms to the set of all partitions spanned by a certain hierarchy, and to cast the segmentation as a selection problem within this space. In this way we increase the number of tested partitions and thus we potentially improve the segmentation results. In addition, this space is considerably smaller than the space of all possible partitions, thus we still keep the complexity controlled. Our second goal aims to improve the locality of region merging algorithms, which usually merge pairs of neighboring regions. In this work, we overcome this limitation by introducing a validation procedure for complete partitions, rather than for pairs of regions. The third goal is to perform an exhaustive experimental evaluation methodology in order to provide reproducible results. Finally, we embed the selection process on a statistical A Contrario framework which allows us to have only one free parameter related to the desired scale.
1305.1221
Construction of two SD Codes
cs.IT math.IT
SD codes are erasure codes that address the mixed failure mode of current RAID systems. Rather than dedicate entire disks to erasure coding, as done in RAID-5, RAID-6 and Reed-Solomon coding, an SD code dedicates entire disks, plus individual sectors to erasure coding. The code then tolerates combinations of disk and sector errors, rather than solely disk errors. It is been an open problem to construct general codes that have the SD property, and previous work has relied on Monte Carlo searches. In this paper, we present two general constructions that address the cases with one disk and two sectors, and two disks and two sectors. Additionally, we make an observation about shortening SD codes that allows us to prune Monte Carlo searches.
1305.1230
Rate Distortion Function for a Class of Relative Entropy Sources
cs.IT math.IT
This paper deals with rate distortion or source coding with fidelity criterion, in measure spaces, for a class of source distributions. The class of source distributions is described by a relative entropy constraint set between the true and a nominal distribution. The rate distortion problem for the class is thus formulated and solved using minimax strategies, which result in robust source coding with fidelity criterion. It is shown that minimax and maxmin strategies can be computed explicitly, and they are generalizations of the classical solution. Finally, for discrete memoryless uncertain sources, the rate distortion theorem is stated for the class omitting the derivations while the converse is derived.
1305.1256
A Convex Functional for Image Denoising based on Patches with Constrained Overlaps and its vectorial application to Low Dose Differential Phase Tomography
math.NA cs.CV
We solve the image denoising problem with a dictionary learning technique by writing a convex functional of a new form. This functional contains beside the usual sparsity inducing term and fidelity term, a new term which induces similarity between overlapping patches in the overlap regions. The functional depends on two free regularization parameters: a coefficient multiplying the sparsity-inducing $L_{1}$ norm of the patch basis functions coefficients, and a coefficient multiplying the $L_{2}$ norm of the differences between patches in the overlapping regions. The solution is found by applying the iterative proximal gradient descent method with FISTA acceleration. In the case of tomography reconstruction we calculate the gradient by applying projection of the solution and its error backprojection at each iterative step. We study the quality of the solution, as a function of the regularization parameters and noise, on synthetic datas for which the solution is a-priori known. We apply the method on experimental data in the case of Differential Phase Tomography. For this case we use an original approach which consists in using vectorial patches, each patch having two components: one per each gradient component. The resulting algorithm, implemented in the ESRF tomography reconstruction code PyHST, results to be robust, efficient, and well adapted to strongly reduce the required dose and the number of projections in medical tomography.
1305.1268
A Contraction Analysis of the Convergence of Risk-Sensitive Filters
math.OC cs.SY
A contraction analysis of risk-sensitive Riccati equations is proposed. When the state-space model is reachable and observable, a block-update implementation of the risk-sensitive filter is used to show that the N-fold composition of the Riccati map is strictly contractive with respect to the Riemannian metric of positive definite matrices, when N is larger than the number of states. The range of values of the risk-sensitivity parameter for which the map remains contractive can be estimated a priori. It is also found that a second condition must be imposed on the risk-sensitivity parameter and on the initial error variance to ensure that the solution of the risk-sensitive Riccati equation remains positive definite at all times. The two conditions obtained can be viewed as extending to the multivariable case an earlier analysis of Whittle for the scalar case.
1305.1288
Decelerated invasion and waning moon patterns in public goods games with delayed distribution
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI q-bio.PE
We study the evolution of cooperation in the spatial public goods game, focusing on the effects that are brought about by the delayed distribution of goods that accumulate in groups due to the continuous investments of cooperators. We find that intermediate delays enhance network reciprocity because of a decelerated invasion of defectors, who are unable to reap the same high short-term benefits as they do in the absence of delayed distribution. Long delays, however, introduce a risk because the large accumulated wealth might fall into the wrong hands. Indeed, as soon as the curvature of a cooperative cluster turns negative, the engulfed defectors can collect the heritage of many generations of cooperators, and by doing so start a waning moon pattern that nullifies the benefits of decelerated invasion. Accidental meeting points of growing cooperative clusters may also act as triggers for the waning moon effect, thus linking the success of cooperators with their propensity to fail in a rather bizarre way. Our results highlight that "investing into the future" is a good idea only if that future is sufficiently near and not likely to be burdened by inflation.
1305.1295
Tight Lower Bounds for Greedy Routing in Higher-Dimensional Small-World Grids
cs.DS cs.CC cs.NI cs.SI
We consider Kleinberg's celebrated small world graph model (Kleinberg, 2000), in which a D-dimensional grid {0,...,n-1}^D is augmented with a constant number of additional unidirectional edges leaving each node. These long range edges are determined at random according to a probability distribution (the augmenting distribution), which is the same for each node. Kleinberg suggested using the inverse D-th power distribution, in which node v is the long range contact of node u with a probability proportional to ||u-v||^(-D). He showed that such an augmenting distribution allows to route a message efficiently in the resulting random graph: The greedy algorithm, where in each intermediate node the message travels over a link that brings the message closest to the target w.r.t. the Manhattan distance, finds a path of expected length O(log^2 n) between any two nodes. In this paper we prove that greedy routing does not perform asymptotically better for any uniform and isotropic augmenting distribution, i.e., the probability that node u has a particular long range contact v is independent of the labels of u and v and only a function of ||u-v||. In order to obtain the result, we introduce a novel proof technique: We define a budget game, in which a token travels over a game board, while the player manages a "probability budget". In each round, the player bets part of her remaining probability budget on step sizes. A step size is chosen at random according to a probability distribution of the player's bet. The token then makes progress as determined by the chosen step size, while some of the player's bet is removed from her probability budget. We prove a tight lower bound for such a budget game, and then obtain a lower bound for greedy routing in the D-dimensional grid by a reduction.
1305.1319
New Alignment Methods for Discriminative Book Summarization
cs.CL
We consider the unsupervised alignment of the full text of a book with a human-written summary. This presents challenges not seen in other text alignment problems, including a disparity in length and, consequent to this, a violation of the expectation that individual words and phrases should align, since large passages and chapters can be distilled into a single summary phrase. We present two new methods, based on hidden Markov models, specifically targeted to this problem, and demonstrate gains on an extractive book summarization task. While there is still much room for improvement, unsupervised alignment holds intrinsic value in offering insight into what features of a book are deemed worthy of summarization.
1305.1343
Towards an Author-Topic-Term-Model Visualization of 100 Years of German Sociological Society Proceedings
cs.DL cs.CL cs.IR
Author co-citation studies employ factor analysis to reduce high-dimensional co-citation matrices to low-dimensional and possibly interpretable factors, but these studies do not use any information from the text bodies of publications. We hypothesise that term frequencies may yield useful information for scientometric analysis. In our work we ask if word features in combination with Bayesian analysis allow well-founded science mapping studies. This work goes back to the roots of Mosteller and Wallace's (1964) statistical text analysis using word frequency features and a Bayesian inference approach, tough with different goals. To answer our research question we (i) introduce a new data set on which the experiments are carried out, (ii) describe the Bayesian model employed for inference and (iii) present first results of the analysis.
1305.1344
Speckle Noise Reduction in Medical Ultrasound Images
cs.CV
Ultrasound imaging is an incontestable vital tool for diagnosis, it provides in non-invasive manner the internal structure of the body to detect eventually diseases or abnormalities tissues. Unfortunately, the presence of speckle noise in these images affects edges and fine details which limit the contrast resolution and make diagnostic more difficult. In this paper, we propose a denoising approach which combines logarithmic transformation and a non linear diffusion tensor. Since speckle noise is multiplicative and nonwhite process, the logarithmic transformation is a reasonable choice to convert signaldependent or pure multiplicative noise to an additive one. The key idea from using diffusion tensor is to adapt the flow diffusion towards the local orientation by applying anisotropic diffusion along the coherent structure direction of interesting features in the image. To illustrate the effective performance of our algorithm, we present some experimental results on synthetically and real echographic images.
1305.1359
A Differential Equations Approach to Optimizing Regret Trade-offs
cs.LG
We consider the classical question of predicting binary sequences and study the {\em optimal} algorithms for obtaining the best possible regret and payoff functions for this problem. The question turns out to be also equivalent to the problem of optimal trade-offs between the regrets of two experts in an "experts problem", studied before by \cite{kearns-regret}. While, say, a regret of $\Theta(\sqrt{T})$ is known, we argue that it important to ask what is the provably optimal algorithm for this problem --- both because it leads to natural algorithms, as well as because regret is in fact often comparable in magnitude to the final payoffs and hence is a non-negligible term. In the basic setting, the result essentially follows from a classical result of Cover from '65. Here instead, we focus on another standard setting, of time-discounted payoffs, where the final "stopping time" is not specified. We exhibit an explicit characterization of the optimal regret for this setting. To obtain our main result, we show that the optimal payoff functions have to satisfy the Hermite differential equation, and hence are given by the solutions to this equation. It turns out that characterization of the payoff function is qualitatively different from the classical (non-discounted) setting, and, namely, there's essentially a unique optimal solution.
1305.1363
One-Pass AUC Optimization
cs.LG
AUC is an important performance measure and many algorithms have been devoted to AUC optimization, mostly by minimizing a surrogate convex loss on a training data set. In this work, we focus on one-pass AUC optimization that requires only going through the training data once without storing the entire training dataset, where conventional online learning algorithms cannot be applied directly because AUC is measured by a sum of losses defined over pairs of instances from different classes. We develop a regression-based algorithm which only needs to maintain the first and second order statistics of training data in memory, resulting a storage requirement independent from the size of training data. To efficiently handle high dimensional data, we develop a randomized algorithm that approximates the covariance matrices by low rank matrices. We verify, both theoretically and empirically, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
1305.1371
Granular association rules for multi-valued data
cs.IR cs.DB
Granular association rule is a new approach to reveal patterns hide in many-to-many relationships of relational databases. Different types of data such as nominal, numeric and multi-valued ones should be dealt with in the process of rule mining. In this paper, we study multi-valued data and develop techniques to filter out strong however uninteresting rules. An example of such rule might be "male students rate movies released in 1990s that are NOT thriller." This kind of rules, called negative granular association rules, often overwhelms positive ones which are more useful. To address this issue, we filter out negative granules such as "NOT thriller" in the process of granule generation. In this way, only positive granular association rules are generated and strong ones are mined. Experimental results on the movielens data set indicate that most rules are negative, and our technique is effective to filter them out.
1305.1372
Cold-start recommendation through granular association rules
cs.IR
Recommender systems are popular in e-commerce as they suggest items of interest to users. Researchers have addressed the cold-start problem where either the user or the item is new. However, the situation with both new user and new item has seldom been considered. In this paper, we propose a cold-start recommendation approach to this situation based on granular association rules. Specifically, we provide a means for describing users and items through information granules, a means for generating association rules between users and items, and a means for recommending items to users using these rules. Experiments are undertaken on a publicly available dataset MovieLens. Results indicate that rule sets perform similarly on the training and the testing sets, and the appropriate setting of granule is essential to the application of granular association rules.
1305.1375
Unique Perfect Phylogeny Characterizations via Uniquely Representable Chordal Graphs
cs.DM cs.CE math.CO q-bio.QM
The perfect phylogeny problem is a classic problem in computational biology, where we seek an unrooted phylogeny that is compatible with a set of qualitative characters. Such a tree exists precisely when an intersection graph associated with the character set, called the partition intersection graph, can be triangulated using a restricted set of fill edges. Semple and Steel used the partition intersection graph to characterize when a character set has a unique perfect phylogeny. Bordewich, Huber, and Semple showed how to use the partition intersection graph to find a maximum compatible set of characters. In this paper, we build on these results, characterizing when a unique perfect phylogeny exists for a subset of partial characters. Our characterization is stated in terms of minimal triangulations of the partition intersection graph that are uniquely representable, also known as ur-chordal graphs. Our characterization is motivated by the structure of ur-chordal graphs, and the fact that the block structure of minimal triangulations is mirrored in the graph that has been triangulated.
1305.1396
A new framework for optimal classifier design
cs.CV cs.LG stat.ML
The use of alternative measures to evaluate classifier performance is gaining attention, specially for imbalanced problems. However, the use of these measures in the classifier design process is still unsolved. In this work we propose a classifier designed specifically to optimize one of these alternative measures, namely, the so-called F-measure. Nevertheless, the technique is general, and it can be used to optimize other evaluation measures. An algorithm to train the novel classifier is proposed, and the numerical scheme is tested with several databases, showing the optimality and robustness of the presented classifier.
1305.1397
How Many Queries Will Resolve Common Randomness?
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
A set of m terminals, observing correlated signals, communicate interactively to generate common randomness for a given subset of them. Knowing only the communication, how many direct queries of the value of the common randomness will resolve it? A general upper bound, valid for arbitrary signal alphabets, is developed for the number of such queries by using a query strategy that applies to all common randomness and associated communication. When the underlying signals are independent and identically distributed repetitions of m correlated random variables, the number of queries can be exponential in signal length. For this case, the mentioned upper bound is tight and leads to a single-letter formula for the largest query exponent, which coincides with the secret key capacity of a corresponding multiterminal source model. In fact, the upper bound constitutes a strong converse for the optimum query exponent, and implies also a new strong converse for secret key capacity. A key tool, estimating the size of a large probability set in terms of Renyi entropy, is interpreted separately, too, as a lossless block coding result for general sources. As a particularization, it yields the classic result for a discrete memoryless source.
1305.1415
Centralized and Cooperative Transmission of Secure Multiple Unicasts using Network Coding
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
We introduce a method for securely delivering a set of messages to a group of clients over a broadcast erasure channel where each client is interested in a distinct message. Each client is able to obtain its own message but not the others'. In the proposed method the messages are combined together using a special variant of random linear network coding. Each client is provided with a private set of decoding coefficients to decode its own message. Our method provides security for the transmission sessions against computational brute-force attacks and also weakly security in information theoretic sense. As the broadcast channel is assumed to be erroneous, the missing coded packets should be recovered in some way. We consider two different scenarios. In the first scenario the missing packets are retransmitted by the base station (centralized). In the second scenario the clients cooperate with each other by exchanging packets (decentralized). In both scenarios, network coding techniques are exploited to increase the total throughput. For the case of centralized retransmissions we provide an analytical approximation for the throughput performance of instantly decodable network coded (IDNC) retransmissions as well as numerical experiments. For the decentralized scenario, we propose a new IDNC based retransmission method where its performance is evaluated via simulations and analytical approximation. Application of this method is not limited to our special problem and can be generalized to a new class of problems introduced in this paper as the cooperative index coding problem.
1305.1422
Somoclu: An Efficient Parallel Library for Self-Organizing Maps
cs.DC cs.MS cs.NE
Somoclu is a massively parallel tool for training self-organizing maps on large data sets written in C++. It builds on OpenMP for multicore execution, and on MPI for distributing the workload across the nodes in a cluster. It is also able to boost training by using CUDA if graphics processing units are available. A sparse kernel is included, which is useful for high-dimensional but sparse data, such as the vector spaces common in text mining workflows. Python, R and MATLAB interfaces facilitate interactive use. Apart from fast execution, memory use is highly optimized, enabling training large emergent maps even on a single computer.
1305.1426
Speech Enhancement Modeling Towards Robust Speech Recognition System
cs.SD cs.CL
Form about four decades human beings have been dreaming of an intelligent machine which can master the natural speech. In its simplest form, this machine should consist of two subsystems, namely automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech understanding (SU). The goal of ASR is to transcribe natural speech while SU is to understand the meaning of the transcription. Recognizing and understanding a spoken sentence is obviously a knowledge-intensive process, which must take into account all variable information about the speech communication process, from acoustics to semantics and pragmatics. While developing an Automatic Speech Recognition System, it is observed that some adverse conditions degrade the performance of the Speech Recognition System. In this contribution, speech enhancement system is introduced for enhancing speech signals corrupted by additive noise and improving the performance of Automatic Speech Recognizers in noisy conditions. Automatic speech recognition experiments show that replacing noisy speech signals by the corresponding enhanced speech signals leads to an improvement in the recognition accuracies. The amount of improvement varies with the type of the corrupting noise.
1305.1427
Achievable Rate Derivations and Further Simulation Results for "Physical-Layer Multicasting by Stochastic Transmit Beamforming and Alamouti Space-Time Coding"
cs.IT math.IT
This is a companion technical report of the main manuscript "Physical-Layer Multicasting by Stochastic Transmit Beamforming and Alamouti Space-Time Coding". The report serves to give detailed derivations of the achievable rate functions encountered in the main manuscript, which are too long to be included in the latter. In addition, more simulation results are presented to verify the viability of the multicast schemes developed in the main manuscript.
1305.1429
Speech User Interface for Information Retrieval
cs.IR
Along with the rapid development of information technology, the amount of information generated at a given time far exceeds human's ability to organize, search, and manipulate without the help of automatic systems. Now a days so many tools and techniques are available for storage and retrieval of information. User uses interface to interact with these techniques, mostly text user interface (TUI) or graphical user interface (GUI). Here, I am trying to introduce a new interface i.e. speech for information retrieval. The goal of this project is to develop a speech interface that can search and read the required information from the database effectively, efficiently and more friendly. This tool will be highly useful to blind people, they will able to demand the information to the computer by giving voice command/s (keyword) through microphone and listen the required information using speaker or headphones.
1305.1434
Gateway Switching in Q/V Band Satellite Feeder Links
cs.IT math.IT
A main challenge towards realizing the next generation Terabit/s broadband satellite communications (SatCom) is the limited spectrum available in the Ka band. An attractive solution is to move the feeder link to the higher Q/V band, where more spectrum is available. When utilizing the Q/V band, due to heavy rain attenuation, gateway diversity is considered a necessity to ensure the required feeder link availability. Although receive site diversity has been studied in the past for SatCom, there is much less maturity in terms of transmit diversity techniques. In this paper, a modified switch and stay combining scheme is proposed for a Q/V band feeder link, but its performance is also evaluated over an end-to-end satellite link. The proposed scheme is pragmatic and has close to optimal performance with notably lower complexity.
1305.1439
Supervision Localization of Timed Discrete-Event Systems
cs.SY
We study supervisor localization for real-time discrete-event systems (DES) in the Brandin-Wonham framework of timed supervisory control. We view a real-time DES as comprised of asynchronous agents which are coupled through imposed logical and temporal specifications; the essence of supervisor localization is the decomposition of monolithic (global) control action into local control strategies for these individual agents. This study extends our previous work on supervisor localization for untimed DES, in that monolithic timed control action typically includes not only disabling action as in the untimed case, but also ``clock preempting'' action which enforces prescribed temporal behavior. The latter action is executed by a class of special events, called ``forcible'' events; accordingly, we localize monolithic preemptive action with respect to these events. We demonstrate the new features of timed supervisor localization with a manufacturing cell case study, and discuss a distributed control implementation.
1305.1443
Standard Fingerprint Databases: Manual Minutiae Labeling and Matcher Performance Analyses
cs.CV
Fingerprint verification and identification algorithms based on minutiae features are used in many biometric systems today (e.g., governmental e-ID programs, border control, AFIS, personal authentication for portable devices). Researchers in industry/academia are now able to utilize many publicly available fingerprint databases (e.g., Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC) & NIST databases) to compare/evaluate their feature extraction and/or matching algorithm performances against those of others. The results from these evaluations are typically utilized by decision makers responsible for implementing the cited biometric systems, in selecting/tuning specific sensors, feature extractors and matchers. In this study, for a subset of the cited public fingerprint databases, we report fingerprint minutiae matching results, which are based on (i) minutiae extracted automatically from fingerprint images, and (ii) minutiae extracted manually by human subjects. By doing so, we are able to (i) quantitatively judge the performance differences between these two cases, (ii) elaborate on performance upper bounds of minutiae matching, utilizing what can be termed as "ground truth" minutiae features, (iii) analyze minutiae matching performance, without coupling it with the minutiae extraction performance beforehand. Further, as we will freely distribute the minutiae templates, originating from this manual labeling study, in a standard minutiae template exchange format (ISO 19794-2), we believe that other researchers in the biometrics community will be able to utilize the associated results & templates to create their own evaluations pertaining to their fingerprint minutiae extractors/matchers.
1305.1454
A constrained tropical optimization problem: complete solution and application example
math.OC cs.SY
The paper focuses on a multidimensional optimization problem, which is formulated in terms of tropical mathematics and consists in minimizing a nonlinear objective function subject to linear inequality constraints. To solve the problem, we follow an approach based on the introduction of an additional unknown variable to reduce the problem to solving linear inequalities, where the variable plays the role of a parameter. A necessary and sufficient condition for the inequalities to hold is used to evaluate the parameter, whereas the general solution of the inequalities is taken as a solution of the original problem. Under fairly general assumptions, a complete direct solution to the problem is obtained in a compact vector form. The result is applied to solve a problem in project scheduling when an optimal schedule is given by minimizing the flow time of activities in a project under various activity precedence constraints. As an illustration, a numerical example of optimal scheduling is also presented.
1305.1459
EURETILE 2010-2012 summary: first three years of activity of the European Reference Tiled Experiment
cs.DC cs.AR cs.NE cs.OS cs.PL
This is the summary of first three years of activity of the EURETILE FP7 project 247846. EURETILE investigates and implements brain-inspired and fault-tolerant foundational innovations to the system architecture of massively parallel tiled computer architectures and the corresponding programming paradigm. The execution targets are a many-tile HW platform, and a many-tile simulator. A set of SW process - HW tile mapping candidates is generated by the holistic SW tool-chain using a combination of analytic and bio-inspired methods. The Hardware dependent Software is then generated, providing OS services with maximum efficiency/minimal overhead. The many-tile simulator collects profiling data, closing the loop of the SW tool chain. Fine-grain parallelism inside processes is exploited by optimized intra-tile compilation techniques, but the project focus is above the level of the elementary tile. The elementary HW tile is a multi-processor, which includes a fault tolerant Distributed Network Processor (for inter-tile communication) and ASIP accelerators. Furthermore, EURETILE investigates and implements the innovations for equipping the elementary HW tile with high-bandwidth, low-latency brain-like inter-tile communication emulating 3 levels of connection hierarchy, namely neural columns, cortical areas and cortex, and develops a dedicated cortical simulation benchmark: DPSNN-STDP (Distributed Polychronous Spiking Neural Net with synaptic Spiking Time Dependent Plasticity). EURETILE leverages on the multi-tile HW paradigm and SW tool-chain developed by the FET-ACA SHAPES Integrated Project (2006-2009).
1305.1477
Sharp control time for viscoelastic bodys
cs.SY math.AP
It is now well understood that equations of viscoelasticity can be seen as perturbation of wave type equations. This observation can be exploited in several different ways and it turns out that it is a usefull tool when studying controllability. Here we compare a viscoelastic system which fills a surface of a solid region (the string case has already been studied) with its memoryless counterpart (which is a generalized telegraph equation) in order to prove exact controllability of the viscoelastic body at precisely the same times at which the telegraph equation is controllable. The comparison is done using a moment method approach to controllability and we prove, using the perturbations theorems of Paley-Wiener and Bari, that a new sequence derived from the viscoelastic system is a Riesz sequence, a fact that implies controllability of the viscoelastic system. The results so obtained generalize existing controllability results and furthermore show that the ``sharp'' control time for the telegraph equation and the viscoelastic system coincide.
1305.1478
Generalised Sphere Decoding for Spatial Modulation
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, Sphere Decoding (SD) algorithms for Spatial Modulation (SM) are developed to reduce the computational complexity of Maximum-Likelihood (ML) detectors. Two SDs specifically designed for SM are proposed and analysed in terms of Bit Error Ratio (BER) and computational complexity. Using Monte Carlo simulations and mathematical analysis, it is shown that by carefully choosing the initial radius the proposed sphere decoder algorithms offer the same BER as ML detection, with a significant reduction in the computational complexity. A tight closed form expression for the BER performance of SM-SD is derived in the paper, along with an algorithm for choosing the initial radius which provides near to optimum performance. Also, it is shown that none of the proposed SDs are always superior to the others, but the best SD to use depends on the target spectral efficiency. The computational complexity trade-off offered by the proposed solutions is studied via analysis and simulation, and is shown to validate our findings. Finally, the performance of SM-SDs are compared to Spatial Multiplexing (SMX) applying ML decoder and applying SD. It is shown that for the same spectral efficiency, SM-SD offers up to 84% reduction in complexity compared to SMX-SD, with up to 1 dB better BER performance than SMX-ML decoder.
1305.1490
Degrees of Freedom of Certain Interference Alignment Schemes with Distributed CSIT
cs.IT math.IT
In this work, we consider the use of interference alignment (IA) in a MIMO interference channel (IC) under the assumption that each transmitter (TX) has access to channel state information (CSI) that generally differs from that available to other TXs. This setting is referred to as distributed CSIT. In a setting where CSI accuracy is controlled by a set of power exponents, we show that in the static 3-user MIMO square IC, the number of degrees-of-freedom (DoF) that can be achieved with distributed CSIT is at least equal to the DoF achieved with the worst accuracy taken across the TXs and across the interfering links. We conjecture further that this represents exactly the DoF achieved. This result is in strong contrast with the centralized CSIT configuration usually studied (where all the TXs share the same, possibly imperfect, channel estimate) for which it was shown that the DoF achieved at receiver (RX) i is solely limited by the quality of its own feedback. This shows the critical impact of CSI discrepancies between the TXs, and highlights the price paid by distributed precoding.
1305.1495
GReTA - a novel Global and Recursive Tracking Algorithm in three dimensions
q-bio.QM cs.CV
Tracking multiple moving targets allows quantitative measure of the dynamic behavior in systems as diverse as animal groups in biology, turbulence in fluid dynamics and crowd and traffic control. In three dimensions, tracking several targets becomes increasingly hard since optical occlusions are very likely, i.e. two featureless targets frequently overlap for several frames. Occlusions are particularly frequent in biological groups such as bird flocks, fish schools, and insect swarms, a fact that has severely limited collective animal behavior field studies in the past. This paper presents a 3D tracking method that is robust in the case of severe occlusions. To ensure robustness, we adopt a global optimization approach that works on all objects and frames at once. To achieve practicality and scalability, we employ a divide and conquer formulation, thanks to which the computational complexity of the problem is reduced by orders of magnitude. We tested our algorithm with synthetic data, with experimental data of bird flocks and insect swarms and with public benchmark datasets, and show that our system yields high quality trajectories for hundreds of moving targets with severe overlap. The results obtained on very heterogeneous data show the potential applicability of our method to the most diverse experimental situations.
1305.1502
Willingness Optimization for Social Group Activity
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Studies show that a person is willing to join a social group activity if the activity is interesting, and if some close friends also join the activity as companions. The literature has demonstrated that the interests of a person and the social tightness among friends can be effectively derived and mined from social networking websites. However, even with the above two kinds of information widely available, social group activities still need to be coordinated manually, and the process is tedious and time-consuming for users, especially for a large social group activity, due to complications of social connectivity and the diversity of possible interests among friends. To address the above important need, this paper proposes to automatically select and recommend potential attendees of a social group activity, which could be very useful for social networking websites as a value-added service. We first formulate a new problem, named Willingness mAximization for Social grOup (WASO). This paper points out that the solution obtained by a greedy algorithm is likely to be trapped in a local optimal solution. Thus, we design a new randomized algorithm to effectively and efficiently solve the problem. Given the available computational budgets, the proposed algorithm is able to optimally allocate the resources and find a solution with an approximation ratio. We implement the proposed algorithm in Facebook, and the user study demonstrates that social groups obtained by the proposed algorithm significantly outperform the solutions manually configured by users.
1305.1520
A Method for Visuo-Spatial Classification of Freehand Shapes Freely Sketched
cs.CV
We present the principle and the main steps of a new method for the visuo-spatial analysis of geometrical sketches recorded online. Visuo-spatial analysis is a necessary step for multi-level analysis. Multi-level analysis simultaneously allows classification, comparison or clustering of the constituent parts of a pattern according to their visuo-spatial properties, their procedural strategies, their structural or temporal parameters, or any combination of two or more of those parameters. The first results provided by this method concern the comparison of sketches to some perfect patterns of simple geometrical figures and the measure of dissimilarity between real sketches. The mean rates of good decision higher than 95% obtained are promising in both cases.
1305.1525
Constant-Envelope Multi-User Precoding for Frequency-Selective Massive MIMO Systems
cs.IT math.IT
We consider downlink precoding in a frequency-selective multi-user Massive MIMO system with highly efficient but non-linear power amplifiers at the base station (BS). A low-complexity precoding algorithm is proposed, which generates constant-envelope (CE) signals at each BS antenna. To achieve a desired per-user information rate, the extra total transmit power required under the per-antenna CE constraint when compared to the commonly used less stringent total average transmit power constraint, is small.
1305.1537
Shannon capacity of nonlinear regenerative channels
cs.IT math.IT physics.optics
We compute Shannon capacity of nonlinear channels with regenerative elements. Conditions are found under which capacity of such nonlinear channels is higher than the Shannon capacity of the classical linear additive white Gaussian noise channel. We develop a general scheme for designing the proposed channels and apply it to the particular nonlinear sine-mapping. The upper bound for regeneration efficiency is found and the asymptotic behavior of the capacity in the saturation regime is derived.
1305.1578
Projective simulation for classical learning agents: a comprehensive investigation
nlin.AO cs.AI
We study the model of projective simulation (PS), a novel approach to artificial intelligence based on stochastic processing of episodic memory which was recently introduced [H.J. Briegel and G. De las Cuevas. Sci. Rep. 2, 400, (2012)]. Here we provide a detailed analysis of the model and examine its performance, including its achievable efficiency, its learning times and the way both properties scale with the problems' dimension. In addition, we situate the PS agent in different learning scenarios, and study its learning abilities. A variety of new scenarios are being considered, thereby demonstrating the model's flexibility. Furthermore, to put the PS scheme in context, we compare its performance with those of Q-learning and learning classifier systems, two popular models in the field of reinforcement learning. It is shown that PS is a competitive artificial intelligence model of unique properties and strengths.
1305.1598
Abelian Group Codes for Source Coding and Channel Coding
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we study the asymptotic performance of Abelian group codes for the lossy source coding problem for arbitrary discrete (finite alphabet) memoryless sources as well as the channel coding problem for arbitrary discrete (finite alphabet) memoryless channels. For the source coding problem, we derive an achievable rate-distortion function that is characterized in a single-letter information-theoretic form using the ensemble of Abelian group codes. When the underlying group is a field, it simplifies to the symmetric rate-distortion function. Similarly, for the channel coding problem, we find an achievable rate characterized in a single-letter information-theoretic form using group codes. This simplifies to the symmetric capacity of the channel when the underlying group is a field. We compute the rate-distortion function and the achievable rate for several examples of sources and channels. Due to the non-symmetric nature of the sources and channels considered, our analysis uses a synergy of information theoretic and group-theoretic tools.
1305.1609
Formal Representation of the SS-DB Benchmark and Experimental Evaluation in EXTASCID
cs.DB
Evaluating the performance of scientific data processing systems is a difficult task considering the plethora of application-specific solutions available in this landscape and the lack of a generally-accepted benchmark. The dual structure of scientific data coupled with the complex nature of processing complicate the evaluation procedure further. SS-DB is the first attempt to define a general benchmark for complex scientific processing over raw and derived data. It fails to draw sufficient attention though because of the ambiguous plain language specification and the extraordinary SciDB results. In this paper, we remedy the shortcomings of the original SS-DB specification by providing a formal representation in terms of ArrayQL algebra operators and ArrayQL/SciQL constructs. These are the first formal representations of the SS-DB benchmark. Starting from the formal representation, we give a reference implementation and present benchmark results in EXTASCID, a novel system for scientific data processing. EXTASCID is complete in providing native support both for array and relational data and extensible in executing any user code inside the system by the means of a configurable metaoperator. These features result in an order of magnitude improvement over SciDB at data loading, extracting derived data, and operations over derived data.
1305.1655
A short note on estimating intelligence from user profiles in the context of universal psychometrics: prospects and caveats
cs.AI
There has been an increasing interest in inferring some personality traits from users and players in social networks and games, respectively. This goes beyond classical sentiment analysis, and also much further than customer profiling. The purpose here is to have a characterisation of users in terms of personality traits, such as openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. While this is an incipient area of research, we ask the question of whether cognitive abilities, and intelligence in particular, are also measurable from user profiles. However, we pose the question as broadly as possible in terms of subjects, in the context of universal psychometrics, including humans, machines and hybrids. Namely, in this paper we analyse the following question: is it possible to measure the intelligence of humans and (non-human) bots in a social network or a game just from their user profiles, i.e., by observation, without the use of interactive tests, such as IQ tests, the Turing test or other more principled machine intelligence tests?
1305.1679
High Level Pattern Classification via Tourist Walks in Networks
cs.AI cs.LG
Complex networks refer to large-scale graphs with nontrivial connection patterns. The salient and interesting features that the complex network study offer in comparison to graph theory are the emphasis on the dynamical properties of the networks and the ability of inherently uncovering pattern formation of the vertices. In this paper, we present a hybrid data classification technique combining a low level and a high level classifier. The low level term can be equipped with any traditional classification techniques, which realize the classification task considering only physical features (e.g., geometrical or statistical features) of the input data. On the other hand, the high level term has the ability of detecting data patterns with semantic meanings. In this way, the classification is realized by means of the extraction of the underlying network's features constructed from the input data. As a result, the high level classification process measures the compliance of the test instances with the pattern formation of the training data. Out of various high level perspectives that can be utilized to capture semantic meaning, we utilize the dynamical features that are generated from a tourist walker in a networked environment. Specifically, a weighted combination of transient and cycle lengths generated by the tourist walk is employed for that end. Interestingly, our study shows that the proposed technique is able to further improve the already optimized performance of traditional classification techniques.
1305.1690
Unsatisfiable Cores for Constraint Programming
cs.LO cs.AI
Constraint Programming (CP) solvers typically tackle optimization problems by repeatedly finding solutions to a problem while placing tighter and tighter bounds on the solution cost. This approach is somewhat naive, especially for soft-constraint optimization problems in which the soft constraints are mostly satisfied. Unsatisfiable-core approaches to solving soft constraint problems in Boolean Satisfiability (e.g. MAXSAT) force all soft constraints to hold initially. When solving fails they return an unsatisfiable core, as a set of soft constraints that cannot hold simultaneously. Using this information the problem is relaxed to allow certain soft constraint(s) to be violated and solving continues. Since Lazy Clause Generation (LCG) solvers can also return unsatisfiable cores we can adapt the MAXSAT unsatisfiable core approach to CP. We implement the original MAXSAT unsatisfiable core solving algorithms WPM1, MSU3 in a state-of-the-art LCG solver and show that there exist problems which benefit from this hybrid approach.
1305.1704
The Extended Parameter Filter
stat.ML cs.AI
The parameters of temporal models, such as dynamic Bayesian networks, may be modelled in a Bayesian context as static or atemporal variables that influence transition probabilities at every time step. Particle filters fail for models that include such variables, while methods that use Gibbs sampling of parameter variables may incur a per-sample cost that grows linearly with the length of the observation sequence. Storvik devised a method for incremental computation of exact sufficient statistics that, for some cases, reduces the per-sample cost to a constant. In this paper, we demonstrate a connection between Storvik's filter and a Kalman filter in parameter space and establish more general conditions under which Storvik's filter works. Drawing on an analogy to the extended Kalman filter, we develop and analyze, both theoretically and experimentally, a Taylor approximation to the parameter posterior that allows Storvik's method to be applied to a broader class of models. Our experiments on both synthetic examples and real applications show improvement over existing methods.
1305.1707
Class Imbalance Problem in Data Mining Review
cs.LG
In last few years there are major changes and evolution has been done on classification of data. As the application area of technology is increases the size of data also increases. Classification of data becomes difficult because of unbounded size and imbalance nature of data. Class imbalance problem become greatest issue in data mining. Imbalance problem occur where one of the two classes having more sample than other classes. The most of algorithm are more focusing on classification of major sample while ignoring or misclassifying minority sample. The minority samples are those that rarely occur but very important. There are different methods available for classification of imbalance data set which is divided into three main categories, the algorithmic approach, data-preprocessing approach and feature selection approach. Each of this technique has their own advantages and disadvantages. In this paper systematic study of each approach is define which gives the right direction for research in class imbalance problem.
1305.1713
Optimization of stochastic database cracking
cs.DB
Variant Stochastic cracking is a significantly more resilient approach to adaptive indexing. It showed [1]that Stochastic cracking uses each query as a hint on how to reorganize data, but not blindly so; it gains resilience and avoids performance bottlenecks by deliberately applying certain arbitrary choices in its decision making. Therefore bring, adaptive indexing forward to a mature formulation that confers the workload-robustness that previous approaches lacked. Original cracking relies on the randomness of the workloads to converge well. [2][3] However, where the workload is non-random, cracking needs to introduce randomness on its own. Stochastic Cracking clearly improves over original cracking by being robust in workload changes while maintaining all original cracking features when it comes to adaptation. But looking at both types of cracking, it conveyed an incomplete picture as at some point of time it is must to know whether the workload is random or sequential. In this paper our focus is on optimization of variant stochastic cracking, that could be achieved in two ways either by reducing the initialization cost to make stochastic cracking even more transparent to the user, especially for queries that initiate a workload change and hence incur a higher cost or by combining the strengths of the various stochastic cracking algorithms via a dynamic component that decides which algorithm to choose for a query on the fly. The efforts have been put in to make an algorithm that reduces the initialization cost by using the main notion of both cracking, while considering the requirements of adaptive indexing [2].
1305.1729
A Simple Technique for the Converse of Finite Blocklength Multiple Access Channels
cs.IT math.IT
A converse for the Discrete Memoryless Multiple Access Channel is given. The result in [13] is refined, and the third order term is obtained. Moreover, our proof is much simpler than [13]. With little modification, the region can be further improved.
1305.1730
The Redundancy of Slepian-Wolf Coding Revisited
cs.IT math.IT
[Draft] In this paper, the redundancy of Slepian Wolf coding is revisited. Applying the random binning and converse technique in \cite{yang}, the same results in \cite{he} are obtained with much simpler proofs. Moreover, our results reflect more details about the high-order terms of the coding rate. The redundancy is investigated for both fixed-rate and variable-rate cases. The normal approximation (or dispersion) can also be obtained with minor modification.
1305.1734
When Politicians Tweet: A Study on the Members of the German Federal Diet
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
In this preliminary study we compare the characteristics of retweets and replies on more than 350,000 messages collected by following members of the German Federal Diet on Twitter. We find significant differences in the characteristics pointing to distinct types of usages for retweets and replies. Using time series and regression analysis we observe that the likelihood of a politician using replies increases with typical leisure times while retweets occur constant over time. Including formal references increases the probability of a message being retweeted but drops its chance of being replied. This hints to a more professional use for retweets while replies tend to have a personal connotation.
1305.1745
Mobile Recommender Systems Methods: An Overview
cs.IR
The information that mobiles can access becomes very wide nowadays, and the user is faced with a dilemma: there is an unlimited pool of information available to him but he is unable to find the exact information he is looking for. This is why the current research aims to design Recommender Systems (RS) able to continually send information that matches the user's interests in order to reduce his navigation time. In this paper, we treat the different approaches to recommend.
1305.1746
Structured $H_\infty$-Optimal Control for Nested Interconnections: A State-Space Solution
math.OC cs.SY
If imposing general structural constraints on controllers, it is unknown how to design $H_\infty$-controllers by convex optimization. Under a so-called quadratic invariance structure of the generalized plant, the Youla parametrization allows to translate the structured synthesis problem into an infinite-dimensional convex program. Nested interconnections that are characterized by a standard plant with a block-triangular structure fall into this class. Recently it has been shown how to design optimal $H_2$-controllers for such nested structures in the state-space by solving algebraic Riccati equations. In the present paper we provide a state-space solution of the corresponding output-feedback $H_\infty$ synthesis problem without any counterpart in the literature. We argue that a solution based on Riccati equations is - even for state-feedback problems - not feasible and we illustrate our results by means of a simple numerical example.
1305.1762
New Bounds on the Capacity of Fiber-Optics Communications
physics.optics cs.IT math.IT
By taking advantage of the temporal correlations of the nonlinear phase noise in WDM systems we show that the capacity of a nonlinear fiber link is notably higher than what is currently assumed. This advantage is translated into the doubling of the link distance for a fixed transmission rate.
1305.1783
Improving Diffusion-Based Molecular Communication with Unanchored Enzymes
cs.IT math.IT q-bio.QM
In this paper, we propose adding enzymes to the propagation environment of a diffusive molecular communication system as a strategy for mitigating intersymbol interference. The enzymes form reaction intermediates with information molecules and then degrade them so that they have a smaller chance of interfering with future transmissions. We present the reaction-diffusion dynamics of this proposed system and derive a lower bound expression for the expected number of molecules observed at the receiver. We justify a particle-based simulation framework, and present simulation results that show both the accuracy of our expression and the potential for enzymes to improve communication performance.
1305.1786
Quantized Iterative Hard Thresholding: Bridging 1-bit and High-Resolution Quantized Compressed Sensing
cs.IT math.IT
In this work, we show that reconstructing a sparse signal from quantized compressive measurement can be achieved in an unified formalism whatever the (scalar) quantization resolution, i.e., from 1-bit to high resolution assumption. This is achieved by generalizing the iterative hard thresholding (IHT) algorithm and its binary variant (BIHT) introduced in previous works to enforce the consistency of the reconstructed signal with respect to the quantization model. The performance of this algorithm, simply called quantized IHT (QIHT), is evaluated in comparison with other approaches (e.g., IHT, basis pursuit denoise) for several quantization scenarios.
1305.1787
Evolution of the user's content: An Overview of the state of the art
cs.IR
The evolution of the user's content still remains a problem for an accurate recommendation.This is why the current research aims to design Recommender Systems (RS) able to continually adapt information that matches the user's interests. This paper aims to explain this problematic point in outlining the proposals that have been made in research with their advantages and disadvantages.
1305.1796
Using Dimensional Analysis to Assess Scalability and Accuracy in Molecular Communication
cs.IT math.IT q-bio.QM
In this paper, we apply dimensional analysis to study a diffusive molecular communication system that uses diffusing enzymes in the propagation environment to mitigate intersymbol interference. The enzymes bind to information molecules and then degrade them so that they cannot interfere with the detection of future transmissions at the receiver. We determine when it is accurate to assume that the concentration of information molecules throughout the receiver is constant and equal to that expected at the center of the receiver. We show that a lower bound on the expected number of molecules observed at the receiver can be arbitrarily scaled over the environmental parameters, and generalize how the accuracy of the lower bound is qualitatively impacted by those parameters.
1305.1809
Cover Tree Bayesian Reinforcement Learning
stat.ML cs.LG
This paper proposes an online tree-based Bayesian approach for reinforcement learning. For inference, we employ a generalised context tree model. This defines a distribution on multivariate Gaussian piecewise-linear models, which can be updated in closed form. The tree structure itself is constructed using the cover tree method, which remains efficient in high dimensional spaces. We combine the model with Thompson sampling and approximate dynamic programming to obtain effective exploration policies in unknown environments. The flexibility and computational simplicity of the model render it suitable for many reinforcement learning problems in continuous state spaces. We demonstrate this in an experimental comparison with least squares policy iteration.
1305.1852
Graph Theoretic Analysis of Knowledge Networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Purpose of our work is to obtain a basic understanding and comparison of the performance and structure of real Knowledge Networks, to identify strengths and weaknesses and to highlight guidelines for improvements. We selected 18 Knowledge Networks from the service sector and 12 networks from the production sector and estimated their Performance and Structure in terms of 19 indices from graph theory. Highlights from our work include: 1) As most networks are unilaterally structured, the direction of knowledge transfer should be taken into account as illustrated in the analysis of clubs and entropy, 2) The stability of most Knowledge Networks is questionable, 3) Few networks are effective in sharing information, while most Knowledge Networks cannot benefit from the network effect, have rather limited capability for coordination, information propagation and synchronization and are not able to integrate Tacit knowledge, 4) Few networks have large cliques which have to be managed with caution as their role may be highly constructive or destructive, 5) While agents with rich connections form clubs, as in most social networks, the poor club effect is not negligible when we take into account the link direction, 6) The directed link analysis of entropy reveals the low complexity-diversification of the Knowledge Networks. In fact the only high entropy network found, has been improved by Knowledge Management Professionals. As most Knowledge Networks underperform, there is plenty of room for further customized analysis in order to improve communication efficiency, coordination, Tacit knowledge dissemination and robustness. This is the first comparative study of real Knowledge Networks in terms of graph theoretic methods.
1305.1861
Turtle: Identifying frequent k-mers with cache-efficient algorithms
q-bio.GN cs.CE
Counting the frequencies of k-mers in read libraries is often a first step in the analysis of high-throughput sequencing experiments. Infrequent k-mers are assumed to be a result of sequencing errors. The frequent k-mers constitute a reduced but error-free representation of the experiment, which can inform read error correction or serve as the input to de novo assembly methods. Ideally, the memory requirement for counting should be linear in the number of frequent k-mers and not in the, typically much larger, total number of k-mers in the read library. We present a novel method that balances time, space and accuracy requirements to efficiently extract frequent k-mers even for high coverage libraries and large genomes such as human. Our method is designed to minimize cache-misses in a cache-efficient manner by using a Pattern-blocked Bloom filter to remove infrequent k-mers from consideration in combination with a novel sort-and-compact scheme, instead of a Hash, for the actual counting. While this increases theoretical complexity, the savings in cache misses reduce the empirical running times. A variant can resort to a counting Bloom filter for even larger savings in memory at the expense of false negatives in addition to the false positives common to all Bloom filter based approaches. A comparison to the state-of-the-art shows reduced memory requirements and running times. Note that we also provide the first competitive method to count k-mers up to size 64.
1305.1885
Distributed Optimization With Local Domains: Applications in MPC and Network Flows
math.OC cs.IT math.IT
In this paper we consider a network with $P$ nodes, where each node has exclusive access to a local cost function. Our contribution is a communication-efficient distributed algorithm that finds a vector $x^\star$ minimizing the sum of all the functions. We make the additional assumption that the functions have intersecting local domains, i.e., each function depends only on some components of the variable. Consequently, each node is interested in knowing only some components of $x^\star$, not the entire vector. This allows for improvement in communication-efficiency. We apply our algorithm to model predictive control (MPC) and to network flow problems and show, through experiments on large networks, that our proposed algorithm requires less communications to converge than prior algorithms.
1305.1899
Mathematical Modeling of Product Rating: Sufficiency, Misbehavior and Aggregation Rules
cs.IR cs.SI
Many web services like eBay, Tripadvisor, Epinions, etc, provide historical product ratings so that users can evaluate the quality of products. Product ratings are important since they affect how well a product will be adopted by the market. The challenge is that we only have {\em "partial information"} on these ratings: Each user provides ratings to only a "{\em small subset of products}". Under this partial information setting, we explore a number of fundamental questions: What is the "{\em minimum number of ratings}" a product needs so one can make a reliable evaluation of its quality? How users' {\em misbehavior} (such as {\em cheating}) in product rating may affect the evaluation result? To answer these questions, we present a formal mathematical model of product evaluation based on partial information. We derive theoretical bounds on the minimum number of ratings needed to produce a reliable indicator of a product's quality. We also extend our model to accommodate users' misbehavior in product rating. We carry out experiments using both synthetic and real-world data (from TripAdvisor, Amazon and eBay) to validate our model, and also show that using the "majority rating rule" to aggregate product ratings, it produces more reliable and robust product evaluation results than the "average rating rule".
1305.1912
Automated polyp detection in colon capsule endoscopy
cs.CV
Colorectal polyps are important precursors to colon cancer, a major health problem. Colon capsule endoscopy (CCE) is a safe and minimally invasive examination procedure, in which the images of the intestine are obtained via digital cameras on board of a small capsule ingested by a patient. The video sequence is then analyzed for the presence of polyps. We propose an algorithm that relieves the labor of a human operator analyzing the frames in the video sequence. The algorithm acts as a binary classifier, which labels the frame as either containing polyps or not, based on the geometrical analysis and the texture content of the frame. The geometrical analysis is based on a segmentation of an image with the help of a mid-pass filter. The features extracted by the segmentation procedure are classified according to an assumption that the polyps are characterized as protrusions that are mostly round in shape. Thus, we use a best fit ball radius as a decision parameter of a binary classifier. We present a statistical study of the performance of our approach on a data set containing over 18,900 frames from the endoscopic video sequences of five adult patients. The algorithm demonstrates a solid performance, achieving 47% sensitivity per frame and over 81% sensitivity per polyp at a specificity level of 90%. On average, with a video sequence length of 3747 frames, only 367 false positive frames need to be inspected by a human operator.
1305.1925
Speech: A Challenge to Digital Signal Processing Technology for Human-to-Computer Interaction
cs.HC cs.CL
This software project based paper is for a vision of the near future in which computer interaction is characterized by natural face-to-face conversations with lifelike characters that speak, emote, and gesture. The first step is speech. The dream of a true virtual reality, a complete human-computer interaction system will not come true unless we try to give some perception to machine and make it perceive the outside world as humans communicate with each other. This software project is under development for listening and replying machine (Computer) through speech. The Speech interface is developed to convert speech input into some parametric form (Speech-to-Text) for further processing and the results, text output to speech synthesis (Text-to-Speech)
1305.1926
Improving Receiver Performance of Diffusive Molecular Communication with Enzymes
cs.IT cs.ET math.IT
This paper studies the mitigation of intersymbol interference in a diffusive molecular communication system using enzymes that freely diffuse in the propagation environment. The enzymes form reaction intermediates with information molecules and then degrade them so that they cannot interfere with future transmissions. A lower bound expression on the expected number of molecules measured at the receiver is derived. A simple binary receiver detection scheme is proposed where the number of observed molecules is sampled at the time when the maximum number of molecules is expected. Insight is also provided into the selection of an appropriate bit interval. The expected bit error probability is derived as a function of the current and all previously transmitted bits. Simulation results show the accuracy of the bit error probability expression and the improvement in communication performance by having active enzymes present.
1305.1946
Semantic-based Anomalous Pattern Discovery in Moving Object Trajectories
cs.AI cs.IR
In this work, we investigate a novel semantic approach for pattern discovery in trajectories that, relying on ontologies, enhances object movement information with event semantics. The approach can be applied to the detection of movement patterns and behaviors whenever the semantics of events occurring along the trajectory is, explicitly or implicitly, available. In particular, we tested it against an exacting case scenario in maritime surveillance, i.e., the discovery of suspicious container transportations. The methodology we have developed entails the formalization of the application domain through a domain ontology, extending the Moving Object Ontology (MOO) described in this paper. Afterwards, movement patterns have to be formalized, either as Description Logic (DL) axioms or queries, enabling the retrieval of the trajectories that follow the patterns. In our experimental evaluation, we have considered a real world dataset of 18 Million of container events describing the deed undertaken in a port to accomplish the shipping (e.g., loading on a vessel, export operation). Leveraging events, we have reconstructed almost 300 thousand container trajectories referring to 50 thousand containers travelling along three years. We have formalized the anomalous itinerary patterns as DL axioms, testing different ontology APIs and DL reasoners to retrieve the suspicious transportations. Our experiments demonstrate that the approach is feasible and efficient. In particular, the joint use of Pellet and SPARQL-DL enables to detect the trajectories following a given pattern in a reasonable time with big size datasets.
1305.1956
Joint Topic Modeling and Factor Analysis of Textual Information and Graded Response Data
stat.ML cs.LG
Modern machine learning methods are critical to the development of large-scale personalized learning systems that cater directly to the needs of individual learners. The recently developed SPARse Factor Analysis (SPARFA) framework provides a new statistical model and algorithms for machine learning-based learning analytics, which estimate a learner's knowledge of the latent concepts underlying a domain, and content analytics, which estimate the relationships among a collection of questions and the latent concepts. SPARFA estimates these quantities given only the binary-valued graded responses to a collection of questions. In order to better interpret the estimated latent concepts, SPARFA relies on a post-processing step that utilizes user-defined tags (e.g., topics or keywords) available for each question. In this paper, we relax the need for user-defined tags by extending SPARFA to jointly process both graded learner responses and the text of each question and its associated answer(s) or other feedback. Our purely data-driven approach (i) enhances the interpretability of the estimated latent concepts without the need of explicitly generating a set of tags or performing a post-processing step, (ii) improves the prediction performance of SPARFA, and (iii) scales to large test/assessments where human annotation would prove burdensome. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach on two real educational datasets.
1305.1958
The Dynamically Extended Mind -- A Minimal Modeling Case Study
cs.AI cs.NE nlin.CD
The extended mind hypothesis has stimulated much interest in cognitive science. However, its core claim, i.e. that the process of cognition can extend beyond the brain via the body and into the environment, has been heavily criticized. A prominent critique of this claim holds that when some part of the world is coupled to a cognitive system this does not necessarily entail that the part is also constitutive of that cognitive system. This critique is known as the "coupling-constitution fallacy". In this paper we respond to this reductionist challenge by using an evolutionary robotics approach to create a minimal model of two acoustically coupled agents. We demonstrate how the interaction process as a whole has properties that cannot be reduced to the contributions of the isolated agents. We also show that the neural dynamics of the coupled agents has formal properties that are inherently impossible for those neural networks in isolation. By keeping the complexity of the model to an absolute minimum, we are able to illustrate how the coupling-constitution fallacy is in fact based on an inadequate understanding of the constitutive role of nonlinear interactions in dynamical systems theory.
1305.1961
An Improved Three-Weight Message-Passing Algorithm
cs.AI cs.DS math.OC physics.comp-ph
We describe how the powerful "Divide and Concur" algorithm for constraint satisfaction can be derived as a special case of a message-passing version of the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) algorithm for convex optimization, and introduce an improved message-passing algorithm based on ADMM/DC by introducing three distinct weights for messages, with "certain" and "no opinion" weights, as well as the standard weight used in ADMM/DC. The "certain" messages allow our improved algorithm to implement constraint propagation as a special case, while the "no opinion" messages speed convergence for some problems by making the algorithm focus only on active constraints. We describe how our three-weight version of ADMM/DC can give greatly improved performance for non-convex problems such as circle packing and solving large Sudoku puzzles, while retaining the exact performance of ADMM for convex problems. We also describe the advantages of our algorithm compared to other message-passing algorithms based upon belief propagation.
1305.1980
Modeling Temporal Activity Patterns in Dynamic Social Networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI physics.data-an stat.AP
The focus of this work is on developing probabilistic models for user activity in social networks by incorporating the social network influence as perceived by the user. For this, we propose a coupled Hidden Markov Model, where each user's activity evolves according to a Markov chain with a hidden state that is influenced by the collective activity of the friends of the user. We develop generalized Baum-Welch and Viterbi algorithms for model parameter learning and state estimation for the proposed framework. We then validate the proposed model using a significant corpus of user activity on Twitter. Our numerical studies show that with sufficient observations to ensure accurate model learning, the proposed framework explains the observed data better than either a renewal process-based model or a conventional uncoupled Hidden Markov Model. We also demonstrate the utility of the proposed approach in predicting the time to the next tweet. Finally, clustering in the model parameter space is shown to result in distinct natural clusters of users characterized by the interaction dynamic between a user and his network.
1305.1986
An Adaptive Statistical Non-uniform Quantizer for Detail Wavelet Components in Lossy JPEG2000 Image Compression
cs.MM cs.CV
The paper presents a non-uniform quantization method for the Detail components in the JPEG2000 standard. Incorporating the fact that the coefficients lying towards the ends of the histogram plot of each Detail component represent the structural information of an image, the quantization step sizes become smaller at they approach the ends of the histogram plot. The variable quantization step sizes are determined by the actual statistics of the wavelet coefficients. Mean and standard deviation are the two statistical parameters used iteratively to obtain the variable step sizes. Moreover, the mean of the coefficients lying within the step size is chosen as the quantized value, contrary to the deadzone uniform quantizer which selects the midpoint of the quantization step size as the quantized value. The experimental results of the deadzone uniform quantizer and the proposed non-uniform quantizer are objectively compared by using Mean-Squared Error (MSE) and Mean Structural Similarity Index Measure (MSSIM), to evaluate the quantization error and reconstructed image quality, respectively. Subjective analysis of the reconstructed images is also carried out. Through the objective and subjective assessments, it is shown that the non-uniform quantizer performs better than the deadzone uniform quantizer in the perceptual quality of the reconstructed image, especially at low bitrates. More importantly, unlike the deadzone uniform quantizer, the non-uniform quantizer accomplishes better visual quality with a few quantized values.
1305.1991
On the universality of cognitive tests
cs.AI
The analysis of the adaptive behaviour of many different kinds of systems such as humans, animals and machines, requires more general ways of assessing their cognitive abilities. This need is strengthened by increasingly more tasks being analysed for and completed by a wider diversity of systems, including swarms and hybrids. The notion of universal test has recently emerged in the context of machine intelligence evaluation as a way to define and use the same cognitive test for a variety of systems, using some principled tasks and adapting the interface to each particular subject. However, how far can universal tests be taken? This paper analyses this question in terms of subjects, environments, space-time resolution, rewards and interfaces. This leads to a number of findings, insights and caveats, according to several levels where universal tests may be progressively more difficult to conceive, implement and administer. One of the most significant contributions is given by the realisation that more universal tests are defined as maximisations of less universal tests for a variety of configurations. This means that universal tests must be necessarily adaptive.
1305.2006
LabelRankT: Incremental Community Detection in Dynamic Networks via Label Propagation
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
An increasingly important challenge in network analysis is efficient detection and tracking of communities in dynamic networks for which changes arrive as a stream. There is a need for algorithms that can incrementally update and monitor communities whose evolution generates huge realtime data streams, such as the Internet or on-line social networks. In this paper, we propose LabelRankT, an online distributed algorithm for detection of communities in large-scale dynamic networks through stabilized label propagation. Results of tests on real-world networks demonstrate that LabelRankT has much lower computational costs than other algorithms. It also improves the quality of the detected communities compared to dynamic detection methods and matches the quality achieved by static detection approaches. Unlike most of other algorithms which apply only to binary networks, LabelRankT works on weighted and directed networks, which provides a flexible and promising solution for real-world applications.
1305.2038
A Rank Minrelation - Majrelation Coefficient
stat.ML cs.AI
Improving the detection of relevant variables using a new bivariate measure could importantly impact variable selection and large network inference methods. In this paper, we propose a new statistical coefficient that we call the rank minrelation coefficient. We define a minrelation of X to Y (or equivalently a majrelation of Y to X) as a measure that estimate p(Y > X) when X and Y are continuous random variables. The approach is similar to Lin's concordance coefficient that rather focuses on estimating p(X = Y). In other words, if a variable X exhibits a minrelation to Y then, as X increases, Y is likely to increases too. However, on the contrary to concordance or correlation, the minrelation is not symmetric. More explicitly, if X decreases, little can be said on Y values (except that the uncertainty on Y actually increases). In this paper, we formally define this new kind of bivariate dependencies and propose a new statistical coefficient in order to detect those dependencies. We show through several key examples that this new coefficient has many interesting properties in order to select relevant variables, in particular when compared to correlation.
1305.2042
Balancing experiments on a torque-controlled humanoid with hierarchical inverse dynamics
cs.RO
Recently several hierarchical inverse dynamics controllers based on cascades of quadratic programs have been proposed for application on torque controlled robots. They have important theoretical benefits but have never been implemented on a torque controlled robot where model inaccuracies and real-time computation requirements can be problematic. In this contribution we present an experimental evaluation of these algorithms in the context of balance control for a humanoid robot. The presented experiments demonstrate the applicability of the approach under real robot conditions (i.e. model uncertainty, estimation errors, etc). We propose a simplification of the optimization problem that allows us to decrease computation time enough to implement it in a fast torque control loop. We implement a momentum-based balance controller which shows robust performance in face of unknown disturbances, even when the robot is standing on only one foot. In a second experiment, a tracking task is evaluated to demonstrate the performance of the controller with more complicated hierarchies. Our results show that hierarchical inverse dynamics controllers can be used for feedback control of humanoid robots and that momentum-based balance control can be efficiently implemented on a real robot.
1305.2091
Characterizing User Behavior and Information Propagation on a Social Multimedia Network
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
An increasing portion of modern socializing takes place via online social networks. Members of these communities often play distinct roles that can be deduced from observations of users' online activities. One such activity is the sharing of multimedia, the popularity of which can vary dramatically. Here we discuss our initial analysis of anonymized, scraped data from consenting Facebook users, together with associated demographic and psychological profiles. We present five clusters of users with common observed online behaviors, where these users also show correlated profile characteristics. Finally, we identify some common properties of the most popular multimedia content.
1305.2103
Translating Relational Queries into Spreadsheets
cs.DB
Spreadsheets are among the most commonly used applications for data management and analysis. Perhaps they are even among the most widely used computer applications of all kinds. They combine in a natural and intuitive way data processing with very diverse supplementary features: statistical functions, visualization tools, pivot tables, pivot charts, linear programming solvers, Web queries periodically downloading data from external sources, etc. However, the spreadsheet paradigm of computation still lacks sufficient analysis. In this article we demonstrate that a spreadsheet can implement all data transformations definable in SQL, without any use of macros or built-in programming languages, merely by utilizing spreadsheet formulas. We provide a query compiler, which translates any given SQL query into a worksheet of the same semantics, including NULL values. Thereby database operations become available to the users who do not want to migrate to a database. They can define their queries using a high-level language and then get their execution plans in a plain vanilla spreadsheet. No sophisticated database system, no spreadsheet plugins or macros are needed. The functions available in spreadsheets impose severe limitations on the algorithms one can implement. In this paper we offer $O(n\log^2n)$ sorting spreadsheet, but using a non-constant number of rows, improving on the previously known $O(n^2)$ ones. It is therefore surprising, that a spreadsheet can implement, as we demonstrate, Depth-First-Search and Breadth-First-Search on graphs, thereby reaching beyond queries definable in SQL-92.
1305.2112
Intercept Probability Analysis of Cooperative Wireless Networks with Best Relay Selection in the Presence of Eavesdropping Attack
cs.IT math.IT
Due to the broadcast nature of wireless medium, wireless communication is extremely vulnerable to eavesdropping attack. Physical-layer security is emerging as a new paradigm to prevent the eavesdropper from interception by exploiting the physical characteristics of wireless channels, which has recently attracted a lot of research attentions. In this paper, we consider the physical-layer security in cooperative wireless networks with multiple decode-and-forward (DF) relays and investigate the best relay selection in the presence of eavesdropping attack. For the comparison purpose, we also examine the conventional direct transmission without relay and traditional max-min relay selection. We derive closed-form intercept probability expressions of the direct transmission, traditional max-min relay selection, and proposed best relay selection schemes in Rayleigh fading channels. Numerical results show that the proposed best relay selection scheme strictly outperforms the traditional direct transmission and max-min relay selection schemes in terms of intercept probability. In addition, as the number of relays increases, the intercept probabilities of both traditional max-min relay selection and proposed best relay selection schemes decrease significantly, showing the advantage of exploiting multiple relays against eavesdropping attack.
1305.2123
Physical-Layer Multicasting by Stochastic Transmit Beamforming and Alamouti Space-Time Coding
cs.IT math.IT
Consider transceiver designs in a multiuser multi-input single-output (MISO) downlink channel, where the users are to receive the same data stream simultaneously. This problem, known as physical-layer multicasting, has drawn much interest. Presently, a popularized approach is transmit beamforming, in which the beamforming optimization is handled by a rank-one approximation method called semidefinite relaxation (SDR). SDR-based beamforming has been shown to be promising for a small or moderate number of users. This paper describes two new transceiver strategies for physical-layer multicasting. The first strategy, called stochastic beamforming (SBF), randomizes the beamformer in a per-symbol time-varying manner, so that the rank-one approximation in SDR can be bypassed. We propose several efficiently realizable SBF schemes, and prove that their multicast achievable rate gaps with respect to the MISO multicast capacity must be no worse than 0.8314 bits/s/Hz, irrespective of any other factors such as the number of users. The use of channel coding and the assumption of sufficiently long code lengths play a crucial role in achieving the above result. The second strategy combines transmit beamforming and the Alamouti space-time code. The result is a rank-two generalization of SDR-based beamforming. We show by analysis that this SDR-based beamformed Alamouti scheme has a better worst-case effective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scaling, and hence a better multicast rate scaling, than SDR-based beamforming. We further the work by combining SBF and the beamformed Alamouti scheme, wherein an improved constant rate gap of 0.39 bits/s/Hz is proven. Simulation results show that under a channel-coded, many-user setting, the proposed multicast transceiver schemes yield significant SNR gains over SDR-based beamforming at the same bit error rate level.
1305.2169
Robust Hydraulic Fracture Monitoring (HFM) of Multiple Time Overlapping Events Using a Generalized Discrete Radon Transform
physics.geo-ph cs.IT math.IT stat.AP
In this work we propose a novel algorithm for multiple-event localization for Hydraulic Fracture Monitoring (HFM) through the exploitation of the sparsity of the observed seismic signal when represented in a basis consisting of space time propagators. We provide explicit construction of these propagators using a forward model for wave propagation which depends non-linearly on the problem parameters - the unknown source location and mechanism of fracture, time and extent of event, and the locations of the receivers. Under fairly general assumptions and an appropriate discretization of these parameters we first build an over-complete dictionary of generalized Radon propagators and assume that the data is well represented as a linear superposition of these propagators. Exploiting this structure we propose sparsity penalized algorithms and workflow for super-resolution extraction of time overlapping multiple seismic events from single well data.
1305.2170
Exploiting Structural Complexity for Robust and Rapid Hyperspectral Imaging
physics.geo-ph cs.IT math.IT stat.AP
This paper presents several strategies for spectral de-noising of hyperspectral images and hypercube reconstruction from a limited number of tomographic measurements. In particular we show that the non-noisy spectral data, when stacked across the spectral dimension, exhibits low-rank. On the other hand, under the same representation, the spectral noise exhibits a banded structure. Motivated by this we show that the de-noised spectral data and the unknown spectral noise and the respective bands can be simultaneously estimated through the use of a low-rank and simultaneous sparse minimization operation without prior knowledge of the noisy bands. This result is novel for for hyperspectral imaging applications. In addition, we show that imaging for the Computed Tomography Imaging Systems (CTIS) can be improved under limited angle tomography by using low-rank penalization. For both of these cases we exploit the recent results in the theory of low-rank matrix completion using nuclear norm minimization.
1305.2173
Optimality of Orthogonal Access for One-dimensional Convex Cellular Networks
cs.IT math.IT
It is shown that a greedy orthogonal access scheme achieves the sum degrees of freedom of all one-dimensional (all nodes placed along a straight line) convex cellular networks (where cells are convex regions) when no channel knowledge is available at the transmitters except the knowledge of the network topology. In general, optimality of orthogonal access holds neither for two-dimensional convex cellular networks nor for one-dimensional non-convex cellular networks, thus revealing a fundamental limitation that exists only when both one-dimensional and convex properties are simultaneously enforced, as is common in canonical information theoretic models for studying cellular networks. The result also establishes the capacity of the corresponding class of index coding problems.
1305.2218
Stochastic gradient descent algorithms for strongly convex functions at O(1/T) convergence rates
cs.LG cs.AI
With a weighting scheme proportional to t, a traditional stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm achieves a high probability convergence rate of O({\kappa}/T) for strongly convex functions, instead of O({\kappa} ln(T)/T). We also prove that an accelerated SGD algorithm also achieves a rate of O({\kappa}/T).
1305.2221
Repairing and Inpainting Damaged Images using Diffusion Tensor
cs.CV
Removing or repairing the imperfections of a digital images or videos is a very active and attractive field of research belonging to the image inpainting technique. This later has a wide range of applications, such as removing scratches in old photographic image, removing text and logos or creating cartoon and artistic effects. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to repair a damaged image based on a non linear diffusion tensor. The idea is to track perfectly the local geometry of the damaged image and allowing diffusion only in the isophotes curves direction. To illustrate the effective performance of our method, we present some experimental results on test and real photographic color images
1305.2233
Asymptotic Coverage Probability and Rate in Massive MIMO Networks
cs.IT math.IT
Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a transmission technique for cellular systems that uses many antennas to support not-as-many users. Thus far, the performance of massive MIMO has only been examined in finite cellular networks. In this letter, we analyze its performance in random cellular networks with Poisson distributed base station locations. Specifically, we provide analytical expressions for the asymptotic coverage probability and rate in both downlink and uplink when each base station has a large number of antennas. The results show that, though limited by pilot contamination, massive MIMO can provide significantly higher asymptotic data rate per user than the single-antenna network.
1305.2238
Calibrated Multivariate Regression with Application to Neural Semantic Basis Discovery
stat.ML cs.LG
We propose a calibrated multivariate regression method named CMR for fitting high dimensional multivariate regression models. Compared with existing methods, CMR calibrates regularization for each regression task with respect to its noise level so that it simultaneously attains improved finite-sample performance and tuning insensitiveness. Theoretically, we provide sufficient conditions under which CMR achieves the optimal rate of convergence in parameter estimation. Computationally, we propose an efficient smoothed proximal gradient algorithm with a worst-case numerical rate of convergence $\cO(1/\epsilon)$, where $\epsilon$ is a pre-specified accuracy of the objective function value. We conduct thorough numerical simulations to illustrate that CMR consistently outperforms other high dimensional multivariate regression methods. We also apply CMR to solve a brain activity prediction problem and find that it is as competitive as a handcrafted model created by human experts. The R package \texttt{camel} implementing the proposed method is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network \url{http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/camel/}.