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1311.3355
HINO: a BFO-aligned ontology representing human molecular interactions and pathways
cs.AI cs.DB q-bio.MN
Many database resources, such as Reactome, collect manually annotated reactions, interactions, and pathways from peer-reviewed publications. The interactors (e.g., a protein), interactions, and pathways in these data resources are often represented as instances in using BioPAX, a standard pathway data exchange format. However, these interactions are better represented as classes (or universals) since they always occur given appropriate conditions. This study aims to represent various human interaction pathways and networks as classes via a formal ontology aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). Towards this goal, the Human Interaction Network Ontology (HINO) was generated by extending the BFO-aligned Interaction Network Ontology (INO). All human pathways and associated processes and interactors listed in Reactome and represented in BioPAX were first converted to ontology classes by aligning them under INO. Related terms and associated relations and hierarchies from external ontologies (e.g., CHEBI and GO) were also retrieved and imported into HINO. HINO ontology terms were resolved in the linked ontology data server Ontobee. The RDF triples stored in the RDF triple store are queryable through a SPARQL program. Such an ontology system supports advanced pathway data integration and applications.
1311.3365
Deriving the Qubit from Entropy Principles
quant-ph cs.IT math-ph math.IT math.MP
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is one of the most famous features of quantum mechanics. However, the non-determinism implied by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle --- together with other prominent aspects of quantum mechanics such as superposition, entanglement, and nonlocality --- poses deep puzzles about the underlying physical reality, even while these same features are at the heart of exciting developments such as quantum cryptography, algorithms, and computing. These puzzles might be resolved if the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics were built up from physically interpretable axioms, but it is not. We propose three physically-based axioms which together characterize the simplest quantum system, namely the qubit. Our starting point is the class of all no-signaling theories. Each such theory can be regarded as a family of empirical models, and we proceed to associate entropies, i.e., measures of information, with these models. To do this, we move to phase space and impose the condition that entropies are real-valued. This requirement, which we call the Information Reality Principle, arises because in order to represent all no-signaling theories (including quantum mechanics itself) in phase space, it is necessary to allow negative probabilities (Wigner [1932]). Our second and third principles take two important features of quantum mechanics and turn them into deliberately chosen physical axioms. One axiom is an Uncertainty Principle, stated in terms of entropy. The other axiom is an Unbiasedness Principle, which requires that whenever there is complete certainty about the outcome of a measurement in one of three mutually orthogonal directions, there must be maximal uncertainty about the outcomes in each of the two other directions.
1311.3368
Anytime Belief Propagation Using Sparse Domains
stat.ML cs.AI cs.LG
Belief Propagation has been widely used for marginal inference, however it is slow on problems with large-domain variables and high-order factors. Previous work provides useful approximations to facilitate inference on such models, but lacks important anytime properties such as: 1) providing accurate and consistent marginals when stopped early, 2) improving the approximation when run longer, and 3) converging to the fixed point of BP. To this end, we propose a message passing algorithm that works on sparse (partially instantiated) domains, and converges to consistent marginals using dynamic message scheduling. The algorithm grows the sparse domains incrementally, selecting the next value to add using prioritization schemes based on the gradients of the marginal inference objective. Our experiments demonstrate local anytime consistency and fast convergence, providing significant speedups over BP to obtain low-error marginals: up to 25 times on grid models, and up to 6 times on a real-world natural language processing task.
1311.3387
Performance of General STCs over Spatially Correlated MIMO Single-keyhole Channels
cs.IT math.IT
For MIMO Rayleigh channels, it has been shown that transmitter correlations always degrade the performance of general space-time codes (STCs) in high SNR regimes. In this correspondence, however, we show that when MIMO channels experience single-keyhole conditions, the effect of spatial correlations between transmission antennas is more sophisticated for general STCs: when $M>N$ (i.e., the number of transmission antennas is greater than the number of receiving antennas), depending on how the correlation matrix $\mathbf{P}$ beamforms the code word difference matrix $\mathbf{\Delta}$, the PEP performance of general STCs can be either degraded or improved in high SNR regimes. We provide a new measure, which is based on the eigenvalues of $\mathbf{\Delta}$ and the numbers of transmission and receiving antennas, to exam if there exists certain correlation matrices that can improve the performance of general STCs in high SNR regimes. Previous studies on the effect of spatial correlations over single-keyhole channels only concentrated on orthogonal STCs, while our study here is for general STCs and can also be used to explain previous findings for orthogonal STCs.
1311.3391
A Class of Six-weight Cyclic Codes and Their Weight Distribution
math.NT cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, a family of six-weight cyclic codes over GF(p) whose duals have two zeros is presented, where p is an odd prime. And the weight distribution of these cyclic codes is determined.
1311.3394
Integrated Expert Recommendation Model for Online Communities
cs.SI cs.IR
Online communities have become vital places for Web 2.0 users to share knowledge and experiences. Recently, finding expertise user in community has become an important research issue. This paper proposes a novel cascaded model for expert recommendation using aggregated knowledge extracted from enormous contents and social network features. Vector space model is used to compute the relevance of published content with respect to a specific query while PageRank algorithm is applied to rank candidate experts. The experimental results show that the proposed model is an effective recommendation which can guarantee that the most candidate experts are both highly relevant to the specific queries and highly influential in corresponding areas.
1311.3405
The STONE Transform: Multi-Resolution Image Enhancement and Real-Time Compressive Video
cs.CV
Compressed sensing enables the reconstruction of high-resolution signals from under-sampled data. While compressive methods simplify data acquisition, they require the solution of difficult recovery problems to make use of the resulting measurements. This article presents a new sensing framework that combines the advantages of both conventional and compressive sensing. Using the proposed \stone transform, measurements can be reconstructed instantly at Nyquist rates at any power-of-two resolution. The same data can then be "enhanced" to higher resolutions using compressive methods that leverage sparsity to "beat" the Nyquist limit. The availability of a fast direct reconstruction enables compressive measurements to be processed on small embedded devices. We demonstrate this by constructing a real-time compressive video camera.
1311.3416
Quantum synchronizable codes from finite geometries
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
Quantum synchronizable error-correcting codes are special quantum error-correcting codes that are designed to correct both the effect of quantum noise on qubits and misalignment in block synchronization. It is known that in principle such a code can be constructed through a combination of a classical linear code and its subcode if the two are both cyclic and dual-containing. However, finding such classical codes that lead to promising quantum synchronizable error-correcting codes is not a trivial task. In fact, although there are two families of classical codes that are proved to produce quantum synchronizable codes with good minimum distances and highest possible tolerance against misalignment, their code lengths have been restricted to primes and Mersenne numbers. In this paper, examining the incidence vectors of projective spaces over the finite fields of characteristic $2$, we give quantum synchronizable codes from cyclic codes whose lengths are not primes or Mersenne numbers. These projective geometric codes achieve good performance in quantum error correction and possess the best possible ability to recover synchronization, thereby enriching the variety of good quantum synchronizable codes. We also extend the current knowledge of cyclic codes in classical coding theory by explicitly giving generator polynomials of the finite geometric codes and completely characterizing the minimum weight nonzero codewords. In addition to the codes based on projective spaces, we carry out a similar analysis on the well-known cyclic codes from Euclidean spaces that are known to be majority logic decodable and determine their exact minimum distances.
1311.3428
Low-complexity End-to-End Performance Optimization in MIMO Full-Duplex Relay Systems
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we deal with the deployment of full-duplex relaying in amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative networks with multiple-antenna terminals. In contrast to previous studies, which focus on the spatial mitigation of the loopback interference (LI) at the relay node, a joint precoding/decoding design that maximizes the end-to-end (e2e) performance is investigated. The proposed precoding incorporates rank-1 zero-forcing (ZF) LI suppression at the relay node and is derived in closed-form by solving appropriate optimization problems. In order to further reduce system complexity, the antenna selection (AS) problem for full-duplex AF cooperative systems is discussed. We investigate different AS schemes to select a single transmit antenna at both the source and the relay, as well as a single receive antenna at both the relay and the destination. To facilitate comparison, exact outage probability expressions and asymptotic approximations of the proposed AS schemes are provided. In order to overcome zero-diversity effects associated with the AS operation, a simple power allocation scheme at the relay node is also investigated and its optimal value is analytically derived. Numerical and simulation results show that the joint ZF-based precoding significantly improves e2e performance, while AS schemes are efficient solutions for scenarios with strict computational constraints.
1311.3429
Hydrodynamic surrogate models for bio-inspired micro-swimming robots
physics.flu-dyn cs.RO
Research on untethered micro-swimming robots is growing fast owing to their potential impact on minimally invasive medical procedures. Candidate propulsion mechanisms of robots are based on flagellar mechanisms of microorganisms such as rotating rigid helices and traveling plane-waves on flexible rods and parameterized by wavelength, amplitude, and frequency. For design and control of swimming robots, accurate real-time models are necessary to compute trajectories, velocities and hydrodynamic forces acting on robots. Resistive force theory (RFT) provides an excellent framework for the development of real-time six degrees-of-freedom surrogate models for design optimization and control. However, the accuracy of RFT-based models depends strongly on hydrodynamic interactions. Here, we introduce interaction coefficients that only multiply body resistance coefficients with no modification to local resistance coefficients on the tail. Interaction coefficients are obtained for a single specimen of Vibrio Algino reported in the literature, and used in the RFT model for comparisons of the forward-swimming component of the resultant velocities and body rotation rates against other specimens. Furthermore, CFD simulations are used to obtain forward and lateral velocities and body rotation rates of bio-inspired swimmers with helical tails and traveling-plane waves for a range of amplitudes and wavelengths. Interaction coefficients are obtained from the CFD simulation for the helical tail with the specified amplitude and wavelength and used in the RFT model for comparisons of velocities and body rotation rates for other designs. Comparisons indicate that hydrodynamic models that employ interaction coefficients prove to be viable surrogates for computationally intensive three-dimensional time-dependent CFD models.
1311.3475
Social Influence and the Collective Dynamics of Opinion Formation
physics.soc-ph cs.SI nlin.AO
Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people. In our strongly interconnected society, social influence plays a prominent role in many self-organized phenomena such as herding in cultural markets, the spread of ideas and innovations, and the amplification of fears during epidemics. Yet, the mechanisms of opinion formation remain poorly understood, and existing physics-based models lack systematic empirical validation. Here, we report two controlled experiments showing how participants answering factual questions revise their initial judgments after being exposed to the opinion and confidence level of others. Based on the observation of 59 experimental subjects exposed to peer-opinion for 15 different items, we draw an influence map that describes the strength of peer influence during interactions. A simple process model derived from our observations demonstrates how opinions in a group of interacting people can converge or split over repeated interactions. In particular, we identify two major attractors of opinion: (i) the expert effect, induced by the presence of a highly confident individual in the group, and (ii) the majority effect, caused by the presence of a critical mass of laypeople sharing similar opinions. Additional simulations reveal the existence of a tipping point at which one attractor will dominate over the other, driving collective opinion in a given direction. These findings have implications for understanding the mechanisms of public opinion formation and managing conflicting situations in which self-confident and better informed minorities challenge the views of a large uninformed majority.
1311.3485
A New Algorithm for Distributed Nonparametric Sequential Detection
cs.IT math.IT
We consider nonparametric sequential hypothesis testing problem when the distribution under the null hypothesis is fully known but the alternate hypothesis corresponds to some other unknown distribution with some loose constraints. We propose a simple algorithm to address the problem. These problems are primarily motivated from wireless sensor networks and spectrum sensing in Cognitive Radios. A decentralized version utilizing spatial diversity is also proposed. Its performance is analysed and asymptotic properties are proved. The simulated and analysed performance of the algorithm is compared with an earlier algorithm addressing the same problem with similar assumptions. We also modify the algorithm for optimizing performance when information about the prior probabilities of occurrence of the two hypotheses are known.
1311.3494
Fundamental Limits of Online and Distributed Algorithms for Statistical Learning and Estimation
cs.LG stat.ML
Many machine learning approaches are characterized by information constraints on how they interact with the training data. These include memory and sequential access constraints (e.g. fast first-order methods to solve stochastic optimization problems); communication constraints (e.g. distributed learning); partial access to the underlying data (e.g. missing features and multi-armed bandits) and more. However, currently we have little understanding how such information constraints fundamentally affect our performance, independent of the learning problem semantics. For example, are there learning problems where any algorithm which has small memory footprint (or can use any bounded number of bits from each example, or has certain communication constraints) will perform worse than what is possible without such constraints? In this paper, we describe how a single set of results implies positive answers to the above, for several different settings.
1311.3508
Demographic and Structural Characteristics to Rationalize Link Formation in Online Social Networks
cs.SI
Recent years have seen tremendous growth of many online social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. People connect to each other through these networks forming large social communities providing researchers rich datasets to understand, model and predict social interactions and behaviors. New contacts in these networks can be formed either due to an individual's demographic profile such as age group, gender, geographic location or due to network's structural dynamics such as triadic closure and preferential attachment, or a combination of both demographic and structural characteristics. A number of network generation models have been proposed in the last decade to explain the structure, evolution and processes taking place in different types of networks, and notably social networks. Network generation models studied in the literature primarily consider structural properties, and in some cases an individual's demographic profile in the formation of new social contacts. These models do not present a mechanism to combine both structural and demographic characteristics for the formation of new links. In this paper, we propose a new network generation algorithm which incorporates both these characteristics to model growth of a network.We use different publicly available Facebook datasets as benchmarks to demonstrate the correctness of the proposed network generation model.
1311.3515
Model predictive control of voltage profiles in MV networks with distributed generation
cs.SY
The Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach is used in this paper to control the voltage profiles in MV networks with distributed generation. The proposed algorithm lies at the intermediate level of a three-layer hierarchical structure. At the upper level a static Optimal Power Flow (OPF) manager computes the required voltage profiles to be transmitted to the MPC level, while at the lower level local Automatic Voltage Regulators (AVR), one for each Distributed Generator (DG), track the reactive power reference values computed by MPC. The control algorithm is based on an impulse response model of the system, easily obtained by means of a detailed simulator of the network, and allows to cope with constraints on the voltage profiles and/or on the reactive power flows along the network. If these constraints cannot be satisfied by acting on the available DGs, the algorithm acts on the On-Load Tap Changing (OLTC) transformer. A radial rural network with two feeders, eight DGs, and thirty-one loads is used as case study. The model of the network is implemented in DIgSILENT PowerFactory, while the control algorithm runs in Matlab. A number of simulation results is reported to witness the main characteristics and limitations of the proposed approach.
1311.3527
A new information dimension of complex networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
The fractal and self-similarity properties are revealed in many real complex networks. However, the classical information dimension of complex networks is not practical for real complex networks. In this paper, a new information dimension to characterize the dimension of complex networks is proposed. The difference of information for each box in the box-covering algorithm of complex networks is considered by this measure. The proposed method is applied to calculate the fractal dimensions of some real networks. Our results show that the proposed method is efficient for fractal dimension of complex networks.
1311.3533
The Hot Bit I: The Szilard-Landauer Correspondence
cs.IT math-ph math.IT math.MP
We present a precise formulation of a correspondence between information and thermodynamics that was first observed by Szilard, and later studied by Landauer. The correspondence identifies available free energy with relative entropy, and provides a dictionary between information and thermodynamics. We precisely state and prove this correspondence. The paper should be broadly accessible since we assume no prior knowledge of information theory, developing it axiomatically, and we assume almost no thermodynamic background.
1311.3534
Enhancing the Energy Efficiency of Radio Base Stations
cs.IT math.IT
This thesis is concerned with the energy efficiency of cellular networks. It studies the dominant power consumer in future cellular networks, the Long Term Evolution radio base stations (BS), and proposes mechanisms that enhance the BS energy efficiency by reducing its power consumption under target rate constraints. These mechanisms trade spare capacity for power saving.
1311.3566
Improving The Scalability By Contact Information Compression In Routing
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
The existence of reduced scalability and delivery leads to the development of scalable routing by contact information compression. The previous work dealt with the result of consistent analysis in the performance of DTN hierarchical routing (DHR). It increases as the source to destination distance increases with decreases in the routing performance. This paper focuses on improving the scalability and delivery through contact information compression algorithm and also addresses the problem of power awareness routing to increase the lifetime of the overall network. Thus implementing the contact information compression (CIC) algorithm the estimated shortest path (ESP) is detected dynamically. The scalability and release are more improved during multipath multicasting, which delivers the information to a collection of target concurrently in a single transmission from the source
1311.3596
Simulation-based optimization of transportation costs in high pressure gas grid
cs.SY
Design, architecture and deployment details of a decision support system engineered to minimize operating costs of compressor stations in a gas network are presented. The system employs standard simulation software for pipelines, combined with well known optimization routine for finding optimal station control profiles in a repetitive way. A list of custom improvements is presented that make the system capable and robust enough to perform the optimization tasks. Implementation process is described in detail, covering the case of handling extra optimality criteria postulated by the user. Benefits from using the system and lessons learned are presented in the conclusions section.
1311.3598
A Statistical Model of Information Evaporation of Perfectly Reflecting Black Holes
quant-ph cs.IT gr-qc hep-th math.IT
We provide a statistical communication model for the phenomenon of quantum information evaporation from black holes. A black hole behaves as a reflecting quantum channel in a very special regime, which allows for a receiver to perfectly recover the absorbed quantum information. The quantum channel of a perfectly reflecting (PR) black hole is the probabilistically weighted sum of infinitely many qubit cloning channels. In this work, we reveal the statistical communication background of the information evaporation process of PR black holes. We show that the density of the cloned quantum particles in function of the PR black hole's mass approximates a Chi-square distribution, while the stimulated emission process is characterized by zero-mean, circular symmetric complex Gaussian random variables. The results lead to the existence of Rayleigh random distributed coefficients in the probability density evolution, which confirms the presence of Rayleigh fading (a special type of random fluctuation) in the statistical communication model of black hole information evaporation.
1311.3613
A Bayesian approach to sparse channel estimation in OFDM systems
cs.IT math.IT
In this work, we address the problem of estimating sparse communication channels in OFDM systems in the presence of carrier frequency offset (CFO) and unknown noise variance. To this end, we consider a convex optimization problem, including a probability function, accounting for the sparse nature of the communication channel. We use the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to solve the corresponding Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimation problem. We show that, by concentrating the cost function in one variable, namely the CFO, the channel estimate can be obtained in closed form within the EM framework in the maximization step. We present an example where we estimate the communication channel, the CFO, the symbol, the noise variance, and the parameter defining the prior distribution of the estimates. We compare the bit error rate performance of our proposed MAP approach against Maximum Likelihood.
1311.3618
Describing Textures in the Wild
cs.CV
Patterns and textures are defining characteristics of many natural objects: a shirt can be striped, the wings of a butterfly can be veined, and the skin of an animal can be scaly. Aiming at supporting this analytical dimension in image understanding, we address the challenging problem of describing textures with semantic attributes. We identify a rich vocabulary of forty-seven texture terms and use them to describe a large dataset of patterns collected in the wild.The resulting Describable Textures Dataset (DTD) is the basis to seek for the best texture representation for recognizing describable texture attributes in images. We port from object recognition to texture recognition the Improved Fisher Vector (IFV) and show that, surprisingly, it outperforms specialized texture descriptors not only on our problem, but also in established material recognition datasets. We also show that the describable attributes are excellent texture descriptors, transferring between datasets and tasks; in particular, combined with IFV, they significantly outperform the state-of-the-art by more than 8 percent on both FMD and KTHTIPS-2b benchmarks. We also demonstrate that they produce intuitive descriptions of materials and Internet images.
1311.3633
A coordination model for ultra-large scale systems of systems
cs.SY
The ultra large multi-agent systems are becoming increasingly popular due to quick decay of the individual production costs and the potential of speeding up the solving of complex problems. Examples include nano-robots, or systems of nano-satellites for dangerous meteorite detection, or cultures of stem cells for organ regeneration or nerve repair. The topics associated with these systems are usually dealt within the theories of intelligent swarms or biologically inspired computation systems. Stochastic models play an important role and they are based on various formulations of the mechanical statistics. In these cases, the main assumption is that the swarm elements have a simple behaviour and that some average properties can be deduced for the entire swarm. In contrast, complex systems in areas like aeronautics are formed by elements with sophisticated behaviour, which are even autonomous. In situations like this, a new approach to swarm coordination is necessary. We present a stochastic model where the swarm elements are communicating autonomous systems, the coordination is separated from the component autonomous activity and the entire swarm can be abstracted away as a piecewise deterministic Markov process, which constitutes one of the most popular model in stochastic control. Keywords: ultra large multi-agent systems, system of systems, autonomous systems, stochastic hybrid systems.
1311.3646
Online Coded Caching
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
We consider a basic content distribution scenario consisting of a single origin server connected through a shared bottleneck link to a number of users each equipped with a cache of finite memory. The users issue a sequence of content requests from a set of popular files, and the goal is to operate the caches as well as the server such that these requests are satisfied with the minimum number of bits sent over the shared link. Assuming a basic Markov model for renewing the set of popular files, we characterize approximately the optimal long-term average rate of the shared link. We further prove that the optimal online scheme has approximately the same performance as the optimal offline scheme, in which the cache contents can be updated based on the entire set of popular files before each new request. To support these theoretical results, we propose an online coded caching scheme termed coded least-recently sent (LRS) and simulate it for a demand time series derived from the dataset made available by Netflix for the Netflix Prize. For this time series, we show that the proposed coded LRS algorithm significantly outperforms the popular least-recently used (LRU) caching algorithm.
1311.3651
Smoothed Analysis of Tensor Decompositions
cs.DS cs.LG stat.ML
Low rank tensor decompositions are a powerful tool for learning generative models, and uniqueness results give them a significant advantage over matrix decomposition methods. However, tensors pose significant algorithmic challenges and tensors analogs of much of the matrix algebra toolkit are unlikely to exist because of hardness results. Efficient decomposition in the overcomplete case (where rank exceeds dimension) is particularly challenging. We introduce a smoothed analysis model for studying these questions and develop an efficient algorithm for tensor decomposition in the highly overcomplete case (rank polynomial in the dimension). In this setting, we show that our algorithm is robust to inverse polynomial error -- a crucial property for applications in learning since we are only allowed a polynomial number of samples. While algorithms are known for exact tensor decomposition in some overcomplete settings, our main contribution is in analyzing their stability in the framework of smoothed analysis. Our main technical contribution is to show that tensor products of perturbed vectors are linearly independent in a robust sense (i.e. the associated matrix has singular values that are at least an inverse polynomial). This key result paves the way for applying tensor methods to learning problems in the smoothed setting. In particular, we use it to obtain results for learning multi-view models and mixtures of axis-aligned Gaussians where there are many more "components" than dimensions. The assumption here is that the model is not adversarially chosen, formalized by a perturbation of model parameters. We believe this an appealing way to analyze realistic instances of learning problems, since this framework allows us to overcome many of the usual limitations of using tensor methods.
1311.3669
Scalable Influence Estimation in Continuous-Time Diffusion Networks
cs.SI cs.LG
If a piece of information is released from a media site, can it spread, in 1 month, to a million web pages? This influence estimation problem is very challenging since both the time-sensitive nature of the problem and the issue of scalability need to be addressed simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a randomized algorithm for influence estimation in continuous-time diffusion networks. Our algorithm can estimate the influence of every node in a network with |V| nodes and |E| edges to an accuracy of $\varepsilon$ using $n=O(1/\varepsilon^2)$ randomizations and up to logarithmic factors O(n|E|+n|V|) computations. When used as a subroutine in a greedy influence maximization algorithm, our proposed method is guaranteed to find a set of nodes with an influence of at least (1-1/e)OPT-2$\varepsilon$, where OPT is the optimal value. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show that the proposed method can easily scale up to networks of millions of nodes while significantly improves over previous state-of-the-arts in terms of the accuracy of the estimated influence and the quality of the selected nodes in maximizing the influence.
1311.3674
Diversity and Social Network Structure in Collective Decision Making: Evolutionary Perspectives with Agent-Based Simulations
cs.MA cs.NE cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Collective, especially group-based, managerial decision making is crucial in organizations. Using an evolutionary theoretic approach to collective decision making, agent-based simulations were conducted to investigate how human collective decision making would be affected by the agents' diversity in problem understanding and/or behavior in discussion, as well as by their social network structure. Simulation results indicated that groups with consistent problem understanding tended to produce higher utility values of ideas and displayed better decision convergence, but only if there was no group-level bias in collective problem understanding. Simulation results also indicated the importance of balance between selection-oriented (i.e., exploitative) and variation-oriented (i.e., explorative) behaviors in discussion to achieve quality final decisions. Expanding the group size and introducing non-trivial social network structure generally improved the quality of ideas at the cost of decision convergence. Simulations with different social network topologies revealed collective decision making on small-world networks with high local clustering tended to achieve highest decision quality more often than on random or scale-free networks. Implications of this evolutionary theory and simulation approach for future managerial research on collective, group, and multi-level decision making are discussed.
1311.3715
Recognizing Image Style
cs.CV
The style of an image plays a significant role in how it is viewed, but style has received little attention in computer vision research. We describe an approach to predicting style of images, and perform a thorough evaluation of different image features for these tasks. We find that features learned in a multi-layer network generally perform best -- even when trained with object class (not style) labels. Our large-scale learning methods results in the best published performance on an existing dataset of aesthetic ratings and photographic style annotations. We present two novel datasets: 80K Flickr photographs annotated with 20 curated style labels, and 85K paintings annotated with 25 style/genre labels. Our approach shows excellent classification performance on both datasets. We use the learned classifiers to extend traditional tag-based image search to consider stylistic constraints, and demonstrate cross-dataset understanding of style.
1311.3732
Exploiting Direct and Indirect Information for Friend Suggestion in ZingMe
cs.SI cs.IR physics.soc-ph
Friend suggestion is a fundamental problem in social networks with the goal of assisting users in creating more relationships, and thereby enhances interest of users to the social networks. This problem is often considered to be the link prediction problem in the network. ZingMe is one of the largest social networks in Vietnam. In this paper, we analyze the current approach for the friend suggestion problem in ZingMe, showing its limitations and disadvantages. We propose a new efficient approach for friend suggestion that uses information from the network structure, attributes and interactions of users to create resources for the evaluation of friend connection amongst users. Friend connection is evaluated exploiting both direct communication between the users and information from other ones in the network. The proposed approach has been implemented in a new system version of ZingMe. We conducted experiments, exploiting a dataset derived from the users' real use of ZingMe, to compare the newly proposed approach to the current approach and some well-known ones for the accuracy of friend suggestion. The experimental results show that the newly proposed approach outperforms the current one, i.e., by an increase of 7% to 98% on average in the friend suggestion accuracy. The proposed approach also outperforms other ones for users who have a small number of friends with improvements from 20% to 85% on average. In this paper, we also discuss a number of open issues and possible improvements for the proposed approach.
1311.3735
Ensemble Relational Learning based on Selective Propositionalization
cs.LG cs.AI
Dealing with structured data needs the use of expressive representation formalisms that, however, puts the problem to deal with the computational complexity of the machine learning process. Furthermore, real world domains require tools able to manage their typical uncertainty. Many statistical relational learning approaches try to deal with these problems by combining the construction of relevant relational features with a probabilistic tool. When the combination is static (static propositionalization), the constructed features are considered as boolean features and used offline as input to a statistical learner; while, when the combination is dynamic (dynamic propositionalization), the feature construction and probabilistic tool are combined into a single process. In this paper we propose a selective propositionalization method that search the optimal set of relational features to be used by a probabilistic learner in order to minimize a loss function. The new propositionalization approach has been combined with the random subspace ensemble method. Experiments on real-world datasets shows the validity of the proposed method.
1311.3764
Modeling systemic risks in financial markets
q-fin.RM cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We survey systemic risks to financial markets and present a high-level description of an algorithm that measures systemic risk in terms of coupled networks.
1311.3772
Impact of system state dynamics on PMU placement in the electric power grid
cs.SY
The goal of this paper is to study the impact of the dynamic nature of bus voltage magnitudes and phase angles, which constitute the state of the power system, on the phasor measurement unit (PMU) placement problem. To facilitate this study, the placement problem is addressed from the perspective of the electrical structure which, unlike existing work on PMU placement, accounts for the sensitivity between power injections and nodal phase angle differences between various buses in the power network. A linear dynamic model captures the time evolution of system states, and a simple procedure is devised to estimate the state transition function at each time instant. The placement problem is formulated as a series (time steps) of binary integer programs, with the goal to obtain the minimum number of PMUs at each time step for complete network observability in the absence of zero injection measurements. Experiments are conducted on several standard IEEE test bus systems. The main thesis of this study is that, owing to the dynamic nature of the system states, for optimal power system operation the best one could do is to install a PMU on each bus of the given network, though it is undesirable from an economic standpoint.
1311.3773
Non-Convex Compressed Sensing Using Partial Support Information
cs.IT math.IT math.OC
In this paper we address the recovery conditions of weighted $\ell_p$ minimization for signal reconstruction from compressed sensing measurements when partial support information is available. We show that weighted $\ell_p$ minimization with $0<p<1$ is stable and robust under weaker sufficient conditions compared to weighted $\ell_1$ minimization. Moreover, the sufficient recovery conditions of weighted $\ell_p$ are weaker than those of regular $\ell_p$ minimization if at least $50%$ of the support estimate is accurate. We also review some algorithms which exist to solve the non-convex $\ell_p$ problem and illustrate our results with numerical experiments.
1311.3779
On Pole Placement and Invariant Subspaces
cs.SY
The classical eigenvalue assignment problem is revisited in this note. We derive an analytic expression for pole placement which represents a slight generalization of the celebrated Bass-Gura and Ackermann formulae, and also is closely related to the modal procedure of Simon and Mitter.
1311.3800
Structural Weights in Ontology Matching
cs.AI cs.IR
Ontology matching finds correspondences between similar entities of different ontologies. Two ontologies may be similar in some aspects such as structure, semantic etc. Most ontology matching systems integrate multiple matchers to extract all the similarities that two ontologies may have. Thus, we face a major problem to aggregate different similarities. Some matching systems use experimental weights for aggregation of similarities among different matchers while others use machine learning approaches and optimization algorithms to find optimal weights to assign to different matchers. However, both approaches have their own deficiencies. In this paper, we will point out the problems and shortcomings of current similarity aggregation strategies. Then, we propose a new strategy, which enables us to utilize the structural information of ontologies to get weights of matchers, for the similarity aggregation task. For achieving this goal, we create a new Ontology Matching system which it uses three available matchers, namely GMO, ISub and VDoc. We have tested our similarity aggregation strategy on the OAEI 2012 data set. Experimental results show significant improvements in accuracies of several cases, especially in matching the classes of ontologies. We will compare the performance of our similarity aggregation strategy with other well-known strategies
1311.3808
Periodicity Extraction using Superposition of Distance Matching Function and One-dimensional Haar Wavelet Transform
cs.CV
Periodicity of a texture is one of the important visual characteristics and is often used as a measure for textural discrimination at the structural level. Knowledge about periodicity of a texture is very essential in the field of texture synthesis and texture compression and also in the design of frieze and wall papers. In this paper, we propose a method of periodicity extraction from noisy images based on superposition of distance matching function (DMF) and wavelet decomposition without de-noising the test images. Overall DMFs are subjected to single-level Haar wavelet decomposition to obtain approximate and detailed coefficients. Extracted coefficients help in determination of periodicities in row and column directions. We illustrate the usefulness and the effectiveness of the proposed method in a texture synthesis application.
1311.3826
Weak Singular Hybrid Automata
cs.FL cs.CC cs.SY
The framework of Hybrid automata, introduced by Alur, Courcourbetis, Henzinger, and Ho, provides a formal modeling and analysis environment to analyze the interaction between the discrete and the continuous parts of cyber-physical systems. Hybrid automata can be considered as generalizations of finite state automata augmented with a finite set of real-valued variables whose dynamics in each state is governed by a system of ordinary differential equations. Moreover, the discrete transitions of hybrid automata are guarded by constraints over the values of these real-valued variables, and enable discontinuous jumps in the evolution of these variables. Singular hybrid automata are a subclass of hybrid automata where dynamics is specified by state-dependent constant vectors. Henzinger, Kopke, Puri, and Varaiya showed that for even very restricted subclasses of singular hybrid automata, the fundamental verification questions, like reachability and schedulability, are undecidable. In this paper we present \emph{weak singular hybrid automata} (WSHA), a previously unexplored subclass of singular hybrid automata, and show the decidability (and the exact complexity) of various verification questions for this class including reachability (NP-Complete) and LTL model-checking (PSPACE-Complete). We further show that extending WSHA with a single unrestricted clock or extending WSHA with unrestricted variable updates lead to undecidability of reachability problem.
1311.3829
Planning based on classification by induction graph
cs.AI
In Artificial Intelligence, planning refers to an area of research that proposes to develop systems that can automatically generate a result set, in the form of an integrated decision-making system through a formal procedure, known as plan. Instead of resorting to the scheduling algorithms to generate plans, it is proposed to operate the automatic learning by decision tree to optimize time. In this paper, we propose to build a classification model by induction graph from a learning sample containing plans that have an associated set of descriptors whose values change depending on each plan. This model will then operate for classifying new cases by assigning the appropriate plan.
1311.3837
SBML for optimizing decision support's tools
cs.CE
Many theoretical works and tools on epidemiological field reflect the emphasis on decision-making Tools by both public health and the scientific community, which continues to increase. Indeed, in the epidemiological field, modeling tools are proving a very important way in helping to make decision. However, the variety, the large volume of data and the nature of epidemics lead us to seek solutions to alleviate the heavy burden imposed on both experts and developers. In this paper, we present a new approach: the passage of an epidemic model realized in Bio-PEPA to a narrative language using the basics of SBML language. Our goal is to allow on one hand, epidemiologists to verify and validate the model, and the other hand, developers to optimize the model in order to achieve a better model of decision making. We also present some preliminary results and some suggestions to improve the simulated model.
1311.3840
Mixing Energy Models in Genetic Algorithms for On-Lattice Protein Structure Prediction
cs.CE cs.NE
Protein structure prediction (PSP) is computationally a very challenging problem. The challenge largely comes from the fact that the energy function that needs to be minimised in order to obtain the native structure of a given protein is not clearly known. A high resolution 20x20 energy model could better capture the behaviour of the actual energy function than a low resolution energy model such as hydrophobic polar. However, the fine grained details of the high resolution interaction energy matrix are often not very informative for guiding the search. In contrast, a low resolution energy model could effectively bias the search towards certain promising directions. In this paper, we develop a genetic algorithm that mainly uses a high resolution energy model for protein structure evaluation but uses a low resolution HP energy model in focussing the search towards exploring structures that have hydrophobic cores. We experimentally show that this mixing of energy models leads to significant lower energy structures compared to the state-of-the-art results.
1311.3859
Mapping cognitive ontologies to and from the brain
stat.ML cs.LG q-bio.NC
Imaging neuroscience links brain activation maps to behavior and cognition via correlational studies. Due to the nature of the individual experiments, based on eliciting neural response from a small number of stimuli, this link is incomplete, and unidirectional from the causal point of view. To come to conclusions on the function implied by the activation of brain regions, it is necessary to combine a wide exploration of the various brain functions and some inversion of the statistical inference. Here we introduce a methodology for accumulating knowledge towards a bidirectional link between observed brain activity and the corresponding function. We rely on a large corpus of imaging studies and a predictive engine. Technically, the challenges are to find commonality between the studies without denaturing the richness of the corpus. The key elements that we contribute are labeling the tasks performed with a cognitive ontology, and modeling the long tail of rare paradigms in the corpus. To our knowledge, our approach is the first demonstration of predicting the cognitive content of completely new brain images. To that end, we propose a method that predicts the experimental paradigms across different studies.
1311.3868
On the automorphism groups of binary linear codes
cs.IT math.CO math.IT
Let C be a binary linear code and suppose that its automorphism group contains a non trivial subgroup G. What can we say about C knowing G? In this paper we collect some answers to this question in the cases G=C_p, G=C_2p and G=D_2p (p an odd prime), with a particular regard to the case in which C is self-dual. Furthermore we generalize some methods used in other papers on this subject. Finally we give a short survey on the problem of determining the automorphism group of a putative self-dual [72,36,16] code, in order to show where these methods can be applied.
1311.3877
Optimal Networks from Error Correcting Codes
cs.IT cs.NI math.CO math.IT
To address growth challenges facing large Data Centers and supercomputing clusters a new construction is presented for scalable, high throughput, low latency networks. The resulting networks require 1.5-5 times fewer switches, 2-6 times fewer cables, have 1.2-2 times lower latency and correspondingly lower congestion and packet losses than the best present or proposed networks providing the same number of ports at the same total bisection. These advantage ratios increase with network size. The key new ingredient is the exact equivalence discovered between the problem of maximizing network bisection for large classes of practically interesting Cayley graphs and the problem of maximizing codeword distance for linear error correcting codes. Resulting translation recipe converts existent optimal error correcting codes into optimal throughput networks.
1311.3879
Answering SPARQL queries modulo RDF Schema with paths
cs.DB
SPARQL is the standard query language for RDF graphs. In its strict instantiation, it only offers querying according to the RDF semantics and would thus ignore the semantics of data expressed with respect to (RDF) schemas or (OWL) ontologies. Several extensions to SPARQL have been proposed to query RDF data modulo RDFS, i.e., interpreting the query with RDFS semantics and/or considering external ontologies. We introduce a general framework which allows for expressing query answering modulo a particular semantics in an homogeneous way. In this paper, we discuss extensions of SPARQL that use regular expressions to navigate RDF graphs and may be used to answer queries considering RDFS semantics. We also consider their embedding as extensions of SPARQL. These SPARQL extensions are interpreted within the proposed framework and their drawbacks are presented. In particular, we show that the PSPARQL query language, a strict extension of SPARQL offering transitive closure, allows for answering SPARQL queries modulo RDFS graphs with the same complexity as SPARQL through a simple transformation of the queries. We also consider languages which, in addition to paths, provide constraints. In particular, we present and compare nSPARQL and our proposal CPSPARQL. We show that CPSPARQL is expressive enough to answer full SPARQL queries modulo RDFS. Finally, we compare the expressiveness and complexity of both nSPARQL and the corresponding fragment of CPSPARQL, that we call cpSPARQL. We show that both languages have the same complexity through cpSPARQL, being a proper extension of SPARQL graph patterns, is more expressive than nSPARQL.
1311.3882
Sampling Content Distributed Over Graphs
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Despite recent effort to estimate topology characteristics of large graphs (i.e., online social networks and peer-to-peer networks), little attention has been given to develop a formal methodology to characterize the vast amount of content distributed over these networks. Due to the large scale nature of these networks, exhaustive enumeration of this content is computationally prohibitive. In this paper, we show how one can obtain content properties by sampling only a small fraction of vertices. We first show that when sampling is naively applied, this can produce a huge bias in content statistics (i.e., average number of content duplications). To remove this bias, one may use maximum likelihood estimation to estimate content characteristics. However our experimental results show that one needs to sample most vertices in the graph to obtain accurate statistics using such a method. To address this challenge, we propose two efficient estimators: special copy estimator (SCE) and weighted copy estimator (WCE) to measure content characteristics using available information in sampled contents. SCE uses the special content copy indicator to compute the estimate, while WCE derives the estimate based on meta-information in sampled vertices. We perform experiments to show WCE and SCE are cost effective and also ``{\em asymptotically unbiased}''. Our methodology provides a new tool for researchers to efficiently query content distributed in large scale networks.
1311.3887
Relating different quantum generalizations of the conditional Renyi entropy
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
Recently a new quantum generalization of the Renyi divergence and the corresponding conditional Renyi entropies was proposed. Here we report on a surprising relation between conditional Renyi entropies based on this new generalization and conditional Renyi entropies based on the quantum relative Renyi entropy that was used in previous literature. Our result generalizes the well-known duality relation H(A|B) + H(A|C) = 0 of the conditional von Neumann entropy for tripartite pure states to Renyi entropies of two different kinds. As a direct application, we prove a collection of inequalities that relate different conditional Renyi entropies and derive a new entropic uncertainty relation.
1311.3900
The Stabilizing Role of Global Alliances in the Dynamics of Coalition Forming
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Coalition forming is investigated among countries, which are coupled with short range interactions, under the influence of external fields produced by the existence of global alliances. The model rests on the natural model of coalition forming inspired from Statistical Physics, where instabilities are a consequence of decentralized maximization of the individual benefits of actors within their long horizon of rationality as the ability to envision a way through intermediate loosing states, to a better configuration. The effects of those external incentives on the interactions between countries and the eventual stabilization of coalitions are studied. The results shed a new light on the understanding of the complex phenomena of stabilization and fragmentation in the coalition dynamics and on the possibility to design stable coalitions. In addition to the formal implementation of the model, the phenomena is illustrated through some historical cases of conflicts in Western Europe.
1311.3918
Sum Secrecy Rate in Full-Duplex Wiretap Channel with Imperfect CSI
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we consider the achievable sum secrecy rate in full-duplex wiretap channel in the presence of an eavesdropper and imperfect channel state information (CSI). We assume that the users participating in full-duplex communication and the eavesdropper have single antenna each. The users have individual transmit power constraints. They also transmit jamming signals to improve the secrecy rates. We obtain the achievable perfect secrecy rate region by maximizing the sum secrecy rate. We also obtain the corresponding optimum powers of the message signals and the jamming signals. Numerical results that show the impact of imperfect CSI on the achievable secrecy rate region are presented.
1311.3959
Clustering Markov Decision Processes For Continual Transfer
cs.AI cs.LG
We present algorithms to effectively represent a set of Markov decision processes (MDPs), whose optimal policies have already been learned, by a smaller source subset for lifelong, policy-reuse-based transfer learning in reinforcement learning. This is necessary when the number of previous tasks is large and the cost of measuring similarity counteracts the benefit of transfer. The source subset forms an `$\epsilon$-net' over the original set of MDPs, in the sense that for each previous MDP $M_p$, there is a source $M^s$ whose optimal policy has $<\epsilon$ regret in $M_p$. Our contributions are as follows. We present EXP-3-Transfer, a principled policy-reuse algorithm that optimally reuses a given source policy set when learning for a new MDP. We present a framework to cluster the previous MDPs to extract a source subset. The framework consists of (i) a distance $d_V$ over MDPs to measure policy-based similarity between MDPs; (ii) a cost function $g(\cdot)$ that uses $d_V$ to measure how good a particular clustering is for generating useful source tasks for EXP-3-Transfer and (iii) a provably convergent algorithm, MHAV, for finding the optimal clustering. We validate our algorithms through experiments in a surveillance domain.
1311.3961
HEVAL: Yet Another Human Evaluation Metric
cs.CL
Machine translation evaluation is a very important activity in machine translation development. Automatic evaluation metrics proposed in literature are inadequate as they require one or more human reference translations to compare them with output produced by machine translation. This does not always give accurate results as a text can have several different translations. Human evaluation metrics, on the other hand, lacks inter-annotator agreement and repeatability. In this paper we have proposed a new human evaluation metric which addresses these issues. Moreover this metric also provides solid grounds for making sound assumptions on the quality of the text produced by a machine translation.
1311.3979
Precision improvement of MEMS gyros for indoor mobile robots with horizontal motion inspired by methods of TRIZ
cs.RO cs.SY
In the paper, the problem of precision improvement for the MEMS gyrosensors on indoor robots with horizontal motion is solved by methods of TRIZ ("the theory of inventive problem solving").
1311.3982
Inferring Multilateral Relations from Dynamic Pairwise Interactions
cs.AI cs.SI
Correlations between anomalous activity patterns can yield pertinent information about complex social processes: a significant deviation from normal behavior, exhibited simultaneously by multiple pairs of actors, provides evidence for some underlying relationship involving those pairs---i.e., a multilateral relation. We introduce a new nonparametric Bayesian latent variable model that explicitly captures correlations between anomalous interaction counts and uses these shared deviations from normal activity patterns to identify and characterize multilateral relations. We showcase our model's capabilities using the newly curated Global Database of Events, Location, and Tone, a dataset that has seen considerable interest in the social sciences and the popular press, but which has is largely unexplored by the machine learning community. We provide a detailed analysis of the latent structure inferred by our model and show that the multilateral relations correspond to major international events and long-term international relationships. These findings lead us to recommend our model for any data-driven analysis of interaction networks where dynamic interactions over the edges provide evidence for latent social structure.
1311.3984
Improving the performance of algorithms to find communities in networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Many algorithms to detect communities in networks typically work without any information on the cluster structure to be found, as one has no a priori knowledge of it, in general. Not surprisingly, knowing some features of the unknown partition could help its identification, yielding an improvement of the performance of the method. Here we show that, if the number of clusters were known beforehand, standard methods, like modularity optimization, would considerably gain in accuracy, mitigating the severe resolution bias that undermines the reliability of the results of the original unconstrained version. The number of clusters can be inferred from the spectra of the recently introduced non-backtracking and flow matrices, even in benchmark graphs with realistic community structure. The limit of such two-step procedure is the overhead of the computation of the spectra.
1311.3987
Big Data and Cross-Document Coreference Resolution: Current State and Future Opportunities
cs.CL cs.DC cs.IR
Information Extraction (IE) is the task of automatically extracting structured information from unstructured/semi-structured machine-readable documents. Among various IE tasks, extracting actionable intelligence from ever-increasing amount of data depends critically upon Cross-Document Coreference Resolution (CDCR) - the task of identifying entity mentions across multiple documents that refer to the same underlying entity. Recently, document datasets of the order of peta-/tera-bytes has raised many challenges for performing effective CDCR such as scaling to large numbers of mentions and limited representational power. The problem of analysing such datasets is called "big data". The aim of this paper is to provide readers with an understanding of the central concepts, subtasks, and the current state-of-the-art in CDCR process. We provide assessment of existing tools/techniques for CDCR subtasks and highlight big data challenges in each of them to help readers identify important and outstanding issues for further investigation. Finally, we provide concluding remarks and discuss possible directions for future work.
1311.3995
Compressed Sensing for Energy-Efficient Wireless Telemonitoring: Challenges and Opportunities
cs.IT math.IT stat.ML
As a lossy compression framework, compressed sensing has drawn much attention in wireless telemonitoring of biosignals due to its ability to reduce energy consumption and make possible the design of low-power devices. However, the non-sparseness of biosignals presents a major challenge to compressed sensing. This study proposes and evaluates a spatio-temporal sparse Bayesian learning algorithm, which has the desired ability to recover such non-sparse biosignals. It exploits both temporal correlation in each individual biosignal and inter-channel correlation among biosignals from different channels. The proposed algorithm was used for compressed sensing of multichannel electroencephalographic (EEG) signals for estimating vehicle drivers' drowsiness. Results showed that the drowsiness estimation was almost unaffected even if raw EEG signals (containing various artifacts) were compressed by 90%.
1311.4013
Percolation on the institute-enterprise R&D collaboration networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Realistic network-like systems are usually composed of multiple networks with interacting relations such as school-enterprise research and development collaboration networks. Here we study the percolation properties of a special kind of that R&D collaboration networks, namely institute-enterprise R&D collaboration networks. We introduce two actual IERDCNs to show their structural properties, and present a mathematical framework based on generating functions for analyzing an interacting network with any connection probability. Then we illustrate the percolation threshold and structural parameter arithmetic in the sub-critical and supercritical regimes. We compare the predictions of our mathematical framework and arithmetic to data for two real R&D collaboration networks and a number of simulations, and we find that they are in remarkable agreement with the data. We show applications of the framework to electronics R&D collaboration networks.
1311.4015
A Three-class ROC for Evaluating Doubletalk Detectors in Acoustic Echo Cancellation
cs.IT math.IT
Doubletalk detector (DTD) is essential to keep adaptive filter from diverging in the presence of near-end speech in acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), and there was a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) to characterize DTD performance. However, the traditional ROC for evaluating DTD used a static time-invariant room acoustic impulse response and could not evaluate DTDs which distinguish echo path change from doubletalk. We solve these problems by extending the traditional binary detection ROC to three class, and simulations show the efficiency of the proposed method.
1311.4029
Blind Deconvolution with Non-local Sparsity Reweighting
cs.CV
Blind deconvolution has made significant progress in the past decade. Most successful algorithms are classified either as Variational or Maximum a-Posteriori ($MAP$). In spite of the superior theoretical justification of variational techniques, carefully constructed $MAP$ algorithms have proven equally effective in practice. In this paper, we show that all successful $MAP$ and variational algorithms share a common framework, relying on the following key principles: sparsity promotion in the gradient domain, $l_2$ regularization for kernel estimation, and the use of convex (often quadratic) cost functions. Our observations lead to a unified understanding of the principles required for successful blind deconvolution. We incorporate these principles into a novel algorithm that improves significantly upon the state of the art.
1311.4033
A Comparative Study of Histogram Equalization Based Image Enhancement Techniques for Brightness Preservation and Contrast Enhancement
cs.CV
Histogram Equalization is a contrast enhancement technique in the image processing which uses the histogram of image. However histogram equalization is not the best method for contrast enhancement because the mean brightness of the output image is significantly different from the input image. There are several extensions of histogram equalization has been proposed to overcome the brightness preservation challenge. Contrast enhancement using brightness preserving bi-histogram equalization (BBHE) and Dualistic sub image histogram equalization (DSIHE) which divides the image histogram into two parts based on the input mean and median respectively then equalizes each sub histogram independently. This paper provides review of different popular histogram equalization techniques and experimental study based on the absolute mean brightness error (AMBE), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), Structure similarity index (SSI) and Entropy.
1311.4040
Enhanced XML Validation using SRML
cs.DB
Data validation is becoming more and more important with the ever-growing amount of data being consumed and transmitted by systems over the Internet. It is important to ensure that the data being sent is valid as it may contain entry errors, which may be consumed by different systems causing further errors. XML has become the defacto standard for data transfer. The XML Schema Definition language (XSD) was created to help XML structural validation and provide a schema for data type restrictions, however it does not allow for more complex situations. In this article we introduce a way to provide rule based XML validation and correction through the extension and improvement of our SRML metalanguage. We also explore the option of applying it in a database as a trigger for CRUD operations allowing more granular dataset validation on an atomic level allowing for more complex dataset record validation rules.
1311.4056
A generalized evidence distance
cs.AI cs.IT math.IT
Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence (D-S theory) is widely used in uncertain information process. The basic probability assignment(BPA) is a key element in D-S theory. How to measure the distance between two BPAs is an open issue. In this paper, a new method to measure the distance of two BPAs is proposed. The proposed method is a generalized of existing evidence distance. Numerical examples are illustrated that the proposed method can overcome the shortcomings of existing methods.
1311.4064
Methods for Integrating Knowledge with the Three-Weight Optimization Algorithm for Hybrid Cognitive Processing
cs.AI
In this paper we consider optimization as an approach for quickly and flexibly developing hybrid cognitive capabilities that are efficient, scalable, and can exploit knowledge to improve solution speed and quality. In this context, we focus on the Three-Weight Algorithm, which aims to solve general optimization problems. We propose novel methods by which to integrate knowledge with this algorithm to improve expressiveness, efficiency, and scaling, and demonstrate these techniques on two example problems (Sudoku and circle packing).
1311.4082
Can a biologically-plausible hierarchy effectively replace face detection, alignment, and recognition pipelines?
cs.CV
The standard approach to unconstrained face recognition in natural photographs is via a detection, alignment, recognition pipeline. While that approach has achieved impressive results, there are several reasons to be dissatisfied with it, among them is its lack of biological plausibility. A recent theory of invariant recognition by feedforward hierarchical networks, like HMAX, other convolutional networks, or possibly the ventral stream, implies an alternative approach to unconstrained face recognition. This approach accomplishes detection and alignment implicitly by storing transformations of training images (called templates) rather than explicitly detecting and aligning faces at test time. Here we propose a particular locality-sensitive hashing based voting scheme which we call "consensus of collisions" and show that it can be used to approximate the full 3-layer hierarchy implied by the theory. The resulting end-to-end system for unconstrained face recognition operates on photographs of faces taken under natural conditions, e.g., Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW), without aligning or cropping them, as is normally done. It achieves a drastic improvement in the state of the art on this end-to-end task, reaching the same level of performance as the best systems operating on aligned, closely cropped images (no outside training data). It also performs well on two newer datasets, similar to LFW, but more difficult: LFW-jittered (new here) and SUFR-W.
1311.4086
A hybrid decision support system : application on healthcare
cs.AI cs.LG
Many systems based on knowledge, especially expert systems for medical decision support have been developed. Only systems are based on production rules, and cannot learn and evolve only by updating them. In addition, taking into account several criteria induces an exorbitant number of rules to be injected into the system. It becomes difficult to translate medical knowledge or a support decision as a simple rule. Moreover, reasoning based on generic cases became classic and can even reduce the range of possible solutions. To remedy that, we propose an approach based on using a multi-criteria decision guided by a case-based reasoning (CBR) approach.
1311.4088
The Optimization of Running Queries in Relational Databases Using ANT-Colony Algorithm
cs.DB cs.NE
The issue of optimizing queries is a cost-sensitive process and with respect to the number of associated tables in a query, its number of permutations grows exponentially. On one hand, in comparison with other operators in relational database, join operator is the most difficult and complicated one in terms of optimization for reducing its runtime. Accordingly, various algorithms have so far been proposed to solve this problem. On the other hand, the success of any database management system (DBMS) means exploiting the query model. In the current paper, the heuristic ant algorithm has been proposed to solve this problem and improve the runtime of join operation. Experiments and observed results reveal the efficiency of this algorithm compared to its similar algorithms.
1311.4096
Distributed Data Storage Systems with Opportunistic Repair
cs.IT math.IT
The reliability of erasure-coded distributed storage systems, as measured by the mean time to data loss (MTTDL), depends on the repair bandwidth of the code. Repair-efficient codes provide reliability values several orders of magnitude better than conventional erasure codes. Current state of the art codes fix the number of helper nodes (nodes participating in repair) a priori. In practice, however, it is desirable to allow the number of helper nodes to be adaptively determined by the network traffic conditions. In this work, we propose an opportunistic repair framework to address this issue. It is shown that there exists a threshold on the storage overhead, below which such an opportunistic approach does not lose any efficiency from the optimal storage-repair-bandwidth tradeoff; i.e. it is possible to construct a code simultaneously optimal for different numbers of helper nodes. We further examine the benefits of such opportunistic codes, and derive the MTTDL improvement for two repair models: one with limited total repair bandwidth and the other with limited individual-node repair bandwidth. In both settings, we show orders of magnitude improvement in MTTDL. Finally, the proposed framework is examined in a network setting where a significant improvement in MTTDL is observed.
1311.4111
Dynamic Resource Allocation for Multiple-Antenna Wireless Power Transfer
cs.IT math.IT
We consider a point-to-point multiple-input-single-output (MISO) system where a receiver harvests energy from a wireless power transmitter to power itself for various applications. The transmitter performs energy beamforming by using an instantaneous channel state information (CSI). The CSI is estimated at the receiver by training via a preamble, and fed back to the transmitter. The channel estimate is more accurate when longer preamble is used, but less time is left for wireless power transfer before the channel changes. To maximize the harvested energy, in this paper, we address the key challenge of balancing the time resource used for channel estimation and wireless power transfer (WPT), and also investigate the allocation of energy resource used for wireless power transfer. First, we consider the general scenario where the preamble length is allowed to vary dynamically. Taking into account the effects of imperfect CSI, the optimal preamble length is obtained online by solving a dynamic programming (DP) problem. The solution is shown to be a threshold-type policy that depends only on the channel estimate power. Next, we consider the scenario in which the preamble length is fixed. The optimal preamble length is optimized offline. Furthermore, we derive the optimal power allocation schemes for both scenarios. For the scenario of dynamic-length preamble, the power is allocated according to both the optimal preamble length and the channel estimate power; while for the scenario of fixed-length preamble, the power is allocated according to only the channel estimate power. The analysis results are validated by numerical simulations. Encouragingly, with optimal power allocation, the harvested energy by using optimized fixed-length preamble is almost the same as the harvested energy by employing dynamic-length preamble, hence allowing a low-complexity WPT system to be implemented in practice.
1311.4115
A Proof Of The Block Model Threshold Conjecture
math.PR cs.SI
We study a random graph model named the "block model" in statistics and the "planted partition model" in theoretical computer science. In its simplest form, this is a random graph with two equal-sized clusters, with a between-class edge probability of $q$ and a within-class edge probability of $p$. A striking conjecture of Decelle, Krzkala, Moore and Zdeborov\'a based on deep, non-rigorous ideas from statistical physics, gave a precise prediction for the algorithmic threshold of clustering in the sparse planted partition model. In particular, if $p = a/n$ and $q = b/n$, $s=(a-b)/2$ and $p=(a+b)/2$ then Decelle et al.\ conjectured that it is possible to efficiently cluster in a way correlated with the true partition if $s^2 > p$ and impossible if $s^2 < p$. By comparison, the best-known rigorous result is that of Coja-Oghlan, who showed that clustering is possible if $s^2 > C p \ln p$ for some sufficiently large $C$. In a previous work, we proved that indeed it is information theoretically impossible to to cluster if $s^2 < p$ and furthermore it is information theoretically impossible to even estimate the model parameters from the graph when $s^2 < p$. Here we complete the proof of the conjecture by providing an efficient algorithm for clustering in a way that is correlated with the true partition when $s^2 > p$. A different independent proof of the same result was recently obtained by Laurent Massoulie.
1311.4121
Application of Rough Set Theory in Data Mining
cs.DB
Rough set theory is a new method that deals with vagueness and uncertainty emphasized in decision making. Data mining is a discipline that has an important contribution to data analysis, discovery of new meaningful knowledge, and autonomous decision making. The rough set theory offers a viable approach for decision rule extraction from data.This paper, introduces the fundamental concepts of rough set theory and other aspects of data mining, a discussion of data representation with rough set theory including pairs of attribute-value blocks, information tables reducts, indiscernibility relation and decision tables. Additionally, the rough set approach to lower and upper approximations and certain possible rule sets concepts are introduced. Finally, some description about applications of the data mining system with rough set theory is included.
1311.4126
Temporal prediction of epidemic patterns in community networks
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI
Most previous studies of epidemic dynamics on complex networks suppose that the disease will eventually stabilize at either a disease-free state or an endemic one. In reality, however, some epidemics always exhibit sporadic and recurrent behaviour in one region because of the invasion from an endemic population elsewhere. In this paper we address this issue and study a susceptible-infected-susceptible epidemiological model on a network consisting of two communities, where the disease is endemic in one community but alternates between outbreaks and extinctions in the other. We provide a detailed characterization of the temporal dynamics of epidemic patterns in the latter community. In particular, we investigate the time duration of both outbreak and extinction, and the time interval between two consecutive inter-community infections, as well as their frequency distributions. Based on the mean-field theory, we theoretically analyze these three timescales and their dependence on the average node degree of each community, the transmission parameters, and the number of intercommunity links, which are in good agreement with simulations, except when the probability of overlaps between successive outbreaks is too large. These findings aid us in better understanding the bursty nature of disease spreading in a local community, and thereby suggesting effective time-dependent control strategies.
1311.4150
Towards Big Topic Modeling
cs.LG cs.DC cs.IR stat.ML
To solve the big topic modeling problem, we need to reduce both time and space complexities of batch latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) algorithms. Although parallel LDA algorithms on the multi-processor architecture have low time and space complexities, their communication costs among processors often scale linearly with the vocabulary size and the number of topics, leading to a serious scalability problem. To reduce the communication complexity among processors for a better scalability, we propose a novel communication-efficient parallel topic modeling architecture based on power law, which consumes orders of magnitude less communication time when the number of topics is large. We combine the proposed communication-efficient parallel architecture with the online belief propagation (OBP) algorithm referred to as POBP for big topic modeling tasks. Extensive empirical results confirm that POBP has the following advantages to solve the big topic modeling problem: 1) high accuracy, 2) communication-efficient, 3) fast speed, and 4) constant memory usage when compared with recent state-of-the-art parallel LDA algorithms on the multi-processor architecture.
1311.4151
Lattice-cell : Hybrid approach for text categorization
cs.IR
In this paper, we propose a new text categorization framework based on Concepts Lattice and cellular automata. In this framework, concept structure are modeled by a Cellular Automaton for Symbolic Induction (CASI). Our objective is to reduce time categorization caused by the Concept Lattice. We examine, by experiments the performance of the proposed approach and compare it with other algorithms such as Naive Bayes and k nearest neighbors. The results show performance improvement while reducing time categorization.
1311.4158
Unsupervised Learning of Invariant Representations in Hierarchical Architectures
cs.CV cs.LG
The present phase of Machine Learning is characterized by supervised learning algorithms relying on large sets of labeled examples ($n \to \infty$). The next phase is likely to focus on algorithms capable of learning from very few labeled examples ($n \to 1$), like humans seem able to do. We propose an approach to this problem and describe the underlying theory, based on the unsupervised, automatic learning of a ``good'' representation for supervised learning, characterized by small sample complexity ($n$). We consider the case of visual object recognition though the theory applies to other domains. The starting point is the conjecture, proved in specific cases, that image representations which are invariant to translations, scaling and other transformations can considerably reduce the sample complexity of learning. We prove that an invariant and unique (discriminative) signature can be computed for each image patch, $I$, in terms of empirical distributions of the dot-products between $I$ and a set of templates stored during unsupervised learning. A module performing filtering and pooling, like the simple and complex cells described by Hubel and Wiesel, can compute such estimates. Hierarchical architectures consisting of this basic Hubel-Wiesel moduli inherit its properties of invariance, stability, and discriminability while capturing the compositional organization of the visual world in terms of wholes and parts. The theory extends existing deep learning convolutional architectures for image and speech recognition. It also suggests that the main computational goal of the ventral stream of visual cortex is to provide a hierarchical representation of new objects/images which is invariant to transformations, stable, and discriminative for recognition---and that this representation may be continuously learned in an unsupervised way during development and visual experience.
1311.4163
Interactive Distributed Detection: Architecture and Performance Analysis
cs.IT math.IT math.OC math.ST stat.AP stat.TH
This paper studies the impact of interactive fusion on detection performance in tandem fusion networks with conditionally independent observations. Within the Neyman-Pearson framework, two distinct regimes are considered: the fixed sample size test and the large sample test. For the former, it is established that interactive distributed detection may strictly outperform the one-way tandem fusion structure. However, for the large sample regime, it is shown that interactive fusion has no improvement on the asymptotic performance characterized by the Kullback-Leibler (KL) distance compared with the simple one-way tandem fusion. The results are then extended to interactive fusion systems where the fusion center and the sensor may undergo multiple steps of memoryless interactions or that involve multiple peripheral sensors, as well as to interactive fusion with soft sensor outputs.
1311.4166
A Visibility Graph Averaging Aggregation Operator
cs.AI
The problem of aggregation is considerable importance in many disciplines. In this paper, a new type of operator called visibility graph averaging (VGA) aggregation operator is proposed. This proposed operator is based on the visibility graph which can convert a time series into a graph. The weights are obtained according to the importance of the data in the visibility graph. Finally, the VGA operator is used in the analysis of the TAIEX database to illustrate that it is practical and compared with the classic aggregation operators, it shows its advantage that it not only implements the aggregation of the data purely, but also conserves the time information, and meanwhile, the determination of the weights is more reasonable.
1311.4180
Towards a New Science of a Clinical Data Intelligence
cs.CY cs.AI
In this paper we define Clinical Data Intelligence as the analysis of data generated in the clinical routine with the goal of improving patient care. We define a science of a Clinical Data Intelligence as a data analysis that permits the derivation of scientific, i.e., generalizable and reliable results. We argue that a science of a Clinical Data Intelligence is sensible in the context of a Big Data analysis, i.e., with data from many patients and with complete patient information. We discuss that Clinical Data Intelligence requires the joint efforts of knowledge engineering, information extraction (from textual and other unstructured data), and statistics and statistical machine learning. We describe some of our main results as conjectures and relate them to a recently funded research project involving two major German university hospitals.
1311.4211
Network communities within and across borders
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
We investigate the impact of borders on the topology of spatially embedded networks. Indeed territorial subdivisions and geographical borders significantly hamper the geographical span of networks thus playing a key role in the formation of network communities. This is especially important in scientific and technological policy-making, highlighting the interplay between pressure for the internationalization to lead towards a global innovation system and the administrative borders imposed by the national and regional institutions. In this study we introduce an outreach index to quantify the impact of borders on the community structure and apply it to the case of the European and US patent co-inventors networks. We find that (a) the US connectivity decays as a power of distance, whereas we observe a faster exponential decay for Europe; (b) European network communities essentially correspond to nations and contiguous regions while US communities span multiple states across the whole country without any characteristic geographic scale. We confirm our findings by means of a set of simulations aimed at exploring the relationship between different patterns of cross-border community structures and the outreach index.
1311.4224
On the Mixed H2/H-infinity Loop Shaping Trade-offs in Fractional Order Control of the AVR System
cs.SY math.OC
This paper looks at frequency domain design of a fractional order (FO) PID controller for an Automatic Voltage Regulator (AVR) system. Various performance criteria of the AVR system are formulated as system norms and is then coupled with an evolutionary multi-objective optimization (MOO) algorithm to yield Pareto optimal design trade-offs. The conflicting performance measures consist of the mixed H2/H-infinity designs for objectives like set-point tracking, load disturbance and noise rejection, controller effort and as such are an exhaustive study of various conflicting design objectives. A fuzzy logic based mechanism is used to identify the best compromise solution on the Pareto fronts. The advantages and disadvantages of using a FOPID controller over the conventional PID controller, which are popular for industrial use, are enunciated from the presented simulations. The relevance and impact of FO controller design from the perspective of the dynamics of AVR control loop is also discussed.
1311.4235
On the definition of a general learning system with user-defined operators
cs.LG
In this paper, we push forward the idea of machine learning systems whose operators can be modified and fine-tuned for each problem. This allows us to propose a learning paradigm where users can write (or adapt) their operators, according to the problem, data representation and the way the information should be navigated. To achieve this goal, data instances, background knowledge, rules, programs and operators are all written in the same functional language, Erlang. Since changing operators affect how the search space needs to be explored, heuristics are learnt as a result of a decision process based on reinforcement learning where each action is defined as a choice of operator and rule. As a result, the architecture can be seen as a 'system for writing machine learning systems' or to explore new operators where the policy reuse (as a kind of transfer learning) is allowed. States and actions are represented in a Q matrix which is actually a table, from which a supervised model is learnt. This makes it possible to have a more flexible mapping between old and new problems, since we work with an abstraction of rules and actions. We include some examples sharing reuse and the application of the system gErl to IQ problems. In order to evaluate gErl, we will test it against some structured problems: a selection of IQ test tasks and some experiments on some structured prediction problems (list patterns).
1311.4252
Contour polygonal approximation using shortest path in networks
physics.comp-ph cs.CV
Contour polygonal approximation is a simplified representation of a contour by line segments, so that the main characteristics of the contour remain in a small number of line segments. This paper presents a novel method for polygonal approximation based on the Complex Networks theory. We convert each point of the contour into a vertex, so that we model a regular network. Then we transform this network into a Small-World Complex Network by applying some transformations over its edges. By analyzing of network properties, especially the geodesic path, we compute the polygonal approximation. The paper presents the main characteristics of the method, as well as its functionality. We evaluate the proposed method using benchmark contours, and compare its results with other polygonal approximation methods.
1311.4276
Data Mining of Online Genealogy Datasets for Revealing Lifespan Patterns in Human Population
cs.SI q-bio.PE stat.AP
Online genealogy datasets contain extensive information about millions of people and their past and present family connections. This vast amount of data can assist in identifying various patterns in human population. In this study, we present methods and algorithms which can assist in identifying variations in lifespan distributions of human population in the past centuries, in detecting social and genetic features which correlate with human lifespan, and in constructing predictive models of human lifespan based on various features which can easily be extracted from genealogy datasets. We have evaluated the presented methods and algorithms on a large online genealogy dataset with over a million profiles and over 9 million connections, all of which were collected from the WikiTree website. Our findings indicate that significant but small positive correlations exist between the parents' lifespan and their children's lifespan. Additionally, we found slightly higher and significant correlations between the lifespans of spouses. We also discovered a very small positive and significant correlation between longevity and reproductive success in males, and a small and significant negative correlation between longevity and reproductive success in females. Moreover, our machine learning algorithms presented better than random classification results in predicting which people who outlive the age of 50 will also outlive the age of 80. We believe that this study will be the first of many studies which utilize the wealth of data on human populations, existing in online genealogy datasets, to better understand factors which influence human lifespan. Understanding these factors can assist scientists in providing solutions for successful aging.
1311.4294
Exponential Approximation of Bandlimited Functions from Average Oversampling
cs.IT math.IT
Weighted average sampling is more practical and numerically more stable than sampling at single points as in the classical Shannon sampling framework. Using the frame theory, one can completely reconstruct a bandlimited function from its suitably-chosen average sample data. When only finitely many sample data are available, truncating the complete reconstruction series with the standard dual frame results in very slow convergence. We present in this note a method of reconstructing a bandlimited function from finite average oversampling with an exponentially-decaying approximation error.
1311.4296
Reflection methods for user-friendly submodular optimization
cs.LG cs.NA cs.RO math.OC
Recently, it has become evident that submodularity naturally captures widely occurring concepts in machine learning, signal processing and computer vision. Consequently, there is need for efficient optimization procedures for submodular functions, especially for minimization problems. While general submodular minimization is challenging, we propose a new method that exploits existing decomposability of submodular functions. In contrast to previous approaches, our method is neither approximate, nor impractical, nor does it need any cumbersome parameter tuning. Moreover, it is easy to implement and parallelize. A key component of our method is a formulation of the discrete submodular minimization problem as a continuous best approximation problem that is solved through a sequence of reflections, and its solution can be easily thresholded to obtain an optimal discrete solution. This method solves both the continuous and discrete formulations of the problem, and therefore has applications in learning, inference, and reconstruction. In our experiments, we illustrate the benefits of our method on two image segmentation tasks.
1311.4306
Distributed bounded-error state estimation for partitioned systems based on practical robust positive invariance
cs.SY math.OC
We propose a partition-based state estimator for linear discrete-time systems composed by coupled subsystems affected by bounded disturbances. The architecture is distributed in the sense that each subsystem is equipped with a local state estimator that exploits suitable pieces of information from parent subsystems. Moreover, differently from methods based on moving horizon estimation, our approach does not require the on-line solution to optimization problems. Our state-estimation scheme, that is based on the notion of practical robust positive invariance developed in Rakovic 2011, also guarantees satisfaction of constraints on local estimation errors and it can be updated with a limited computational effort when subsystems are added or removed.
1311.4310
Achievable Rate Region of the Bidirectional Buffer-Aided Relay Channel with Block Fading
cs.IT math.IT
The bidirectional relay channel, in which two users communicate with each other through a relay node, is a simple but fundamental and practical network architecture. In this paper, we consider the block fading bidirectional relay channel and propose efficient transmission strategies that exploit the block fading property of the channel. Thereby, we consider a decode-and-forward relay and assume that a direct link between the two users is not present. Our aim is to characterize the long-term achievable rate region and to develop protocols which achieve all points of the obtained rate region. Specifically, in the bidirectional relay channel, there exist six possible transmission modes: four point-to-point modes (user 1-to-relay, user 2-to-relay, relay-to-user 1, relay-to-user 2), a multiple-access mode (both users to the relay), and a broadcast mode (the relay to both users). Most existing protocols assume a fixed schedule for using a subset of the aforementioned transmission modes. Motivated by this limitation, we develop protocols which are not restricted to adhere to a predefined schedule for using the transmission modes. In fact, based on the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) of the involved links, the proposed protocol selects the optimal transmission mode in each time slot to maximize the long-term achievable rate region. Thereby, we consider two different types of transmit power constraints: 1) a joint long-term power constraint for all nodes, and 2) a fixed transmit power for each node. Furthermore, to enable the use of a non-predefined schedule for transmission mode selection, the relay has to be equipped with two buffers for storage of the information received from both users. As data buffering increases the end-to-end delay, we consider both delay-unconstrained and delay-constrained transmission in the paper.
1311.4319
Ranking Algorithms by Performance
cs.AI cs.LG
A common way of doing algorithm selection is to train a machine learning model and predict the best algorithm from a portfolio to solve a particular problem. While this method has been highly successful, choosing only a single algorithm has inherent limitations -- if the choice was bad, no remedial action can be taken and parallelism cannot be exploited, to name but a few problems. In this paper, we investigate how to predict the ranking of the portfolio algorithms on a particular problem. This information can be used to choose the single best algorithm, but also to allocate resources to the algorithms according to their rank. We evaluate a range of approaches to predict the ranking of a set of algorithms on a problem. We furthermore introduce a framework for categorizing ranking predictions that allows to judge the expressiveness of the predictive output. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates on a range of data sets from the literature that it is beneficial to consider the relationship between algorithms when predicting rankings. We furthermore show that relatively naive approaches deliver rankings of good quality already.
1311.4336
Temporal scaling in information propagation
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
For the study of information propagation, one fundamental problem is uncovering universal laws governing the dynamics of information propagation. This problem, from the microscopic perspective, is formulated as estimating the propagation probability that a piece of information propagates from one individual to another. Such a propagation probability generally depends on two major classes of factors: the intrinsic attractiveness of information and the interactions between individuals. Despite the fact that the temporal effect of attractiveness is widely studied, temporal laws underlying individual interactions remain unclear, causing inaccurate prediction of information propagation on evolving social networks. In this report, we empirically study the dynamics of information propagation, using the dataset from a population-scale social media website. We discover a temporal scaling in information propagation: the probability a message propagates between two individuals decays with the length of time latency since their latest interaction, obeying a power-law rule. Leveraging the scaling law, we further propose a temporal model to estimate future propagation probabilities between individuals, reducing the error rate of information propagation prediction from 6.7% to 2.6% and improving viral marketing with 9.7% incremental customers.
1311.4362
Sparse Identification of Posynomial Models
cs.SY
Posynomials are nonnegative combinations of monomials with possibly fractional and both positive and negative exponents. Posynomial models are widely used in various engineering design endeavors, such as circuits, aerospace and structural design, mainly due to the fact that design problems cast in terms of posynomial objectives and constraints can be solved efficiently by means of a convex optimization technique known as geometric programming (GP). However, while quite a vast literature exists on GP-based design, very few contributions can yet be found on the problem of identifying posynomial models from experimental data. Posynomial identification amounts to determining not only the coefficients of the combination, but also the exponents in the monomials, which renders the identification problem numerically hard. In this draft, we propose an approach to the identification of multivariate posynomial models, based on the expansion on a given large-scale basis of monomials. The model is then identified by seeking coefficients of the combination that minimize a mixed objective, composed by a term representing the fitting error and a term inducing sparsity in the representation, which results in a problem formulation of the ``square-root LASSO'' type, with nonnegativity constraints on the variables. We propose to solve the problem via a sequential coordinate-descent scheme, which is suitable for large-scale implementations.
1311.4369
Distributed Widely Linear Complex Kalman Filtering
cs.SY cs.IT math.IT
We introduce cooperative sequential state space estimation in the domain of augmented complex statistics, whereby nodes in a network collaborate locally to estimate noncircular complex signals. For rigour, a distributed augmented (widely linear) complex Kalman filter (D-ACKF) suited to the generality of complex signals is introduced, allowing for unified treatment of both proper (rotation invariant) and improper (rotation dependent) signal distributions. Its duality with the bivariate real-valued distributed Kalman filter, along with several issues of implementation are also illuminated. The analysis and simulations show that unlike existing distributed Kalman filter solutions, the D-ACKF caters for both the improper data and the correlations between nodal observation noises, thus providing enhanced performance in real-world scenarios.
1311.4419
Perception and Steering Control in Paired Bat Flight
cs.SY cs.RO physics.bio-ph
Animals within groups need to coordinate their reactions to perceived environmental features and to each other in order to safely move from one point to another. This paper extends our previously published work on the flight patterns of Myotis velifer that have been observed in a habitat near Johnson City, Texas. Each evening, these bats emerge from a cave in sequences of small groups that typically contain no more than three or four individuals, and they thus provide ideal subjects for studying leader-follower behaviors. By analyzing the flight paths of a group of M. velifer, the data show that the flight behavior of a follower bat is influenced by the flight behavior of a leader bat in a way that is not well explained by existing pursuit laws, such as classical pursuit, constant bearing and motion camouflage. Thus we propose an alternative steering law based on virtual loom, a concept we introduce to capture the geometrical configuration of the leader-follower pair. It is shown that this law may be integrated with our previously proposed vision-enabled steering laws to synthesize trajectories, the statistics of which fit with those of the bats in our data set. The results suggest that bats use perceived information of both the environment and their neighbors for navigation.
1311.4420
CAVDM: Cellular Automata Based Video Cloud Mining Framework for Information Retrieval
cs.IR
Cloud Mining technique can be applied to various documents. Acquisition and storage of video data is an easy task but retrieval of information from video data is a challenging task. So video Cloud Mining plays an important role in efficient video data management for information retrieval. This paper proposes a Cellular Automata based framework for video Cloud Mining to extract the information from video data. This includes developing the technique for shot detection then key frame analysis is considered to compare the frames of each shot to each others to define the relationship between shots. Cellular automata based hierarchical clustering technique is adopted to make a group of similar shots to detect the particular event on some requirement as per user demand.
1311.4431
Mathematical Foundations for Information Theory in Diffusion-Based Molecular Communications
cs.IT math.IT q-bio.MN
Molecular communication emerges as a promising communication paradigm for nanotechnology. However, solid mathematical foundations for information-theoretic analysis of molecular communication have not yet been built. In particular, no one has ever proven that the channel coding theorem applies for molecular communication, and no relationship between information rate capacity (maximum mutual information) and code rate capacity (supremum achievable code rate) has been established. In this paper, we focus on a major subclass of molecular communication - the diffusion-based molecular communication. We provide solid mathematical foundations for information theory in diffusion-based molecular communication by creating a general diffusion-based molecular channel model in measure-theoretic form and prove its channel coding theorems. Various equivalence relationships between statistical and operational definitions of channel capacity are also established, including the most classic information rate capacity and code rate capacity. As byproducts, we have shown that the diffusion-based molecular channel is with "asymptotically decreasing input memory and anticipation" and "d-continuous". Other properties of diffusion-based molecular channel such as stationarity or ergodicity are also proven.
1311.4439
60 GHz Wireless Link Within Metal Enclosures: Channel Measurements and System Analysis
cs.IT math.IT
Wireless channel measurement results for 60 GHz within a closed metal cabinet are provided. A metal cabinet is chosen to emulate the environment within a mechatronic system, which have metal enclosures in general. A frequency domain sounding technique is used to measure the wireless channel for different volumes of the metal enclosure, considering both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenarios. Large-scale and small-scale characteristics of the wireless channel are extracted in order to build a comprehensive channel model. In contrast to conventional indoor channels at 60 GHz, the channel in the metal enclosure is highly reflective resulting in a rich scattering environment with a significantly large root-mean-square (RMS) delay spread. Based on the obtained measurement results, the bit error rate (BER) performance is evaluated for a wideband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system.
1311.4460
Information slows down hierarchy growth
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
We consider models of growing multi-level systems wherein the growth process is driven by rules of tournament selection. A system can be conceived as an evolving tree with a new node being attached to a contestant node at the best hierarchy level (a level nearest to the tree root). The proposed evolution reflects limited information on system properties available to new nodes. It can also be expressed in terms of population dynamics. Two models are considered: a constant tournament (CT) model wherein the number of tournament participants is constant throughout system evolution, and a proportional tournament (PT) model where this number increases proportionally to the growing size of the system itself. The results of analytical calculations based on a rate equation fit well to numerical simulations for both models. In the CT model all hierarchy levels emerge but the birth time of a consecutive hierarchy level increases exponentially or faster for each new level. The number of nodes at the first hierarchy level grows logarithmically in time, while the size of the last, "worst" hierarchy level oscillates quasi log-periodically. In the PT model the occupations of the first two hierarchy levels increase linearly but worse hierarchy levels either do not emerge at all or appear only by chance in early stage of system evolution to further stop growing at all. The results allow to conclude that information available to each new node in tournament dynamics restrains the emergence of new hierarchy levels and that it is the absolute amount of information, not relative, which governs such behavior.
1311.4468
Stochastic processes and feedback-linearisation for online identification and Bayesian adaptive control of fully-actuated mechanical systems
cs.LG cs.SY physics.data-an stat.ML
This work proposes a new method for simultaneous probabilistic identification and control of an observable, fully-actuated mechanical system. Identification is achieved by conditioning stochastic process priors on observations of configurations and noisy estimates of configuration derivatives. In contrast to previous work that has used stochastic processes for identification, we leverage the structural knowledge afforded by Lagrangian mechanics and learn the drift and control input matrix functions of the control-affine system separately. We utilise feedback-linearisation to reduce, in expectation, the uncertain nonlinear control problem to one that is easy to regulate in a desired manner. Thereby, our method combines the flexibility of nonparametric Bayesian learning with epistemological guarantees on the expected closed-loop trajectory. We illustrate our method in the context of torque-actuated pendula where the dynamics are learned with a combination of normal and log-normal processes.
1311.4472
A Component Lasso
stat.ML cs.LG
We propose a new sparse regression method called the component lasso, based on a simple idea. The method uses the connected-components structure of the sample covariance matrix to split the problem into smaller ones. It then solves the subproblems separately, obtaining a coefficient vector for each one. Then, it uses non-negative least squares to recombine the different vectors into a single solution. This step is useful in selecting and reweighting components that are correlated with the response. Simulated and real data examples show that the component lasso can outperform standard regression methods such as the lasso and elastic net, achieving a lower mean squared error as well as better support recovery.
1311.4486
Discriminative Density-ratio Estimation
cs.LG
The covariate shift is a challenging problem in supervised learning that results from the discrepancy between the training and test distributions. An effective approach which recently drew a considerable attention in the research community is to reweight the training samples to minimize that discrepancy. In specific, many methods are based on developing Density-ratio (DR) estimation techniques that apply to both regression and classification problems. Although these methods work well for regression problems, their performance on classification problems is not satisfactory. This is due to a key observation that these methods focus on matching the sample marginal distributions without paying attention to preserving the separation between classes in the reweighted space. In this paper, we propose a novel method for Discriminative Density-ratio (DDR) estimation that addresses the aforementioned problem and aims at estimating the density-ratio of joint distributions in a class-wise manner. The proposed algorithm is an iterative procedure that alternates between estimating the class information for the test data and estimating new density ratio for each class. To incorporate the estimated class information of the test data, a soft matching technique is proposed. In addition, we employ an effective criterion which adopts mutual information as an indicator to stop the iterative procedure while resulting in a decision boundary that lies in a sparse region. Experiments on synthetic and benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in terms of both accuracy and robustness.
1311.4527
A message-passing algorithm for multi-agent trajectory planning
cs.AI cs.DC cs.MA cs.RO cs.SY
We describe a novel approach for computing collision-free \emph{global} trajectories for $p$ agents with specified initial and final configurations, based on an improved version of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Compared with existing methods, our approach is naturally parallelizable and allows for incorporating different cost functionals with only minor adjustments. We apply our method to classical challenging instances and observe that its computational requirements scale well with $p$ for several cost functionals. We also show that a specialization of our algorithm can be used for {\em local} motion planning by solving the problem of joint optimization in velocity space.
1311.4529
Incremental Discovery of Prominent Situational Facts
cs.DB
We study the novel problem of finding new, prominent situational facts, which are emerging statements about objects that stand out within certain contexts. Many such facts are newsworthy---e.g., an athlete's outstanding performance in a game, or a viral video's impressive popularity. Effective and efficient identification of these facts assists journalists in reporting, one of the main goals of computational journalism. Technically, we consider an ever-growing table of objects with dimension and measure attributes. A situational fact is a "contextual" skyline tuple that stands out against historical tuples in a context, specified by a conjunctive constraint involving dimension attributes, when a set of measure attributes are compared. New tuples are constantly added to the table, reflecting events happening in the real world. Our goal is to discover constraint-measure pairs that qualify a new tuple as a contextual skyline tuple, and discover them quickly before the event becomes yesterday's news. A brute-force approach requires exhaustive comparison with every tuple, under every constraint, and in every measure subspace. We design algorithms in response to these challenges using three corresponding ideas---tuple reduction, constraint pruning, and sharing computation across measure subspaces. We also adopt a simple prominence measure to rank the discovered facts when they are numerous. Experiments over two real datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our techniques.