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1310.1811
End-to-End Text Recognition with Hybrid HMM Maxout Models
cs.CV
The problem of detecting and recognizing text in natural scenes has proved to be more challenging than its counterpart in documents, with most of the previous work focusing on a single part of the problem. In this work, we propose new solutions to the character and word recognition problems and then show how to combine these solutions in an end-to-end text-recognition system. We do so by leveraging the recently introduced Maxout networks along with hybrid HMM models that have proven useful for voice recognition. Using these elements, we build a tunable and highly accurate recognition system that beats state-of-the-art results on all the sub-problems for both the ICDAR 2003 and SVT benchmark datasets.
1310.1822
Error Rate Analysis of Cognitive Radio Transmissions with Imperfect Channel Sensing
cs.IT math.IT
This paper studies the symbol error rate performance of cognitive radio transmissions in the presence of imperfect sensing decisions. Two different transmission schemes, namely sensing-based spectrum sharing (SSS) and opportunistic spectrum access (OSA), are considered. In both schemes, secondary users first perform channel sensing, albeit with possible errors. In SSS, depending on the sensing decisions, they adapt the transmission power level and coexist with primary users in the channel. On the other hand, in OSA, secondary users are allowed to transmit only when the primary user activity is not detected. Initially, for both transmission schemes, general formulations for the optimal decision rule and error probabilities are provided for arbitrary modulation schemes under the assumptions that the receiver is equipped with the sensing decision and perfect knowledge of the channel fading, and the primary user's received faded signals at the secondary receiver has a Gaussian mixture distribution. Subsequently, the general approach is specialized to rectangular quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). More specifically, optimal decision rule is characterized for rectangular QAM, and closed-form expressions for the average symbol error probability attained with the optimal detector are derived under both transmit power and interference constraints. The effects of imperfect channel sensing decisions, interference from the primary user and its Gaussian mixture model, and the transmit power and interference constraints on the error rate performance of cognitive transmissions are analyzed.
1310.1829
Delineating geographical regions with networks of human interactions in an extensive set of countries
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Large-scale networks of human interaction, in particular country-wide telephone call networks, can be used to redraw geographical maps by applying algorithms of topological community detection. The geographic projections of the emerging areas in a few recent studies on single regions have been suggested to share two distinct properties: first, they are cohesive, and second, they tend to closely follow socio-economic boundaries and are similar to existing political regions in size and number. Here we use an extended set of countries and clustering indices to quantify overlaps, providing ample additional evidence for these observations using phone data from countries of various scales across Europe, Asia, and Africa: France, the UK, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, and Ivory Coast. In our analysis we use the known approach of partitioning country-wide networks, and an additional iterative partitioning of each of the first level communities into sub-communities, revealing that cohesiveness and matching of official regions can also be observed on a second level if spatial resolution of the data is high enough. The method has possible policy implications on the definition of the borderlines and sizes of administrative regions.
1310.1840
Parallel coordinate descent for the Adaboost problem
cs.LG math.OC stat.ML
We design a randomised parallel version of Adaboost based on previous studies on parallel coordinate descent. The algorithm uses the fact that the logarithm of the exponential loss is a function with coordinate-wise Lipschitz continuous gradient, in order to define the step lengths. We provide the proof of convergence for this randomised Adaboost algorithm and a theoretical parallelisation speedup factor. We finally provide numerical examples on learning problems of various sizes that show that the algorithm is competitive with concurrent approaches, especially for large scale problems.
1310.1855
Early Fire Detection Using HEP and Space-time Analysis
cs.CV cs.MM
In this article, a video base early fire alarm system is developed by monitoring the smoke in the scene. There are two major contributions in this work. First, to find the best texture feature for smoke detection, a general framework, named Histograms of Equivalent Patterns (HEP), is adopted to achieve an extensive evaluation of various kinds of texture features. Second, the \emph{Block based Inter-Frame Difference} (BIFD) and a improved version of LBP-TOP are proposed and ensembled to describe the space-time characteristics of the smoke. In order to reduce the false alarms, the Smoke History Image (SHI) is utilized to register the recent classification results of candidate smoke blocks. Experimental results using SVM show that the proposed method can achieve better accuracy and less false alarm compared with the state-of-the-art technologies.
1310.1857
Predictor-Based Tracking For Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation
math.OC cs.SY
A new hybrid tracking controller for neuromuscular electrical stimulation is proposed. The control scheme uses sampled measurements and is designed by utilizing a numerical prediction of the state variables. The tracking error of the closed-loop system converges exponentially to zero and robustness to perturbations of the sampling schedule is exhibited. One of the novelties of our approach is the ability to satisfy a state constraint imposed by the physical system.
1310.1861
Physical-Layer Cryptography Through Massive MIMO
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
We propose the new technique of physical-layer cryptography based on using a massive MIMO channel as a key between the sender and desired receiver, which need not be secret. The goal is for low-complexity encoding and decoding by the desired transmitter-receiver pair, whereas decoding by an eavesdropper is hard in terms of prohibitive complexity. The decoding complexity is analyzed by mapping the massive MIMO system to a lattice. We show that the eavesdropper's decoder for the MIMO system with M-PAM modulation is equivalent to solving standard lattice problems that are conjectured to be of exponential complexity for both classical and quantum computers. Hence, under the widely-held conjecture that standard lattice problems are hard to solve in the worst-case, the proposed encryption scheme has a more robust notion of security than that of the most common encryption methods used today such as RSA and Diffie-Hellman. Additionally, we show that this scheme could be used to securely communicate without a pre-shared secret and little computational overhead. Thus, by exploiting the physical layer properties of the radio channel, the massive MIMO system provides for low-complexity encryption commensurate with the most sophisticated forms of application-layer encryption that are currently known.
1310.1863
Empowerment -- an Introduction
cs.AI cs.IT math.IT nlin.AO
This book chapter is an introduction to and an overview of the information-theoretic, task independent utility function "Empowerment", which is defined as the channel capacity between an agent's actions and an agent's sensors. It quantifies how much influence and control an agent has over the world it can perceive. This book chapter discusses the general idea behind empowerment as an intrinsic motivation and showcases several previous applications of empowerment to demonstrate how empowerment can be applied to different sensor-motor configuration, and how the same formalism can lead to different observed behaviors. Furthermore, we also present a fast approximation for empowerment in the continuous domain.
1310.1869
Singular Value Decomposition of Images from Scanned Photographic Plates
cs.CV astro-ph.IM cs.CE
We want to approximate the mxn image A from scanned astronomical photographic plates (from the Sofia Sky Archive Data Center) by using far fewer entries than in the original matrix. By using rank of a matrix, k we remove the redundant information or noise and use as Wiener filter, when rank k<m or k<n. With this approximation more than 98% compression ration of image of astronomical plate without that image details, is obtained. The SVD of images from scanned photographic plates (SPP) is considered and its possible image compression.
1310.1891
Every list-decodable code for high noise has abundant near-optimal rate puncturings
cs.IT math.IT
We show that any q-ary code with sufficiently good distance can be randomly punctured to obtain, with high probability, a code that is list decodable up to radius $1 - 1/q - \epsilon$ with near-optimal rate and list sizes. Our results imply that "most" Reed-Solomon codes are list decodable beyond the Johnson bound, settling the long-standing open question of whether any Reed Solomon codes meet this criterion. More precisely, we show that a Reed-Solomon code with random evaluation points is, with high probability, list decodable up to radius $1 - \epsilon$ with list sizes $O(1/\epsilon)$ and rate $\Omega(\epsilon)$. As a second corollary of our argument, we obtain improved bounds on the list decodability of random linear codes over large fields. Our approach exploits techniques from high dimensional probability. Previous work used similar tools to obtain bounds on the list decodability of random linear codes, but the bounds did not scale with the size of the alphabet. In this paper, we use a chaining argument to deal with large alphabet sizes.
1310.1930
Polytopic uncertainty for linear systems: New and old complexity results
cs.SY cs.CC math.DS
We survey the problem of deciding the stability or stabilizability of uncertain linear systems whose region of uncertainty is a polytope. This natural setting has applications in many fields of applied science, from Control Theory to Systems Engineering to Biology. We focus on the algorithmic decidability of this property when one is given a particular polytope. This setting gives rise to several different algorithmic questions, depending on the nature of time (discrete/continuous), the property asked (stability/stabilizability), or the type of uncertainty (fixed/switching). Several of these questions have been answered in the literature in the last thirty years. We point out the ones that have remained open, and we answer all of them, except one which we raise as an open question. In all the cases, the results are negative in the sense that the questions are NP-hard. As a byproduct, we obtain complexity results for several other matrix problems in Systems and Control.
1310.1934
Discriminative Features via Generalized Eigenvectors
cs.LG stat.ML
Representing examples in a way that is compatible with the underlying classifier can greatly enhance the performance of a learning system. In this paper we investigate scalable techniques for inducing discriminative features by taking advantage of simple second order structure in the data. We focus on multiclass classification and show that features extracted from the generalized eigenvectors of the class conditional second moments lead to classifiers with excellent empirical performance. Moreover, these features have attractive theoretical properties, such as inducing representations that are invariant to linear transformations of the input. We evaluate classifiers built from these features on three different tasks, obtaining state of the art results.
1310.1942
Containing Viral Spread on Sparse Random Graphs: Bounds, Algorithms, and Experiments
math.PR cs.DM cs.SI math.CO
Viral spread on large graphs has many real-life applications such as malware propagation in computer networks and rumor (or misinformation) spread in Twitter-like online social networks. Although viral spread on large graphs has been intensively analyzed on classical models such as Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered, there still exits a deficit of effective methods in practice to contain epidemic spread once it passes a critical threshold. Against this backdrop, we explore methods of containing viral spread in large networks with the focus on sparse random networks. The viral containment strategy is to partition a large network into small components and then to ensure the sanity of all messages delivered across different components. With such a defense mechanism in place, an epidemic spread starting from any node is limited to only those nodes belonging to the same component as the initial infection node. We establish both lower and upper bounds on the costs of inspecting inter-component messages. We further propose heuristic-based approaches to partition large input graphs into small components. Finally, we study the performance of our proposed algorithms under different network topologies and different edge weight models.
1310.1947
Bayesian Optimization With Censored Response Data
cs.AI cs.LG stat.ML
Bayesian optimization (BO) aims to minimize a given blackbox function using a model that is updated whenever new evidence about the function becomes available. Here, we address the problem of BO under partially right-censored response data, where in some evaluations we only obtain a lower bound on the function value. The ability to handle such response data allows us to adaptively censor costly function evaluations in minimization problems where the cost of a function evaluation corresponds to the function value. One important application giving rise to such censored data is the runtime-minimizing variant of the algorithm configuration problem: finding settings of a given parametric algorithm that minimize the runtime required for solving problem instances from a given distribution. We demonstrate that terminating slow algorithm runs prematurely and handling the resulting right-censored observations can substantially improve the state of the art in model-based algorithm configuration.
1310.1949
Least Squares Revisited: Scalable Approaches for Multi-class Prediction
cs.LG stat.ML
This work provides simple algorithms for multi-class (and multi-label) prediction in settings where both the number of examples n and the data dimension d are relatively large. These robust and parameter free algorithms are essentially iterative least-squares updates and very versatile both in theory and in practice. On the theoretical front, we present several variants with convergence guarantees. Owing to their effective use of second-order structure, these algorithms are substantially better than first-order methods in many practical scenarios. On the empirical side, we present a scalable stagewise variant of our approach, which achieves dramatic computational speedups over popular optimization packages such as Liblinear and Vowpal Wabbit on standard datasets (MNIST and CIFAR-10), while attaining state-of-the-art accuracies.
1310.1953
The dynamics of correlated novelties
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
One new thing often leads to another. Such correlated novelties are a familiar part of daily life. They are also thought to be fundamental to the evolution of biological systems, human society, and technology. By opening new possibilities, one novelty can pave the way for others in a process that Kauffman has called "expanding the adjacent possible". The dynamics of correlated novelties, however, have yet to be quantified empirically or modeled mathematically. Here we propose a simple mathematical model that mimics the process of exploring a physical, biological or conceptual space that enlarges whenever a novelty occurs. The model, a generalization of Polya's urn, predicts statistical laws for the rate at which novelties happen (analogous to Heaps' law) and for the probability distribution on the space explored (analogous to Zipf's law), as well as signatures of the hypothesized process by which one novelty sets the stage for another. We test these predictions on four data sets of human activity: the edit events of Wikipedia pages, the emergence of tags in annotation systems, the sequence of words in texts, and listening to new songs in online music catalogues. By quantifying the dynamics of correlated novelties, our results provide a starting point for a deeper understanding of the ever-expanding adjacent possible and its role in biological, linguistic, cultural, and technological evolution.
1310.1964
Named entity recognition using conditional random fields with non-local relational constraints
cs.CL
We begin by introducing the Computer Science branch of Natural Language Processing, then narrowing the attention on its subbranch of Information Extraction and particularly on Named Entity Recognition, discussing briefly its main methodological approaches. It follows an introduction to state-of-the-art Conditional Random Fields under the form of linear chains. Subsequently, the idea of constrained inference as a way to model long-distance relationships in a text is presented, based on an Integer Linear Programming representation of the problem. Adding such relationships to the problem as automatically inferred logical formulas, translatable into linear conditions, we propose to solve the resulting more complex problem with the aid of Lagrangian relaxation, of which some technical details are explained. Lastly, we give some experimental results.
1310.1970
The Classical-Quantum Multiple Access Channel with Conferencing Encoders and with Common Messages
quant-ph cs.IT math-ph math.IT math.MP
We prove coding theorems for two scenarios of cooperating encoders for the multiple access channel with two classical inputs and one quantum output. In the first scenario (ccq-MAC with common messages), the two senders each have their private messages, but would also like to transmit common messages. In the second scenario (ccq-MAC with conferencing encoders), each sender has its own set of messages, but they are allowed to use a limited amount of noiseless classical communication amongst each other prior to encoding their messages. This conferencing protocol may depend on each individual message they intend to send. The two scenarios are related to each other not only in spirit - the existence of near-optimal codes for the ccq-MAC with common messages is used for proving the existence of near-optimal codes for the ccq-MAC with conferencing encoders.
1310.1975
ARKref: a rule-based coreference resolution system
cs.CL
ARKref is a tool for noun phrase coreference. It is a deterministic, rule-based system that uses syntactic information from a constituent parser, and semantic information from an entity recognition component. Its architecture is based on the work of Haghighi and Klein (2009). ARKref was originally written in 2009. At the time of writing, the last released version was in March 2011. This document describes that version, which is open-source and publicly available at: http://www.ark.cs.cmu.edu/ARKref
1310.1976
Feature Selection Strategies for Classifying High Dimensional Astronomical Data Sets
astro-ph.IM cs.CV
The amount of collected data in many scientific fields is increasing, all of them requiring a common task: extract knowledge from massive, multi parametric data sets, as rapidly and efficiently possible. This is especially true in astronomy where synoptic sky surveys are enabling new research frontiers in the time domain astronomy and posing several new object classification challenges in multi dimensional spaces; given the high number of parameters available for each object, feature selection is quickly becoming a crucial task in analyzing astronomical data sets. Using data sets extracted from the ongoing Catalina Real-Time Transient Surveys (CRTS) and the Kepler Mission we illustrate a variety of feature selection strategies used to identify the subsets that give the most information and the results achieved applying these techniques to three major astronomical problems.
1310.2001
Overflow Probability of Variable-length Codes with Codeword Cost
cs.IT math.IT
Lossless variable-length source coding with codeword cost is considered for general sources. The problem setting, where we impose on unequal costs on code symbols, is called the variable-length coding with codeword cost. In this problem, the infimum of average codeword cost have been determined for general sources. On the other hand, overflow probability, which is defined as the probability of codeword cost being above a threshold, have not been considered yet. In this paper, we determine the infimum of achievable threshold in the first-order sense and the second-order sense for general sources and compute it for some special sources such as i.i.d. sources and mixed sources. A relationship between the overflow probability of variable-length coding and the error probability of fixed-length coding is also revealed. Our analysis is based on the information-spectrum methods.
1310.2026
Low-Complexity Interactive Algorithms for Synchronization from Deletions, Insertions, and Substitutions
cs.IT cs.DS math.IT
Consider two remote nodes having binary sequences $X$ and $Y$, respectively. $Y$ is an edited version of ${X}$, where the editing involves random deletions, insertions, and substitutions, possibly in bursts. The goal is for the node with $Y$ to reconstruct $X$ with minimal exchange of information over a noiseless link. The communication is measured in terms of both the total number of bits exchanged and the number of interactive rounds of communication. This paper focuses on the setting where the number of edits is $o(\tfrac{n}{\log n})$, where $n$ is the length of $X$. We first consider the case where the edits are a mixture of insertions and deletions (indels), and propose an interactive synchronization algorithm with near-optimal communication rate and average computational complexity of $O(n)$ arithmetic operations. The algorithm uses interaction to efficiently split the source sequence into substrings containing exactly one deletion or insertion. Each of these substrings is then synchronized using an optimal one-way synchronization code based on the single-deletion correcting channel codes of Varshamov and Tenengolts (VT codes). We then build on this synchronization algorithm in three different ways. First, it is modified to work with a single round of interaction. The reduction in the number of rounds comes at the expense of higher communication, which is quantified. Next, we present an extension to the practically important case where the insertions and deletions may occur in (potentially large) bursts. Finally, we show how to synchronize the sources to within a target Hamming distance. This feature can be used to differentiate between substitution and indel edits. In addition to theoretical performance bounds, we provide several validating simulation results for the proposed algorithms.
1310.2028
Codebook-Based Opportunistic Interference Alignment
cs.IT math.IT
Opportunistic interference alignment (OIA) asymptotically achieves the optimal degrees-of-freedom (DoF) in interfering multiple-access channels (IMACs) in a distributed fashion, as a certain user scaling condition is satisfied. For the multiple-input multiple-output IMAC, it was shown that the singular value decomposition (SVD)-based beamforming at the users fundamentally reduces the user scaling condition required to achieve any target DoF compared to that for the single-inputmultiple-output IMAC. In this paper, we tackle two practical challenges of the existing SVD-based OIA: 1) the need of full feedforward of the selected users' beamforming weight vectors and 2) a low rate achieved based on the exiting zero-forcing (ZF) receiver. We first propose a codebook-based OIA, in which the weight vectors are chosen from a pre-defined codebook with a finite size so that information of the weight vectors can be sent to the belonging BS with limited feedforward. We derive the codebook size required to achieve the same user scaling condition as the SVD-based OIA case for both Grassmannian and random codebooks. Surprisingly, it is shown that the derived codebook size is the same for the two considered codebook approaches. Second, we take into account an enhanced receiver at the base stations (BSs) in pursuit of improving the achievable rate based on the ZF receiver. Assuming no collaboration between the BSs, the interfering links between a BS and the selected users in neighboring cells are difficult to be acquired at the belonging BS. We propose the use of a simple minimum Euclidean distance receiver operating with no information of the interfering links. With the help of the OIA, we show that this new receiver asymptotically achieves the channel capacity as the number of users increases.
1310.2037
Coordinated Beamforming for Energy Efficient Transmission in Multicell Multiuser Systems
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper we study energy efficient joint power allocation and beamforming for coordinated multicell multiuser downlink systems. The considered optimization problem is in a non-convex fractional form and hard to tackle. We propose to first transform the original problem into an equivalent optimization problem in a parametric subtractive form, by which we reach its solution through a two-layer optimization scheme. The outer layer only involves one-dimension search for the energy efficiency parameter which can be addressed using the bi-section search, the key issue lies in the inner layer where a non-fractional sub-problem needs to tackle. By exploiting the relationship between the user rate and the mean square error, we then develop an iterative algorithm to solve it. The convergence of this algorithm is proved and the solution is further derived in closed-form. Our analysis also shows that the proposed algorithm can be implemented in parallel with reasonable complexity. Numerical results illustrate that our algorithm has a fast convergence and achieves near-optimal energy efficiency. It is also observed that at the low transmit power region, our solution almost achieves the optimal sum rate and the optimal energy efficiency simultaneously; while at the middle-high transmit power region, a certain sum rate loss is suffered in order to guarantee the energy efficiency.
1310.2045
A de Bruijn identity for symmetric stable laws
cs.IT math.IT math.PR
We show how some attractive information--theoretic properties of Gaussians pass over to more general families of stable densities. We define a new score function for symmetric stable laws, and use it to give a stable version of the heat equation. Using this, we derive a version of the de Bruijn identity, allowing us to write the derivative of relative entropy as an inner product of score functions. We discuss maximum entropy properties of symmetric stable densities.
1310.2049
Fast Multi-Instance Multi-Label Learning
cs.LG
In many real-world tasks, particularly those involving data objects with complicated semantics such as images and texts, one object can be represented by multiple instances and simultaneously be associated with multiple labels. Such tasks can be formulated as multi-instance multi-label learning (MIML) problems, and have been extensively studied during the past few years. Existing MIML approaches have been found useful in many applications; however, most of them can only handle moderate-sized data. To efficiently handle large data sets, in this paper we propose the MIMLfast approach, which first constructs a low-dimensional subspace shared by all labels, and then trains label specific linear models to optimize approximated ranking loss via stochastic gradient descent. Although the MIML problem is complicated, MIMLfast is able to achieve excellent performance by exploiting label relations with shared space and discovering sub-concepts for complicated labels. Experiments show that the performance of MIMLfast is highly competitive to state-of-the-art techniques, whereas its time cost is much less; particularly, on a data set with 20K bags and 180K instances, MIMLfast is more than 100 times faster than existing MIML approaches. On a larger data set where none of existing approaches can return results in 24 hours, MIMLfast takes only 12 minutes. Moreover, our approach is able to identify the most representative instance for each label, and thus providing a chance to understand the relation between input patterns and output label semantics.
1310.2050
A State Of the Art Report on Research in Multiple RGB-D sensor Setups
cs.CV
That the Microsoft Kinect, an RGB-D sensor, transformed the gaming and end consumer sector has been anticipated by the developers. That it also impacted in rigorous computer vision research has probably been a surprise to the whole community. Shortly before the commercial deployment of its successor, Kinect One, the research literature fills with resumees and state-of-the art papers to summarize the development over the past 3 years. This particular report describes significant research projects which have built on sensoring setups that include two or more RGB-D sensors in one scene.
1310.2051
Distributed Space-Time Coding for Full-Duplex Asynchronous Cooperative Communications
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we propose two distributed linear convolutional space-time coding (DLC-STC) schemes for full-duplex (FD) asynchronous cooperative communications. The DLC-STC Scheme 1 is for the case of the complete loop channel cancellation, which achieves the full asynchronous cooperative diversity. The DLC-STC Scheme 2 is for the case of the partial loop channel cancellation and amplifying, where some loop signals are used as the self-coding instead of treated as interference to be directly cancelled. We show this scheme can achieve full asynchronous cooperative diversity. We then evaluate the performance of the two schemes when loop channel information is not accurate and present an amplifying factor control method for the DLC-STC Scheme 2 to improve its performance with inaccurate loop channel information. Simulation results show that the DLC-STC Scheme 1 outperforms the DLC-STC Scheme 2 and the delay diversity scheme if perfect or high quality loop channel information is available at the relay, while the DLC-STC Scheme 2 achieves better performance if the loop channel information is imperfect.
1310.2053
The role of RGB-D benchmark datasets: an overview
cs.CV
The advent of the Microsoft Kinect three years ago stimulated not only the computer vision community for new algorithms and setups to tackle well-known problems in the community but also sparked the launch of several new benchmark datasets to which future algorithms can be compared 019 to. This review of the literature and industry developments concludes that the current RGB-D benchmark datasets can be useful to determine the accuracy of a variety of applications of a single or multiple RGB-D sensors.
1310.2055
Distributed Linear Convolutional Space-Time Coding for Two-Relay Full-Duplex Asynchronous Cooperative Networks
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, a two-relay full-duplex asynchronous cooperative network with the amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol is considered. We propose two distributed space-time coding schemes for the cases with and without cross-talks, respectively. In the first case, each relay can receive the signal sent by the other through the cross-talk link. We first study the feasibility of cross-talk cancellation in this network and show that the cross-talk interference cannot be removed well. For this reason, we design space-time codes by utilizing the cross-talk signals instead of removing them. In the other case, the self-coding is realized individually through the loop channel at each relay node and the signals from the two relay nodes form a space-time code. The achievable cooperative diversity of both cases is investigated and the conditions to achieve full cooperative diversity are presented. Simulation results verify the theoretical analysis.
1310.2059
Distributed Coordinate Descent Method for Learning with Big Data
stat.ML cs.DC cs.LG math.OC
In this paper we develop and analyze Hydra: HYbriD cooRdinAte descent method for solving loss minimization problems with big data. We initially partition the coordinates (features) and assign each partition to a different node of a cluster. At every iteration, each node picks a random subset of the coordinates from those it owns, independently from the other computers, and in parallel computes and applies updates to the selected coordinates based on a simple closed-form formula. We give bounds on the number of iterations sufficient to approximately solve the problem with high probability, and show how it depends on the data and on the partitioning. We perform numerical experiments with a LASSO instance described by a 3TB matrix.
1310.2063
Active causation and the origin of meaning
q-bio.PE cs.NE nlin.AO q-bio.NC
Purpose and meaning are necessary concepts for understanding mind and culture, but appear to be absent from the physical world and are not part of the explanatory framework of the natural sciences. Understanding how meaning (in the broad sense of the term) could arise from a physical world has proven to be a tough problem. The basic scheme of Darwinian evolution produces adaptations that only represent apparent ("as if") goals and meaning. Here I use evolutionary models to show that a slight, evolvable extension of the basic scheme is sufficient to produce genuine goals. The extension, targeted modulation of mutation rate, is known to be generally present in biological cells, and gives rise to two phenomena that are absent from the non-living world: intrinsic meaning and the ability to initiate goal-directed chains of causation (active causation). The extended scheme accomplishes this by utilizing randomness modulated by a feedback loop that is itself regulated by evolutionary pressure. The mechanism can be extended to behavioural variability as well, and thus shows how freedom of behaviour is possible. A further extension to communication suggests that the active exchange of intrinsic meaning between organisms may be the origin of consciousness, which in combination with active causation can provide a physical basis for the phenomenon of free will.
1310.2066
A Simplified Approach for Quality Management in Data Warehouse
cs.DB cs.CY
Data warehousing is continuously gaining importance as organizations are realizing the benefits of decision oriented data bases. However, the stumbling block to this rapid development is data quality issues at various stages of data warehousing. Quality can be defined as a measure of excellence or a state free from defects. Users appreciate quality products and available literature suggests that many organization`s have significant data quality problems that have substantial social and economic impacts. A metadata based quality system is introduced to manage quality of data in data warehouse. The approach is used to analyze the quality of data warehouse system by checking the expected value of quality parameters with that of actual values. The proposed approach is supported with a metadata framework that can store additional information to analyze the quality parameters, whenever required.
1310.2071
Predicting Students' Performance Using ID3 And C4.5 Classification Algorithms
cs.CY cs.LG
An educational institution needs to have an approximate prior knowledge of enrolled students to predict their performance in future academics. This helps them to identify promising students and also provides them an opportunity to pay attention to and improve those who would probably get lower grades. As a solution, we have developed a system which can predict the performance of students from their previous performances using concepts of data mining techniques under Classification. We have analyzed the data set containing information about students, such as gender, marks scored in the board examinations of classes X and XII, marks and rank in entrance examinations and results in first year of the previous batch of students. By applying the ID3 (Iterative Dichotomiser 3) and C4.5 classification algorithms on this data, we have predicted the general and individual performance of freshly admitted students in future examinations.
1310.2079
Mining The Relationship Between Demographic Variables And Brand Associations
cs.CY cs.DB
This research aims to mine the relationship between demographic variables and brand associations, and study the relative importance of these variables. The study is conducted on fast-food restaurant brands chains in Jordan. The result ranks and evaluates the demographic variables in relation with the brand associations for the selected sample. Discovering brand associations according to demographic variables reveals many facts and linkages in the context of Jordanian culture. Suggestions are given accordingly for marketers to benefits from to build their strategies and direct their decisions. Also, data mining technique used in this study reflects a new trend for studying and analyzing marketing samples.
1310.2085
A Robust Variational Model for Positive Image Deconvolution
cs.CV
In this paper, an iterative method for robust deconvolution with positivity constraints is discussed. It is based on the known variational interpretation of the Richardson-Lucy iterative deconvolution as fixed-point iteration for the minimisation of an information divergence functional under a multiplicative perturbation model. The asymmetric penaliser function involved in this functional is then modified into a robust penaliser, and complemented with a regulariser. The resulting functional gives rise to a fixed point iteration that we call robust and regularised Richardson-Lucy deconvolution. It achieves an image restoration quality comparable to state-of-the-art robust variational deconvolution with a computational efficiency similar to that of the original Richardson-Lucy method. Experiments on synthetic and real-world image data demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.
1310.2086
An Iterative Method Applied to Correct the Actual Compressor Performance to the Equivalent Performance under the Specified Reference Conditions
cs.SY
This paper proposes a correction method, which corrects the actual compressor performance in real operating conditions to the equivalent performance under specified reference condition. The purpose is to make fair comparisons between actual performance against design performance or reference maps under the same operating conditions. Then the abnormal operating conditions or early failure indications can be identified through condition monitoring, which helps to avoid mandatory shutdown and reduces maintenance costs. The corrections are based on an iterative scheme, which simultaneously correct the main performance parameters known as the polytropic head, the gas power, and the polytropic efficiency. The excellent performance of the method is demonstrated by performing the corrections over real industrial measurements.
1310.2089
Double four-bar crank-slider mechanism dynamic balancing by meta-heuristic algorithms
cs.AI
In this paper, a new method for dynamic balancing of double four-bar crank slider mechanism by meta- heuristic-based optimization algorithms is proposed. For this purpose, a proper objective function which is necessary for balancing of this mechanism and corresponding constraints has been obtained by dynamic modeling of the mechanism. Then PSO, ABC, BGA and HGAPSO algorithms have been applied for minimizing the defined cost function in optimization step. The optimization results have been studied completely by extracting the cost function, fitness, convergence speed and runtime values of applied algorithms. It has been shown that PSO and ABC are more efficient than BGA and HGAPSO in terms of convergence speed and result quality. Also, a laboratory scale experimental doublefour-bar crank-slider mechanism was provided for validating the proposed balancing method practically.
1310.2098
A short note on the axiomatic requirements of uncertainty measure
cs.IT cs.AI math.IT
In this note, we argue that the axiomatic requirement of range to the measure of aggregated total uncertainty (ATU) in Dempster-Shafer theory is not reasonable.
1310.2121
Dynamics and termination cost of spatially coupled mean-field models
cond-mat.stat-mech cs.IT math.IT
This work is motivated by recent progress in information theory and signal processing where the so-called `spatially coupled' design of systems leads to considerably better performance. We address relevant open questions about spatially coupled systems through the study of a simple Ising model. In particular, we consider a chain of Curie-Weiss models that are coupled by interactions up to a certain range. Indeed, it is well known that the pure (uncoupled) Curie-Weiss model undergoes a first order phase transition driven by the magnetic field, and furthermore, in the spinodal region such systems are unable to reach equilibrium in sub-exponential time if initialized in the metastable state. By contrast, the spatially coupled system is, instead, able to reach the equilibrium even when initialized to the metastable state. The equilibrium phase propagates along the chain in the form of a travelling wave. Here we study the speed of the wave-front and the so-called `termination cost'--- \textit{i.e.}, the conditions necessary for the propagation to occur. We reach several interesting conclusions about optimization of the speed and the cost.
1310.2125
Retrieval of Experiments with Sequential Dirichlet Process Mixtures in Model Space
stat.ML cs.IR stat.AP
We address the problem of retrieving relevant experiments given a query experiment, motivated by the public databases of datasets in molecular biology and other experimental sciences, and the need of scientists to relate to earlier work on the level of actual measurement data. Since experiments are inherently noisy and databases ever accumulating, we argue that a retrieval engine should possess two particular characteristics. First, it should compare models learnt from the experiments rather than the raw measurements themselves: this allows incorporating experiment-specific prior knowledge to suppress noise effects and focus on what is important. Second, it should be updated sequentially from newly published experiments, without explicitly storing either the measurements or the models, which is critical for saving storage space and protecting data privacy: this promotes life long learning. We formulate the retrieval as a ``supermodelling'' problem, of sequentially learning a model of the set of posterior distributions, represented as sets of MCMC samples, and suggest the use of Particle-Learning-based sequential Dirichlet process mixture (DPM) for this purpose. The relevance measure for retrieval is derived from the supermodel through the mixture representation. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed retrieval method on simulated data and molecular biological experiments.
1310.2127
BloSEn: Blog Search Engine Based On Post Concept Clustering
cs.IR
This paper focuses on building a blog search engine which doesn't focus only on keyword search but includes extended search capabilities. It also incorporates the blog-post concept clustering which is based on the category extracted from the blog post semantic content analysis. The proposed approach is titled as "BloSen (Blog Search Engine)". It involves in extracting the posts from blogs and parsing them to extract the blog elements and store them as fields in a document format. Inverted index is being built on the fields of the documents. Search is induced on the index and requested query is processed based on the documents so far made from blog posts. It currently focuses on Blogger and Wordpress hosted blogs since both these hosting services are the most popular ones in the blogosphere. The proposed BloSen model is experimented with a prototype implementation and the results of the experiments with the user's relevance cumulative metric value of 95.44% confirms the efficiency of the proposed model.
1310.2155
Lower Bounds for Quantum Parameter Estimation
quant-ph cs.IT math-ph math.IT math.MP
The laws of quantum mechanics place fundamental limits on the accuracy of measurements and therefore on the estimation of unknown parameters of a quantum system. In this work, we prove lower bounds on the size of confidence regions reported by any region estimator for a given ensemble of probe states and probability of success. Our bounds are derived from a previously unnoticed connection between the size of confidence regions and the error probabilities of a corresponding binary hypothesis test. In group-covariant scenarios, we find that there is an ultimate bound for any estimation scheme which depends only on the representation-theoretic data of the probe system, and we evaluate its asymptotics in the limit of many systems, establishing a general "Heisenberg limit" for region estimation. We apply our results to several examples, in particular to phase estimation, where our bounds allow us to recover the well-known Heisenberg and shot-noise scaling.
1310.2169
Efficient local behavioral change strategies to reduce the spread of epidemics in networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
It has recently become established that the spread of infectious diseases between humans is affected not only by the pathogen itself but also by changes in behavior as the population becomes aware of the epidemic; for example, social distancing. It is also well known that community structure (the existence of relatively densely connected groups of vertices) in contact networks influences the spread of disease. We propose a set of local strategies for social distancing, based on community structure, that can be employed in the event of an epidemic to reduce the epidemic size. Unlike most social distancing methods, ours do not require individuals to know the disease state (infected or susceptible, etc.) of others, and we do not make the unrealistic assumption that the structure of the entire contact network is known. Instead, the recommended behavior change is based only on an individual's local view of the network. Each individual avoids contact with a fraction of his/her contacts, using knowledge of his/her local network to decide which contacts should be avoided. If the behavior change occurs only when an individual becomes ill or aware of the disease, these strategies can substantially reduce epidemic size with a relatively small cost, measured by the number of contacts avoided.
1310.2182
New Approach for Prediction Pre-cancer via Detecting Mutated in Tumor Protein P53
cs.CE q-bio.OT
Tumor protein P53 is believed to be involved in over half of human cancers cases, the prediction of malignancies plays essential roles not only in advance detection for cancer, but also in discovering effective prevention and treatment of cancer, till now there isn't approach be able in prediction the mutated in tumor protein P53 which is caused high ratio of human cancers like breast, Blood, skin, liver, lung, bladder etc. This research proposed a new approach for prediction pre-cancer via detection malignant mutations in tumor protein P53 using bioinformatics tools like FASTA, BLAST, CLUSTALW and TP53 databases worldwide. Implement and apply this new approach of prediction pre-cancer through mutations at tumor protein P53 shows an effective result when used more specific parameters/features to extract the prediction result that means when the user increase the number of filters of the results which obtained from the database gives more specific diagnosis and classify, addition that the detecting pre-cancer via prediction mutated tumor protein P53 will reduces a person's cancers in the future by avoiding exposure to toxins, radiation or monitoring themselves at older ages by change their food, environment, even the pace of living. Also that new approach of prediction pre-cancer will help if there is any treatment can give for that person to therapy the mutated tumor protein P53. Index Terms (Normal Homology TP53 gene, Tumor Protein P53, Oncogene Labs, GC and AT content, FASTA, BLAST, ClustalW)
1310.2206
Group lifting structures for multirate filter banks I: Uniqueness of lifting factorizations
cs.IT math.IT
Group lifting structures are introduced to provide an algebraic framework for studying lifting factorizations of two-channel perfect reconstruction finite-impulse-response (FIR) filter banks. The lifting factorizations generated by a group lifting structure are characterized by Abelian groups of lower and upper triangular lifting matrices, an Abelian group of unimodular gain scaling matrices, and a set of base filter banks. Examples of group lifting structures are given for linear phase lifting factorizations of the two nontrivial classes of two-channel linear phase FIR filter banks, the whole- and half-sample symmetric classes, including both the reversible and irreversible cases. This covers the lifting specifications for whole-sample symmetric filter banks in Parts 1 and 2 of the ISO/IEC JPEG 2000 still image coding standard. The theory is used to address the uniqueness of lifting factorizations. With no constraints on the lifting process, it is shown that lifting factorizations are highly nonunique. When certain hypotheses developed in the paper are satisfied, however, lifting factorizations generated by a group lifting structure are shown to be unique. A companion paper applies the uniqueness results proven in this paper to the linear phase group lifting structures for whole- and half-sample symmetric filter banks.
1310.2208
Group lifting structures for multirate filter banks II: Linear phase filter banks
cs.IT math.IT
The theory of group lifting structures is applied to linear phase lifting factorizations for the two nontrivial classes of two-channel linear phase perfect reconstruction filter banks, the whole- and half-sample symmetric classes. Group lifting structures defined for the reversible and irreversible classes of whole- and half-sample symmetric filter banks are shown to satisfy the hypotheses of the uniqueness theorem for group lifting structures. It follows that linear phase group lifting factorizations of whole- and half-sample symmetric filter banks are therefore independent of the factorization methods used to construct them. These results cover the specification of whole-sample symmetric filter banks in the ISO/IEC JPEG 2000 image coding standard.
1310.2217
Lower Bounds on the Communication Complexity of Binary Local Quantum Measurement Simulation
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
We consider the problem of the classical simulation of quantum measurements in the scenario of communication complexity. Regev and Toner (2007) have presented a 2-bit protocol which simulates one particular correlation function arising from binary projective quantum measurements on arbitrary state, and in particular does not preserve local averages. The question of simulating other correlation functions using a protocol with bounded communication, or preserving local averages, has been posed as an open one. Within this paper we resolve it in the negative: we show that any such protocol must have unbounded communication for some subset of executions. In particular, we show that for any protocol, there exist inputs for which the random variable describing the number of communicated bits has arbitrarily large variance.
1310.2267
A Partial Derandomization of PhaseLift using Spherical Designs
cs.IT math.IT quant-ph
The problem of retrieving phase information from amplitude measurements alone has appeared in many scientific disciplines over the last century. PhaseLift is a recently introduced algorithm for phase recovery that is computationally efficient, numerically stable, and comes with rigorous performance guarantees. PhaseLift is optimal in the sense that the number of amplitude measurements required for phase reconstruction scales linearly with the dimension of the signal. However, it specifically demands Gaussian random measurement vectors - a limitation that restricts practical utility and obscures the specific properties of measurement ensembles that enable phase retrieval. Here we present a partial derandomization of PhaseLift that only requires sampling from certain polynomial size vector configurations, called t-designs. Such configurations have been studied in algebraic combinatorics, coding theory, and quantum information. We prove reconstruction guarantees for a number of measurements that depends on the degree t of the design. If the degree is allowed to to grow logarithmically with the dimension, the bounds become tight up to polylog-factors. Beyond the specific case of PhaseLift, this work highlights the utility of spherical designs for the derandomization of data recovery schemes.
1310.2273
Semidefinite Programming Based Preconditioning for More Robust Near-Separable Nonnegative Matrix Factorization
stat.ML cs.LG math.OC
Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) under the separability assumption can provably be solved efficiently, even in the presence of noise, and has been shown to be a powerful technique in document classification and hyperspectral unmixing. This problem is referred to as near-separable NMF and requires that there exists a cone spanned by a small subset of the columns of the input nonnegative matrix approximately containing all columns. In this paper, we propose a preconditioning based on semidefinite programming making the input matrix well-conditioned. This in turn can improve significantly the performance of near-separable NMF algorithms which is illustrated on the popular successive projection algorithm (SPA). The new preconditioned SPA is provably more robust to noise, and outperforms SPA on several synthetic data sets. We also show how an active-set method allow us to apply the preconditioning on large-scale real-world hyperspectral images.
1310.2274
Accounting for Secondary Uncertainty: Efficient Computation of Portfolio Risk Measures on Multi and Many Core Architectures
cs.DC cs.CE
Aggregate Risk Analysis is a computationally intensive and a data intensive problem, thereby making the application of high-performance computing techniques interesting. In this paper, the design and implementation of a parallel Aggregate Risk Analysis algorithm on multi-core CPU and many-core GPU platforms are explored. The efficient computation of key risk measures, including Probable Maximum Loss (PML) and the Tail Value-at-Risk (TVaR) in the presence of both primary and secondary uncertainty for a portfolio of property catastrophe insurance treaties is considered. Primary Uncertainty is the the uncertainty associated with whether a catastrophe event occurs or not in a simulated year, while Secondary Uncertainty is the uncertainty in the amount of loss when the event occurs. A number of statistical algorithms are investigated for computing secondary uncertainty. Numerous challenges such as loading large data onto hardware with limited memory and organising it are addressed. The results obtained from experimental studies are encouraging. Consider for example, an aggregate risk analysis involving 800,000 trials, with 1,000 catastrophic events per trial, a million locations, and a complex contract structure taking into account secondary uncertainty. The analysis can be performed in just 41 seconds on a GPU, that is 24x faster than the sequential counterpart on a fast multi-core CPU. The results indicate that GPUs can be used to efficiently accelerate aggregate risk analysis even in the presence of secondary uncertainty.
1310.2279
A Mathematical Model, Implementation and Study of a Swarm System
cs.RO
The work reported in this paper is motivated towards the development of a mathematical model for swarm systems based on macroscopic primitives. A pattern formation and transformation model is proposed. The pattern transformation model comprises two general methods for pattern transformation, namely a macroscopic transformation and mathematical transformation method. The problem of transformation is formally expressed and four special cases of transformation are considered. Simulations to confirm the feasibility of the proposed models and transformation methods are presented. Comparison between the two transformation methods is also reported.
1310.2289
Subband coding for large-scale scientific simulation data using JPEG 2000
cs.IT cs.MM math.IT
The ISO/IEC JPEG 2000 image coding standard is a family of source coding algorithms targeting high-resolution image communications. JPEG 2000 features highly scalable embedded coding features that allow one to interactively zoom out to reduced resolution thumbnails of enormous data sets or to zoom in on highly localized regions of interest with very economical communications and rendering requirements. While intended for fixed-precision input data, the implementation of the irreversible version of the standard is often done internally in floating point arithmetic. Moreover, the standard is designed to support high-bit-depth data. Part 2 of the standard also provides support for three-dimensional data sets such as multicomponent or volumetric imagery. These features make JPEG 2000 an appealing candidate for highly scalable communications coding and visualization of two- and three-dimensional data produced by scientific simulation software. We present results of initial experiments applying JPEG 2000 to scientific simulation data produced by the Parallel Ocean Program (POP) global ocean circulation model, highlighting both the promise and the many challenges this approach holds for scientific visualization applications.
1310.2290
Modelling Complexity for Policy: Opportunities and Challenges
cs.MA cs.CY nlin.AO physics.soc-ph
This chapter reviews the purpose and use of models from the field of complex systems and, in particular, the implications of trying to use models to understand or make decisions within complex situations, such as policy makers usually face. A discussion of the different dimensions one can formalise situations, the different purposes for models and the different kinds of relationship they can have with the policy making process, is followed by an examination of the compromises forced by the complexity of the target issues. Several modelling approaches from complexity science are briefly described, with notes as to their abilities and limitations. These approaches include system dynamics, network theory, information theory, cellular automata, and agent-based modelling. Some examples of policy models are presented and discussed in the context of the previous analysis. Finally we conclude by outlining some of the major pitfalls facing those wishing to use such models for policy evaluation.
1310.2291
Interactive Function Computation with Reconstruction Constraints
cs.IT math.IT
This paper investigates two-terminal interactive function computation with reconstruction constraints. Each terminal wants to compute a (possibly different) function of two correlated sources, but can only access one of the sources directly. In addition to distortion constraints at the terminals, each terminal is required to estimate the computed function value at the other terminal in a lossy fashion, leading to the constrained reconstruction constraint. A special case of constrained reconstruction is the common reconstruction constraint, in which both terminals agree on the functions computed with probability one. The terminals exchange information in multiple rate constrained communication rounds. A characterization of the multi-round rate-distortion region for the above problem with constrained reconstruction constraints is provided. To gain more insights and to highlight the value of interaction and order of communication, the rate-distortion region for computing various functions of jointly Gaussian sources according to common reconstruction constraints is studied.
1310.2296
Interactive Relay Assisted Source Coding
cs.IT math.IT
This paper investigates a source coding problem in which two terminals communicating through a relay wish to estimate one another's source within some distortion constraint. The relay has access to side information that is correlated with the sources. Two different schemes based on the order of communication, \emph{distributed source coding/delivery} and \emph{two cascaded rounds}, are proposed and inner and outer bounds for the resulting rate-distortion regions are provided. Examples are provided to show that neither rate-distortion region includes the other one.
1310.2298
SAT-based Preprocessing for MaxSAT (extended version)
cs.AI
State-of-the-art algorithms for industrial instances of MaxSAT problem rely on iterative calls to a SAT solver. Preprocessing is crucial for the acceleration of SAT solving, and the key preprocessing techniques rely on the application of resolution and subsumption elimination. Additionally, satisfiability-preserving clause elimination procedures are often used. Since MaxSAT computation typically involves a large number of SAT calls, we are interested in whether an input instance to a MaxSAT problem can be preprocessed up-front, i.e. prior to running the MaxSAT solver, rather than (or, in addition to) during each iterative SAT solver call. The key requirement in this setting is that the preprocessing has to be sound, i.e. so that the solution can be reconstructed correctly and efficiently after the execution of a MaxSAT algorithm on the preprocessed instance. While, as we demonstrate in this paper, certain clause elimination procedures are sound for MaxSAT, it is well-known that this is not the case for resolution and subsumption elimination. In this paper we show how to adapt these preprocessing techniques to MaxSAT. To achieve this we recast the MaxSAT problem in a recently introduced labelled-CNF framework, and show that within the framework the preprocessing techniques can be applied soundly. Furthermore, we show that MaxSAT algorithms restated in the framework have a natural implementation on top of an incremental SAT solver. We evaluate the prototype implementation of a MaxSAT algorithm WMSU1 in this setting, demonstrate the effectiveness of preprocessing, and show overall improvement with respect to non-incremental versions of the algorithm on some classes of problems.
1310.2305
Gain scaling for multirate filter banks
cs.IT math.IT
Eliminating two trivial degrees of freedom corresponding to the lowpass DC response and the highpass Nyquist response in a two-channel multirate filter bank seems simple enough. Nonetheless, the ISO/IEC JPEG 2000 image coding standard manages to make this mundane task look totally mysterious. We reveal the true meaning behind JPEG 2000's arcane specifications for filter bank normalization and point out how the seemingly trivial matter of gain scaling leads to highly nontrivial issues concerning uniqueness of lifting factorizations.
1310.2306
Robust Adaptive Control for Circadian Dynamics: Poincare Approach to Backstepping Method
cs.SY
A mathematical model of the circadian dynamics in the form of Van der Pol equation with an external force as a control is investigated. The combination of backstepping method and differential-topological techniques based on the Poincare's ideas is used. The robust model identification adaptive control for a specific adaptation law is designed.
1310.2350
The Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem solved with Ant Algorithms
cs.AI cs.NE
A well known N P-hard problem called the Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem (GTSP) is considered. In GTSP the nodes of a complete undirected graph are partitioned into clusters. The objective is to find a minimum cost tour passing through exactly one node from each cluster. An exact exponential time algorithm and an effective meta-heuristic algorithm for the problem are presented. The meta-heuristic proposed is a modified Ant Colony System (ACS) algorithm called Reinforcing Ant Colony System (RACS) which introduces new correction rules in the ACS algorithm. Computational results are reported for many standard test problems. The proposed algorithm is competitive with the other already proposed heuristics for the GTSP in both solution quality and computational time.
1310.2357
SurpriseMe: an integrated tool for network community structure characterization using Surprise maximization
q-bio.MN cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Detecting communities, densely connected groups may contribute to unravel the underlying relationships among the units present in diverse biological networks (e.g., interactome, coexpression networks, ecological networks, etc.). We recently showed that communities can be very precisely characterized by maximizing Surprise, a global network parameter. Here we present SurpriseMe, a tool that integrates the outputs of seven of the best algorithms available to estimate the maximum Surprise value. SurpriseMe also generates distance matrices that allow to visualize the relationships among the solutions generated by the algorithms. We show that the communities present in small and medium-sized networks, with up to 10.000 nodes, can be easily characterized: on standard PC computers, these analyses take less than an hour. Also, four of the algorithms may quite rapidly analyze networks with up to 100.000 nodes, given enough memory resources. Because of its performance and simplicity, SurpriseMe is a reference tool for community structure characterization.
1310.2361
Survey on Modelling Methods Applicable to Gene Regulatory Network
cs.CE
Gene Regulatory Network (GRN) plays an important role in knowing insight of cellular life cycle. It gives information about at which different environmental conditions genes of particular interest get over expressed or under expressed. Modelling of GRN is nothing but finding interactive relationships between genes. Interaction can be positive or negative. For inference of GRN, time series data provided by Microarray technology is used. Key factors to be considered while constructing GRN are scalability, robustness, reliability and maximum detection of true positive interactions between genes. This paper gives detailed technical review of existing methods applied for building of GRN along with scope for future work.
1310.2367
Handy Annotations within Oracle 10g
cs.DB
This paper describes practical observations during the Database system Lab. Oracle 10g DBMS is used in the data base system lab and performed SQL queries based many concepts like Data Definition Language Commands (DDL), Data Modification Language Commands ((DML), Views, Integrity Constraints, Aggregate functions, Joins and Abstract type . While performing practical during the lab session, many problems occurred, in order to solve them many text books and websites referred but could not obtain expected help from them. Even though by spending much time in the database labs with Oracle 10g, tried in numerous ways, as a final point expected output is achieved. This paper describes annotations which were experimentally proved in the Database lab.
1310.2375
Web Usage Mining: Pattern Discovery and Forecasting
cs.DB cs.IR
Web usage mining: automatic discovery of patterns in clickstreams and associated data collected or generated as a result of user interactions with one or more Web sites. This paper describes web usage mining for our college log files to analyze the behavioral patterns and profiles of users interacting with a Web site. The discovered patterns are represented as clusters that are frequently accessed by groups of visitors with common interests. In this paper, the visitors and hits were forecasted to predict the further access statistics.
1310.2381
MDR Codes: A New Class of RAID-6 Codes with Optimal Rebuilding and Encoding
cs.IT math.IT
As storage systems grow in size, device failures happen more frequently than ever before. Given the commodity nature of hard drives employed, a storage system needs to tolerate a certain number of disk failures while maintaining data integrity, and to recover lost data with minimal interference to normal disk I/O operations. RAID-6, which can tolerate up to two disk failures with the minimum redundancy, is becoming widespread. However, traditional RAID-6 codes suffer from high disk I/O overhead during recovery. In this paper, we propose a new family of RAID-6 codes, the Minimum Disk I/O Repairable (MDR) codes, which achieve the optimal disk I/O overhead for single failure recoveries. Moreover, we show that MDR codes can be encoded with the minimum number of bit-wise XOR operations. Simulation results show that MDR codes help to save about half of disk read operations than traditional RAID-6 codes, and thus can reduce the recovery time by up to 40%.
1310.2385
Topological Interference Management with Alternating Connectivity: The Wyner-Type Three User Interference Channel
cs.IT math.IT
Interference management in a three-user interference channel with alternating connectivity with only topological knowledge at the transmitters is considered. The network has a Wyner-type channel flavor, i.e., for each connectivity state the receivers observe at most one interference signal in addition to their desired signal. Degrees of freedom (DoF) upper bounds and lower bounds are derived. The lower bounds are obtained from a scheme based on joint encoding across the alternating states. Given a uniform distribution among the connectivity states, it is shown that the channel has 2+ 1/9 DoF. This provides an increase in the DoF as compared to encoding over each state separately, which achieves 2 DoF only.
1310.2396
A necessary and sufficient condition for two relations to induce the same definable set family
cs.AI
In Pawlak rough sets, the structure of the definable set families is simple and clear, but in generalizing rough sets, the structure of the definable set families is a bit more complex. There has been much research work focusing on this topic. However, as a fundamental issue in relation based rough sets, under what condition two relations induce the same definable set family has not been discussed. In this paper, based on the concept of the closure of relations, we present a necessary and sufficient condition for two relations to induce the same definable set family.
1310.2408
Improved Bayesian Logistic Supervised Topic Models with Data Augmentation
cs.LG cs.CL stat.AP stat.ML
Supervised topic models with a logistic likelihood have two issues that potentially limit their practical use: 1) response variables are usually over-weighted by document word counts; and 2) existing variational inference methods make strict mean-field assumptions. We address these issues by: 1) introducing a regularization constant to better balance the two parts based on an optimization formulation of Bayesian inference; and 2) developing a simple Gibbs sampling algorithm by introducing auxiliary Polya-Gamma variables and collapsing out Dirichlet variables. Our augment-and-collapse sampling algorithm has analytical forms of each conditional distribution without making any restricting assumptions and can be easily parallelized. Empirical results demonstrate significant improvements on prediction performance and time efficiency.
1310.2409
Discriminative Relational Topic Models
cs.LG cs.IR stat.ML
Many scientific and engineering fields involve analyzing network data. For document networks, relational topic models (RTMs) provide a probabilistic generative process to describe both the link structure and document contents, and they have shown promise on predicting network structures and discovering latent topic representations. However, existing RTMs have limitations in both the restricted model expressiveness and incapability of dealing with imbalanced network data. To expand the scope and improve the inference accuracy of RTMs, this paper presents three extensions: 1) unlike the common link likelihood with a diagonal weight matrix that allows the-same-topic interactions only, we generalize it to use a full weight matrix that captures all pairwise topic interactions and is applicable to asymmetric networks; 2) instead of doing standard Bayesian inference, we perform regularized Bayesian inference (RegBayes) with a regularization parameter to deal with the imbalanced link structure issue in common real networks and improve the discriminative ability of learned latent representations; and 3) instead of doing variational approximation with strict mean-field assumptions, we present collapsed Gibbs sampling algorithms for the generalized relational topic models by exploring data augmentation without making restricting assumptions. Under the generic RegBayes framework, we carefully investigate two popular discriminative loss functions, namely, the logistic log-loss and the max-margin hinge loss. Experimental results on several real network datasets demonstrate the significance of these extensions on improving the prediction performance, and the time efficiency can be dramatically improved with a simple fast approximation method.
1310.2410
Sparse signal recovery by $\ell_q$ minimization under restricted isometry property
cs.IT math.IT
In the context of compressed sensing, the nonconvex $\ell_q$ minimization with $0<q<1$ has been studied in recent years. In this paper, by generalizing the sharp bound for $\ell_1$ minimization of Cai and Zhang, we show that the condition $\delta_{(s^q+1)k}<\dfrac{1}{\sqrt{s^{q-2}+1}}$ in terms of \emph{restricted isometry constant (RIC)} can guarantee the exact recovery of $k$-sparse signals in noiseless case and the stable recovery of approximately $k$-sparse signals in noisy case by $\ell_q$ minimization. This result is more general than the sharp bound for $\ell_1$ minimization when the order of RIC is greater than $2k$ and illustrates the fact that a better approximation to $\ell_0$ minimization is provided by $\ell_q$ minimization than that provided by $\ell_1$ minimization.
1310.2418
Linear Algorithm for Digital Euclidean Connected Skeleton
cs.CV
The skeleton is an essential shape characteristic providing a compact representation of the studied shape. Its computation on the image grid raises many issues. Due to the effects of discretization, the required properties of the skeleton - thinness, homotopy to the shape, reversibility, connectivity - may become incompatible. However, as regards practical use, the choice of a specific skeletonization algorithm depends on the application. This allows to classify the desired properties by order of importance, and tend towards the most critical ones. Our goal is to make a skeleton dedicated to shape matching for recognition. So, the discrete skeleton has to be thin - so that it can be represented by a graph -, robust to noise, reversible - so that the initial shape can be fully reconstructed - and homotopic to the shape. We propose a linear-time skeletonization algorithm based on the squared Euclidean distance map from which we extract the maximal balls and ridges. After a thinning and pruning process, we obtain the skeleton. The proposed method is finally compared to fairly recent methods.
1310.2431
Practical Verification of Decision-Making in Agent-Based Autonomous Systems
cs.LO cs.MA
We present a verification methodology for analysing the decision-making component in agent-based hybrid systems. Traditionally hybrid automata have been used to both implement and verify such systems, but hybrid automata based modelling, programming and verification techniques scale poorly as the complexity of discrete decision-making increases making them unattractive in situations where complex logical reasoning is required. In the programming of complex systems it has, therefore, become common to separate out logical decision-making into a separate, discrete, component. However, verification techniques have failed to keep pace with this development. We are exploring agent-based logical components and have developed a model checking technique for such components which can then be composed with a separate analysis of the continuous part of the hybrid system. Among other things this allows program model checkers to be used to verify the actual implementation of the decision-making in hybrid autonomous systems.
1310.2435
Interference Alignment via Message-Passing
cs.IT math.IT
We introduce an iterative solution to the problem of interference alignment (IA) over MIMO channels based on a message-passing formulation. We propose a parameterization of the messages that enables the computation of IA precoders by a min-sum algorithm over continuous variable spaces -- under this parameterization, suitable approximations of the messages can be computed in closed-form. We show that the iterative leakage minimization algorithm of Cadambe et al. is a special case of our message-passing algorithm, obtained for a particular schedule. Finally, we show that the proposed algorithm compares favorably to iterative leakage minimization in terms of convergence speed, and discuss a distributed implementation.
1310.2441
Pioneers of Influence Propagation in Social Networks
cs.SI cs.DM physics.soc-ph
With the growing importance of corporate viral marketing campaigns on online social networks, the interest in studies of influence propagation through networks is higher than ever. In a viral marketing campaign, a firm initially targets a small set of pioneers and hopes that they would influence a sizeable fraction of the population by diffusion of influence through the network. In general, any marketing campaign might fail to go viral in the first try. As such, it would be useful to have some guide to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign and judge whether it is worthy of further resources, and in case the campaign has potential, how to hit upon a good pioneer who can make the campaign go viral. In this paper, we present a diffusion model developed by enriching the generalized random graph (a.k.a. configuration model) to provide insight into these questions. We offer the intuition behind the results on this model, rigorously proved in Blaszczyszyn & Gaurav(2013), and illustrate them here by taking examples of random networks having prototypical degree distributions - Poisson degree distribution, which is commonly used as a kind of benchmark, and Power Law degree distribution, which is normally used to approximate the real-world networks. On these networks, the members are assumed to have varying attitudes towards propagating the information. We analyze three cases, in particular - (1) Bernoulli transmissions, when a member influences each of its friend with probability p; (2) Node percolation, when a member influences all its friends with probability p and none with probability 1-p; (3) Coupon-collector transmissions, when a member randomly selects one of his friends K times with replacement. We assume that the configuration model is the closest approximation of a large online social network, when the information available about the network is very limited. The key insight offered by this study from a firm's perspective is regarding how to evaluate the effectiveness of a marketing campaign and do cost-benefit analysis by collecting relevant statistical data from the pioneers it selects. The campaign evaluation criterion is informed by the observation that if the parameters of the underlying network and the campaign effectiveness are such that the campaign can indeed reach a significant fraction of the population, then the set of good pioneers also forms a significant fraction of the population. Therefore, in such a case, the firms can even adopt the naive strategy of repeatedly picking and targeting some number of pioneers at random from the population. With this strategy, the probability of them picking a good pioneer will increase geometrically fast with the number of tries.
1310.2451
M-Power Regularized Least Squares Regression
stat.ML cs.LG math.PR
Regularization is used to find a solution that both fits the data and is sufficiently smooth, and thereby is very effective for designing and refining learning algorithms. But the influence of its exponent remains poorly understood. In particular, it is unclear how the exponent of the reproducing kernel Hilbert space~(RKHS) regularization term affects the accuracy and the efficiency of kernel-based learning algorithms. Here we consider regularized least squares regression (RLSR) with an RKHS regularization raised to the power of m, where m is a variable real exponent. We design an efficient algorithm for solving the associated minimization problem, we provide a theoretical analysis of its stability, and we compare its advantage with respect to computational complexity, speed of convergence and prediction accuracy to the classical kernel ridge regression algorithm where the regularization exponent m is fixed at 2. Our results show that the m-power RLSR problem can be solved efficiently, and support the suggestion that one can use a regularization term that grows significantly slower than the standard quadratic growth in the RKHS norm.
1310.2456
Discrete Sparse Signals: Compressed Sensing by Combining OMP and the Sphere Decoder
cs.IT math.IT
We study the reconstruction of discrete-valued sparse signals from underdetermined systems of linear equations. On the one hand, classical compressed sensing (CS) is designed to deal with real-valued sparse signals. On the other hand, algorithms known from MIMO communications, especially the sphere decoder (SD), are capable to reconstruct discrete-valued non-sparse signals from well- or overdefined system of linear equations. Hence, a combination of both approaches is required. We discuss strategies to include the knowledge of the discrete nature of the signal in the reconstruction process. For brevity, the exposition is done for combining the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) with the SD; design guidelines are derived. It is shown that by suitably combining OMP and SD an efficient low-complexity scheme for the detection of discrete sparse signals is obtained.
1310.2473
Improved Decoding Algorithms for Reed-Solomon Codes
cs.IT math.IT
In coding theory, Reed-Solomon codes are one of the most well-known and widely used classes of error-correcting codes. In this thesis we study and compare two major strategies known for their decoding procedure, the Peterson-Gorenstein-Zierler (PGZ) and the Berlekamp-Massey (BM) decoder, in order to improve existing decoding algorithms and propose faster new ones. In particular we study a modified version of the PGZ decoder, which we will call the fast Peterson-Gorenstein-Zierler (fPGZ) decoding algorithm. This improvement was presented in 1997 by exploiting the Hankel structure of the syndrome matrix. In this thesis we show that the fPGZ decoding algorithm can be seen as a particular case of the BM one. Indeed we prove that the intermediate outcomes obtained in the implementation of fPGZ are a subset of those of the BM decoding algorithm. In this way, we also uncover the existing relationship between the leading principal minors of syndrome matrix and the discrepancies computed by the BM algorithm. Finally, thanks to the study done on the structure of the syndrome matrix and its leading principal minors, we improve the error value computation in both the decoding strategies studied (specifically we prove new error value formulas for the fPGZ and the BM decoding algorithm) and moreover we state a new iterative formulation of the PGZ decoder well suited to a parallel implementation on integrated microchips. Thus using techniques of linear algebra we obtain a parallel decoding algorithm for Reed-Solomon codes with an O(e) computational time complexity, where e is the number of errors which occurred, although a fairly large number of elementary circuit elements is needed.
1310.2477
Model-free control of nonlinear power converters
cs.SY math.OC
A new "model-free" control methodology is applied to a boost power converter. The properties of the boost converter allow to evaluate the performances of the model-free strategy in the case of switching nonlinear transfer functions, regarding load variations. Our approach, which utilizes "intelligent" PI controllers, does not require any converter model identification while ensuring the stability and the robustness of the controlled system. Simulation results show that, with a simple control structure, the proposed control method is almost insensitive to fluctuations and large load variations.
1310.2479
Spatio-temporal variation of conversational utterances on Twitter
physics.soc-ph cs.CL cs.SI
Conversations reflect the existing norms of a language. Previously, we found that utterance lengths in English fictional conversations in books and movies have shortened over a period of 200 years. In this work, we show that this shortening occurs even for a brief period of 3 years (September 2009-December 2012) using 229 million utterances from Twitter. Furthermore, the subset of geographically-tagged tweets from the United States show an inverse proportion between utterance lengths and the state-level percentage of the Black population. We argue that shortening of utterances can be explained by the increasing usage of jargon including coined words.
1310.2490
Degrees of Freedom of Generic Block-Fading MIMO Channels without A Priori Channel State Information
cs.IT math.IT
We studynthe high-SNR capacity of generic MIMO Rayleigh block-fading channels in the noncoherent setting where neither transmitter nor receiver has a priori channel state information but both are aware of the channel statistics. In contrast to the well-established constant block-fading model, we allow the fading to vary within each block with a temporal correlation that is "generic" (in the sense used in the interference-alignment literature). We show that the number of degrees of freedom of a generic MIMO Rayleigh block-fading channel with $T$ transmit antennas and block length $N$ is given by $T(1-1/N)$ provided that $T<N$ and the number of receive antennas is at least $T(N-1)/(N-T)$. A comparison with the constant block-fading channel (where the fading is constant within each block) shows that, for large block lengths, generic correlation increases the number of degrees of freedom by a factor of up to four.
1310.2493
Combining Ontologies with Correspondences and Link Relations: The E-SHIQ Representation Framework
cs.AI
Combining knowledge and beliefs of autonomous peers in distributed settings, is a ma- jor challenge. In this paper we consider peers that combine ontologies and reason jointly with their coupled knowledge. Ontologies are within the SHIQ fragment of Description Logics. Although there are several representation frameworks for modular Description Log- ics, each one makes crucial assumptions concerning the subjectivity of peers' knowledge, the relation between the domains over which ontologies are interpreted, the expressivity of the constructors used for combining knowledge, and the way peers share their knowledge. However in settings where autonomous peers can evolve and extend their knowledge and beliefs independently from others, these assumptions may not hold. In this article, we moti- vate the need for a representation framework that allows peers to combine their knowledge in various ways, maintaining the subjectivity of their own knowledge and beliefs, and that reason collaboratively, constructing a tableau that is distributed among them, jointly. The paper presents the proposed E-SHIQ representation framework, the implementation of the E-SHIQ distributed tableau reasoner, and discusses the efficiency of this reasoner.
1310.2514
Maximal Cost-Bounded Reachability Probability on Continuous-Time Markov Decision Processes
cs.SY
In this paper, we consider multi-dimensional maximal cost-bounded reachability probability over continuous-time Markov decision processes (CTMDPs). Our major contributions are as follows. Firstly, we derive an integral characterization which states that the maximal cost-bounded reachability probability function is the least fixed point of a system of integral equations. Secondly, we prove that the maximal cost-bounded reachability probability can be attained by a measurable deterministic cost-positional scheduler. Thirdly, we provide a numerical approximation algorithm for maximal cost-bounded reachability probability. We present these results under the setting of both early and late schedulers.
1310.2527
Treating clitics with minimalist grammars
cs.CL cs.LO
We propose an extension of Stabler's version of clitics treatment for a wider coverage of the French language. For this, we present the lexical entries needed in the lexicon. Then, we show the recognition of complex syntactic phenomena as (left and right) dislo- cation, clitic climbing over modal and extraction from determiner phrase. The aim of this presentation is the syntax-semantic interface for clitics analyses in which we will stress on clitic climbing over verb and raising verb.
1310.2539
Intrinsic filtering on Lie groups with applications to attitude estimation
cs.SY cs.RO math.OC
This paper proposes a probabilistic approach to the problem of intrinsic filtering of a system on a matrix Lie group with invariance properties. The problem of an invariant continuous-time model with discrete-time measurements is cast into a rigorous stochastic and geometric framework. Building upon the theory of continuous-time invariant observers, we show that, as in the linear case, the error equation is a Markov chain that does not depend on the state estimate. Thus, when the filter's gains are held fixed, and the filter admits almost-global convergence properties with noise turned off, the noisy error's distribution is proved to converge to a stationary distribution, providing insight into the mathematical theory of filtering on Lie groups. For engineering purposes we also introduce the discrete-time Invariant Extended Kalman Filter, for which the trusted covariance matrix is shown to asymptotically converge, and some numerically more involved sample-based methods as well to compute the Kalman gains. The methods are applied to attitude estimation, allowing to derive novel theoretical results in this field, and illustrated through simulations on synthetic data.
1310.2547
All Your Location are Belong to Us: Breaking Mobile Social Networks for Automated User Location Tracking
cs.SI cs.CR
Many popular location-based social networks (LBSNs) support built-in location-based social discovery with hundreds of millions of users around the world. While user (near) realtime geographical information is essential to enable location-based social discovery in LBSNs, the importance of user location privacy has also been recognized by leading real-world LBSNs. To protect user's exact geographical location from being exposed, a number of location protection approaches have been adopted by the industry so that only relative location information are publicly disclosed. These techniques are assumed to be secure and are exercised on the daily base. In this paper, we question the safety of these location-obfuscation techniques used by existing LBSNs. We show, for the first time, through real world attacks that they can all be easily destroyed by an attacker with the capability of no more than a regular LBSN user. In particular, by manipulating location information fed to LBSN client app, an ill-intended regular user can easily deduce the exact location information by running LBSN apps as location oracle and performing a series of attacking strategies. We develop an automated user location tracking system and test it on the most popular LBSNs including Wechat, Skout and Momo. We demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency via a 3 week real-world experiment with 30 volunteers. Our evaluation results show that we could geo-locate a target with high accuracy and can readily recover users' Top 5 locations. We also propose to use grid reference system and location classification to mitigate the attacks. Our work shows that the current industrial best practices on user location privacy protection are completely broken, and it is critical to address this immediate threat.
1310.2561
Characterizing Strategic Cascades on Networks
cs.SI cs.GT physics.soc-ph
Transmission of disease, spread of information and rumors, adoption of new products, and many other network phenomena can be fruitfully modeled as cascading processes, where actions chosen by nodes influence the subsequent behavior of neighbors in the network graph. Current literature on cascades tends to assume nodes choose myopically based on the state of choices already taken by other nodes. We examine the possibility of strategic choice, where agents representing nodes anticipate the choices of others who have not yet decided, and take into account their own influence on such choices. Our study employs the framework of Chierichetti et al. [2012], who (under assumption of myopic node behavior) investigate the scheduling of node decisions to promote cascades of product adoptions preferred by the scheduler. We show that when nodes behave strategically, outcomes can be extremely different. We exhibit cases where in the strategic setting 100% of agents adopt, but in the myopic setting only an arbitrarily small epsilon % do. Conversely, we present cases where in the strategic setting 0% of agents adopt, but in the myopic setting (100-epsilon)% do, for any constant epsilon > 0. Additionally, we prove some properties of cascade processes with strategic agents, both in general and for particular classes of graphs.
1310.2578
On Minimum-time Paths of Bounded Curvature with Position-dependent Constraints
math.OC cs.SY math.DS
We consider the problem of a particle traveling from an initial configuration to a final configuration (given by a point in the plane along with a prescribed velocity vector) in minimum time with non-homogeneous velocity and with constraints on the minimum turning radius of the particle over multiple regions of the state space. Necessary conditions for optimality of these paths are derived to characterize the nature of optimal paths, both when the particle is inside a region and when it crosses boundaries between neighboring regions. These conditions are used to characterize families of optimal and nonoptimal paths. Among the optimality conditions, we derive a "refraction" law at the boundary of the regions that generalizes the so-called Snell's law of refraction in optics to the case of paths with bounded curvature. Tools employed to deduce our results include recent principles of optimality for hybrid systems. The results are validated numerically.
1310.2592
Consensus and Coherence in Fractal Networks
cs.SY
We consider first and second order consensus algorithms in networks with stochastic disturbances. We quantify the deviation from consensus using the notion of network coherence, which can be expressed as an $H_2$ norm of the stochastic system. We use the setting of fractal networks to investigate the question of whether a purely topological measure, such as the fractal dimension, can capture the asymptotics of coherence in the large system size limit. Our analysis for first-order systems is facilitated by connections between first-order stochastic consensus and the global mean first passage time of random walks. We then show how to apply similar techniques to analyze second-order stochastic consensus systems. Our analysis reveals that two networks with the same fractal dimension can exhibit different asymptotic scalings for network coherence. Thus, this topological characterization of the network does not uniquely determine coherence behavior. The question of whether the performance of stochastic consensus algorithms in large networks can be captured by purely topological measures, such as the spatial dimension, remains open.
1310.2619
Information Relaxation is Ultradiffusive
cs.SI cs.CY physics.soc-ph
We investigate how the overall response to a piece of information (a story or an article) evolves and relaxes as a function of time in social networks like Reddit, Digg and Youtube. This response or popularity is measured in terms of the number of votes/comments that the story (or article) accrued over time. We find that the temporal evolution of popularity can be described by a universal function whose parameters depend upon the system under consideration. Unlike most previous studies, which empirically investigated the dynamics of voting behavior, we also give a theoretical interpretation of the observed behavior using ultradiffusion. Whether it is the inter-arrival time between two consecutive votes on a story on Reddit or the comments on a video shared on Youtube, there is always a hierarchy of time scales in information propagation. One vote/comment might occur almost simultaneously with the previous, whereas another vote/comment might occur hours after the preceding one. This hierarchy of time scales leads us to believe that the dynamical response of users to information is ultradiffusive in nature. We show that a ultradiffusion based stochastic process can be used to rationalize the observed temporal evolution.
1310.2627
A Sparse and Adaptive Prior for Time-Dependent Model Parameters
stat.ML cs.AI cs.LG
We consider the scenario where the parameters of a probabilistic model are expected to vary over time. We construct a novel prior distribution that promotes sparsity and adapts the strength of correlation between parameters at successive timesteps, based on the data. We derive approximate variational inference procedures for learning and prediction with this prior. We test the approach on two tasks: forecasting financial quantities from relevant text, and modeling language contingent on time-varying financial measurements.
1310.2632
Bilinear Generalized Approximate Message Passing
cs.IT math.IT
We extend the generalized approximate message passing (G-AMP) approach, originally proposed for high-dimensional generalized-linear regression in the context of compressive sensing, to the generalized-bilinear case, which enables its application to matrix completion, robust PCA, dictionary learning, and related matrix-factorization problems. In the first part of the paper, we derive our Bilinear G-AMP (BiG-AMP) algorithm as an approximation of the sum-product belief propagation algorithm in the high-dimensional limit, where central-limit theorem arguments and Taylor-series approximations apply, and under the assumption of statistically independent matrix entries with known priors. In addition, we propose an adaptive damping mechanism that aids convergence under finite problem sizes, an expectation-maximization (EM)-based method to automatically tune the parameters of the assumed priors, and two rank-selection strategies. In the second part of the paper, we discuss the specializations of EM-BiG-AMP to the problems of matrix completion, robust PCA, and dictionary learning, and present the results of an extensive empirical study comparing EM-BiG-AMP to state-of-the-art algorithms on each problem. Our numerical results, using both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrate that EM-BiG-AMP yields excellent reconstruction accuracy (often best in class) while maintaining competitive runtimes and avoiding the need to tune algorithmic parameters.
1310.2636
The small-world effect is a modern phenomenon
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
The "small-world effect" is the observation that one can find a short chain of acquaintances, often of no more than a handful of individuals, connecting almost any two people on the planet. It is often expressed in the language of networks, where it is equivalent to the statement that most pairs of individuals are connected by a short path through the acquaintance network. Although the small-world effect is well-established empirically for contemporary social networks, we argue here that it is a relatively recent phenomenon, arising only in the last few hundred years: for most of mankind's tenure on Earth the social world was large, with most pairs of individuals connected by relatively long chains of acquaintances, if at all. Our conclusions are based on observations about the spread of diseases, which travel over contact networks between individuals and whose dynamics can give us clues to the structure of those networks even when direct network measurements are not available. As an example we consider the spread of the Black Death in 14th-century Europe, which is known to have traveled across the continent in well-defined waves of infection over the course of several years. Using established epidemiological models, we show that such wave-like behavior can occur only if contacts between individuals living far apart are exponentially rare. We further show that if long-distance contacts are exponentially rare, then the shortest chain of contacts between distant individuals is on average a long one. The observation of the wave-like spread of a disease like the Black Death thus implies a network without the small-world effect.
1310.2646
Localized Iterative Methods for Interpolation in Graph Structured Data
cs.LG
In this paper, we present two localized graph filtering based methods for interpolating graph signals defined on the vertices of arbitrary graphs from only a partial set of samples. The first method is an extension of previous work on reconstructing bandlimited graph signals from partially observed samples. The iterative graph filtering approach very closely approximates the solution proposed in the that work, while being computationally more efficient. As an alternative, we propose a regularization based framework in which we define the cost of reconstruction to be a combination of smoothness of the graph signal and the reconstruction error with respect to the known samples, and find solutions that minimize this cost. We provide both a closed form solution and a computationally efficient iterative solution of the optimization problem. The experimental results on the recommendation system datasets demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed methods.
1310.2665
Clustering Memes in Social Media
cs.SI cs.CY physics.data-an physics.soc-ph
The increasing pervasiveness of social media creates new opportunities to study human social behavior, while challenging our capability to analyze their massive data streams. One of the emerging tasks is to distinguish between different kinds of activities, for example engineered misinformation campaigns versus spontaneous communication. Such detection problems require a formal definition of meme, or unit of information that can spread from person to person through the social network. Once a meme is identified, supervised learning methods can be applied to classify different types of communication. The appropriate granularity of a meme, however, is hardly captured from existing entities such as tags and keywords. Here we present a framework for the novel task of detecting memes by clustering messages from large streams of social data. We evaluate various similarity measures that leverage content, metadata, network features, and their combinations. We also explore the idea of pre-clustering on the basis of existing entities. A systematic evaluation is carried out using a manually curated dataset as ground truth. Our analysis shows that pre-clustering and a combination of heterogeneous features yield the best trade-off between number of clusters and their quality, demonstrating that a simple combination based on pairwise maximization of similarity is as effective as a non-trivial optimization of parameters. Our approach is fully automatic, unsupervised, and scalable for real-time detection of memes in streaming data.
1310.2671
Traveling Trends: Social Butterflies or Frequent Fliers?
cs.SI cs.CY physics.soc-ph
Trending topics are the online conversations that grab collective attention on social media. They are continually changing and often reflect exogenous events that happen in the real world. Trends are localized in space and time as they are driven by activity in specific geographic areas that act as sources of traffic and information flow. Taken independently, trends and geography have been discussed in recent literature on online social media; although, so far, little has been done to characterize the relation between trends and geography. Here we investigate more than eleven thousand topics that trended on Twitter in 63 main US locations during a period of 50 days in 2013. This data allows us to study the origins and pathways of trends, how they compete for popularity at the local level to emerge as winners at the country level, and what dynamics underlie their production and consumption in different geographic areas. We identify two main classes of trending topics: those that surface locally, coinciding with three different geographic clusters (East coast, Midwest and Southwest); and those that emerge globally from several metropolitan areas, coinciding with the major air traffic hubs of the country. These hubs act as trendsetters, generating topics that eventually trend at the country level, and driving the conversation across the country. This poses an intriguing conjecture, drawing a parallel between the spread of information and diseases: Do trends travel faster by airplane than over the Internet?
1310.2686
New Families of $p$-ary Sequences of Period $\frac{p^n-1}{2}$ With Low Maximum Correlation Magnitude
cs.IT math.IT
Let $p$ be an odd prime such that $p \equiv 3\;{\rm mod}\;4$ and $n$ be an odd integer. In this paper, two new families of $p$-ary sequences of period $N = \frac{p^n-1}{2}$ are constructed by two decimated $p$-ary m-sequences $m(2t)$ and $m(dt)$, where $d = 4$ and $d = (p^n + 1)/2=N+1$. The upper bound on the magnitude of correlation values of two sequences in the family is derived using Weil bound. Their upper bound is derived as $\frac{3}{\sqrt{2}} \sqrt{N+\frac{1}{2}}+\frac{1}{2}$ and the family size is 4N, which is four times the period of the sequence.
1310.2700
Analyzing Big Data with Dynamic Quantum Clustering
physics.data-an cs.LG physics.comp-ph
How does one search for a needle in a multi-dimensional haystack without knowing what a needle is and without knowing if there is one in the haystack? This kind of problem requires a paradigm shift - away from hypothesis driven searches of the data - towards a methodology that lets the data speak for itself. Dynamic Quantum Clustering (DQC) is such a methodology. DQC is a powerful visual method that works with big, high-dimensional data. It exploits variations of the density of the data (in feature space) and unearths subsets of the data that exhibit correlations among all the measured variables. The outcome of a DQC analysis is a movie that shows how and why sets of data-points are eventually classified as members of simple clusters or as members of - what we call - extended structures. This allows DQC to be successfully used in a non-conventional exploratory mode where one searches data for unexpected information without the need to model the data. We show how this works for big, complex, real-world datasets that come from five distinct fields: i.e., x-ray nano-chemistry, condensed matter, biology, seismology and finance. These studies show how DQC excels at uncovering unexpected, small - but meaningful - subsets of the data that contain important information. We also establish an important new result: namely, that big, complex datasets often contain interesting structures that will be missed by many conventional clustering techniques. Experience shows that these structures appear frequently enough that it is crucial to know they can exist, and that when they do, they encode important hidden information. In short, we not only demonstrate that DQC can be flexibly applied to datasets that present significantly different challenges, we also show how a simple analysis can be used to look for the needle in the haystack, determine what it is, and find what this means.
1310.2703
Max-Min Energy Efficient Beamforming for Multicell Multiuser Joint Transmission Systems
cs.IT math.IT
Energy efficient communication technology has attracted much attention due to the explosive growth of energy consumption in current wireless communication systems. In this letter we focus on fairness-based energy efficiency and aim to maximize the minimum user energy efficiency in the multicell multiuser joint beamforming system, taking both dynamic and static power consumptions into account. This optimization problem is a non-convex fractional programming problem and hard to tackle. In order to find its solution, the original problem is transformed into a parameterized polynomial subtractive form by exploiting the relationship between the user rate and the minimum mean square error, and using the fractional programming theorem. Furthermore, an iterative algorithm with proved convergence is developed to achieve a near-optimal performance. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed solution and show that our algorithm significantly outperforms the max-min rate optimization algorithm in terms of maximizing the minimum energy efficiency.
1310.2717
Low-cost photoplethysmograph solutions using the Raspberry Pi
cs.SY
Photoplethysmography is a prevalent, non-invasive heart monitoring method. In this paper an implementation of photoplethysmography on the Raspberry Pi is presented. Two modulation techniques are discussed, which make possible to measure these signals by the Raspberry Pi, using an external sound card as A/D converter. Furthermore, it is shown, how can digital signal processing improve signal quality. The presented methods can be used in low-cost cardiac function monitoring, in telemedicine applications and in education as well, since cheap and current hardware are used. Full documentation and open-source software for the measurement available: http://www.noise.inf.u-szeged.hu/Instruments/raspberryplet/
1310.2743
Case Adaptation with Qualitative Algebras
cs.AI
This paper proposes an approach for the adaptation of spatial or temporal cases in a case-based reasoning system. Qualitative algebras are used as spatial and temporal knowledge representation languages. The intuition behind this adaptation approach is to apply a substitution and then repair potential inconsistencies, thanks to belief revision on qualitative algebras. A temporal example from the cooking domain is given. (The paper on which this extended abstract is based was the recipient of the best paper award of the 2012 International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning.)