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1309.3151
Distributed privacy-preserving network size computation: A system-identification based method
math.OC cs.DC cs.SY math.DS
In this study, we propose an algorithm for computing the network size of communicating agents. The algorithm is distributed: a) it does not require a leader selection; b) it only requires local exchange of information, and; c) its design can be implemented using local information only, without any global information about the network. It is privacy-preserving, namely it does not require to propagate identifying labels. This algorithm is based on system identification, and more precisely on the identification of the order of a suitably-constructed discrete-time linear time-invariant system over some finite field. We provide a probabilistic guarantee for any randomly picked node to correctly compute the number of nodes in the network. Moreover, numerical implementation has been taken into account to make the algorithm applicable to networks of hundreds of nodes, and therefore make the algorithm applicable in real-world sensor or robotic networks. We finally illustrate our results in simulation and conclude the paper with discussions on how our technique differs from a previously-known strategy based on statistical inference.
1309.3173
Low Complexity List Successive Cancellation Decoding of Polar Codes
cs.IT math.IT
We propose a low complexity list successive cancellation (LCLSC) decoding algorithm to reduce complexity of traditional list successive cancellation (LSC) decoding of polar codes while trying to maintain the LSC decoding performance at the same time. By defining two thresholds, namely "likelihood ratio (LR) threshold" and "Bhattacharyya parameter threshold", we classify the reliability of each received information bit and the quality of each bit channel. Based on this classification, we implement successive cancellation (SC) decoding instead of LSC decoding when the information bits from "bad" subchannels are received reliably and further attempt to skip LSC decoding for the rest information bits in order to achieve a lower complexity compared to full LSC decoding. Simulation results show that the complexity of LCLSC decoding is much lower than LSC decoding and can be close to that of SC decoding, especially in low code rate regions.
1309.3187
Cache Performance Study of Portfolio-Based Parallel CDCL SAT Solvers
cs.DC cs.AI
Parallel SAT solvers are becoming mainstream. Their performance has made them win the past two SAT competitions consecutively and are in the limelight of research and industry. The problem is that it is not known exactly what is needed to make them perform even better; that is, how to make them solve more problems in less time. Also, it is also not know how well they scale in massive multi-core environments which, predictably, is the scenario of comming new hardware. In this paper we show that cache contention is a main culprit of a slowing down in scalability, and provide empirical results that for some type of searches, physically sharing the clause Database between threads is beneficial.
1309.3195
Improved LT Codes in Low Overhead Regions for Binary Erasure Channels
cs.IT math.IT
We study improved degree distribution for Luby Transform (LT) codes which exhibits improved bit error rate performance particularly in low overhead regions. We construct the degree distribution by modifying Robust Soliton distribution. The performance of our proposed LT codes is evaluated and compared to the conventional LT codes via And-Or tree analysis. Then we propose a transmission scheme based on the proposed degree distribution to improve its frame error rate in full recovery regions. Furthermore, the improved degree distribution is applied to distributed multi-source relay networks and unequal error protection. It is shown that our schemes achieve better performance and reduced complexity especially in low overhead regions, compared with conventional schemes.
1309.3197
Inducing Honest Reporting Without Observing Outcomes: An Application to the Peer-Review Process
cs.MA cs.AI cs.DL math.ST stat.TH
When eliciting opinions from a group of experts, traditional devices used to promote honest reporting assume that there is an observable future outcome. In practice, however, this assumption is not always reasonable. In this paper, we propose a scoring method built on strictly proper scoring rules to induce honest reporting without assuming observable outcomes. Our method provides scores based on pairwise comparisons between the reports made by each pair of experts in the group. For ease of exposition, we introduce our scoring method by illustrating its application to the peer-review process. In order to do so, we start by modeling the peer-review process using a Bayesian model where the uncertainty regarding the quality of the manuscript is taken into account. Thereafter, we introduce our scoring method to evaluate the reported reviews. Under the assumptions that reviewers are Bayesian decision-makers and that they cannot influence the reviews of other reviewers, we show that risk-neutral reviewers strictly maximize their expected scores by honestly disclosing their reviews. We also show how the group's scores can be used to find a consensual review. Experimental results show that encouraging honest reporting through the proposed scoring method creates more accurate reviews than the traditional peer-review process.
1309.3214
Modeling Based on Elman Wavelet Neural Network for Class-D Power Amplifiers
cs.NE
In Class-D Power Amplifiers (CDPAs), the power supply noise can intermodulate with the input signal, manifesting into power-supply induced intermodulation distortion (PS-IMD) and due to the memory effects of the system, there exist asymmetries in the PS-IMDs. In this paper, a new behavioral modeling based on the Elman Wavelet Neural Network (EWNN) is proposed to study the nonlinear distortion of the CDPAs. In EWNN model, the Morlet wavelet functions are employed as the activation function and there is a normalized operation in the hidden layer, the modification of the scale factor and translation factor in the wavelet functions are ignored to avoid the fluctuations of the error curves. When there are 30 neurons in the hidden layer, to achieve the same square sum error (SSE) $\epsilon_{min}=10^{-3}$, EWNN needs 31 iteration steps, while the basic Elman neural network (BENN) model needs 86 steps. The Volterra-Laguerre model has 605 parameters to be estimated but still can't achieve the same magnitude accuracy of EWNN. Simulation results show that the proposed approach of EWNN model has fewer parameters and higher accuracy than the Volterra-Laguerre model and its convergence rate is much faster than the BENN model.
1309.3228
Quantum hypothesis testing and the operational interpretation of the quantum Renyi relative entropies
quant-ph cs.IT math-ph math.IT math.MP
We show that the new quantum extension of Renyi's \alpha-relative entropies, introduced recently by Muller-Lennert, Dupuis, Szehr, Fehr and Tomamichel, J. Math. Phys. 54, 122203, (2013), and Wilde, Winter, Yang, Commun. Math. Phys. 331, (2014), have an operational interpretation in the strong converse problem of quantum hypothesis testing. Together with related results for the direct part of quantum hypothesis testing, known as the quantum Hoeffding bound, our result suggests that the operationally relevant definition of the quantum Renyi relative entropies depends on the parameter \alpha: for \alpha<1, the right choice seems to be the traditional definition, whereas for \alpha>1 the right choice is the newly introduced version. As a sideresult, we show that the new Renyi \alpha-relative entropies are asymptotically attainable by measurements for \alpha>1, and give a new simple proof for their monotonicity under completely positive trace-preserving maps.
1309.3233
Efficient Orthogonal Tensor Decomposition, with an Application to Latent Variable Model Learning
stat.ML cs.LG math.ST stat.TH
Decomposing tensors into orthogonal factors is a well-known task in statistics, machine learning, and signal processing. We study orthogonal outer product decompositions where the factors in the summands in the decomposition are required to be orthogonal across summands, by relating this orthogonal decomposition to the singular value decompositions of the flattenings. We show that it is a non-trivial assumption for a tensor to have such an orthogonal decomposition, and we show that it is unique (up to natural symmetries) in case it exists, in which case we also demonstrate how it can be efficiently and reliably obtained by a sequence of singular value decompositions. We demonstrate how the factoring algorithm can be applied for parameter identification in latent variable and mixture models.
1309.3242
Using memristor crossbar structure to implement a novel adaptive real time fuzzy modeling algorithm
cs.AI
Although fuzzy techniques promise fast meanwhile accurate modeling and control abilities for complicated systems, different difficulties have been re-vealed in real situation implementations. Usually there is no escape of it-erative optimization based on crisp domain algorithms. Recently memristor structures appeared promising to implement neural network structures and fuzzy algorithms. In this paper a novel adaptive real-time fuzzy modeling algorithm is proposed which uses active learning method concept to mimic recent understandings of right brain processing techniques. The developed method is based on processing fuzzy numbers to provide the ability of being sensitive to each training data point to expand the knowledge tree leading to plasticity while used defuzzification technique guaranties enough stability. An outstanding characteristic of the proposed algorithm is its consistency to memristor crossbar hardware processing concepts. An analog implemen-tation of the proposed algorithm on memristor crossbars structure is also introduced in this paper. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in modeling and pattern recognition tasks is verified by means of computer simulations
1309.3256
Recovery guarantees for exemplar-based clustering
stat.ML cs.CV cs.LG
For a certain class of distributions, we prove that the linear programming relaxation of $k$-medoids clustering---a variant of $k$-means clustering where means are replaced by exemplars from within the dataset---distinguishes points drawn from nonoverlapping balls with high probability once the number of points drawn and the separation distance between any two balls are sufficiently large. Our results hold in the nontrivial regime where the separation distance is small enough that points drawn from different balls may be closer to each other than points drawn from the same ball; in this case, clustering by thresholding pairwise distances between points can fail. We also exhibit numerical evidence of high-probability recovery in a substantially more permissive regime.
1309.3285
A tabu search algorithm with efficient diversification strategy for high school timetabling problem
cs.AI
The school timetabling problem can be described as scheduling a set of lessons (combination of classes, teachers, subjects and rooms) in a weekly timetable. This paper presents a novel way to generate timetables for high schools. The algorithm has three phases. Pre-scheduling, initial phase and optimization through tabu search. In the first phase, a graph based algorithm used to create groups of lessons to be scheduled simultaneously; then an initial solution is built by a sequential greedy heuristic. Finally, the solution is optimized using tabu search algorithm based on frequency based diversification. The algorithm has been tested on a set of real problems gathered from Iranian high schools. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm can effectively build acceptable timetables.
1309.3292
MacWilliams' Extension Theorem for Bi-Invariant Weights over Finite Principal Ideal Rings
math.RA cs.IT math.IT
A finite ring R and a weight w on R satisfy the Extension Property if every R-linear w-isometry between two R-linear codes in R^n extends to a monomial transformation of R^n that preserves w. MacWilliams proved that finite fields with the Hamming weight satisfy the Extension Property. It is known that finite Frobenius rings with either the Hamming weight or the homogeneous weight satisfy the Extension Property. Conversely, if a finite ring with the Hamming or homogeneous weight satisfies the Extension Property, then the ring is Frobenius. This paper addresses the question of a characterization of all bi-invariant weights on a finite ring that satisfy the Extension Property. Having solved this question in previous papers for all direct products of finite chain rings and for matrix rings, we have now arrived at a characterization of these weights for finite principal ideal rings, which form a large subclass of the finite Frobenius rings. We do not assume commutativity of the rings in question.
1309.3307
Delay-Sensitive Communication over Fading Channel: Queueing Behavior and Code Parameter Selection
cs.IT math.IT
This article examines the queueing performance of communication systems that transmit encoded data over unreliable channels. A fading formulation suitable for wireless environments is considered where errors are caused by a discrete channel with correlated behavior over time. Random codes and BCH codes are employed as means to study the relationship between code-rate selection and the queueing performance of point-to-point data links. For carefully selected channel models and arrival processes, a tractable Markov structure composed of queue length and channel state is identified. This facilitates the analysis of the stationary behavior of the system, leading to evaluation criteria such as bounds on the probability of the queue exceeding a threshold. Specifically, this article focuses on system models with scalable arrival profiles, which are based on Poisson processes, and finite-state channels with memory. These assumptions permit the rigorous comparison of system performance for codes with arbitrary block lengths and code rates. Based on the resulting characterizations, it is possible to select the best code parameters for delay-sensitive applications over various channels. The methodology introduced herein offers a new perspective on the joint queueing-coding analysis of finitestate channels with memory, and it is supported by numerical simulations.
1309.3317
Pole-placement in higher-order sliding-mode control
math.OC cs.SY
We show that the well-known formula by Ackermann and Utkin can be generalized to the case of higher-order sliding modes. By interpreting the eigenvalue assignment of the sliding dynamics as a zero-placement problem, the generalization becomes straightforward and the proof is greatly simplified. The generalized formula retains the simplicity of the original one while allowing to construct the sliding variable of a single-input linear time-invariant system in such a way that it has desired relative degree and desired sliding-mode dynamics. The formula can be used as part of a higher-order sliding-mode control design methodology, achieving high accuracy and robustness at the same time.
1309.3321
Wedge Sampling for Computing Clustering Coefficients and Triangle Counts on Large Graphs
cs.SI cs.DS
Graphs are used to model interactions in a variety of contexts, and there is a growing need to quickly assess the structure of such graphs. Some of the most useful graph metrics are based on triangles, such as those measuring social cohesion. Algorithms to compute them can be extremely expensive, even for moderately-sized graphs with only millions of edges. Previous work has considered node and edge sampling; in contrast, we consider wedge sampling, which provides faster and more accurate approximations than competing techniques. Additionally, wedge sampling enables estimation local clustering coefficients, degree-wise clustering coefficients, uniform triangle sampling, and directed triangle counts. Our methods come with provable and practical probabilistic error estimates for all computations. We provide extensive results that show our methods are both more accurate and faster than state-of-the-art alternatives.
1309.3323
Mapping Mutable Genres in Structurally Complex Volumes
cs.CL cs.DL
To mine large digital libraries in humanistically meaningful ways, scholars need to divide them by genre. This is a task that classification algorithms are well suited to assist, but they need adjustment to address the specific challenges of this domain. Digital libraries pose two problems of scale not usually found in the article datasets used to test these algorithms. 1) Because libraries span several centuries, the genres being identified may change gradually across the time axis. 2) Because volumes are much longer than articles, they tend to be internally heterogeneous, and the classification task needs to begin with segmentation. We describe a multi-layered solution that trains hidden Markov models to segment volumes, and uses ensembles of overlapping classifiers to address historical change. We test this approach on a collection of 469,200 volumes drawn from HathiTrust Digital Library. To demonstrate the humanistic value of these methods, we extract 32,209 volumes of fiction from the digital library, and trace the changing proportions of first- and third-person narration in the corpus. We note that narrative points of view seem to have strong associations with particular themes and genres.
1309.3330
Reliable Crowdsourcing for Multi-Class Labeling using Coding Theory
cs.IT cs.SI math.IT
Crowdsourcing systems often have crowd workers that perform unreliable work on the task they are assigned. In this paper, we propose the use of error-control codes and decoding algorithms to design crowdsourcing systems for reliable classification despite unreliable crowd workers. Coding-theory based techniques also allow us to pose easy-to-answer binary questions to the crowd workers. We consider three different crowdsourcing models: systems with independent crowd workers, systems with peer-dependent reward schemes, and systems where workers have common sources of information. For each of these models, we analyze classification performance with the proposed coding-based scheme. We develop an ordering principle for the quality of crowds and describe how system performance changes with the quality of the crowd. We also show that pairing among workers and diversification of the questions help in improving system performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed coding-based scheme using both simulated data and real datasets from Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing microtask platform. Results suggest that use of good codes may improve the performance of the crowdsourcing task over typical majority-voting approaches.
1309.3418
A Novel Approach in detecting pose orientation of a 3D face required for face
cs.CV
In this paper we present a novel approach that takes as input a 3D image and gives as output its pose i.e. it tells whether the face is oriented with respect the X, Y or Z axes with angles of rotation up to 40 degree. All the experiments have been performed on the FRAV3D Database. After applying the proposed algorithm to the 3D facial surface we have obtained i.e. on 848 3D face images our method detected the pose correctly for 566 face images,thus giving an approximately 67 % of correct pose detection.
1309.3421
Indexing by Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Ensemble Model
cs.IR
The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we present Indexing by Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDI), an automatic document indexing method. The probability distributions in LDI utilize those in Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a generative topic model that has been previously used in applications for document retrieval tasks. However, the ad hoc applications, or their variants with smoothing techniques as prompted by previous studies in LDA-based language modeling, result in unsatisfactory performance as the document representations do not accurately reflect concept space. To improve performance, we introduce a new definition of document probability vectors in the context of LDA and present a novel scheme for automatic document indexing based on LDA. Second, we propose an Ensemble Model (EnM) for document retrieval. The EnM combines basis indexing models by assigning different weights and attempts to uncover the optimal weights to maximize the Mean Average Precision (MAP). To solve the optimization problem, we propose an algorithm, EnM.B, which is derived based on the boosting method. The results of our computational experiments on benchmark data sets indicate that both the proposed approaches are viable options for document retrieval.
1309.3425
A method for nose-tip based 3D face registration using maximum intensity algorithm
cs.CV
In this paper we present a novel technique of registering 3D images across pose. In this context, we have taken into account the images which are aligned across X, Y and Z axes. We have first determined the angle across which the image is rotated with respect to X, Y and Z axes and then translation is performed on the images. After testing the proposed method on 472 images from the FRAV3D database, the method correctly registers 358 images thus giving a performance rate of 75.84%.
1309.3439
Measuring the similarity of PML documents with RFID-based sensors
cs.DB cs.NI
The Electronic Product Code (EPC) Network is an important part of the Internet of Things. The Physical Mark-Up Language (PML) is to represent and de-scribe data related to objects in EPC Network. The PML documents of each component to exchange data in EPC Network system are XML documents based on PML Core schema. For managing theses huge amount of PML documents of tags captured by Radio frequency identification (RFID) readers, it is inevitable to develop the high-performance technol-ogy, such as filtering and integrating these tag data. So in this paper, we propose an approach for meas-uring the similarity of PML documents based on Bayesian Network of several sensors. With respect to the features of PML, while measuring the similarity, we firstly reduce the redundancy data except information of EPC. On the basis of this, the Bayesian Network model derived from the structure of the PML documents being compared is constructed.
1309.3446
A Systematic Approach for Interference Alignment in CSIT-less Relay-Aided X-Networks
cs.IT math.IT
The degrees of freedom (DoF) of an X-network with M transmit and N receive nodes utilizing interference alignment with the support of $J$ relays each equipped with $L_j$ antennas operating in a half-duplex non-regenerative mode is investigated. Conditions on the feasibility of interference alignment are derived using a proper transmit strategy and a structured approach based on a Kronecker-product representation. The advantages of this approach are twofold: First, it extends existing results on the achievable DoF to generalized antenna configurations. Second, it unifies the analysis for time-varying and constant channels and provides valuable insights and interconnections between the two channel models. It turns out that a DoF of $\nicefrac{NM}{M+N-1}$ is feasible whenever the sum of the $L_j^2 \geq [N-1][M-1]$.
1309.3467
Wireless Bidirectional Relaying, Latin Squares and Graph Vertex Coloring
cs.IT math.IT
The problem of obtaining network coding maps for the physical layer network coded two-way relay channel is considered, using the denoise-and-forward forward protocol. It is known that network coding maps used at the relay node which ensure unique decodability at the end nodes form a Latin Square. Also, it is known that minimum distance of the effective constellation at the relay node becomes zero, when the ratio of the fade coefficients from the end node to the relay node, belongs to a finite set of complex numbers determined by the signal set used, called the singular fade states. Furthermore, it has been shown recently that the problem of obtaining network coding maps which remove the harmful effects of singular fade states, reduces to the one of obtaining Latin Squares, which satisfy certain constraints called \textit{singularity removal constraints}. In this paper, it is shown that the singularity removal constraints along with the row and column exclusion conditions of a Latin Square, can be compactly represented by a graph called the \textit{singularity removal graph} determined by the singular fade state and the signal set used. It is shown that a Latin Square which removes a singular fade state can be obtained from a proper vertex coloring of the corresponding singularity removal graph. The minimum number of symbols used to fill in a Latin Square which removes a singular fade state is equal to the chromatic number of the singularity removal graph. It is shown that for any square $M$-QAM signal set, there exists singularity removal graphs whose chromatic numbers exceed $M$ and hence require more than $M$ colors for vertex coloring. Also, it is shown that for any $2^{\lambda}$-PSK signal set, $\lambda \geq 3,$ all the singularity removal graphs can be colored using $2^{\lambda}$ colors.
1309.3511
Event-Triggered State Observers for Sparse Sensor Noise/Attacks
math.OC cs.CR cs.IT cs.SY math.IT
This paper describes two algorithms for state reconstruction from sensor measurements that are corrupted with sparse, but otherwise arbitrary, "noise". These results are motivated by the need to secure cyber-physical systems against a malicious adversary that can arbitrarily corrupt sensor measurements. The first algorithm reconstructs the state from a batch of sensor measurements while the second algorithm is able to incorporate new measurements as they become available, in the spirit of a Luenberger observer. A distinguishing point of these algorithms is the use of event-triggered techniques to improve the computational performance of the proposed algorithms.
1309.3522
Tail bounds via generic chaining
math.PR cs.IT math.IT
We modify Talagrand's generic chaining method to obtain upper bounds for all p-th moments of the supremum of a stochastic process. These bounds lead to an estimate for the upper tail of the supremum with optimal deviation parameters. We apply our procedure to improve and extend some known deviation inequalities for suprema of unbounded empirical processes and chaos processes. As an application we give a significantly simplified proof of the restricted isometry property of the subsampled discrete Fourier transform.
1309.3533
Mixed Membership Models for Time Series
stat.ME cs.LG stat.ML
In this article we discuss some of the consequences of the mixed membership perspective on time series analysis. In its most abstract form, a mixed membership model aims to associate an individual entity with some set of attributes based on a collection of observed data. Although much of the literature on mixed membership models considers the setting in which exchangeable collections of data are associated with each member of a set of entities, it is equally natural to consider problems in which an entire time series is viewed as an entity and the goal is to characterize the time series in terms of a set of underlying dynamic attributes or "dynamic regimes". Indeed, this perspective is already present in the classical hidden Markov model, where the dynamic regimes are referred to as "states", and the collection of states realized in a sample path of the underlying process can be viewed as a mixed membership characterization of the observed time series. Our goal here is to review some of the richer modeling possibilities for time series that are provided by recent developments in the mixed membership framework.
1309.3546
On Determining Deep Holes of Generalized Reed-Solomon Codes
cs.IT math.IT
For a linear code, deep holes are defined to be vectors that are further away from codewords than all other vectors. The problem of deciding whether a received word is a deep hole for generalized Reed-Solomon codes is proved to be co-NP-complete. For the extended Reed-Solomon codes $RS_q(\F_q,k)$, a conjecture was made to classify deep holes by Cheng and Murray in 2007. Since then a lot of effort has been made to prove the conjecture, or its various forms. In this paper, we classify deep holes completely for generalized Reed-Solomon codes $RS_p (D,k)$, where $p$ is a prime, $|D| > k \geqslant \frac{p-1}{2}$. Our techniques are built on the idea of deep hole trees, and several results concerning the Erd{\"o}s-Heilbronn conjecture.
1309.3582
Multihop Routing in Ad Hoc Networks
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
This paper presents a dual method of closed-form analysis and lightweight simulation that enables an evaluation of the performance of mobile ad hoc networks that is more realistic, efficient, and accurate than those found in existing publications. Some features accommodated by the new analysis are shadowing, exclusion and guard zones, and distance-dependent fading. Three routing protocols are examined: least-delay, nearest-neighbor, and maximum-progress routing. The tradeoffs among the path reliabilities, average conditional delays, average conditional number of hops, and area spectral efficiencies are examined.
1309.3591
Optimal Power Allocation for Parameter Tracking in a Distributed Amplify-and-Forward Sensor Network
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the problem of optimal power allocation in a sensor network where the sensors observe a dynamic parameter in noise and coherently amplify and forward their observations to a fusion center (FC). The FC uses the observations in a Kalman filter to track the parameter, and we show how to find the optimal gain and phase of the sensor transmissions under both global and individual power constraints in order to minimize the mean squared error (MSE) of the parameter estimate. For the case of a global power constraint, a closed-form solution can be obtained. A numerical optimization is required for individual power constraints, but the problem can be relaxed to a semidefinite programming problem (SDP), and we show that the optimal result can be constructed from the SDP solution. We also study the dual problem of minimizing global and individual power consumption under a constraint on the MSE. As before, a closed-form solution can be found when minimizing total power, while the optimal solution is constructed from the output of an SDP when minimizing the maximum individual sensor power. For purposes of comparison, we derive an exact expression for the outage probability on the MSE for equal-power transmission, which can serve as an upper bound for the case of optimal power control. Finally, we present the results of several simulations to show that the use of optimal power control provides a significant reduction in either MSE or transmit power compared with a non-optimized approach (i.e., equal power transmission).
1309.3611
Ultrametric Component Analysis with Application to Analysis of Text and of Emotion
cs.AI
We review the theory and practice of determining what parts of a data set are ultrametric. It is assumed that the data set, to begin with, is endowed with a metric, and we include discussion of how this can be brought about if a dissimilarity, only, holds. The basis for part of the metric-endowed data set being ultrametric is to consider triplets of the observables (vectors). We develop a novel consensus of hierarchical clusterings. We do this in order to have a framework (including visualization and supporting interpretation) for the parts of the data that are determined to be ultrametric. Furthermore a major objective is to determine locally ultrametric relationships as opposed to non-local ultrametric relationships. As part of this work, we also study a particular property of our ultrametricity coefficient, namely, it being a function of the difference of angles of the base angles of the isosceles triangle. This work is completed by a review of related work, on consensus hierarchies, and of a major new application, namely quantifying and interpreting the emotional content of narrative.
1309.3623
Unified Sum-BER Performance Analysis of AF MIMO Beamforming in Two-Way Relay Networks
cs.IT math.IT
Unified performance analysis is carried out for amplify-and-forward (AF) multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) beamforming (BF) two-way relay networks in Rayleigh fading with five different relaying protocols including two novel protocols for better performance. As a result, a novel closed-form sum-bit error rate (BER) expression is presented in a unified expression for all protocols. A new closed-form high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) performance is also obtained in a single expression, and an analytical high-SNR gap expression between the five protocols is provided. We compare the performance of the five relaying protocols with respect to sum-BER with appropriately normalized rate and power, and show that the proposed protocol with four time slots outperforms other protocols when transmit powers from two sources are sufficiently different, and the one with three time slots dominates other protocols when multiple relay antennas are used, at high-SNR.
1309.3647
Protecting Public OSN Posts from Unintended Access
cs.SI cs.CR
The design of secure and usable access schemes to personal data represent a major challenge of online social networks (OSNs). State of the art requires prior interaction to grant access. Sharing with users who are not subscribed or previously have not been accepted as contacts in any case is only possible via public posts, which can easily be abused by automatic harvesting for user profiling, targeted spear-phishing, or spamming. Moreover, users are restricted to the access rules defined by the provider, which may be overly restrictive, cumbersome to define, or insufficiently fine-grained. We suggest a complementary approach that can be easily deployed in addition to existing access control schemes, does not require any interaction, and includes even public, unsubscribed users. It exploits the fact that different social circles of a user share different experiences and hence encrypts arbitrary posts. Hence arbitrary posts are encrypted, such that only users with sufficient knowledge about the owner can decrypt. Assembling only well-established cryptographic primitives, we prove that the security of our scheme is determined by the entropy of the required knowledge. We consequently analyze the efficiency of an informed dictionary attack and assess the entropy to be on par with common passwords. A fully functional implementation is used for performance evaluations, and available for download on the Web.
1309.3660
(Failure of the) Wisdom of the crowds in an endogenous opinion dynamics model with multiply biased agents
cs.SI cs.MA nlin.AO physics.soc-ph
We study an endogenous opinion (or, belief) dynamics model where we endogenize the social network that models the link (`trust') weights between agents. Our network adjustment mechanism is simple: an agent increases her weight for another agent if that agent has been close to truth (whence, our adjustment criterion is `past performance'). Moreover, we consider multiply biased agents that do not learn in a fully rational manner but are subject to persuasion bias - they learn in a DeGroot manner, via a simple `rule of thumb' - and that have biased initial beliefs. In addition, we also study this setup under conformity, opposition, and homophily - which are recently suggested variants of DeGroot learning in social networks - thereby taking into account further biases agents are susceptible to. Our main focus is on crowd wisdom, that is, on the question whether the so biased agents can adequately aggregate dispersed information and, consequently, learn the true states of the topics they communicate about. In particular, we present several conditions under which wisdom fails.
1309.3674
Power Allocation for Distributed BLUE Estimation with Full and Limited Feedback of CSI
cs.IT math.IT
This paper investigates the problem of adaptive power allocation for distributed best linear unbiased estimation (BLUE) of a random parameter at the fusion center (FC) of a wireless sensor network (WSN). An optimal power-allocation scheme is proposed that minimizes the $L^2$-norm of the vector of local transmit powers, given a maximum variance for the BLUE estimator. This scheme results in the increased lifetime of the WSN compared to similar approaches that are based on the minimization of the sum of the local transmit powers. The limitation of the proposed optimal power-allocation scheme is that it requires the feedback of the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) from the FC to local sensors, which is not practical in most applications of large-scale WSNs. In this paper, a limited-feedback strategy is proposed that eliminates this requirement by designing an optimal codebook for the FC using the generalized Lloyd algorithm with modified distortion metrics. Each sensor amplifies its analog noisy observation using a quantized version of its optimal amplification gain, which is received by the FC and used to estimate the unknown parameter.
1309.3676
Optimized projections for compressed sensing via rank-constrained nearest correlation matrix
cs.IT cs.LG math.IT stat.ML
Optimizing the acquisition matrix is useful for compressed sensing of signals that are sparse in overcomplete dictionaries, because the acquisition matrix can be adapted to the particular correlations of the dictionary atoms. In this paper a novel formulation of the optimization problem is proposed, in the form of a rank-constrained nearest correlation matrix problem. Furthermore, improvements for three existing optimization algorithms are introduced, which are shown to be particular instances of the proposed formulation. Simulation results show notable improvements and superior robustness in sparse signal recovery.
1309.3692
Sufficient Conditions on the Optimality of Myopic Sensing in Opportunistic Channel Access: A Unifying Framework
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers a widely studied stochastic control problem arising from opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) in a multi-channel system, with the goal of providing a unifying analytical framework whereby a number of prior results may be viewed as special cases. Specifically, we consider a single wireless transceiver/user with access to $N$ channels, each modeled as an iid discrete-time two-state Markov chain. In each time step the user is allowed to sense $k\leq N$ channels, and subsequently use up to $m\leq k$ channels out of those sensed to be available. Channel sensing is assumed to be perfect, and for each channel use in each time step the user gets a unit reward. The user's objective is to maximize its total discounted or average reward over a finite or infinite horizon. This problem has previously been studied in various special cases including $k=1$ and $m=k\leq N$, often cast as a restless bandit problem, with optimality results derived for a myopic policy that seeks to maximize the immediate one-step reward when the two-state Markov chain model is positively correlated. In this paper we study the general problem with $1\leq m\leq k\leq N$, and derive sufficient conditions under which the myopic policy is optimal for the finite and infinite horizon reward criteria, respectively. It is shown that these results reduce to those derived in prior studies under the corresponding special cases, and thus may be viewed as a set of unifying optimality conditions. Numerical examples are also presented to highlight how and why an optimal policy may deviate from the otherwise-optimal myopic sensing given additional exploration opportunities, i.e., when $m<k$.
1309.3697
Group Learning and Opinion Diffusion in a Broadcast Network
cs.LG
We analyze the following group learning problem in the context of opinion diffusion: Consider a network with $M$ users, each facing $N$ options. In a discrete time setting, at each time step, each user chooses $K$ out of the $N$ options, and receive randomly generated rewards, whose statistics depend on the options chosen as well as the user itself, and are unknown to the users. Each user aims to maximize their expected total rewards over a certain time horizon through an online learning process, i.e., a sequence of exploration (sampling the return of each option) and exploitation (selecting empirically good options) steps. Within this context we consider two group learning scenarios, (1) users with uniform preferences and (2) users with diverse preferences, and examine how a user should construct its learning process to best extract information from other's decisions and experiences so as to maximize its own reward. Performance is measured in {\em weak regret}, the difference between the user's total reward and the reward from a user-specific best single-action policy (i.e., always selecting the set of options generating the highest mean rewards for this user). Within each scenario we also consider two cases: (i) when users exchange full information, meaning they share the actual rewards they obtained from their choices, and (ii) when users exchange limited information, e.g., only their choices but not rewards obtained from these choices.
1309.3699
Local Support Vector Machines:Formulation and Analysis
stat.ML cs.AI cs.LG
We provide a formulation for Local Support Vector Machines (LSVMs) that generalizes previous formulations, and brings out the explicit connections to local polynomial learning used in nonparametric estimation literature. We investigate the simplest type of LSVMs called Local Linear Support Vector Machines (LLSVMs). For the first time we establish conditions under which LLSVMs make Bayes consistent predictions at each test point $x_0$. We also establish rates at which the local risk of LLSVMs converges to the minimum value of expected local risk at each point $x_0$. Using stability arguments we establish generalization error bounds for LLSVMs.
1309.3704
To Stay Or To Switch: Multiuser Dynamic Channel Access
cs.SY cs.IT math.IT
In this paper we study opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) policies in a multiuser multichannel random access cognitive radio network, where users perform channel probing and switching in order to obtain better channel condition or higher instantaneous transmission quality. However, unlikely many prior works in this area, including those on channel probing and switching policies for a single user to exploit spectral diversity, and on probing and access policies for multiple users over a single channel to exploit temporal and multiuser diversity, in this study we consider the collective switching of multiple users over multiple channels. In addition, we consider finite arrivals, i.e., users are not assumed to always have data to send and demand for channel follow a certain arrival process. Under such a scenario, the users' ability to opportunistically exploit temporal diversity (the temporal variation in channel quality over a single channel) and spectral diversity (quality variation across multiple channels at a given time) is greatly affected by the level of congestion in the system. We investigate the optimal decision process in this case, and evaluate the extent to which congestion affects potential gains from opportunistic dynamic channel switching.
1309.3716
Revisiting Optimal Power Control: its Dual Effect on SNR and Contention
cs.SY
In this paper we study a transmission power tune problem with densely deployed 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). While previous papers emphasize on tuning transmission power with either PHY or MAC layer separately, optimally setting each Access Point's (AP's) transmission power of a densely deployed 802.11 network considering its dual effects on both layers remains an open problem. In this work, we design a measure by evaluating impacts of transmission power on network performance on both PHY and MAC layers. We show that such an optimization problem is intractable and then we investigate and develop an analytical framework to allow simple yet efficient solutions. Through simulations and numerical results, we observe clear benefits of the dual-effect model compared to solutions optimizing solely on a single layer; therefore, we conclude that tuning transmission power from a dual layer (PHY-MAC) point of view is essential and necessary for dense WLANs. We further form a game theoretical framework and investigate above power-tune problem in a strategic network. We show that with decentralized and strategic users, the Nash Equilibrium (N.E.) of the corresponding game is in-efficient and thereafter we propose a punishment based mechanism to enforce users to adopt the social optimal strategy profile under both perfect and imperfect sensing environments.
1309.3720
The Incidence and Cross Methods for Efficient Radar Detection
cs.IT math.IT
The designation of the radar system is to detect the position and velocity of targets around us. The radar transmits a waveform, which is reflected back from the targets, and echo waveform is received. In a commonly used model, the echo is a sum of a superposition of several delay-Doppler shifts of the transmitted waveform, and a noise component. The delay and Doppler parameters encode, respectively, the distances, and relative velocities, between the targets and the radar. Using standard digital-to-analog and sampling techniques, the estimation task of the delay-Doppler parameters, which involves waveforms, is reduced to a problem for complex sequences of finite length N. In these notes we introduce the Incidence and Cross methods for radar detection. One of their advantages, is robustness to inhomogeneous radar scene, i.e., for sensing small targets in the vicinity of large objects. The arithmetic complexity of the incidence and cross methods is O(NlogN + r^3) and O(NlogN + r^2), for r targets, respectively. In the case of noisy environment, these are the fastest radar detection techniques. Both methods employ chirp sequences, which are commonly used by radar systems, and hence are attractive for real world applications.
1309.3733
Discovery of Approximate Differential Dependencies
cs.DB
Differential dependencies (DDs) capture the relationships between data columns of relations. They are more general than functional dependencies (FDs) and and the difference is that DDs are defined on the distances between values of two tuples, not directly on the values. Because of this difference, the algorithms for discovering FDs from data find only special DDs, not all DDs and therefore are not applicable to DD discovery. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to discover DDs from data following the way of fixing the left hand side of a candidate DD to determine the right hand side. We also show some properties of DDs and conduct a comprehensive analysis on how sampling affects the DDs discovered from data.
1309.3745
An Optimizer's Approach to Stochastic Control Problems with Nonclassical Information Structures
math.OC cs.IT math.IT
We present an optimization-based approach to stochastic control problems with nonclassical information structures. We cast these problems equivalently as optimization prob- lems on joint distributions. The resulting problems are necessarily nonconvex. Our approach to solving them is through convex relaxation. We solve the instance solved by Bansal and Basar with a particular application of this approach that uses the data processing inequality for constructing the convex relaxation. Using certain f-divergences, we obtain a new, larger set of inverse optimal cost functions for such problems. Insights are obtained on the relation between the structure of cost functions and of convex relaxations for inverse optimal control.
1309.3752
Novel Repair-by-Transfer Codes and Systematic Exact-MBR Codes with Lower Complexities and Smaller Field Sizes
cs.IT math.IT
The $(n,k,d)$ regenerating code is a class of $(n,k)$ erasure codes with the capability to recover a lost code fragment from other $d$ existing code fragments. This paper concentrates on the design of exact regenerating codes at Minimum Bandwidth Regenerating (MBR) points. For $d=n-1$, a class of $(n,k,d=n-1)$ Exact-MBR codes, termed as repair-by-transfer codes, have been developed in prior work to avoid arithmetic operations in node repairing process. The first result of this paper presents a new class of repair-by-transfer codes via congruent transformations. As compared with the prior works, the advantages of the proposed codes include: i) The minimum of the finite field size is significantly reduced from $n \choose 2$ to $n$. ii) The encoding complexity is decreased from $n^4$ to $n^3$. As shown in simulations, the proposed repair-by-transfer codes have lower computational overhead when $n$ is greater than a specific constant. The second result of this paper presents a new form of coding matrix for product-matrix Exact-MBR codes. The proposed coding matrix includes a number of advantages: i). The minimum of the finite field size is reduced from $n-k+d$ to $n$. ii). The fast Reed-Solomon erasure coding algorithms can be applied on the Exact-MBR codes to reduce the time complexities.
1309.3775
Beyond the quantum formalism: consequences of a neural-oscillator model to quantum cognition
physics.bio-ph cs.AI q-bio.NC quant-ph
In this paper we present a neural oscillator model of stimulus response theory that exhibits quantum-like behavior. We then show that without adding any additional assumptions, a quantum model constructed to fit observable pairwise correlations has no predictive power over the unknown triple moment, obtainable through the activation of multiple oscillators. We compare this with the results obtained in de Barros (2013), where a criteria of rationality gives optimal ranges for the triple moment.
1309.3792
Exact Complexity: The Spectral Decomposition of Intrinsic Computation
cond-mat.stat-mech cs.IT math.IT nlin.CD nlin.CG
We give exact formulae for a wide family of complexity measures that capture the organization of hidden nonlinear processes. The spectral decomposition of operator-valued functions leads to closed-form expressions involving the full eigenvalue spectrum of the mixed-state presentation of a process's epsilon-machine causal-state dynamic. Measures include correlation functions, power spectra, past-future mutual information, transient and synchronization informations, and many others. As a result, a direct and complete analysis of intrinsic computation is now available for the temporal organization of finitary hidden Markov models and nonlinear dynamical systems with generating partitions and for the spatial organization in one-dimensional systems, including spin systems, cellular automata, and complex materials via chaotic crystallography.
1309.3797
Robustness of skeletons and salient features in networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Real world network datasets often contain a wealth of complex topological information. In the face of these data, researchers often employ methods to extract reduced networks containing the most important structures or pathways, sometimes known as `skeletons' or `backbones'. Numerous such methods have been developed. Yet data are often noisy or incomplete, with unknown numbers of missing or spurious links. Relatively little effort has gone into understanding how salient network extraction methods perform in the face of noisy or incomplete networks. We study this problem by comparing how the salient features extracted by two popular methods change when networks are perturbed, either by deleting nodes or links, or by randomly rewiring links. Our results indicate that simple, global statistics for skeletons can be accurately inferred even for noisy and incomplete network data, but it is crucial to have complete, reliable data to use the exact topologies of skeletons or backbones. These results also help us understand how skeletons respond to damage to the network itself, as in an attack scenario.
1309.3808
Low-Complexity Design of Generalized Block Diagonalization Precoding Algorithms for Multiuser MIMO Systems
cs.IT math.IT
Block diagonalization (BD) based precoding techniques are well-known linear transmit strategies for multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems. By employing BD-type precoding algorithms at the transmit side, the MU-MIMO broadcast channel is decomposed into multiple independent parallel single user MIMO (SU-MIMO) channels and achieves the maximum diversity order at high data rates. The main computational complexity of BD-type precoding algorithms comes from two singular value decomposition (SVD) operations, which depend on the number of users and the dimensions of each user's channel matrix. In this work, low-complexity precoding algorithms are proposed to reduce the computational complexity and improve the performance of BD-type precoding algorithms. We devise a strategy based on a common channel inversion technique, QR decompositions, and lattice reductions to decouple the MU-MIMO channel into equivalent SU-MIMO channels. Analytical and simulation results show that the proposed precoding algorithms can achieve a comparable sum-rate performance as BD-type precoding algorithms, substantial bit error rate (BER) performance gains, and a simplified receiver structure, while requiring a much lower complexity.
1309.3809
Visual-Semantic Scene Understanding by Sharing Labels in a Context Network
cs.CV cs.LG stat.ML
We consider the problem of naming objects in complex, natural scenes containing widely varying object appearance and subtly different names. Informed by cognitive research, we propose an approach based on sharing context based object hypotheses between visual and lexical spaces. To this end, we present the Visual Semantic Integration Model (VSIM) that represents object labels as entities shared between semantic and visual contexts and infers a new image by updating labels through context switching. At the core of VSIM is a semantic Pachinko Allocation Model and a visual nearest neighbor Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model. For inference, we derive an iterative Data Augmentation algorithm that pools the label probabilities and maximizes the joint label posterior of an image. Our model surpasses the performance of state-of-art methods in several visual tasks on the challenging SUN09 dataset.
1309.3816
Multiplicative Approximations, Optimal Hypervolume Distributions, and the Choice of the Reference Point
cs.NE
Many optimization problems arising in applications have to consider several objective functions at the same time. Evolutionary algorithms seem to be a very natural choice for dealing with multi-objective problems as the population of such an algorithm can be used to represent the trade-offs with respect to the given objective functions. In this paper, we contribute to the theoretical understanding of evolutionary algorithms for multi-objective problems. We consider indicator-based algorithms whose goal is to maximize the hypervolume for a given problem by distributing {\mu} points on the Pareto front. To gain new theoretical insights into the behavior of hypervolume-based algorithms we compare their optimization goal to the goal of achieving an optimal multiplicative approximation ratio. Our studies are carried out for different Pareto front shapes of bi-objective problems. For the class of linear fronts and a class of convex fronts, we prove that maximizing the hypervolume gives the best possible approximation ratio when assuming that the extreme points have to be included in both distributions of the points on the Pareto front. Furthermore, we investigate the choice of the reference point on the approximation behavior of hypervolume-based approaches and examine Pareto fronts of different shapes by numerical calculations.
1309.3842
Estimation of intrinsic volumes from digital grey-scale images
math.ST cs.CV stat.TH
Local algorithms are common tools for estimating intrinsic volumes from black-and-white digital images. However, these algorithms are typically biased in the design based setting, even when the resolution tends to infinity. Moreover, images recorded in practice are most often blurred grey-scale images rather than black-and-white. In this paper, an extended definition of local algorithms, applying directly to grey-scale images without thresholding, is suggested. We investigate the asymptotics of these new algorithms when the resolution tends to infinity and apply this to construct estimators for surface area and integrated mean curvature that are asymptotically unbiased in certain natural settings.
1309.3848
SEEDS: Superpixels Extracted via Energy-Driven Sampling
cs.CV
Superpixel algorithms aim to over-segment the image by grouping pixels that belong to the same object. Many state-of-the-art superpixel algorithms rely on minimizing objective functions to enforce color ho- mogeneity. The optimization is accomplished by sophis- ticated methods that progressively build the superpix- els, typically by adding cuts or growing superpixels. As a result, they are computationally too expensive for real-time applications. We introduce a new approach based on a simple hill-climbing optimization. Starting from an initial superpixel partitioning, it continuously refines the superpixels by modifying the boundaries. We define a robust and fast to evaluate energy function, based on enforcing color similarity between the bound- aries and the superpixel color histogram. In a series of experiments, we show that we achieve an excellent com- promise between accuracy and efficiency. We are able to achieve a performance comparable to the state-of- the-art, but in real-time on a single Intel i7 CPU at 2.8GHz.
1309.3864
Unequal Error Protection by Partial Superposition Transmission Using LDPC Codes
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we consider designing low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded modulation systems to achieve unequal error protection (UEP). We propose a new UEP approach by partial superposition transmission called UEP-by-PST. In the UEP-by-PST system, the information sequence is distinguished as two parts, the more important data (MID) and the less important data (LID), both of which are coded with LDPC codes. The codeword that corresponds to the MID is superimposed on the codeword that corresponds to the LID. The system performance can be analyzed by using discretized density evolution. Also proposed in this paper is a criterion from a practical point of view to compare the efficiencies of different UEP approaches. Numerical results show that, over both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels and uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels, 1) UEP-by-PST provides higher coding gain for the MID compared with the traditional equal error protection (EEP) approach, but with negligible performance loss for the LID; 2) UEP-by-PST is more efficient with the proposed practical criterion than the UEP approach in the digital video broadcasting (DVB) system.
1309.3874
Finding an infection source under the SIS model
cs.SI q-bio.PE
We consider the problem of identifying an infection source based only on an observed set of infected nodes in a network, assuming that the infection process follows a Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) model. We derive an estimator based on estimating the most likely infection source associated with the most likely infection path. Simulation results on regular trees suggest that our estimator performs consistently better than the minimum distance centrality based heuristic.
1309.3877
A Metric-learning based framework for Support Vector Machines and Multiple Kernel Learning
cs.LG
Most metric learning algorithms, as well as Fisher's Discriminant Analysis (FDA), optimize some cost function of different measures of within-and between-class distances. On the other hand, Support Vector Machines(SVMs) and several Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) algorithms are based on the SVM large margin theory. Recently, SVMs have been analyzed from SVM and metric learning, and to develop new algorithms that build on the strengths of each. Inspired by the metric learning interpretation of SVM, we develop here a new metric-learning based SVM framework in which we incorporate metric learning concepts within SVM. We extend the optimization problem of SVM to include some measure of the within-class distance and along the way we develop a new within-class distance measure which is appropriate for SVM. In addition, we adopt the same approach for MKL and show that it can be also formulated as a Mahalanobis metric learning problem. Our end result is a number of SVM/MKL algorithms that incorporate metric learning concepts. We experiment with them on a set of benchmark datasets and observe important predictive performance improvements.
1309.3888
User-Relatedness and Community Structure in Social Interaction Networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
With social media and the according social and ubiquitous applications finding their way into everyday life, there is a rapidly growing amount of user generated content yielding explicit and implicit network structures. We consider social activities and phenomena as proxies for user relatedness. Such activities are represented in so-called social interaction networks or evidence networks, with different degrees of explicitness. We focus on evidence networks containing relations on users, which are represented by connections between individual nodes. Explicit interaction networks are then created by specific user actions, for example, when building a friend network. On the other hand, more implicit networks capture user traces or evidences of user actions as observed in Web portals, blogs, resource sharing systems, and many other social services. These implicit networks can be applied for a broad range of analysis methods instead of using expensive gold-standard information. In this paper, we analyze different properties of a set of networks in social media. We show that there are dependencies and correlations between the networks. These allow for drawing reciprocal conclusions concerning pairs of networks, based on the assessment of structural correlations and ranking interchangeability. Additionally, we show how these inter-network correlations can be used for assessing the results of structural analysis techniques, e.g., community mining methods.
1309.3901
A new design criterion for spherically-shaped division algebra-based space-time codes
cs.IT math.IT
This work considers normalized inverse determinant sums as a tool for analyzing the performance of division algebra based space-time codes for multiple antenna wireless systems. A general union bound based code design criterion is obtained as a main result. In our previous work, the behavior of inverse determinant sums was analyzed using point counting techniques for Lie groups; it was shown that the asymptotic growth exponents of these sums correctly describe the diversity-multiplexing gain trade-off of the space-time code for some multiplexing gain ranges. This paper focuses on the constant terms of the inverse determinant sums, which capture the coding gain behavior. Pursuing the Lie group approach, a tighter asymptotic bound is derived, allowing to compute the constant terms for several classes of space-time codes appearing in the literature. The resulting design criterion suggests that the performance of division algebra based codes depends on several fundamental algebraic invariants of the underlying algebra.
1309.3908
Exploring Image Virality in Google Plus
cs.SI cs.CY cs.MM physics.soc-ph
Reactions to posts in an online social network show different dynamics depending on several textual features of the corresponding content. Do similar dynamics exist when images are posted? Exploiting a novel dataset of posts, gathered from the most popular Google+ users, we try to give an answer to such a question. We describe several virality phenomena that emerge when taking into account visual characteristics of images (such as orientation, mean saturation, etc.). We also provide hypotheses and potential explanations for the dynamics behind them, and include cases for which common-sense expectations do not hold true in our experiments.
1309.3910
Robustness analysis of finite precision implementations
cs.SE cs.SY
A desirable property of control systems is to be robust to inputs, that is small perturbations of the inputs of a system will cause only small perturbations on its outputs. But it is not clear whether this property is maintained at the implementation level, when two close inputs can lead to very different execution paths. The problem becomes particularly crucial when considering finite precision implementations, where any elementary computation can be affected by a small error. In this context, almost every test is potentially unstable, that is, for a given input, the computed (finite precision) path may differ from the ideal (same computation in real numbers) path. Still, state-of-the-art error analyses do not consider this possibility and rely on the stable test hypothesis, that control flows are identical. If there is a discontinuity between the treatments in the two branches, that is the conditional block is not robust to uncertainties, the error bounds can be unsound. We propose here a new abstract-interpretation based error analysis of finite precision implementations, which is sound in presence of unstable tests. It automatically bounds the discontinuity error coming from the difference between the float and real values when there is a path divergence, and introduces a new error term labeled by the test that introduced this potential discontinuity. This gives a tractable error analysis, implemented in our static analyzer FLUCTUAT: we present results on representative extracts of control programs.
1309.3917
Strategic Planning in Air Traffic Control as a Multi-objective Stochastic Optimization Problem
cs.AI
With the objective of handling the airspace sector congestion subject to continuously growing air traffic, we suggest to create a collaborative working plan during the strategic phase of air traffic control. The plan obtained via a new decision support tool presented in this article consists in a schedule for controllers, which specifies time of overflight on the different waypoints of the flight plans. In order to do it, we believe that the decision-support tool shall model directly the uncertainty at a trajectory level in order to propagate the uncertainty to the sector level. Then, the probability of congestion for any sector in the airspace can be computed. Since air traffic regulations and sector congestion are antagonist, we designed and implemented a multi-objective optimization algorithm for determining the best trade-off between these two criteria. The solution comes up as a set of alternatives for the multi-sector planner where the severity of the congestion cost is adjustable. In this paper, the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II) was used to solve an artificial benchmark problem involving 24 aircraft and 11 sectors, and is able to provide a good approximation of the Pareto front.
1309.3921
Computational Methods for Probabilistic Inference of Sector Congestion in Air Traffic Management
cs.AI
This article addresses the issue of computing the expected cost functions from a probabilistic model of the air traffic flow and capacity management. The Clenshaw-Curtis quadrature is compared to Monte-Carlo algorithms defined specifically for this problem. By tailoring the algorithms to this model, we reduce the computational burden in order to simulate real instances. The study shows that the Monte-Carlo algorithm is more sensible to the amount of uncertainty in the system, but has the advantage to return a result with the associated accuracy on demand. The performances for both approaches are comparable for the computation of the expected cost of delay and the expected cost of congestion. Finally, this study shows some evidences that the simulation of the proposed probabilistic model is tractable for realistic instances.
1309.3945
A Neural Network based Approach for Predicting Customer Churn in Cellular Network Services
cs.NE cs.CE
Marketing literature states that it is more costly to engage a new customer than to retain an existing loyal customer. Churn prediction models are developed by academics and practitioners to effectively manage and control customer churn in order to retain existing customers. As churn management is an important activity for companies to retain loyal customers, the ability to correctly predict customer churn is necessary. As the cellular network services market becoming more competitive, customer churn management has become a crucial task for mobile communication operators. This paper proposes a neural network based approach to predict customer churn in subscription of cellular wireless services. The results of experiments indicate that neural network based approach can predict customer churn.
1309.3946
Using Self-Organizing Maps for Sentiment Analysis
cs.IR cs.CL cs.NE
Web 2.0 services have enabled people to express their opinions, experience and feelings in the form of user-generated content. Sentiment analysis or opinion mining involves identifying, classifying and aggregating opinions as per their positive or negative polarity. This paper investigates the efficacy of different implementations of Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) for sentiment based visualization and classification of online reviews. Specifically, this paper implements the SOM algorithm for both supervised and unsupervised learning from text documents. The unsupervised SOM algorithm is implemented for sentiment based visualization and classification tasks. For supervised sentiment analysis, a competitive learning algorithm known as Learning Vector Quantization is used. Both algorithms are also compared with their respective multi-pass implementations where a quick rough ordering pass is followed by a fine tuning pass. The experimental results on the online movie review data set show that SOMs are well suited for sentiment based classification and sentiment polarity visualization.
1309.3949
Performance Investigation of Feature Selection Methods
cs.IR cs.CL cs.LG
Sentiment analysis or opinion mining has become an open research domain after proliferation of Internet and Web 2.0 social media. People express their attitudes and opinions on social media including blogs, discussion forums, tweets, etc. and, sentiment analysis concerns about detecting and extracting sentiment or opinion from online text. Sentiment based text classification is different from topical text classification since it involves discrimination based on expressed opinion on a topic. Feature selection is significant for sentiment analysis as the opinionated text may have high dimensions, which can adversely affect the performance of sentiment analysis classifier. This paper explores applicability of feature selection methods for sentiment analysis and investigates their performance for classification in term of recall, precision and accuracy. Five feature selection methods (Document Frequency, Information Gain, Gain Ratio, Chi Squared, and Relief-F) and three popular sentiment feature lexicons (HM, GI and Opinion Lexicon) are investigated on movie reviews corpus with a size of 2000 documents. The experimental results show that Information Gain gave consistent results and Gain Ratio performs overall best for sentimental feature selection while sentiment lexicons gave poor performance. Furthermore, we found that performance of the classifier depends on appropriate number of representative feature selected from text.
1309.3957
Autocatalysis in Reaction Networks
math.DS cs.CE q-bio.MN
The persistence conjecture is a long-standing open problem in chemical reaction network theory. It concerns the behavior of solutions to coupled ODE systems that arise from applying mass-action kinetics to a network of chemical reactions. The idea is that if all reactions are reversible in a weak sense, then no species can go extinct. A notion that has been found useful in thinking about persistence is that of "critical siphon." We explore the combinatorics of critical siphons, with a view towards the persistence conjecture. We introduce the notions of "drainable" and "self-replicable" (or autocatalytic) siphons. We show that: every minimal critical siphon is either drainable or self-replicable; reaction networks without drainable siphons are persistent; and non-autocatalytic weakly-reversible networks are persistent. Our results clarify that the difficulties in proving the persistence conjecture are essentially due to competition between drainable and self-replicable siphons.
1309.3959
Bounded Confidence Opinion Dynamics in a Social Network of Bayesian Decision Makers
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Bounded confidence opinion dynamics model the propagation of information in social networks. However in the existing literature, opinions are only viewed as abstract quantities without semantics rather than as part of a decision-making system. In this work, opinion dynamics are examined when agents are Bayesian decision makers that perform hypothesis testing or signal detection, and the dynamics are applied to prior probabilities of hypotheses. Bounded confidence is defined on prior probabilities through Bayes risk error divergence, the appropriate measure between priors in hypothesis testing. This definition contrasts with the measure used between opinions in standard models: absolute error. It is shown that the rapid convergence of prior probabilities to a small number of limiting values is similar to that seen in the standard Krause-Hegselmann model. The most interesting finding in this work is that the number of these limiting values and the time to convergence changes with the signal-to-noise ratio in the detection task. The number of final values or clusters is maximal at intermediate signal-to-noise ratios, suggesting that the most contentious issues lead to the largest number of factions. It is at these same intermediate signal-to-noise ratios at which the degradation in detection performance of the aggregate vote of the decision makers is greatest in comparison to the Bayes optimal detection performance.
1309.3964
An Investigation of Data Privacy and Utility Preservation using KNN Classification as a Gauge
cs.CR cs.DB
It is obligatory that organizations by law safeguard the privacy of individuals when handling data sets containing personal identifiable information (PII). Nevertheless, during the process of data privatization, the utility or usefulness of the privatized data diminishes. Yet achieving the optimal balance between data privacy and utility needs has been documented as an NP-hard challenge. In this study, we investigate data privacy and utility preservation using KNN machine learning classification as a gauge.
1309.3975
Problem Complexity Research from Energy Perspective
cs.CC cs.IT math.IT physics.pop-ph
Computational complexity is a particularly important objective. The idea of Landauer principle was extended through mapping three classic problems (sorting,ordered searching and max of N unordered numbers) into Maxwell demon thought experiment in this paper. The problems'complexity is defined on the entropy basis and the minimum energy required to solve them are rigorous deduced from the perspective of energy (entropy) and the second law of thermodynamics. Then the theoretical energy consumed by real program and basic operators of classical computer are both analyzed, the time complexity lower bounds of three problems'all possible algorithms are derived in this way. The lower bound is also deduced for the two n*n matrix multiplication problem. In the end, the reason why reversible computation is impossible and the possibility of super-linear energy consumption capacity which may be the power behind quantum computation are discussed, a conjecture is proposed which may prove NP!=P. The study will bring fresh and profound understanding of computation complexity.
1309.3985
The ADI iteration for Lyapunov equations implicitly performs H2 pseudo-optimal model order reduction
math.NA cs.SY math.DS
Two approaches for approximating the solution of large-scale Lyapunov equations are considered: the alternating direction implicit (ADI) iteration and projective methods by Krylov subspaces. A link between them is presented by showing that the ADI iteration can always be identified by a Petrov-Galerkin projection with rational block Krylov subspaces. Then a unique Krylov-projected dynamical system can be associated with the ADI iteration, which is proven to be an H2 pseudo-optimal approximation. This includes the generalization of previous results on H2 pseudo-optimality to the multivariable case. Additionally, a low-rank formulation of the residual in the Lyapunov equation is presented, which is well-suited for implementation, and which yields a measure of the "obliqueness" that the ADI iteration is associated with.
1309.4009
Access Patterns for Robots and Humans in Web Archives
cs.DL cs.IR
Although user access patterns on the live web are well-understood, there has been no corresponding study of how users, both humans and robots, access web archives. Based on samples from the Internet Archive's public Wayback Machine, we propose a set of basic usage patterns: Dip (a single access), Slide (the same page at different archive times), Dive (different pages at approximately the same archive time), and Skim (lists of what pages are archived, i.e., TimeMaps). Robots are limited almost exclusively to Dips and Skims, but human accesses are more varied between all four types. Robots outnumber humans 10:1 in terms of sessions, 5:4 in terms of raw HTTP accesses, and 4:1 in terms of megabytes transferred. Robots almost always access TimeMaps (95% of accesses), but humans predominately access the archived web pages themselves (82% of accesses). In terms of unique archived web pages, there is no overall preference for a particular time, but the recent past (within the last year) shows significant repeat accesses.
1309.4024
The Cyborg Astrobiologist: Matching of Prior Textures by Image Compression for Geological Mapping and Novelty Detection
cs.CV astro-ph.EP astro-ph.IM cs.LG
(abridged) We describe an image-comparison technique of Heidemann and Ritter that uses image compression, and is capable of: (i) detecting novel textures in a series of images, as well as of: (ii) alerting the user to the similarity of a new image to a previously-observed texture. This image-comparison technique has been implemented and tested using our Astrobiology Phone-cam system, which employs Bluetooth communication to send images to a local laptop server in the field for the image-compression analysis. We tested the system in a field site displaying a heterogeneous suite of sandstones, limestones, mudstones and coalbeds. Some of the rocks are partly covered with lichen. The image-matching procedure of this system performed very well with data obtained through our field test, grouping all images of yellow lichens together and grouping all images of a coal bed together, and giving a 91% accuracy for similarity detection. Such similarity detection could be employed to make maps of different geological units. The novelty-detection performance of our system was also rather good (a 64% accuracy). Such novelty detection may become valuable in searching for new geological units, which could be of astrobiological interest. The image-comparison technique is an unsupervised technique that is not capable of directly classifying an image as containing a particular geological feature; labeling of such geological features is done post facto by human geologists associated with this study, for the purpose of analyzing the system's performance. By providing more advanced capabilities for similarity detection and novelty detection, this image-compression technique could be useful in giving more scientific autonomy to robotic planetary rovers, and in assisting human astronauts in their geological exploration and assessment.
1309.4026
Secure Degrees of Freedom of MIMO X-Channels with Output Feedback and Delayed CSIT
cs.IT math.IT
We investigate the problem of secure transmission over a two-user multi-input multi-output (MIMO) X-channel in which channel state information is provided with one-unit delay to both transmitters (CSIT), and each receiver feeds back its channel output to a different transmitter. We refer to this model as MIMO X-channel with asymmetric output feedback and delayed CSIT. The transmitters are equipped with M-antennas each, and the receivers are equipped with N-antennas each. For this model, accounting for both messages at each receiver, we characterize the optimal sum secure degrees of freedom (SDoF) region. We show that, in presence of asymmetric output feedback and delayed CSIT, the sum SDoF region of the MIMO X-channel is same as the SDoF region of a two-user MIMO BC with 2M-antennas at the transmitter, N-antennas at each receiver and delayed CSIT. This result shows that, upon availability of asymmetric output feedback and delayed CSIT, there is no performance loss in terms of sum SDoF due to the distributed nature of the transmitters. Next, we show that this result also holds if only output feedback is conveyed to the transmitters, but in a symmetric manner, i.e., each receiver feeds back its output to both transmitters and no CSIT. We also study the case in which only asymmetric output feedback is provided to the transmitters, i.e., without CSIT, and derive a lower bound on the sum SDoF for this model. Furthermore, we specialize our results to the case in which there are no security constraints. In particular, similar to the setting with security constraints, we show that the optimal sum DoF region of the (M,M,N,N)--MIMO X-channel with asymmetric output feedback and delayed CSIT is same as the DoF region of a two-user MIMO BC with 2M-antennas at the transmitter, N-antennas at each receiver, and delayed CSIT. We illustrate our results with some numerical examples.
1309.4034
The Weighted Sum Rate Maximization in MIMO Interference Networks: The Minimax Lagrangian Duality and Algorithm
cs.IT math.IT
We take a new perspective on the weighted sum-rate maximization in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) interference networks, by formulating an equivalent max-min problem. This seemingly trivial reformulation has significant implications: the Lagrangian duality of the equivalent max-min problem provides an elegant way to establish the sum-rate duality between an interference network and its reciprocal when such a duality exists, and more importantly, suggests a novel iterative minimax algorithm for the weighted sum-rate maximization. Moreover, the design and convergence proof of the algorithm use only general convex analysis. They apply and extend to any max-min problems with similar structure, and thus provide a general class of algorithms for such optimization problems. This paper presents a promising step and lends hope for establishing a general framework based on the minimax Lagrangian duality for characterizing the weighted sum-rate and developing efficient algorithms for general MIMO interference networks.
1309.4035
Domain and Function: A Dual-Space Model of Semantic Relations and Compositions
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Given appropriate representations of the semantic relations between carpenter and wood and between mason and stone (for example, vectors in a vector space model), a suitable algorithm should be able to recognize that these relations are highly similar (carpenter is to wood as mason is to stone; the relations are analogous). Likewise, with representations of dog, house, and kennel, an algorithm should be able to recognize that the semantic composition of dog and house, dog house, is highly similar to kennel (dog house and kennel are synonymous). It seems that these two tasks, recognizing relations and compositions, are closely connected. However, up to now, the best models for relations are significantly different from the best models for compositions. In this paper, we introduce a dual-space model that unifies these two tasks. This model matches the performance of the best previous models for relations and compositions. The dual-space model consists of a space for measuring domain similarity and a space for measuring function similarity. Carpenter and wood share the same domain, the domain of carpentry. Mason and stone share the same domain, the domain of masonry. Carpenter and mason share the same function, the function of artisans. Wood and stone share the same function, the function of materials. In the composition dog house, kennel has some domain overlap with both dog and house (the domains of pets and buildings). The function of kennel is similar to the function of house (the function of shelters). By combining domain and function similarities in various ways, we can model relations, compositions, and other aspects of semantics.
1309.4050
Analytical solution for a class of network dynamics with mechanical and financial applications
cond-mat.stat-mech cond-mat.dis-nn cs.SI physics.soc-ph q-fin.ST
We show that for a certain class of dynamics at the nodes the response of a network of any topology to arbitrary inputs is defined in a simple way by its response to a monotone input. The nodes may have either a discrete or continuous set of states and there is no limit on the complexity of the network. The results provide both an efficient numerical method and the potential for accurate analytic approximation of the dynamics on such networks. As illustrative applications, we introduce a quasistatic mechanical model with objects interacting via frictional forces, and a financial market model with avalanches and critical behavior that are generated by momentum trading strategies.
1309.4058
Why SOV might be initially preferred and then lost or recovered? A theoretical framework
cs.CL nlin.AO physics.soc-ph q-bio.NC
Little is known about why SOV order is initially preferred and then discarded or recovered. Here we present a framework for understanding these and many related word order phenomena: the diversity of dominant orders, the existence of free words orders, the need of alternative word orders and word order reversions and cycles in evolution. Under that framework, word order is regarded as a multiconstraint satisfaction problem in which at least two constraints are in conflict: online memory minimization and maximum predictability.
1309.4061
Learning a Loopy Model For Semantic Segmentation Exactly
cs.LG cs.CV
Learning structured models using maximum margin techniques has become an indispensable tool for com- puter vision researchers, as many computer vision applications can be cast naturally as an image labeling problem. Pixel-based or superpixel-based conditional random fields are particularly popular examples. Typ- ically, neighborhood graphs, which contain a large number of cycles, are used. As exact inference in loopy graphs is NP-hard in general, learning these models without approximations is usually deemed infeasible. In this work we show that, despite the theoretical hardness, it is possible to learn loopy models exactly in practical applications. To this end, we analyze the use of multiple approximate inference techniques together with cutting plane training of structural SVMs. We show that our proposed method yields exact solutions with an optimality guarantees in a computer vision application, for little additional computational cost. We also propose a dynamic caching scheme to accelerate training further, yielding runtimes that are comparable with approximate methods. We hope that this insight can lead to a reconsideration of the tractability of loopy models in computer vision.
1309.4062
Resource Optimization in Device-to-Device Cellular Systems Using Time-Frequency Hopping
cs.IT math.IT
We develop a flexible and accurate framework for device-to-device (D2D) communication in the context of a conventional cellular network, which allows for time-frequency resources to be either shared or orthogonally partitioned between the two networks. Using stochastic geometry, we provide accurate expressions for SINR distributions and average rates, under an assumption of interference randomization via time and/or frequency hopping, for both dedicated and shared spectrum approaches. We obtain analytical results in closed or semi-closed form in high SNR regime, that allow us to easily explore the impact of key parameters (e.g., the load and hopping probabilities) on the network performance. In particular, unlike other models, the expressions we obtain are tractable, i.e., they can be efficiently optimized without extensive simulation. Using these, we optimize the hopping probabilities for the D2D links, i.e., how often they should request a time or frequency slot. This can be viewed as an optimized lower bound to other more sophisticated scheduling schemes. We also investigate the optimal resource partitions between D2D and cellular networks when they use orthogonal resources.
1309.4067
Facebook Applications' Installation and Removal: A Temporal Analysis
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Facebook applications are one of the reasons for Facebook attractiveness. Unfortunately, numerous users are not aware of the fact that many malicious Facebook applications exist. To educate users, to raise users' awareness and to improve Facebook users' security and privacy, we developed a Firefox add-on that alerts users to the number of installed applications on their Facebook profiles. In this study, we present the temporal analysis of the Facebook applications' installation and removal dataset collected by our add-on. This dataset consists of information from 2,945 users, collected during a period of over a year. We used linear regression to analyze our dataset and discovered the linear connection between the average percentage change of newly installed Facebook applications and the number of days passed since the user initially installed our add-on. Additionally, we found out that users who used our Firefox add-on become more aware of their security and privacy installing on average fewer new applications. Finally, we discovered that on average 86.4% of Facebook users install an additional application every 4.2 days.
1309.4085
Multiobjective Tactical Planning under Uncertainty for Air Traffic Flow and Capacity Management
cs.AI
We investigate a method to deal with congestion of sectors and delays in the tactical phase of air traffic flow and capacity management. It relies on temporal objectives given for every point of the flight plans and shared among the controllers in order to create a collaborative environment. This would enhance the transition from the network view of the flow management to the local view of air traffic control. Uncertainty is modeled at the trajectory level with temporal information on the boundary points of the crossed sectors and then, we infer the probabilistic occupancy count. Therefore, we can model the accuracy of the trajectory prediction in the optimization process in order to fix some safety margins. On the one hand, more accurate is our prediction; more efficient will be the proposed solutions, because of the tighter safety margins. On the other hand, when uncertainty is not negligible, the proposed solutions will be more robust to disruptions. Furthermore, a multiobjective algorithm is used to find the tradeoff between the delays and congestion, which are antagonist in airspace with high traffic density. The flow management position can choose manually, or automatically with a preference-based algorithm, the adequate solution. This method is tested against two instances, one with 10 flights and 5 sectors and one with 300 flights and 16 sectors.
1309.4111
Regularized Spectral Clustering under the Degree-Corrected Stochastic Blockmodel
stat.ML cs.LG math.ST stat.TH
Spectral clustering is a fast and popular algorithm for finding clusters in networks. Recently, Chaudhuri et al. (2012) and Amini et al.(2012) proposed inspired variations on the algorithm that artificially inflate the node degrees for improved statistical performance. The current paper extends the previous statistical estimation results to the more canonical spectral clustering algorithm in a way that removes any assumption on the minimum degree and provides guidance on the choice of the tuning parameter. Moreover, our results show how the "star shape" in the eigenvectors--a common feature of empirical networks--can be explained by the Degree-Corrected Stochastic Blockmodel and the Extended Planted Partition model, two statistical models that allow for highly heterogeneous degrees. Throughout, the paper characterizes and justifies several of the variations of the spectral clustering algorithm in terms of these models.
1309.4132
Attribute-Efficient Evolvability of Linear Functions
cs.LG q-bio.PE
In a seminal paper, Valiant (2006) introduced a computational model for evolution to address the question of complexity that can arise through Darwinian mechanisms. Valiant views evolution as a restricted form of computational learning, where the goal is to evolve a hypothesis that is close to the ideal function. Feldman (2008) showed that (correlational) statistical query learning algorithms could be framed as evolutionary mechanisms in Valiant's model. P. Valiant (2012) considered evolvability of real-valued functions and also showed that weak-optimization algorithms that use weak-evaluation oracles could be converted to evolutionary mechanisms. In this work, we focus on the complexity of representations of evolutionary mechanisms. In general, the reductions of Feldman and P. Valiant may result in intermediate representations that are arbitrarily complex (polynomial-sized circuits). We argue that biological constraints often dictate that the representations have low complexity, such as constant depth and fan-in circuits. We give mechanisms for evolving sparse linear functions under a large class of smooth distributions. These evolutionary algorithms are attribute-efficient in the sense that the size of the representations and the number of generations required depend only on the sparsity of the target function and the accuracy parameter, but have no dependence on the total number of attributes.
1309.4136
Compression via Compressive Sensing : A Low-Power Framework for the Telemonitoring of Multi-Channel Physiological Signals
cs.IT math.IT
Telehealth and wearable equipment can deliver personal healthcare and necessary treatment remotely. One major challenge is transmitting large amount of biosignals through wireless networks. The limited battery life calls for low-power data compressors. Compressive Sensing (CS) has proved to be a low-power compressor. In this study, we apply CS on the compression of multichannel biosignals. We firstly develop an efficient CS algorithm from the Block Sparse Bayesian Learning (BSBL) framework. It is based on a combination of the block sparse model and multiple measurement vector model. Experiments on real-life Fetal ECGs showed that the proposed algorithm has high fidelity and efficiency. Implemented in hardware, the proposed algorithm was compared to a Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) based algorithm, verifying the proposed one has low power consumption and occupies less computational resources.
1309.4138
Base Station Activation and Linear Transceiver Design for Optimal Resource Management in Heterogeneous Networks
cs.IT math.IT
In a densely deployed heterogeneous network (HetNet), the number of pico/micro base stations (BS) can be comparable with the number of the users. To reduce the operational overhead of the HetNet, proper identification of the set of serving BSs becomes an important design issue. In this work, we show that by jointly optimizing the transceivers and determining the active set of BSs, high system resource utilization can be achieved with only a small number of BSs. In particular, we provide formulations and efficient algorithms for such joint optimization problem, under the following two common design criteria: i) minimization of the total power consumption at the BSs, and ii) maximization of the system spectrum efficiency. In both cases, we introduce a nonsmooth regularizer to facilitate the activation of the most appropriate BSs. We illustrate the efficiency and the efficacy of the proposed algorithms via extensive numerical simulations.
1309.4141
Analysis of Blockage Effects on Urban Cellular Networks
cs.IT math.IT
Large-scale blockages like buildings affect the performance of urban cellular networks, especially at higher frequencies. Unfortunately, such blockage effects are either neglected or characterized by oversimplified models in the analysis of cellular networks. Leveraging concepts from random shape theory, this paper proposes a mathematical framework to model random blockages and analyze their impact on cellular network performance. Random buildings are modeled as a process of rectangles with random sizes and orientations whose centers form a Poisson point process on the plane. The distribution of the number of blockages in a link is proven to be Poisson random variable with parameter dependent on the length of the link. A path loss model that incorporates the blockage effects is proposed, which matches experimental trends observed in prior work. The model is applied to analyze the performance of cellular networks in urban areas with the presence of buildings, in terms of connectivity, coverage probability, and average rate. Analytic results show while buildings may block the desired signal, they may still have a positive impact on network performance since they can block significantly more interference.
1309.4151
A Non-Local Means Filter for Removing the Poisson Noise
stat.AP cs.CV
A new image denoising algorithm to deal with the Poisson noise model is given, which is based on the idea of Non-Local Mean. By using the "Oracle" concept, we establish a theorem to show that the Non-Local Means Filter can effectively deal with Poisson noise with some modification. Under the theoretical result, we construct our new algorithm called Non-Local Means Poisson Filter and demonstrate in theory that the filter converges at the usual optimal rate. The filter is as simple as the classic Non-Local Means and the simulation results show that our filter is very competitive.
1309.4156
Trade integration and trade imbalances in the European Union: a network perspective
physics.soc-ph cs.CE physics.data-an q-fin.GN
We study the ever more integrated and ever more unbalanced trade relationships between European countries. To better capture the complexity of economic networks, we propose two global measures that assess the trade integration and the trade imbalances of the European countries. These measures are the network (or indirect) counterparts to traditional (or direct) measures such as the trade-to-GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and trade deficit-to-GDP ratios. Our indirect tools account for the European inter-country trade structure and follow (i) a decomposition of the global trade flow into elementary flows that highlight the long-range dependencies between exporting and importing economies and (ii) the commute-time distance for trade integration,which measures the impact of a perturbation in the economy of a country on another country, possibly through intermediate partners by domino effect. Our application addresses the impact of the launch of the Euro. We find that the indirect imbalance measures better identify the countries ultimately bearing deficits and surpluses, by neutralizing the impact of trade transit countries, such as the Netherlands. Among others, we find that ultimate surpluses of Germany are quite concentrated in only three partners. We also show that for some countries, the direct and indirect measures of trade integration diverge, thereby revealing that these countries (e.g. Greece and Portugal) trade to a smaller extent with countries considered as central in the European Union network.
1309.4157
EgoNet-UIUC: A Dataset For Ego Network Research
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
In this report, we introduce the version one of EgoNet-UIUC, which is a dataset for ego network research. The dataset contains about 230 ego networks in Linkedin, which have about 33K users (with their attributes) and 283K relationships (with their relationship types) in total. We name this dataset as EgoNet-UIUC, which stands for Ego Network Dataset from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
1309.4161
How to Identify an Infection Source with Limited Observations
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
A rumor spreading in a social network or a disease propagating in a community can be modeled as an infection spreading in a network. Finding the infection source is a challenging problem, which is made more difficult in many applications where we have access only to a limited set of observations. We consider the problem of estimating an infection source for a Susceptible-Infected model, in which not all infected nodes can be observed. When the network is a tree, we show that an estimator for the source node associated with the most likely infection path that yields the limited observations is given by a Jordan center, i.e., a node with minimum distance to the set of observed infected nodes. We also propose approximate source estimators for general networks. Simulation results on various synthetic networks and real world networks suggest that our estimators perform better than distance, closeness, and betweenness centrality based heuristics.
1309.4164
The Development of ADS Virtual Accelerator Based on XAL
physics.acc-ph cs.SY
XAL is a high level accelerator application framework originally developed by the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It has advanced design concept and adopted by many international accelerator laboratories. Adopting XAL for ADS is a key subject in the long term. This paper will present the modifications to the original XAL applications for ADS. The work includes proper relational database schema modification in order to better suit ADS configuration data requirement, redesigning and re-implementing db2xal application and modifying the virtual accelerator application. In addition, the new device types and new device attributes for ADS online modeling purpose is also described here.
1309.4166
A New Class of Index Coding Instances Where Linear Coding is Optimal
cs.IT math.IT
We study index-coding problems (one sender broadcasting messages to multiple receivers) where each message is requested by one receiver, and each receiver may know some messages a priori. This type of index-coding problems can be fully described by directed graphs. The aim is to find the minimum codelength that the sender needs to transmit in order to simultaneously satisfy all receivers' requests. For any directed graph, we show that if a maximum acyclic induced subgraph (MAIS) is obtained by removing two or fewer vertices from the graph, then the minimum codelength (i.e., the solution to the index-coding problem) equals the number of vertices in the MAIS, and linear codes are optimal for this index-coding problem. Our result increases the set of index-coding problems for which linear index codes are proven to be optimal.
1309.4168
Exploiting Similarities among Languages for Machine Translation
cs.CL
Dictionaries and phrase tables are the basis of modern statistical machine translation systems. This paper develops a method that can automate the process of generating and extending dictionaries and phrase tables. Our method can translate missing word and phrase entries by learning language structures based on large monolingual data and mapping between languages from small bilingual data. It uses distributed representation of words and learns a linear mapping between vector spaces of languages. Despite its simplicity, our method is surprisingly effective: we can achieve almost 90% precision@5 for translation of words between English and Spanish. This method makes little assumption about the languages, so it can be used to extend and refine dictionaries and translation tables for any language pairs.
1309.4203
An efficient algorithm for weighted sum-rate maximization in multicell downlink beamforming
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers coordinated linear precoding for rate optimization in downlink multicell, multiuser orthogonal frequency- division multiple access networks. We focus on two different design criteria. In the first, the weighted sum-rate is maximized under transmit power constraints per base station. In the second, we minimize the total transmit power satisfying the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio constraints of the subcarriers per cell. Both problems are solved using standard conic optimization packages. A less complex, fast, and provably convergent algorithm that maximizes the weighted sum-rate with per-cell transmit power constraints is formulated. We approximate the nonconvex weighted sum- rate maximization (WSRM) problem with a solvable convex form by means of a sequential parametric convex approximation approach. The second- order cone formulations of an objective function and the constraints of the optimization problem are derived through a proper change of variables, first-order linear approximation, and hyperbolic constraints transformation. This algorithm converges to the suboptimal solution while taking fewer it- erations in comparison to other known iterative WSRM algorithms. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed algorithm.
1309.4251
Optimal Distributed Controller Design with Communication Delays: Application to Vehicle Formations
cs.SY
This paper develops a controller synthesis algorithm for distributed LQG control problems under output feedback. We consider a system consisting of three interconnected linear subsystems with a delayed information sharing structure. While the state-feedback case of this problem has previously been solved, the extension to output-feedback is nontrivial, as the classical separation principle fails. To find the optimal solution, the controller is decomposed into two independent components. One is delayed centralized LQR, and the other is the sum of correction terms based on additional local information. Explicit discrete-time equations are derived whose solutions are the gains of the optimal controller.
1309.4259
Optimal scales in weighted networks
physics.data-an cond-mat.dis-nn cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI
The analysis of networks characterized by links with heterogeneous intensity or weight suffers from two long-standing problems of arbitrariness. On one hand, the definitions of topological properties introduced for binary graphs can be generalized in non-unique ways to weighted networks. On the other hand, even when a definition is given, there is no natural choice of the (optimal) scale of link intensities (e.g. the money unit in economic networks). Here we show that these two seemingly independent problems can be regarded as intimately related, and propose a common solution to both. Using a formalism that we recently proposed in order to map a weighted network to an ensemble of binary graphs, we introduce an information-theoretic approach leading to the least biased generalization of binary properties to weighted networks, and at the same time fixing the optimal scale of link intensities. We illustrate our method on various social and economic networks.
1309.4291
Models and algorithms for skip-free Markov decision processes on trees
math.OC cs.AI math.PR
We introduce a class of models for multidimensional control problems which we call skip-free Markov decision processes on trees. We describe and analyse an algorithm applicable to Markov decision processes of this type that are skip-free in the negative direction. Starting with the finite average cost case, we show that the algorithm combines the advantages of both value iteration and policy iteration -- it is guaranteed to converge to an optimal policy and optimal value function after a finite number of iterations but the computational effort required for each iteration step is comparable with that for value iteration. We show that the algorithm can also be used to solve discounted cost models and continuous time models, and that a suitably modified algorithm can be used to solve communicating models.
1309.4306
Sparsity Based Poisson Denoising with Dictionary Learning
cs.CV stat.ML
The problem of Poisson denoising appears in various imaging applications, such as low-light photography, medical imaging and microscopy. In cases of high SNR, several transformations exist so as to convert the Poisson noise into an additive i.i.d. Gaussian noise, for which many effective algorithms are available. However, in a low SNR regime, these transformations are significantly less accurate, and a strategy that relies directly on the true noise statistics is required. A recent work by Salmon et al. took this route, proposing a patch-based exponential image representation model based on GMM (Gaussian mixture model), leading to state-of-the-art results. In this paper, we propose to harness sparse-representation modeling to the image patches, adopting the same exponential idea. Our scheme uses a greedy pursuit with boot-strapping based stopping condition and dictionary learning within the denoising process. The reconstruction performance of the proposed scheme is competitive with leading methods in high SNR, and achieving state-of-the-art results in cases of low SNR.
1309.4345
Music Files Search System
cs.IR
This paper introduces a project of advanced system of music retrieval from the Internet. The system uses combination of text search (by author, title and other information about the music file included in id3 tag description or similar for other file types) with more intuitive and novel method of melody search using query by humming. The patterns for storing text and melody information as well as improved clustering algorithm for the pattern space were proposed. The search engine is planned to optimise the query due to the data input by user, thanks to the structure of text and melody index database. The system is planned to be a plug-in for popular digital music players or an independent player. An advanced system of recommendation based on information gathered from user's profile and search history is an integral part of the system. The recommendation mechanism uses scrobbling methods and is responsible for making suggestions of songs unknown to the user but similar to his preferred music styles and positioning search results.
1309.4355
Experimental Evaluation of Interference Alignment for Broadband WLAN Systems
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper we present an experimental study on the performance of spatial Interference Alignment (IA) in indoor wireless local area network scenarios that use Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) according to the physical-layer specifications of the IEEE 802.11a standard. Experiments have been carried out using a wireless network testbed capable of implementing a 3-user MIMO interference channel. We have implemented IA decoding schemes that can be designed according to distinct criteria (e.g. zero-forcing or MaxSINR). The measurement methodology has been validated considering practical issues like the number of OFDM training symbols used for channel estimation or feedback time. In case of asynchronous users, a time-domain IA decoding filter is also compared to its frequency-domain counterpart. We also evaluated the performance of IA from bit error rate measurement-based results in comparison to different time-division multiple access transmission schemes. The comparison includes single- and multiple-antenna systems transmitting over the dominant mode of the MIMO channel. Our results indicate that spatial IA is suitable for practical indoor scenarios in which wireless channels often exhibit relatively large coherence times.
1309.4385
Photon counting compressive depth mapping
physics.optics cs.CV
We demonstrate a compressed sensing, photon counting lidar system based on the single-pixel camera. Our technique recovers both depth and intensity maps from a single under-sampled set of incoherent, linear projections of a scene of interest at ultra-low light levels around 0.5 picowatts. Only two-dimensional reconstructions are required to image a three-dimensional scene. We demonstrate intensity imaging and depth mapping at 256 x 256 pixel transverse resolution with acquisition times as short as 3 seconds. We also show novelty filtering, reconstructing only the difference between two instances of a scene. Finally, we acquire 32 x 32 pixel real-time video for three-dimensional object tracking at 14 frames-per-second.