id
stringlengths
9
16
title
stringlengths
4
278
categories
stringlengths
5
104
abstract
stringlengths
6
4.09k
1312.0659
Prioritizing Consumers in Smart Grid: A Game Theoretic Approach
cs.SY cs.GT
This paper proposes an energy management technique for a consumer-to-grid system in smart grid. The benefit to consumers is made the primary concern to encourage consumers to participate voluntarily in energy trading with the central power station (CPS) in situations of energy deficiency. A novel system model motivating energy trading under the goal of social optimality is proposed. A single-leader multiple-follower Stackelberg game is then studied to model the interactions between the CPS and a number of energy consumers (ECs), and to find optimal distributed solutions for the optimization problem based on the system model. The CPS is considered as a leader seeking to minimize its total cost of buying energy from the ECs, and the ECs are the followers who decide on how much energy they will sell to the CPS for maximizing their utilities. It is shown that the game, which can be implemented distributedly, possesses a socially optimal solution, in which the benefits-sum to all consumers is maximized, as the total cost to the CPS is minimized. Numerical analysis confirms the effectiveness of the game.
1312.0685
Optimization of zero-delay mappings for distributed coding by deterministic annealing
cs.IT math.IT
This paper studies the optimization of zero-delay analog mappings in a network setting that involves distributed coding. The cost surface is known to be non-convex, and known greedy methods tend to get trapped in poor locally optimal solutions that depend heavily on initialization. We derive an optimization algorithm based on the principles of "deterministic annealing", a powerful global optimization framework that has been successfully employed in several disciplines, including, in our recent work, to a simple zero-delay analog communications problem. We demonstrate strict superiority over the descent based methods, as well as present example mappings whose properties lend insights on the workings of the solution and relations with digital distributed coding.
1312.0700
Redundancy and Aging of Efficient Multidimensional MDS-Parity Protected Distributed Storage Systems
cs.IT math.IT
The effect of redundancy on the aging of an efficient Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) parity--protected distributed storage system that consists of multidimensional arrays of storage units is explored. In light of the experimental evidences and survey data, this paper develops generalized expressions for the reliability of array storage systems based on more realistic time to failure distributions such as Weibull. For instance, a distributed disk array system is considered in which the array components are disseminated across the network and are subject to independent failure rates. Based on such, generalized closed form hazard rate expressions are derived. These expressions are extended to estimate the asymptotical reliability behavior of large scale storage networks equipped with MDS parity-based protection. Unlike previous studies, a generic hazard rate function is assumed, a generic MDS code for parity generation is used, and an evaluation of the implications of adjustable redundancy level for an efficient distributed storage system is presented. Results of this study are applicable to any erasure correction code as long as it is accompanied with a suitable structure and an appropriate encoding/decoding algorithm such that the MDS property is maintained.
1312.0718
Electromagnetic Lens-focusing Antenna Enabled Massive MIMO: Performance Improvement and Cost Reduction
cs.IT math.IT
Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques have been recently advanced to tremendously improve the performance of wireless communication networks. However, the use of very large antenna arrays at the base stations (BSs) brings new issues, such as the significantly increased hardware and signal processing costs. In order to reap the enormous gain of massive MIMO and yet reduce its cost to an affordable level, this paper proposes a novel system design by integrating an electromagnetic (EM) lens with the large antenna array, termed the EM-lens enabled MIMO. The EM lens has the capability of focusing the power of an incident wave to a small area of the antenna array, while the location of the focal area varies with the angle of arrival (AoA) of the wave. Therefore, in practical scenarios where the arriving signals from geographically separated users have different AoAs, the EM-lens enabled system provides two new benefits, namely energy focusing and spatial interference rejection. By taking into account the effects of imperfect channel estimation via pilot-assisted training, in this paper we analytically show that the average received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in both the single-user and multiuser uplink transmissions can be strictly improved by the EM-lens enabled system. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed design makes it possible to considerably reduce the hardware and signal processing costs with only slight degradations in performance. To this end, two complexity/cost reduction schemes are proposed, which are small-MIMO processing with parallel receiver filtering applied over subgroups of antennas to reduce the computational complexity, and channel covariance based antenna selection to reduce the required number of radio frequency (RF) chains. Numerical results are provided to corroborate our analysis.
1312.0728
A Backstepping Control Method for a Nonlinear Process - Two Coupled-Tanks
cs.SY
The aim of this work is to compute a level backstepping control strategy for a coupled tanks system. The coupled tanks plant is a component included in the water treatment system of power plants. The nonlinear-model of the process was designed and implemented in Matlab- Simulink. The advantages of the control method proposed is that it takes into consideration the nonlinearity which can be useful for stabilization and a larger operating point with specified performances. The backstepping control method is computed using the nonlinear model of the system and the performance was validated on the physical plant.
1312.0735
Use of the C4.5 machine learning algorithm to test a clinical guideline-based decision support system
cs.AI
Well-designed medical decision support system (DSS) have been shown to improve health care quality. However, before they can be used in real clinical situations, these systems must be extensively tested, to ensure that they conform to the clinical guidelines (CG) on which they are based. Existing methods cannot be used for the systematic testing of all possible test cases. We describe here a new exhaustive dynamic verification method. In this method, the DSS is considered to be a black box, and the Quinlan C4.5 algorithm is used to build a decision tree from an exhaustive set of DSS input vectors and outputs. This method was successfully used for the testing of a medical DSS relating to chronic diseases: the ASTI critiquing module for type 2 diabetes.
1312.0736
A generic system for critiquing physicians' prescriptions: usability, satisfaction and lessons learnt
cs.AI
Clinical decision support systems have been developed to help physicians to take clinical guidelines into account during consultations. The ASTI critiquing module is one such systems; it provides the physician with automatic criticisms when a drug prescription does not follow the guidelines. It was initially developed for hypertension and type 2 diabetes, but is designed to be generic enough for application to all chronic diseases. We present here the results of usability and satisfaction evaluations for the ASTI critiquing module, obtained with GPs for a newly implemented guideline concerning dyslipaemia, and we discuss the lessons learnt and the difficulties encountered when building a generic DSS for critiquing physicians' prescriptions.
1312.0742
Parallel Deferred Update Replication
cs.DC cs.DB
Deferred update replication (DUR) is an established approach to implementing highly efficient and available storage. While the throughput of read-only transactions scales linearly with the number of deployed replicas in DUR, the throughput of update transactions experiences limited improvements as replicas are added. This paper presents Parallel Deferred Update Replication (P-DUR), a variation of classical DUR that scales both read-only and update transactions with the number of cores available in a replica. In addition to introducing the new approach, we describe its full implementation and compare its performance to classical DUR and to Berkeley DB, a well-known standalone database.
1312.0750
A semi-automatic semantic method for mapping SNOMED CT concepts to VCM Icons
cs.AI cs.HC
VCM (Visualization of Concept in Medicine) is an iconic language for representing key medical concepts by icons. However, the use of this language with reference terminologies, such as SNOMED CT, will require the mapping of its icons to the terms of these terminologies. Here, we present and evaluate a semi-automatic semantic method for the mapping of SNOMED CT concepts to VCM icons. Both SNOMED CT and VCM are compositional in nature; SNOMED CT is expressed in description logic and VCM semantics are formalized in an OWL ontology. The proposed method involves the manual mapping of a limited number of underlying concepts from the VCM ontology, followed by automatic generation of the rest of the mapping. We applied this method to the clinical findings of the SNOMED CT CORE subset, and 100 randomly-selected mappings were evaluated by three experts. The results obtained were promising, with 82 of the SNOMED CT concepts correctly linked to VCM icons according to the experts. Most of the errors were easy to fix.
1312.0760
Template-Based Active Contours
cs.CV
We develop a generalized active contour formalism for image segmentation based on shape templates. The shape template is subjected to a restricted affine transformation (RAT) in order to segment the object of interest. RAT allows for translation, rotation, and scaling, which give a total of five degrees of freedom. The proposed active contour comprises an inner and outer contour pair, which are closed and concentric. The active contour energy is a contrast function defined based on the intensities of pixels that lie inside the inner contour and those that lie in the annulus between the inner and outer contours. We show that the contrast energy functional is optimal under certain conditions. The optimal RAT parameters are computed by maximizing the contrast function using a gradient descent optimizer. We show that the calculations are made efficient through use of Green's theorem. The proposed formalism is capable of handling a variety of shapes because for a chosen template, optimization is carried with respect to the RAT parameters only. The proposed formalism is validated on multiple images to show robustness to Gaussian and Poisson noise, to initialization, and to partial loss of structure in the object to be segmented.
1312.0786
Image Representation Learning Using Graph Regularized Auto-Encoders
cs.LG
We consider the problem of image representation for the tasks of unsupervised learning and semi-supervised learning. In those learning tasks, the raw image vectors may not provide enough representation for their intrinsic structures due to their highly dense feature space. To overcome this problem, the raw image vectors should be mapped to a proper representation space which can capture the latent structure of the original data and represent the data explicitly for further learning tasks such as clustering. Inspired by the recent research works on deep neural network and representation learning, in this paper, we introduce the multiple-layer auto-encoder into image representation, we also apply the locally invariant ideal to our image representation with auto-encoders and propose a novel method, called Graph regularized Auto-Encoder (GAE). GAE can provide a compact representation which uncovers the hidden semantics and simultaneously respects the intrinsic geometric structure. Extensive experiments on image clustering show encouraging results of the proposed algorithm in comparison to the state-of-the-art algorithms on real-word cases.
1312.0788
A compact formula for the derivative of a 3-D rotation in exponential coordinates
cs.CV math.OC
We present a compact formula for the derivative of a 3-D rotation matrix with respect to its exponential coordinates. A geometric interpretation of the resulting expression is provided, as well as its agreement with other less-compact but better-known formulas. To the best of our knowledge, this simpler formula does not appear anywhere in the literature. We hope by providing this more compact expression to alleviate the common pressure to reluctantly resort to alternative representations in various computational applications simply as a means to avoid the complexity of differential analysis in exponential coordinates.
1312.0790
Test Set Selection using Active Information Acquisition for Predictive Models
cs.AI cs.LG stat.ML
In this paper, we consider active information acquisition when the prediction model is meant to be applied on a targeted subset of the population. The goal is to label a pre-specified fraction of customers in the target or test set by iteratively querying for information from the non-target or training set. The number of queries is limited by an overall budget. Arising in the context of two rather disparate applications- banking and medical diagnosis, we pose the active information acquisition problem as a constrained optimization problem. We propose two greedy iterative algorithms for solving the above problem. We conduct experiments with synthetic data and compare results of our proposed algorithms with few other baseline approaches. The experimental results show that our proposed approaches perform better than the baseline schemes.
1312.0809
Automatic White Blood Cell Measuring Aid for Medical Diagnosis
cs.CY cs.CV
Blood related invasive pathological investigations play a major role in diagnosis of diseases. But in India and other third world countries there are no enough pathological infrastructures for medical diagnosis. Moreover, most of the remote places of those countries have neither pathologists nor physicians. Telemedicine partially solves the lack of physicians. But the pathological investigation infrastructure can not be integrated with the telemedicine technology. The objective of this work is to automate the blood related pathological investigation process. Detection of different white blood cells has been automated in this work. This system can be deployed in the remote area as a supporting aid for telemedicine technology and only high school education is sufficient to operate it. The proposed system achieved 97.33 percent accuracy for the samples collected to test this system.
1312.0821
Delay-Robustness in Distributed Control of Timed Discrete-Event Systems Based on Supervisor Localization
cs.SY
Recently we studied communication delay in distributed control of untimed discrete-event systems based on supervisor localization. We proposed a property called delay-robustness: the overall system behavior controlled by distributed controllers with communication delay is logically equivalent to its delay-free counterpart. In this paper we extend our previous work to timed discrete-event systems, in which communication delays are counted by a special clock event {\it tick}. First, we propose a timed channel model and define timed delay-robustness; for the latter, a polynomial verification procedure is presented. Next, if the delay-robust property does not hold, we introduce bounded delay-robustness, and present an algorithm to compute the maximal delay bound (measured by number of ticks) for transmitting a channeled event. Finally, we demonstrate delay-robustness on the example of an under-load tap-changing transformer.
1312.0825
FRANTIC: A Fast Reference-based Algorithm for Network Tomography via Compressive Sensing
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT
We study the problem of link and node delay estimation in undirected networks when at most k out of n links or nodes in the network are congested. Our approach relies on end-to-end measurements of path delays across pre-specified paths in the network. We present a class of algorithms that we call FRANTIC. The FRANTIC algorithms are motivated by compressive sensing; however, unlike traditional compressive sensing, the measurement design here is constrained by the network topology and the matrix entries are constrained to be positive integers. A key component of our design is a new compressive sensing algorithm SHO-FA-INT that is related to the prior SHO-FA algorithm for compressive sensing, but unlike SHO-FA, the matrix entries here are drawn from the set of integers {0, 1, ..., M}. We show that O(k log n /log M) measurements suffice both for SHO-FA-INT and FRANTIC. Further, we show that the computational complexity of decoding is also O(k log n/log M) for each of these algorithms. Finally, we look at efficient constructions of the measurement operations through Steiner Trees.
1312.0841
Combining Simulated Annealing and Monte Carlo Tree Search for Expression Simplification
cs.AI
In many applications of computer algebra large expressions must be simplified to make repeated numerical evaluations tractable. Previous works presented heuristically guided improvements, e.g., for Horner schemes. The remaining expression is then further reduced by common subexpression elimination. A recent approach successfully applied a relatively new algorithm, Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with UCT as the selection criterion, to find better variable orderings. Yet, this approach is fit for further improvements since it is sensitive to the so-called exploration-exploitation constant $C_p$ and the number of tree updates $N$. In this paper we propose a new selection criterion called Simulated Annealing UCT (SA-UCT) that has a dynamic exploration-exploitation parameter, which decreases with the iteration number $i$ and thus reduces the importance of exploration over time. First, we provide an intuitive explanation in terms of the exploration-exploitation behavior of the algorithm. Then, we test our algorithm on three large expressions of different origins. We observe that SA-UCT widens the interval of good initial values $C_p$ where best results are achieved. The improvement is large (more than a tenfold) and facilitates the selection of an appropriate $C_p$.
1312.0852
Feature Extraction of Human Lip Prints
cs.CV
Methods have been used for identification of human by recognizing lip prints. Human lips have a number of elevation and depressions features called lip prints and examination of lip prints is referred to as cheiloscopy. Lip prints of each human being are unique in nature like many others features of human. In this paper lip print is first smoothened using a Gaussian Filter. Next Sobel Edge Detector and Canny Edge Detector are used to detect the vertical and horizontal groove pattern in the lip. This method of identification will be useful both in criminal forensics and personal identification. It is our assumption that study of lip prints and their types are well connected to play a song in a better way that are well accepted to people who loves to hear songs.
1312.0860
Community Specific Temporal Topic Discovery from Social Media
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Studying temporal dynamics of topics in social media is very useful to understand online user behaviors. Most of the existing work on this subject usually monitors the global trends, ignoring variation among communities. Since users from different communities tend to have varying tastes and interests, capturing community-level temporal change can improve the understanding and management of social content. Additionally, it can further facilitate the applications such as community discovery, temporal prediction and online marketing. However, this kind of extraction becomes challenging due to the intricate interactions between community and topic, and intractable computational complexity. In this paper, we take a unified solution towards the community-level topic dynamic extraction. A probabilistic model, CosTot (Community Specific Topics-over-Time) is proposed to uncover the hidden topics and communities, as well as capture community-specific temporal dynamics. Specifically, CosTot considers text, time, and network information simultaneously, and well discovers the interactions between community and topic over time. We then discuss the approximate inference implementation to enable scalable computation of model parameters, especially for large social data. Based on this, the application layer support for multi-scale temporal analysis and community exploration is also investigated. We conduct extensive experimental studies on a large real microblog dataset, and demonstrate the superiority of proposed model on tasks of time stamp prediction, link prediction and topic perplexity.
1312.0882
On the Throughput of Hybrid-ARQ under QoS Constraints
cs.IT math.IT
Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) is a high performance communication protocol, leading to effective use of the wireless channel and the resources with only limited feedback about the channel state information (CSI) to the transmitter. In this paper, the throughput of HARQ with incremental redundancy (IR) and fixed transmission rate is studied in the presence of quality of service (QoS) constraints imposed as limitations on buffer overflow probabilities. In particular, tools from the theory of renewal processes and stochastic network calculus are employed to characterize the maximum arrival rates that can be supported by the wireless channel when HARQ-IR is adopted. Effective capacity is employed as the throughput metric and a closed-form expression for the effective capacity of HARQ-IR is determined for small values of the QoS exponent. The impact of the fixed transmission rate, QoS constraints, and hard deadline limitations on the throughput is investigated and comparisons with regular ARQ operation are provided.
1312.0912
Evolution of Communities with Focus on Stability
cs.SI cs.CY physics.soc-ph
Community detection is an important tool for analyzing the social graph of mobile phone users. The problem of finding communities in static graphs has been widely studied. However, since mobile social networks evolve over time, static graph algorithms are not sufficient. To be useful in practice (e.g. when used by a telecom analyst), the stability of the partitions becomes critical. We tackle this particular use case in this paper: tracking evolution of communities in dynamic scenarios with focus on stability. We propose two modifications to a widely used static community detection algorithm: we introduce fixed nodes and preferential attachment to pre-existing communities. We then describe experiments to study the stability and quality of the resulting partitions on real-world social networks, represented by monthly call graphs for millions of subscribers.
1312.0914
Characterizing the Rate Region of the (4,3,3) Exact-Repair Regenerating Codes
cs.IT math.IT
Exact-repair regenerating codes are considered for the case (n,k,d)=(4,3,3), for which a complete characterization of the rate region is provided. This characterization answers in the affirmative the open question whether there exists a non-vanishing gap between the optimal bandwidth-storage tradeoff of the functional-repair regenerating codes (i.e., the cut-set bound) and that of the exact-repair regenerating codes. To obtain an explicit information theoretic converse, a computer-aided proof (CAP) approach based on primal and dual relation is developed. This CAP approach extends Yeung's linear programming (LP) method, which was previously only used on information theoretic problems with a few random variables due to the exponential growth of the number of variables in the corresponding LP problem. The symmetry in the exact-repair regenerating code problem allows an effective reduction of the number of variables, and together with several other problem-specific reductions, the LP problem is reduced to a manageable scale. For the achievability, only one non-trivial corner point of the rate region needs to be addressed in this case, for which an explicit binary code construction is given.
1312.0925
Understanding Alternating Minimization for Matrix Completion
cs.LG cs.DS stat.ML
Alternating Minimization is a widely used and empirically successful heuristic for matrix completion and related low-rank optimization problems. Theoretical guarantees for Alternating Minimization have been hard to come by and are still poorly understood. This is in part because the heuristic is iterative and non-convex in nature. We give a new algorithm based on Alternating Minimization that provably recovers an unknown low-rank matrix from a random subsample of its entries under a standard incoherence assumption. Our results reduce the sample size requirements of the Alternating Minimization approach by at least a quartic factor in the rank and the condition number of the unknown matrix. These improvements apply even if the matrix is only close to low-rank in the Frobenius norm. Our algorithm runs in nearly linear time in the dimension of the matrix and, in a broad range of parameters, gives the strongest sample bounds among all subquadratic time algorithms that we are aware of. Underlying our work is a new robust convergence analysis of the well-known Power Method for computing the dominant singular vectors of a matrix. This viewpoint leads to a conceptually simple understanding of Alternating Minimization. In addition, we contribute a new technique for controlling the coherence of intermediate solutions arising in iterative algorithms based on a smoothed analysis of the QR factorization. These techniques may be of interest beyond their application here.
1312.0932
Joint Source-Channel Coding with Time-Varying Channel and Side-Information
cs.IT math.IT
Transmission of a Gaussian source over a time-varying Gaussian channel is studied in the presence of time-varying correlated side information at the receiver. A block fading model is considered for both the channel and the side information, whose states are assumed to be known only at the receiver. The optimality of separate source and channel coding in terms of average end-to-end distortion is shown when the channel is static while the side information state follows a discrete or a continuous and quasiconcave distribution. When both the channel and side information states are time-varying, separate source and channel coding is suboptimal in general. A partially informed encoder lower bound is studied by providing the channel state information to the encoder. Several achievable transmission schemes are proposed based on uncoded transmission, separate source and channel coding, joint decoding as well as hybrid digital-analog transmission. Uncoded transmission is shown to be optimal for a class of continuous and quasiconcave side information state distributions, while the channel gain may have an arbitrary distribution. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first example in which the uncoded transmission achieves the optimal performance thanks to the time-varying nature of the states, while it is suboptimal in the static version of the same problem. Then, the optimal \emph{distortion exponent}, that quantifies the exponential decay rate of the expected distortion in the high SNR regime, is characterized for Nakagami distributed channel and side information states, and it is shown to be achieved by hybrid digital-analog and joint decoding schemes in certain cases, illustrating the suboptimality of pure digital or analog transmission in general.
1312.0938
Epidemic Thresholds with External Agents
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We study the effect of external infection sources on phase transitions in epidemic processes. In particular, we consider an epidemic spreading on a network via the SIS/SIR dynamics, which in addition is aided by external agents - sources unconstrained by the graph, but possessing a limited infection rate or virulence. Such a model captures many existing models of externally aided epidemics, and finds use in many settings - epidemiology, marketing and advertising, network robustness, etc. We provide a detailed characterization of the impact of external agents on epidemic thresholds. In particular, for the SIS model, we show that any external infection strategy with constant virulence either fails to significantly affect the lifetime of an epidemic, or at best, sustains the epidemic for a lifetime which is polynomial in the number of nodes. On the other hand, a random external-infection strategy, with rate increasing linearly in the number of infected nodes, succeeds under some conditions to sustain an exponential epidemic lifetime. We obtain similar sharp thresholds for the SIR model, and discuss the relevance of our results in a variety of settings.
1312.0940
Medical Aid for Automatic Detection of Malaria
cs.CY cs.CV
The analysis and counting of blood cells in a microscope image can provide useful information concerning to the health of a person. In particular, morphological analysis of red blood cells deformations can effectively detect important disease like malaria. Blood images, obtained by the microscope, which is coupled with a digital camera, are analyzed by the computer for diagnosis or can be transmitted easily to clinical centers than liquid blood samples. Automatic analysis system for the presence of Plasmodium in microscopic image of blood can greatly help pathologists and doctors that typically inspect blood films manually. Unfortunately, the analysis made by human experts is not rapid and not yet standardized due to the operators capabilities and tiredness. The paper shows how effectively and accurately it is possible to identify the Plasmodium in the blood film. In particular, the paper presents how to enhance the microscopic image and filter out the unnecessary segments followed by the threshold based segmentation and recognize the presence of Plasmodium. The proposed system can be deployed in the remote area as a supporting aid for telemedicine technology and only basic training is sufficient to operate it. This system achieved more than 98 percentage accuracy for the samples collected to test this system.
1312.0972
Rank-Modulation Rewrite Coding for Flash Memories
cs.IT math.IT
The current flash memory technology focuses on the cost minimization of its static storage capacity. However, the resulting approach supports a relatively small number of program-erase cycles. This technology is effective for consumer devices (e.g., smartphones and cameras) where the number of program-erase cycles is small. However, it is not economical for enterprise storage systems that require a large number of lifetime writes. The proposed approach in this paper for alleviating this problem consists of the efficient integration of two key ideas: (i) improving reliability and endurance by representing the information using relative values via the rank modulation scheme and (ii) increasing the overall (lifetime) capacity of the flash device via rewriting codes, namely, performing multiple writes per cell before erasure. This paper presents a new coding scheme that combines rank modulation with rewriting. The key benefits of the new scheme include: (i) the ability to store close to 2 bits per cell on each write with minimal impact on the lifetime of the memory, and (ii) efficient encoding and decoding algorithms that make use of capacity-achieving write-once-memory (WOM) codes that were proposed recently.
1312.0976
Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
cs.CY cs.CL cs.DL cs.SI physics.soc-ph
This article analyzes one month of edits to Wikipedia in order to examine the role of users editing multiple language editions (referred to as multilingual users). Such multilingual users may serve an important function in diffusing information across different language editions of the encyclopedia, and prior work has suggested this could reduce the level of self-focus bias in each edition. This study finds multilingual users are much more active than their single-edition (monolingual) counterparts. They are found in all language editions, but smaller-sized editions with fewer users have a higher percentage of multilingual users than larger-sized editions. About a quarter of multilingual users always edit the same articles in multiple languages, while just over 40% of multilingual users edit different articles in different languages. When non-English users do edit a second language edition, that edition is most frequently English. Nonetheless, several regional and linguistic cross-editing patterns are also present.
1312.1003
High Throughput Virtual Screening with Data Level Parallelism in Multi-core Processors
cs.AI cs.PF
Improving the throughput of molecular docking, a computationally intensive phase of the virtual screening process, is a highly sought area of research since it has a significant weight in the drug designing process. With such improvements, the world might find cures for incurable diseases like HIV disease and Cancer sooner. Our approach presented in this paper is to utilize a multi-core environment to introduce Data Level Parallelism (DLP) to the Autodock Vina software, which is a widely used for molecular docking software. Autodock Vina already exploits Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP) in multi-core environments and therefore optimized for such environments. However, with the results we have obtained, it can be clearly seen that our approach has enhanced the throughput of the already optimized software by more than six times. This will dramatically reduce the time consumed for the lead identification phase in drug designing along with the shift in the processor technology from multi-core to many-core of the current era. Therefore, we believe that the contribution of this project will effectively make it possible to expand the number of small molecules docked against a drug target and improving the chances to design drugs for incurable diseases.
1312.1004
Composite Channel Estimation in Massive MIMO Systems
cs.IT math.IT
We consider a multiuser (MU) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) time-division duplexing (TDD) system in which the base station (BS) is equipped with a large number of antennas for communicating with single-antenna mobile users. In such a system the BS has to estimate the channel state information (CSI) that includes large-scale fading coefficients (LSFCs) and small-scale fading coefficients (SSFCs) by uplink pilots. Although information about the former FCs are indispensable in a MU-MIMO or distributed MIMO system, they are usually ignored or assumed perfectly known when treating the MIMO CSI estimation problem. We take advantage of the large spatial samples of a massive MIMO BS to derive accurate LSFC estimates in the absence of SSFC information. With estimated LSFCs, SSFCs are then obtained using a rank-reduced (RR) channel model which in essence transforms the channel vector into a lower dimension representation. We analyze the mean squared error (MSE) performance of the proposed composite channel estimator and prove that the separable angle of arrival (AoA) information provided by the RR model is beneficial for enhancing the estimator's performance, especially when the angle spread of the uplink signal is not too large.
1312.1020
High-quality Image Restoration from Partial Mixed Adaptive-Random Measurements
cs.IT math.IT
A novel framework to construct an efficient sensing (measurement) matrix, called mixed adaptive-random (MAR) matrix, is introduced for directly acquiring a compressed image representation. The mixed sampling (sensing) procedure hybridizes adaptive edge measurements extracted from a low-resolution image with uniform random measurements predefined for the high-resolution image to be recovered. The mixed sensing matrix seamlessly captures important information of an image, and meanwhile approximately satisfies the restricted isometry property. To recover the high-resolution image from MAR measurements, the total variation algorithm based on the compressive sensing theory is employed for solving the Lagrangian regularization problem. Both peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity results demonstrate the MAR sensing framework shows much better recovery performance than the completely random sensing one. The work is particularly helpful for high-performance and lost-cost data acquisition.
1312.1024
Reliability-output Decoding of Tail-biting Convolutional Codes
cs.IT math.IT
We present extensions to Raghavan and Baum's reliability-output Viterbi algorithm (ROVA) to accommodate tail-biting convolutional codes. These tail-biting reliability-output algorithms compute the exact word-error probability of the decoded codeword after first calculating the posterior probability of the decoded tail-biting codeword's starting state. One approach employs a state-estimation algorithm that selects the maximum a posteriori state based on the posterior distribution of the starting states. Another approach is an approximation to the exact tail-biting ROVA that estimates the word-error probability. A comparison of the computational complexity of each approach is discussed in detail. The presented reliability-output algorithms apply to both feedforward and feedback tail-biting convolutional encoders. These tail-biting reliability-output algorithms are suitable for use in reliability-based retransmission schemes with short blocklengths, in which terminated convolutional codes would introduce rate loss.
1312.1031
Analysis of Distributed Stochastic Dual Coordinate Ascent
cs.DC cs.LG
In \citep{Yangnips13}, the author presented distributed stochastic dual coordinate ascent (DisDCA) algorithms for solving large-scale regularized loss minimization. Extraordinary performances have been observed and reported for the well-motivated updates, as referred to the practical updates, compared to the naive updates. However, no serious analysis has been provided to understand the updates and therefore the convergence rates. In the paper, we bridge the gap by providing a theoretical analysis of the convergence rates of the practical DisDCA algorithm. Our analysis helped by empirical studies has shown that it could yield an exponential speed-up in the convergence by increasing the number of dual updates at each iteration. This result justifies the superior performances of the practical DisDCA as compared to the naive variant. As a byproduct, our analysis also reveals the convergence behavior of the one-communication DisDCA.
1312.1037
Blind Fractional Interference Alignment
cs.IT math.IT
Fractional Interference Alignment (FIA) is a transmission scheme which achieves any value between [0,1] for the Symbols transmitted per Antenna per Channel use (SpAC). FIA was designed in [1] specifically for Finite Alphabet (FA) signals, under the constraint that the Minimum Distance (MD) detector is used at all the receivers. Similar to classical interference alignment, the FIA precoder also needs perfect channel state information at all the transmitters (CSIT). In this work, a novel Blind Fractional Interference Alignment (B-FIA) scheme is introduced, where the basic assumption is that CSIT is not available. We consider two popular channel models, namely: Broadcast channel, and Interference channel. For these two channel models, the maximum achievable value of SpAC satisfying the constraints of the MD detector is obtained, but with no CSIT, and also a precoder design is provided to obtain any value of SpAC in the achievable range. Further, the precoder structure provided has one distinct advantage: interference channel state information at the receiver (I-CSIR) is not needed, when all the transmitters and receivers are equipped with one antenna each. When two or more antennas are used at both ends, I-CSIR must be available to obtain the maximum achievable value of SpAC. The receiver designs for both the Minimum Distance and the Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoders are discussed, where the interference statistics is estimated from the received signal samples. Simulation results of the B-FIA show that the ML decoder with estimated statistics achieves a significantly better error rate performance when compared to the MD decoder with known statistics, since the MD decoder assumes the interference plus noise term as colored Gaussian noise.
1312.1038
Efficient Multi-Robot Motion Planning for Unlabeled Discs in Simple Polygons
cs.CG cs.RO
We consider the following motion-planning problem: we are given $m$ unit discs in a simple polygon with $n$ vertices, each at their own start position, and we want to move the discs to a given set of $m$ target positions. Contrary to the standard (labeled) version of the problem, each disc is allowed to be moved to any target position, as long as in the end every target position is occupied. We show that this unlabeled version of the problem can be solved in $O(n\log n+mn+m^2)$ time, assuming that the start and target positions are at least some minimal distance from each other. This is in sharp contrast to the standard (labeled) and more general multi-robot motion-planning problem for discs moving in a simple polygon, which is known to be strongly NP-hard.
1312.1053
Large deviations, Basic information theorem for fitness preferential attachment random networks
cs.IT cs.SI math.IT math.PR
For fitness preferential attachment random networks, we define the empirical degree and pair measure, which counts the number of vertices of a given degree and the number of edges with given fits, and the sample path empirical degree distribution. For the empirical degree and pair distribution for the fitness preferential attachment random networks, we find a large deviation upper bound. From this result we obtain a weak law of large numbers for the empirical degree and pair distribution, and the basic information theorem or an asymptotic equipartition property for fitness preferential attachment random networks.
1312.1054
Faster and Sample Near-Optimal Algorithms for Proper Learning Mixtures of Gaussians
cs.DS cs.LG math.PR math.ST stat.TH
We provide an algorithm for properly learning mixtures of two single-dimensional Gaussians without any separability assumptions. Given $\tilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from an unknown mixture, our algorithm outputs a mixture that is $\varepsilon$-close in total variation distance, in time $\tilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^5)$. Our sample complexity is optimal up to logarithmic factors, and significantly improves upon both Kalai et al., whose algorithm has a prohibitive dependence on $1/\varepsilon$, and Feldman et al., whose algorithm requires bounds on the mixture parameters and depends pseudo-polynomially in these parameters. One of our main contributions is an improved and generalized algorithm for selecting a good candidate distribution from among competing hypotheses. Namely, given a collection of $N$ hypotheses containing at least one candidate that is $\varepsilon$-close to an unknown distribution, our algorithm outputs a candidate which is $O(\varepsilon)$-close to the distribution. The algorithm requires ${O}(\log{N}/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from the unknown distribution and ${O}(N \log N/\varepsilon^2)$ time, which improves previous such results (such as the Scheff\'e estimator) from a quadratic dependence of the running time on $N$ to quasilinear. Given the wide use of such results for the purpose of hypothesis selection, our improved algorithm implies immediate improvements to any such use.
1312.1060
An algebraic study of linkages with helical joints
cs.RO math.AG
Methods from algebra and algebraic geometry have been used in various ways to study linkages in kinematics. These methods have failed so far for the study of linkages with helical joints (joints with screw motion), because of the presence of some non-algebraic relations. In this article, we explore a delicate reduction of some analytic equations in kinematics to algebraic questions via a theorem of Ax. As an application, we give a classification of mobile closed 5-linkages with revolute, prismatic, and helical joints.
1312.1075
A Necessary and Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Potential Functions for Heterogeneous Routing Games
cs.GT cs.SY math.OC
We study a heterogeneous routing game in which vehicles might belong to more than one type. The type determines the cost of traveling along an edge as a function of the flow of various types of vehicles over that edge. We relax the assumptions needed for the existence of a Nash equilibrium in this heterogeneous routing game. We extend the available results to present necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a potential function. We characterize a set of tolls that guarantee the existence of a potential function when only two types of users are participating in the game. We present an upper bound for the price of anarchy (i.e., the worst-case ratio of the social cost calculated for a Nash equilibrium over the social cost for a socially optimal flow) for the case in which only two types of players are participating in a game with affine edge cost functions. A heterogeneous routing game with vehicle platooning incentives is used as an example throughout the article to clarify the concepts and to validate the results.
1312.1099
Multiscale Dictionary Learning for Estimating Conditional Distributions
stat.ML cs.LG
Nonparametric estimation of the conditional distribution of a response given high-dimensional features is a challenging problem. It is important to allow not only the mean but also the variance and shape of the response density to change flexibly with features, which are massive-dimensional. We propose a multiscale dictionary learning model, which expresses the conditional response density as a convex combination of dictionary densities, with the densities used and their weights dependent on the path through a tree decomposition of the feature space. A fast graph partitioning algorithm is applied to obtain the tree decomposition, with Bayesian methods then used to adaptively prune and average over different sub-trees in a soft probabilistic manner. The algorithm scales efficiently to approximately one million features. State of the art predictive performance is demonstrated for toy examples and two neuroscience applications including up to a million features.
1312.1121
Interpreting random forest classification models using a feature contribution method
cs.LG
Model interpretation is one of the key aspects of the model evaluation process. The explanation of the relationship between model variables and outputs is relatively easy for statistical models, such as linear regressions, thanks to the availability of model parameters and their statistical significance. For "black box" models, such as random forest, this information is hidden inside the model structure. This work presents an approach for computing feature contributions for random forest classification models. It allows for the determination of the influence of each variable on the model prediction for an individual instance. By analysing feature contributions for a training dataset, the most significant variables can be determined and their typical contribution towards predictions made for individual classes, i.e., class-specific feature contribution "patterns", are discovered. These patterns represent a standard behaviour of the model and allow for an additional assessment of the model reliability for a new data. Interpretation of feature contributions for two UCI benchmark datasets shows the potential of the proposed methodology. The robustness of results is demonstrated through an extensive analysis of feature contributions calculated for a large number of generated random forest models.
1312.1134
Massive MIMO Multicasting in Noncooperative Cellular Networks
cs.IT math.IT
We study the massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multicast transmission in cellular networks where each base station (BS) is equipped with a large-scale antenna array and transmits a common message using a single beamformer to multiple mobile users. We first show that when each BS knows the perfect channel state information (CSI) of its own served users, the asymptotically optimal beamformer at each BS is a linear combination of the channel vectors of its multicast users. Moreover, the optimal combining coefficients are obtained in closed form. Then we consider the imperfect CSI scenario where the CSI is obtained through uplink channel estimation in timedivision duplex systems. We propose a new pilot scheme that estimates the composite channel which is a linear combination of the individual channels of multicast users in each cell. This scheme is able to completely eliminate pilot contamination. The pilot power control for optimizing the multicast beamformer at each BS is also derived. Numerical results show that the asymptotic performance of the proposed scheme is close to the ideal case with perfect CSI. Simulation also verifies the effectiveness of the proposed scheme with finite number of antennas at each BS.
1312.1142
ADI iteration for Lyapunov equations: a tangential approach and adaptive shift selection
math.NA cs.SY math.DS
A new version of the alternating directions implicit (ADI) iteration for the solution of large-scale Lyapunov equations is introduced. It generalizes the hitherto existing iteration, by incorporating tangential directions in the way they are already available for rational Krylov subspaces. Additionally, first strategies to adaptively select shifts and tangential directions in each iteration are presented. Numerical examples emphasize the potential of the new results.
1312.1146
Case-Based Merging Techniques in OAKPLAN
cs.AI
Case-based planning can take advantage of former problem-solving experiences by storing in a plan library previously generated plans that can be reused to solve similar planning problems in the future. Although comparative worst-case complexity analyses of plan generation and reuse techniques reveal that it is not possible to achieve provable efficiency gain of reuse over generation, we show that the case-based planning approach can be an effective alternative to plan generation when similar reuse candidates can be chosen.
1312.1147
Optimality of Operator-Like Wavelets for Representing Sparse AR(1) Processes
cs.IT math.IT
It is known that the Karhunen-Lo\`{e}ve transform (KLT) of Gaussian first-order auto-regressive (AR(1)) processes results in sinusoidal basis functions. The same sinusoidal bases come out of the independent-component analysis (ICA) and actually correspond to processes with completely independent samples. In this paper, we relax the Gaussian hypothesis and study how orthogonal transforms decouple symmetric-alpha-stable (S$\alpha$S) AR(1) processes. The Gaussian case is not sparse and corresponds to $\alpha=2$, while $0<\alpha<2$ yields processes with sparse linear-prediction error. In the presence of sparsity, we show that operator-like wavelet bases do outperform the sinusoidal ones. Also, we observe that, for processes with very sparse increments ($0<\alpha\leq 1$), the operator-like wavelet basis is indistinguishable from the ICA solution obtained through numerical optimization. We consider two criteria for independence. The first is the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the joint probability density function (pdf) of the original signal and the product of the marginals in the transformed domain. The second is a divergence between the joint pdf of the original signal and the product of the marginals in the transformed domain, which is based on Stein's formula for the mean-square estimation error in additive Gaussian noise. Our framework then offers a unified view that encompasses the discrete cosine transform (known to be asymptotically optimal for $\alpha=2$) and Haar-like wavelets (for which we achieve optimality for $0<\alpha\leq1$).
1312.1243
Pricing Residential Electricity Based on Individual Consumption Behaviors
math.OC cs.SI cs.SY
The conventional practice of retail electric utilities is to aggregate customers geographically. The utility purchases electricity for its customers via bulk transactions on the wholesale market, and it passes these costs along to its customers, the end consumers, through their rate plan. Typically, all residential consumers are offered the same per unit rate plan, which leads to cost sharing. Some consumers use their electricity at peak hours, when it is more expensive on the wholesale market, and others consume mostly at off peak hours, when it is cheaper, but they all enjoy the same per unit rate through their utility. This paper proposed a method for the utility to segment a population of consumers on the basis of their individual consumption patterns. An optimal recruitment algorithm was developed to aggregate consumers into groups with a relatively low per unit cost of electricity on the wholesale market. It was then proposed that the utility should group together enough consumers to ensure an adequately low forecast error, which is related to risks it faces in wholesale market transactions. Finally, it was shown that by repeated application of this process, the utility could segment the entire population into groups and offer them differentiated rate plans based on their actual consumption behavior. These groupings are stable in the sense that no one consumer can unilaterally improve her outcome.
1312.1277
Bandits and Experts in Metric Spaces
cs.DS cs.LG
In a multi-armed bandit problem, an online algorithm chooses from a set of strategies in a sequence of trials so as to maximize the total payoff of the chosen strategies. While the performance of bandit algorithms with a small finite strategy set is quite well understood, bandit problems with large strategy sets are still a topic of very active investigation, motivated by practical applications such as online auctions and web advertisement. The goal of such research is to identify broad and natural classes of strategy sets and payoff functions which enable the design of efficient solutions. In this work we study a very general setting for the multi-armed bandit problem in which the strategies form a metric space, and the payoff function satisfies a Lipschitz condition with respect to the metric. We refer to this problem as the "Lipschitz MAB problem". We present a solution for the multi-armed bandit problem in this setting. That is, for every metric space we define an isometry invariant which bounds from below the performance of Lipschitz MAB algorithms for this metric space, and we present an algorithm which comes arbitrarily close to meeting this bound. Furthermore, our technique gives even better results for benign payoff functions. We also address the full-feedback ("best expert") version of the problem, where after every round the payoffs from all arms are revealed.
1312.1286
An Ontology Model for Organizing Information Resources Sharing on Personal Web
cs.DL cs.IR
Retrieve information resources made by the machine processing may refer to multiple sources. A personal web as part of information resources in the Internet requires a feature that can be understood by computer machines. Therefore, in this paper an ontology semantic web approach is used to map the resources in a meaningful scheme. In the design of concept, resources on the web are viewed as documents that have some property and ownership. Domain interest or web scope is used to describe a classification of resources that navigate into relevant documents. If instances are completed to the concept, then the ontology file can be loaded and shared as annotation on personal web. This allows computer machine to query multiple ontology from different personal webs that use it.
1312.1309
On the DoF Region of the K-user MISO Broadcast Channel with Hybrid CSIT
cs.IT math.IT
An outer bound for the degrees of freedom (DoF) region of the K-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) broadcast channel (BC) is developed under the hybrid channel state information at transmitter (CSIT) model, in which the transmitter has instantaneous CSIT of channels to a subset of the receivers and delayed CSIT of channels to the rest of the receivers. For the 3-user MISO BC, when the transmitter has instantaneous CSIT of the channel to one receiver and delayed CSIT of channels to the other two, two new communication schemes are designed, which are able to achieve the DoF tuple of $\left(1,\frac{1}{3},\frac{1}{3}\right)$, with a sum DoF of $\frac{5}{3}$, that is greater than the sum DoF achievable only with delayed CSIT. Another communication scheme showing the benefit of the alternating CSIT model is also developed, to obtain the DoF tuple of $\left(1,\frac{4}{9},\frac{4}{9}\right)$ for the 3-user MISO BC.
1312.1325
Permutation polynomials induced from permutations of subfields, and some complete sets of mutually orthogonal latin squares
math.NT cs.IT math.CO math.IT
We present a general technique for obtaining permutation polynomials over a finite field from permutations of a subfield. By applying this technique to the simplest classes of permutation polynomials on the subfield, we obtain several new families of permutation polynomials. Some of these have the additional property that both f(x) and f(x)+x induce permutations of the field, which has combinatorial consequences. We use some of our permutation polynomials to exhibit complete sets of mutually orthogonal latin squares. In addition, we solve the open problem from a recent paper by Wu and Lin, and we give simpler proofs of much more general versions of the results in two other recent papers.
1312.1349
Improving self-calibration
astro-ph.IM cs.IT math.IT physics.data-an stat.ML
Response calibration is the process of inferring how much the measured data depend on the signal one is interested in. It is essential for any quantitative signal estimation on the basis of the data. Here, we investigate self-calibration methods for linear signal measurements and linear dependence of the response on the calibration parameters. The common practice is to augment an external calibration solution using a known reference signal with an internal calibration on the unknown measurement signal itself. Contemporary self-calibration schemes try to find a self-consistent solution for signal and calibration by exploiting redundancies in the measurements. This can be understood in terms of maximizing the joint probability of signal and calibration. However, the full uncertainty structure of this joint probability around its maximum is thereby not taken into account by these schemes. Therefore better schemes -- in sense of minimal square error -- can be designed by accounting for asymmetries in the uncertainty of signal and calibration. We argue that at least a systematic correction of the common self-calibration scheme should be applied in many measurement situations in order to properly treat uncertainties of the signal on which one calibrates. Otherwise the calibration solutions suffer from a systematic bias, which consequently distorts the signal reconstruction. Furthermore, we argue that non-parametric, signal-to-noise filtered calibration should provide more accurate reconstructions than the common bin averages and provide a new, improved self-calibration scheme. We illustrate our findings with a simplistic numerical example.
1312.1375
Impact of receiver reaction mechanisms on the performance of molecular communication networks
q-bio.MN cs.IT math.IT
In a molecular communication network, transmitters and receivers communicate by using signalling molecules. At the receivers, the signalling molecules react, via a chain of chemical reactions, to produce output molecules. The counts of output molecules over time is considered to be the output signal of the receiver. This output signal is used to detect the presence of signalling molecules at the receiver. The output signal is noisy due to the stochastic nature of diffusion and chemical reactions. The aim of this paper is to characterise the properties of the output signals for two types of receivers, which are based on two different types of reaction mechanisms. We derive analytical expressions for the mean, variance and frequency properties of these two types of receivers. These expressions allow us to study the properties of these two types of receivers. In addition, our model allows us to study the effect of the diffusibility of the receiver membrane on the performance of the receivers.
1312.1397
A Passivity Framework for Modeling and Mitigating Wormhole Attacks on Networked Control Systems
cs.SY cs.CR cs.NI
Networked control systems consist of distributed sensors and actuators that communicate via a wireless network. The use of an open wireless medium and unattended deployment leaves these systems vulnerable to intelligent adversaries whose goal is to disrupt the system performance. In this paper, we study the wormhole attack on a networked control system, in which an adversary establishes a link between two distant regions of the network by using either high-gain antennas, as in the out-of-band wormhole, or colluding network nodes as in the in-band wormhole. Wormholes allow the adversary to violate the timing constraints of real-time control systems by delaying or dropping packets, and cannot be detected using cryptographic mechanisms alone. We study the impact of the wormhole attack on the network flows and delays and introduce a passivity-based control-theoretic framework for modeling the wormhole attack. We develop this framework for both the in-band and out-of-band wormhole attacks as well as complex, hereto-unreported wormhole attacks consisting of arbitrary combinations of in-and out-of band wormholes. We integrate existing mitigation strategies into our framework, and analyze the throughput, delay, and stability properties of the overall system. Through simulation study, we show that, by selectively dropping control packets, the wormhole attack can cause disturbances in the physical plant of a networked control system, and demonstrate that appropriate selection of detection parameters mitigates the disturbances due to the wormhole while satisfying the delay constraints of the physical system.
1312.1421
Intermittent Communication
cs.IT math.IT
We formulate a model for intermittent communication that can capture bursty transmissions or a sporadically available channel, where in either case the receiver does not know a priori when the transmissions will occur. Focusing on the point-to-point case, we develop a decoding structure, decoding from pattern detection, and its achievable rate for such communication scenarios. Decoding from pattern detection first detects the locations of codeword symbols and then uses them to decode. We introduce the concept of partial divergence and study some of its properties in order to obtain stronger achievability results. As the system becomes more intermittent, the achievable rates decrease due to the additional uncertainty about the positions of the codeword symbols at the decoder. Additionally, we provide upper bounds on the capacity of binary noiseless intermittent communication with the help of a genie-aided encoder and decoder. The upper bounds imply a tradeoff between the capacity and the intermittency rate of the communication system, even if the receive window scales linearly with the codeword length.
1312.1423
ABC-SG: A New Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm-Based Distance of Sequential Data Using Sigma Grams
cs.NE cs.AI
The problem of similarity search is one of the main problems in computer science. This problem has many applications in text-retrieval, web search, computational biology, bioinformatics and others. Similarity between two data objects can be depicted using a similarity measure or a distance metric. There are numerous distance metrics in the literature, some are used for a particular data type, and others are more general. In this paper we present a new distance metric for sequential data which is based on the sum of n-grams. The novelty of our distance is that these n-grams are weighted using artificial bee colony; a recent optimization algorithm based on the collective intelligence of a swarm of bees on their search for nectar. This algorithm has been used in optimizing a large number of numerical problems. We validate the new distance experimentally.
1312.1444
Energy Beamforming with One-Bit Feedback
cs.IT math.IT
Wireless energy transfer (WET) has attracted significant attention recently for providing energy supplies wirelessly to electrical devices without the need of wires or cables. Among different types of WET techniques, the radio frequency (RF) signal enabled far-field WET is most practically appealing to power energy constrained wireless networks in a broadcast manner. To overcome the significant path loss over wireless channels, multi-antenna or multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques have been proposed to enhance the transmission efficiency and distance for RF-based WET. However, in order to reap the large energy beamforming gain in MIMO WET, acquiring the channel state information (CSI) at the energy transmitter (ET) is an essential task. This task is particularly challenging for WET systems, since existing channel training and feedback methods used for communication receivers may not be implementable at the energy receiver (ER) due to its hardware limitation. To tackle this problem, in this paper we consider a multiuser MIMO system for WET, where a multiple-antenna ET broadcasts wireless energy to a group of multiple-antenna ERs concurrently via transmit energy beamforming. By taking into account the practical energy harvesting circuits at the ER, we propose a new channel learning method that requires only one feedback bit from each ER to the ET per feedback interval. The feedback bit indicates the increase or decrease of the harvested energy by each ER between the present and previous intervals, which can be measured without changing the existing hardware at the ER. Based on such feedback information, the ET adjusts transmit beamforming in different training intervals and at the same time obtains improved estimates of the MIMO channels to ERs by applying a new approach termed analytic center cutting plane method (ACCPM).
1312.1447
Asynchronous Convolutional-Coded Physical-Layer Network Coding
cs.IT math.IT
This paper investigates the decoding process of asynchronous convolutional-coded physical-layer network coding (PNC) systems. Specifically, we put forth a layered decoding framework for convolutional-coded PNC consisting of three layers: symbol realignment layer, codeword realignment layer, and joint channel-decoding network coding (Jt-CNC) decoding layer. Our framework can deal with phase asynchrony and symbol arrival-time asynchrony between the signals simultaneously transmitted by multiple sources. A salient feature of this framework is that it can handle both fractional and integral symbol offsets; previously proposed PNC decoding algorithms (e.g., XOR-CD and reduced-state Viterbi algorithms) can only deal with fractional symbol offset. Moreover, the Jt-CNC algorithm, based on belief propagation (BP), is BER-optimal for synchronous PNC and near optimal for asynchronous PNC. Extending beyond convolutional codes, we further generalize the Jt-CNC decoding algorithm for all cyclic codes. Our simulation shows that Jt-CNC outperforms the previously proposed XOR-CD algorithm and reduced-state Viterbi algorithm by 2dB for synchronous PNC. For phase-asynchronous PNC, Jt-CNC is 4dB better than the other two algorithms. Importantly, for real wireless environment testing, we have also implemented our decoding algorithm in a PNC system built on the USRP software radio platform. Our experiment shows that the proposed Jt-CNC decoder works well in practice.
1312.1448
Food Recommendation using Ontology and Heuristics
cs.IR
Recommender systems are needed to find food items of ones interest. We review recommender systems and recommendation methods. We propose a food personalization framework based on adaptive hypermedia. We extend Hermes framework with food recommendation functionality. We combine TF-IDF term extraction method with cosine similarity measure. Healthy heuristics and standard food database are incorporated into the knowledgebase. Based on the performed evaluation, we conclude that semantic recommender systems in general outperform traditional recommenders systems with respect to accuracy, precision, and recall, and that the proposed recommender has a better F-measure than existing semantic recommenders.
1312.1450
Multi-Antenna Wireless Powered Communication with Energy Beamforming
cs.IT math.IT
The newly emerging wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs) have recently drawn significant attention, where radio signals are used to power wireless terminals for information transmission. In this paper, we study a WPCN where one multi-antenna access point (AP) coordinates energy transfer and information transfer to/from a set of single-antenna users. A harvest-then-transmit protocol is assumed where the AP first broadcasts wireless power to all users via energy beamforming in the downlink (DL), and then the users send their independent information to the AP simultaneously in the uplink (UL) using their harvested energy. To optimize the users' throughput and yet guarantee their rate fairness, we maximize the minimum throughput among all users by a joint design of the DL-UL time allocation, the DL energy beamforming, and the UL transmit power allocation plus receive beamforming. We solve this non-convex problem optimally by two steps. First, we fix the DL-UL time allocation and obtain the optimal DL energy beamforming, UL power allocation and receive beamforming to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of all users. This problem is shown to be in general non-convex; however, we convert it equivalently to a spectral radius minimization problem, which can be solved efficiently by applying the alternating optimization based on the non-negative matrix theory. Then, the optimal time allocation is found by a one-dimension search to maximize the minimum rate of all users. Furthermore, two suboptimal designs of lower complexity are proposed, and their throughput performance is compared against that of the optimal solution.
1312.1461
Multi-Sensor Image Fusion Based on Moment Calculation
cs.CV
An image fusion method based on salient features is proposed in this paper. In this work, we have concentrated on salient features of the image for fusion in order to preserve all relevant information contained in the input images and tried to enhance the contrast in fused image and also suppressed noise to a maximum extent. In our system, first we have applied a mask on two input images in order to conserve the high frequency information along with some low frequency information and stifle noise to a maximum extent. Thereafter, for identification of salience features from sources images, a local moment is computed in the neighborhood of a coefficient. Finally, a decision map is generated based on local moment in order to get the fused image. To verify our proposed algorithm, we have tested it on 120 sensor image pairs collected from Manchester University UK database. The experimental results show that the proposed method can provide superior fused image in terms of several quantitative fusion evaluation index.
1312.1462
Geometric Feature Based Face-Sketch Recognition
cs.CV
This paper presents a novel facial sketch image or face-sketch recognition approach based on facial feature extraction. To recognize a face-sketch, we have concentrated on a set of geometric face features like eyes, nose, eyebrows, lips, etc and their length and width ratio because it is difficult to match photos and sketches because they belong to two different modalities. In this system, first the facial features/components from training images are extracted, then ratios of length, width, and area etc. are calculated and those are stored as feature vectors for individual images. After that the mean feature vectors are computed and subtracted from each feature vector for centering of the feature vectors. In the next phase, feature vector for the incoming probe face-sketch is also computed in similar fashion. Here, K-NN classifier is used to recognize probe face-sketch. It is experimentally verified that the proposed method is robust against faces are in a frontal pose, with normal lighting and neutral expression and have no occlusions. The experiment has been conducted with 80 male and female face images from different face databases. It has useful applications for both law enforcement and digital entertainment.
1312.1474
`Hits' emerge through self-organized coordination in collective response of free agents
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Individuals in free societies frequently exhibit striking coordination when making independent decisions en masse. Examples include the regular appearance of hit products or memes with substantially higher popularity compared to their otherwise equivalent competitors, or extreme polarization in public opinion. Such segregation of events manifests as bimodality in the distribution of collective choices. Here we quantify how apparently independent choices made by individuals result in a significantly polarized but stable distribution of success in the context of the box-office performance of movies and show that it is an emergent feature of a system of non-interacting agents who respond to sequentially arriving signals. The aggregate response exhibits extreme variability amplifying much smaller differences in individual cost of adoption. Due to self-organization of the competitive landscape, most events elicit only a muted response but a few stimulate widespread adoption, emerging as "hits".
1312.1482
Low Complexity Decoding for Punctured Trellis-Coded Modulation Over Intersymbol Interference Channels
cs.IT math.IT
Classical trellis-coded modulation (TCM) as introduced by Ungerboeck in 1976/1983 uses a signal constellation of twice the cardinality compared to an uncoded transmission with one bit of redundancy per PAM symbol, i.e., application of codes with rates $\frac{n-1}{n}$ when $2^{n}$ denotes the cardinality of the signal constellation. The original approach therefore only comprises integer transmission rates, i.e., $R=\left\{ 2,\,3,\,4\,\ldots \right\}$, additionally, when transmitting over an intersymbol interference (ISI) channel an optimum decoding scheme would perform equalization and decoding of the channel code jointly. In this paper, we allow rate adjustment for TCM by means of puncturing the convolutional code (CC) on which a TCM scheme is based on. In this case a nontrivial mapping of the output symbols of the CC to signal points results in a time-variant trellis. We propose an efficient technique to integrate an ISI-channel into this trellis and show that the computational complexity can be significantly reduced by means of a reduced state sequence estimation (RSSE) algorithm for time-variant trellises.
1312.1492
A fast and robust algorithm to count topologically persistent holes in noisy clouds
cs.CG cs.CV math.AT
Preprocessing a 2D image often produces a noisy cloud of interest points. We study the problem of counting holes in unorganized clouds in the plane. The holes in a given cloud are quantified by the topological persistence of their boundary contours when the cloud is analyzed at all possible scales. We design the algorithm to count holes that are most persistent in the filtration of offsets (neighborhoods) around given points. The input is a cloud of $n$ points in the plane without any user-defined parameters. The algorithm has $O(n\log n)$ time and $O(n)$ space. The output is the array (number of holes, relative persistence in the filtration). We prove theoretical guarantees when the algorithm finds the correct number of holes (components in the complement) of an unknown shape approximated by a cloud.
1312.1494
Approximating persistent homology for a cloud of $n$ points in a subquadratic time
cs.CG cs.CV math.AT
The Vietoris-Rips filtration for an $n$-point metric space is a sequence of large simplicial complexes adding a topological structure to the otherwise disconnected space. The persistent homology is a key tool in topological data analysis and studies topological features of data that persist over many scales. The fastest algorithm for computing persistent homology of a filtration has time $O(M(u)+u^2\log^2 u)$, where $u$ is the number of updates (additions or deletions of simplices), $M(u)=O(u^{2.376})$ is the time for multiplication of $u\times u$ matrices. For a space of $n$ points given by their pairwise distances, we approximate the Vietoris-Rips filtration by a zigzag filtration consisting of $u=o(n)$ updates, which is sublinear in $n$. The constant depends on a given error of approximation and on the doubling dimension of the metric space. Then the persistent homology of this sublinear-size filtration can be computed in time $o(n^2)$, which is subquadratic in $n$.
1312.1512
An adaptive block based integrated LDP,GLCM,and Morphological features for Face Recognition
cs.CV
This paper proposes a technique for automatic face recognition using integrated multiple feature sets extracted from the significant blocks of a gradient image. We discuss about the use of novel morphological, local directional pattern (LDP) and gray-level co-occurrence matrix GLCM based feature extraction technique to recognize human faces. Firstly, the new morphological features i.e., features based on number of runs of pixels in four directions (N,NE,E,NW) are extracted, together with the GLCM based statistical features and LDP features that are less sensitive to the noise and non-monotonic illumination changes, are extracted from the significant blocks of the gradient image. Then these features are concatenated together. We integrate the above mentioned methods to take full advantage of the three approaches. Extraction of the significant blocks from the absolute gradient image and hence from the original image to extract pertinent information with the idea of dimension reduction forms the basis of the work. The efficiency of our method is demonstrated by the experiment on 1100 images from the FRAV2D face database, 2200 images from the FERET database, where the images vary in pose, expression, illumination and scale and 400 images from the ORL face database, where the images slightly vary in pose. Our method has shown 90.3%, 93% and 98.75% recognition accuracy for the FRAV2D, FERET and the ORL database respectively.
1312.1517
A Gabor block based Kernel Discriminative Common Vector (KDCV) approach using cosine kernels for Human Face Recognition
cs.CV
In this paper a nonlinear Gabor Wavelet Transform (GWT) discriminant feature extraction approach for enhanced face recognition is proposed. Firstly, the low-energized blocks from Gabor wavelet transformed images are extracted. Secondly, the nonlinear discriminating features are analyzed and extracted from the selected low-energized blocks by the generalized Kernel Discriminative Common Vector (KDCV) method. The KDCV method is extended to include cosine kernel function in the discriminating method. The KDCV with the cosine kernels is then applied on the extracted low energized discriminating feature vectors to obtain the real component of a complex quantity for face recognition. In order to derive positive kernel discriminative vectors; we apply only those kernel discriminative eigenvectors that are associated with non-zero eigenvalues. The feasibility of the low energized Gabor block based generalized KDCV method with cosine kernel function models has been successfully tested for image classification using the L1, L2 distance measures; and the cosine similarity measure on both frontal and pose-angled face recognition. Experimental results on the FRAV2D and the FERET database demonstrate the effectiveness of this new approach.
1312.1520
A Face Recognition approach based on entropy estimate of the nonlinear DCT features in the Logarithm Domain together with Kernel Entropy Component Analysis
cs.CV
This paper exploits the feature extraction capabilities of the discrete cosine transform (DCT) together with an illumination normalization approach in the logarithm domain that increase its robustness to variations in facial geometry and illumination. Secondly in the same domain the entropy measures are applied on the DCT coefficients so that maximum entropy preserving pixels can be extracted as the feature vector. Thus the informative features of a face can be extracted in a low dimensional space. Finally, the kernel entropy component analysis (KECA) with an extension of arc cosine kernels is applied on the extracted DCT coefficients that contribute most to the entropy estimate to obtain only those real kernel ECA eigenvectors that are associated with eigenvalues having high positive entropy contribution. The resulting system was successfully tested on real image sequences and is robust to significant partial occlusion and illumination changes, validated with the experiments on the FERET, AR, FRAV2D and ORL face databases. Experimental comparison is demonstrated to prove the superiority of the proposed approach in respect to recognition accuracy. Using specificity and sensitivity we find that the best is achieved when Renyi entropy is applied on the DCT coefficients. Extensive experimental comparison is demonstrated to prove the superiority of the proposed approach in respect to recognition accuracy. Moreover, the proposed approach is very simple, computationally fast and can be implemented in any real-time face recognition system.
1312.1530
Bandit Online Optimization Over the Permutahedron
cs.LG
The permutahedron is the convex polytope with vertex set consisting of the vectors $(\pi(1),\dots, \pi(n))$ for all permutations (bijections) $\pi$ over $\{1,\dots, n\}$. We study a bandit game in which, at each step $t$, an adversary chooses a hidden weight weight vector $s_t$, a player chooses a vertex $\pi_t$ of the permutahedron and suffers an observed loss of $\sum_{i=1}^n \pi(i) s_t(i)$. A previous algorithm CombBand of Cesa-Bianchi et al (2009) guarantees a regret of $O(n\sqrt{T \log n})$ for a time horizon of $T$. Unfortunately, CombBand requires at each step an $n$-by-$n$ matrix permanent approximation to within improved accuracy as $T$ grows, resulting in a total running time that is super linear in $T$, making it impractical for large time horizons. We provide an algorithm of regret $O(n^{3/2}\sqrt{T})$ with total time complexity $O(n^3T)$. The ideas are a combination of CombBand and a recent algorithm by Ailon (2013) for online optimization over the permutahedron in the full information setting. The technical core is a bound on the variance of the Plackett-Luce noisy sorting process's "pseudo loss". The bound is obtained by establishing positive semi-definiteness of a family of 3-by-3 matrices generated from rational functions of exponentials of 3 parameters.
1312.1577
On Coordinating Ultra-Dense Wireless Access Networks: Optimization Modeling, Algorithms and Insights
cs.IT math.IT
Network densification along with universal resources reuse is expected to play a key role in the realization of 5G radio access as an enabler for delivering most of the anticipated network capacity improvements. On the one hand, neither the expected additional spectrum allocation nor the forthcoming novel air-interface processing techniques will be sufficient for sustaining the anticipated exponentially-increasing mobile data traffic. On the other hand, enhanced ultra-dense infrastructure deployments are expected to provide remarkable capacity gains, regardless of the evolutionary or revolutionary approach followed towards 5G development. In this work, we thoroughly examine global network coordination as the main enabler for future 5G large dense small-cell deployments. We propose a powerful radio resources coordination framework through which interference management is handled network-wise and jointly over multiple dimensions. In particular, we explore strategies for pairing serving and served access nodes, partitioning the available network resources, as well as dynamically allocating power per pair, towards optimizing system performance and guaranteeing individual minimum performance levels. We develop new optimization formulations, providing network scaling performance upper bounds, along with lower complexity algorithmic solutions tailored to large networks. We apply the proposed solutions to dense network deployments, in order to obtain useful insights on network performance and optimization, such as rate scaling, infrastructure density, optimal bandwidth partitioning and spatial reuse factor optimization.
1312.1583
Sequences with high nonlinear complexity
cs.IT math.IT math.NT
We improve lower bounds on the $k$th-order nonlinear complexity of pseudorandom sequences over finite fields and we establish a probabilistic result on the behavior of the $k$th-order nonlinear complexity of random sequences over finite fields.
1312.1593
Performance Analysis of Network Coded Systems Under Quasi-static Rayleigh Fading Channels
cs.IT math.IT
In the area of basic and network coded cooperative communication, the expected end-to-end bit error rate (BER) values are frequently required to compare the proposed coding, relaying, and decoding techniques. Instead of obtaining these values via time consuming Monte Carlo simulations, deriving closed form expressions using approximations is crucial. In this work, the ultimate goal is to derive an approximate average BER expression for a network coded system. While reaching this goal, we firstly consider the cooperative systems' instantaneous BER values that are commonly composed of Q-functions of more than one variables. For these Q-functions, we investigate the convergence characteristics of the sampling property and generalize this property to arbitrary functions of multiple variables. Second, we adapt the equivalent channel approach to the network coded scenario for the ease of analysis and propose a network decoder with reduced complexity. Finally, by combining these techniques, we show that the obtained closed form expressions well agree with simulation results in a wide SNR range.
1312.1611
Intent Models for Contextualising and Diversifying Query Suggestions
cs.IR
The query suggestion or auto-completion mechanisms help users to type less while interacting with a search engine. A basic approach that ranks suggestions according to their frequency in the query logs is suboptimal. Firstly, many candidate queries with the same prefix can be removed as redundant. Secondly, the suggestions can also be personalised based on the user's context. These two directions to improve the aforementioned mechanisms' quality can be in opposition: while the latter aims to promote suggestions that address search intents that a user is likely to have, the former aims to diversify the suggestions to cover as many intents as possible. We introduce a contextualisation framework that utilises a short-term context using the user's behaviour within the current search session, such as the previous query, the documents examined, and the candidate query suggestions that the user has discarded. This short-term context is used to contextualise and diversify the ranking of query suggestions, by modelling the user's information need as a mixture of intent-specific user models. The evaluation is performed offline on a set of approximately 1.0M test user sessions. Our results suggest that the proposed approach significantly improves query suggestions compared to the baseline approach.
1312.1613
Max-Min Distance Nonnegative Matrix Factorization
stat.ML cs.LG cs.NA
Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) has been a popular representation method for pattern classification problem. It tries to decompose a nonnegative matrix of data samples as the product of a nonnegative basic matrix and a nonnegative coefficient matrix, and the coefficient matrix is used as the new representation. However, traditional NMF methods ignore the class labels of the data samples. In this paper, we proposed a supervised novel NMF algorithm to improve the discriminative ability of the new representation. Using the class labels, we separate all the data sample pairs into within-class pairs and between-class pairs. To improve the discriminate ability of the new NMF representations, we hope that the maximum distance of the within-class pairs in the new NMF space could be minimized, while the minimum distance of the between-class pairs pairs could be maximized. With this criterion, we construct an objective function and optimize it with regard to basic and coefficient matrices and slack variables alternatively, resulting in a iterative algorithm.
1312.1666
Semi-Stochastic Gradient Descent Methods
stat.ML cs.LG cs.NA math.NA math.OC
In this paper we study the problem of minimizing the average of a large number ($n$) of smooth convex loss functions. We propose a new method, S2GD (Semi-Stochastic Gradient Descent), which runs for one or several epochs in each of which a single full gradient and a random number of stochastic gradients is computed, following a geometric law. The total work needed for the method to output an $\varepsilon$-accurate solution in expectation, measured in the number of passes over data, or equivalently, in units equivalent to the computation of a single gradient of the loss, is $O((\kappa/n)\log(1/\varepsilon))$, where $\kappa$ is the condition number. This is achieved by running the method for $O(\log(1/\varepsilon))$ epochs, with a single gradient evaluation and $O(\kappa)$ stochastic gradient evaluations in each. The SVRG method of Johnson and Zhang arises as a special case. If our method is limited to a single epoch only, it needs to evaluate at most $O((\kappa/\varepsilon)\log(1/\varepsilon))$ stochastic gradients. In contrast, SVRG requires $O(\kappa/\varepsilon^2)$ stochastic gradients. To illustrate our theoretical results, S2GD only needs the workload equivalent to about 2.1 full gradient evaluations to find an $10^{-6}$-accurate solution for a problem with $n=10^9$ and $\kappa=10^3$.
1312.1681
An Approach: Modality Reduction and Face-Sketch Recognition
cs.CV
To recognize face sketch through face photo database is a challenging task for todays researchers. Because face photo images in training set and face sketch images in testing set have different modality. Difference between two face photos of difference person is smaller than the difference between same person in a face photo and face sketched. In this paper, for reduction of the modality between face photo and face sketch we first bring face photo and face sketch images in a new dimension using 2D Discrete Haar wavelet transform with scale 3 followed by a negative approach. After that, extract features from transformed images using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Thereafter, we use SVM classifier and K-NN classifier for better classification. Our proposed method is experimentally verified by its robustness against faces that are captured in a good lighting condition and in a frontal pose. The experiment has been conducted with 100 male and female face images as training set and 100 male and female face sketch images as testing set collected from CUHK training and testing cropped photos and CUHK training and testing cropped sketches.
1312.1683
Face Recognition using Hough Peaks extracted from the significant blocks of the Gradient Image
cs.CV
This paper proposes a new technique for automatic face recognition using integrated peaks of the Hough transformed significant blocks of the binary gradient image. In this approach firstly the gradient of an image is calculated and a threshold is set to obtain a binary gradient image, which is less sensitive to noise and illumination changes. Secondly, significant blocks are extracted from the absolute gradient image, to extract pertinent information with the idea of dimension reduction. Finally the best fitted Hough peaks are extracted from the Hough transformed significant blocks for efficient face recognition. Then these Hough peaks are concatenated together, which are used as feature in classification process. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated by the experiment on 1100 images from the FRAV2D face database, 2200 images from the FERET database, where the images vary in pose, expression, illumination and scale and 400 images from the ORL face database, where the images slightly vary in pose. Our method has shown 93.3%, 88.5% and 99% recognition accuracy for the FRAV2D, FERET and the ORL database respectively.
1312.1684
High Performance Human Face Recognition using Gabor based Pseudo Hidden Markov Model
cs.CV
This paper introduces a novel methodology that combines the multi-resolution feature of the Gabor wavelet transformation (GWT) with the local interactions of the facial structures expressed through the Pseudo Hidden Markov model (PHMM). Unlike the traditional zigzag scanning method for feature extraction a continuous scanning method from top-left corner to right then top-down and right to left and so on until right-bottom of the image i.e. a spiral scanning technique has been proposed for better feature selection. Unlike traditional HMMs, the proposed PHMM does not perform the state conditional independence of the visible observation sequence assumption. This is achieved via the concept of local structures introduced by the PHMM used to extract facial bands and automatically select the most informative features of a face image. Thus, the long-range dependency problem inherent to traditional HMMs has been drastically reduced. Again with the use of most informative pixels rather than the whole image makes the proposed method reasonably faster for face recognition. This method has been successfully tested on frontal face images from the ORL, FRAV2D and FERET face databases where the images vary in pose, illumination, expression, and scale. The FERET data set contains 2200 frontal face images of 200 subjects, while the FRAV2D data set consists of 1100 images of 100 subjects and the full ORL database is considered. The results reported in this application are far better than the recent and most referred systems.
1312.1685
Human Face Recognition using Gabor based Kernel Entropy Component Analysis
cs.CV
In this paper, we present a novel Gabor wavelet based Kernel Entropy Component Analysis (KECA) method by integrating the Gabor wavelet transformation (GWT) of facial images with the KECA method for enhanced face recognition performance. Firstly, from the Gabor wavelet transformed images the most important discriminative desirable facial features characterized by spatial frequency, spatial locality and orientation selectivity to cope with the variations due to illumination and facial expression changes were derived. After that KECA, relating to the Renyi entropy is extended to include cosine kernel function. The KECA with the cosine kernels is then applied on the extracted most important discriminating feature vectors of facial images to obtain only those real kernel ECA eigenvectors that are associated with eigenvalues having positive entropy contribution. Finally, these real KECA features are used for image classification using the L1, L2 distance measures; the Mahalanobis distance measure and the cosine similarity measure. The feasibility of the Gabor based KECA method with the cosine kernel has been successfully tested on both frontal and pose-angled face recognition, using datasets from the ORL, FRAV2D and the FERET database.
1312.1706
Swapping Variables for High-Dimensional Sparse Regression with Correlated Measurements
math.ST cs.IT math.IT stat.ML stat.TH
We consider the high-dimensional sparse linear regression problem of accurately estimating a sparse vector using a small number of linear measurements that are contaminated by noise. It is well known that the standard cadre of computationally tractable sparse regression algorithms---such as the Lasso, Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP), and their extensions---perform poorly when the measurement matrix contains highly correlated columns. To address this shortcoming, we develop a simple greedy algorithm, called SWAP, that iteratively swaps variables until convergence. SWAP is surprisingly effective in handling measurement matrices with high correlations. In fact, we prove that SWAP outputs the true support, the locations of the non-zero entries in the sparse vector, under a relatively mild condition on the measurement matrix. Furthermore, we show that SWAP can be used to boost the performance of any sparse regression algorithm. We empirically demonstrate the advantages of SWAP by comparing it with several state-of-the-art sparse regression algorithms.
1312.1725
Book embeddings of Reeb graphs
cs.CG cs.CV math.GT
Let $X$ be a simplicial complex with a piecewise linear function $f:X\to\mathbb{R}$. The Reeb graph $Reeb(f,X)$ is the quotient of $X$, where we collapse each connected component of $f^{-1}(t)$ to a single point. Let the nodes of $Reeb(f,X)$ be all homologically critical points where any homology of the corresponding component of the level set $f^{-1}(t)$ changes. Then we can label every arc of $Reeb(f,X)$ with the Betti numbers $(\beta_1,\beta_2,\dots,\beta_d)$ of the corresponding $d$-dimensional component of a level set. The homology labels give more information about the original complex $X$ than the classical Reeb graph. We describe a canonical embedding of a Reeb graph into a multi-page book (a star cross a line) and give a unique linear code of this book embedding.
1312.1727
On the Capacity Region of Broadcast Packet Erasure Relay Networks With Feedback
cs.IT math.IT
We derive a new outer bound on the capacity region of broadcast traffic in multiple input broadcast packet erasure channels with feedback, and extend this outer bound to packet erasure relay networks with feedback. We show the tightness of the outer bound for various classes of networks. An important engineering implication of this work is that for network coding schemes for parallel broadcast channels, the `xor' packets should be sent over correlated broadcast subchannels.
1312.1737
Curriculum Learning for Handwritten Text Line Recognition
cs.LG
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) have recently achieved the best performance in off-line Handwriting Text Recognition. At the same time, learning RNN by gradient descent leads to slow convergence, and training times are particularly long when the training database consists of full lines of text. In this paper, we propose an easy way to accelerate stochastic gradient descent in this set-up, and in the general context of learning to recognize sequences. The principle is called Curriculum Learning, or shaping. The idea is to first learn to recognize short sequences before training on all available training sequences. Experiments on three different handwritten text databases (Rimes, IAM, OpenHaRT) show that a simple implementation of this strategy can significantly speed up the training of RNN for Text Recognition, and even significantly improve performance in some cases.
1312.1740
Approximate message-passing with spatially coupled structured operators, with applications to compressed sensing and sparse superposition codes
cs.IT cond-mat.dis-nn math.IT
We study the behavior of Approximate Message-Passing, a solver for linear sparse estimation problems such as compressed sensing, when the i.i.d matrices -for which it has been specifically designed- are replaced by structured operators, such as Fourier and Hadamard ones. We show empirically that after proper randomization, the structure of the operators does not significantly affect the performances of the solver. Furthermore, for some specially designed spatially coupled operators, this allows a computationally fast and memory efficient reconstruction in compressed sensing up to the information-theoretical limit. We also show how this approach can be applied to sparse superposition codes, allowing the Approximate Message-Passing decoder to perform at large rates for moderate block length.
1312.1743
Dual coordinate solvers for large-scale structural SVMs
cs.LG cs.CV
This manuscript describes a method for training linear SVMs (including binary SVMs, SVM regression, and structural SVMs) from large, out-of-core training datasets. Current strategies for large-scale learning fall into one of two camps; batch algorithms which solve the learning problem given a finite datasets, and online algorithms which can process out-of-core datasets. The former typically requires datasets small enough to fit in memory. The latter is often phrased as a stochastic optimization problem; such algorithms enjoy strong theoretical properties but often require manual tuned annealing schedules, and may converge slowly for problems with large output spaces (e.g., structural SVMs). We discuss an algorithm for an "intermediate" regime in which the data is too large to fit in memory, but the active constraints (support vectors) are small enough to remain in memory. In this case, one can design rather efficient learning algorithms that are as stable as batch algorithms, but capable of processing out-of-core datasets. We have developed such a MATLAB-based solver and used it to train a collection of recognition systems for articulated pose estimation, facial analysis, 3D object recognition, and action classification, all with publicly-available code. This writeup describes the solver in detail.
1312.1752
Particle Swarm Optimization of Information-Content Weighting of Symbolic Aggregate Approximation
cs.NE cs.AI
Bio-inspired optimization algorithms have been gaining more popularity recently. One of the most important of these algorithms is particle swarm optimization (PSO). PSO is based on the collective intelligence of a swam of particles. Each particle explores a part of the search space looking for the optimal position and adjusts its position according to two factors; the first is its own experience and the second is the collective experience of the whole swarm. PSO has been successfully used to solve many optimization problems. In this work we use PSO to improve the performance of a well-known representation method of time series data which is the symbolic aggregate approximation (SAX). As with other time series representation methods, SAX results in loss of information when applied to represent time series. In this paper we use PSO to propose a new minimum distance WMD for SAX to remedy this problem. Unlike the original minimum distance, the new distance sets different weights to different segments of the time series according to their information content. This weighted minimum distance enhances the performance of SAX as we show through experiments using different time series datasets.
1312.1756
Joint Energy and Spectrum Cooperation for Cellular Communication Systems
cs.IT math.IT
Powered by renewable energy sources, cellular communication systems usually have different wireless traffic loads and available resources over time. To match their traffics, it is beneficial for two neighboring systems to cooperate in resource sharing when one is excessive in one resource (e.g., spectrum), while the other is sufficient in another (e.g., energy). In this paper, we propose a joint energy and spectrum cooperation scheme between different cellular systems to reduce their operational costs. When the two systems are fully cooperative in nature (e.g., belonging to the same entity), we formulate the cooperation problem as a convex optimization problem to minimize their weighted sum cost and obtain the optimal solution in closed form. We also study another partially cooperative scenario where the two systems have their own interests. We show that the two systems seek for partial cooperation as long as they find inter-system complementarity between the energy and spectrum resources. Under the partial cooperation conditions, we propose a distributed algorithm for the two systems to gradually and simultaneously reduce their costs from the non-cooperative benchmark to the Pareto optimum. This distributed algorithm also has proportional fair cost reduction by reducing each system's cost proportionally over iterations. Finally, we provide numerical results to validate the convergence of the distributed algorithm to the Pareto optimality and compare the centralized and distributed cost reduction approaches for fully and partially cooperative scenarios.
1312.1760
Towards Normalizing the Edit Distance Using a Genetic Algorithms Based Scheme
cs.NE cs.AI
The normalized edit distance is one of the distances derived from the edit distance. It is useful in some applications because it takes into account the lengths of the two strings compared. The normalized edit distance is not defined in terms of edit operations but rather in terms of the edit path. In this paper we propose a new derivative of the edit distance that also takes into consideration the lengths of the two strings, but the new distance is related directly to the edit distance. The particularity of the new distance is that it uses the genetic algorithms to set the values of the parameters it uses. We conduct experiments to test the new distance and we obtain promising results.
1312.1763
Optimal Error Rates for Interactive Coding II: Efficiency and List Decoding
cs.DS cs.IT math.IT
We study coding schemes for error correction in interactive communications. Such interactive coding schemes simulate any $n$-round interactive protocol using $N$ rounds over an adversarial channel that corrupts up to $\rho N$ transmissions. Important performance measures for a coding scheme are its maximum tolerable error rate $\rho$, communication complexity $N$, and computational complexity. We give the first coding scheme for the standard setting which performs optimally in all three measures: Our randomized non-adaptive coding scheme has a near-linear computational complexity and tolerates any error rate $\delta < 1/4$ with a linear $N = \Theta(n)$ communication complexity. This improves over prior results which each performed well in two of these measures. We also give results for other settings of interest, namely, the first computationally and communication efficient schemes that tolerate $\rho < \frac{2}{7}$ adaptively, $\rho < \frac{1}{3}$ if only one party is required to decode, and $\rho < \frac{1}{2}$ if list decoding is allowed. These are the optimal tolerable error rates for the respective settings. These coding schemes also have near linear computational and communication complexity. These results are obtained via two techniques: We give a general black-box reduction which reduces unique decoding, in various settings, to list decoding. We also show how to boost the computational and communication efficiency of any list decoder to become near linear.
1312.1764
Optimal Error Rates for Interactive Coding I: Adaptivity and Other Settings
cs.DS cs.IT math.IT
We consider the task of interactive communication in the presence of adversarial errors and present tight bounds on the tolerable error-rates in a number of different settings. Most significantly, we explore adaptive interactive communication where the communicating parties decide who should speak next based on the history of the interaction. Braverman and Rao [STOC'11] show that non-adaptively one can code for any constant error rate below 1/4 but not more. They asked whether this bound could be improved using adaptivity. We answer this open question in the affirmative (with a slightly different collection of resources): Our adaptive coding scheme tolerates any error rate below 2/7 and we show that tolerating a higher error rate than 1/3 is impossible. We also show that in the setting of Franklin et al. [CRYPTO'13], where parties share randomness not known to the adversary, adaptivity increases the tolerable error rate from 1/2 to 2/3. For list-decodable interactive communications, where each party outputs a constant size list of possible outcomes, the tight tolerable error rate is 1/2. Our negative results hold even for unbounded communication and computations, whereas for our positive results communication and computations are polynomially bounded. Most prior work considered coding schemes with linear amount of communication, while allowing unbounded computations. We argue that studying tolerable error rates in this relaxed context helps to identify a setting's intrinsic optimal error rate. We set forward a strong working hypothesis which stipulates that for any setting the maximum tolerable error rate is independent of many computational and communication complexity measures. We believe this hypothesis to be a powerful guideline for the design of simple, natural, and efficient coding schemes and for understanding the (im)possibilities of coding for interactive communications.
1312.1766
Matrix-Monotonic Optimization for MIMO Systems
cs.IT math.IT
For MIMO systems, due to the deployment of multiple antennas at both the transmitter and the receiver, the design variables e.g., precoders, equalizers, training sequences, etc. are usually matrices. It is well known that matrix operations are usually more complicated compared to their vector counterparts. In order to overcome the high complexity resulting from matrix variables, in this paper we investigate a class of elegant multi-objective optimization problems, namely matrix-monotonic optimization problems (MMOPs). In our work, various representative MIMO optimization problems are unified into a framework of matrix-monotonic optimization, which includes linear transceiver design, nonlinear transceiver design, training sequence design, radar waveform optimization, the corresponding robust design and so on as its special cases. Then exploiting the framework of matrix-monotonic optimization the optimal structures of the considered matrix variables can be derived first. Based on the optimal structure, the matrix-variate optimization problems can be greatly simplified into the ones with only vector variables. In particular, the dimension of the new vector variable is equal to the minimum number of columns and rows of the original matrix variable. Finally, we also extend our work to some more general cases with multiple matrix variables.
1312.1799
Space-Time Polar Coded Modulation
cs.IT math.IT
The polar codes are proven to be capacity-achieving and are shown to have equivalent or even better finite-length performance than the turbo/LDPC codes under some improved decoding algorithms over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. Polar coding is based on the so-called channel polarization phenomenon induced by a transform over the underlying binary-input channel. The channel polarization is found to be universal in many signal processing problems and has been applied to the coded modulation schemes. In this paper, the channel polarization is further extended to the multiple antenna transmission following a multilevel coding principle. The multiple-input multile-output (MIMO) channel under quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) are transformed into a series of synthesized binary-input channels under a three-stage channel transform. Based on this generalized channel polarization, the proposed space-time polar coded modulation (STPCM) scheme allows a joint optimization of the binary polar coding, modulation and MIMO transmission. In addition, a practical solution of polar code construction over the fading channels is also provided, where the fading channels are approximated by an AWGN channel which shares the same capacity with the original. The simulations over the MIMO channel with uncorrelated Rayleigh fast fading show that the proposed STPCM scheme can outperform the bit-interleaved turbo coded scheme in all the simulated cases, where the latter is adopted in many existing communication systems.
1312.1830
Quantization and Greed are Good: One bit Phase Retrieval, Robustness and Greedy Refinements
cs.IT math.IT math.ST stat.TH
In this paper, we study the problem of robust phase recovery. We investigate a novel approach based on extremely quantized (one-bit) phase-less measurements and a corresponding recovery scheme. The proposed approach has surprising robustness and stability properties and, unlike currently available methods, allows to efficiently perform phase recovery from measurements affected by severe (possibly unknown) non-linear perturbations, such as distortions (e.g. clipping). Beyond robustness, we show how our approach can be used within greedy approaches based on alternating minimization. In particular, we propose novel initialization schemes for the alternating minimization achieving favorable convergence properties with improved sample complexity.
1312.1847
Understanding Deep Architectures using a Recursive Convolutional Network
cs.LG
A key challenge in designing convolutional network models is sizing them appropriately. Many factors are involved in these decisions, including number of layers, feature maps, kernel sizes, etc. Complicating this further is the fact that each of these influence not only the numbers and dimensions of the activation units, but also the total number of parameters. In this paper we focus on assessing the independent contributions of three of these linked variables: The numbers of layers, feature maps, and parameters. To accomplish this, we employ a recursive convolutional network whose weights are tied between layers; this allows us to vary each of the three factors in a controlled setting. We find that while increasing the numbers of layers and parameters each have clear benefit, the number of feature maps (and hence dimensionality of the representation) appears ancillary, and finds most of its benefit through the introduction of more weights. Our results (i) empirically confirm the notion that adding layers alone increases computational power, within the context of convolutional layers, and (ii) suggest that precise sizing of convolutional feature map dimensions is itself of little concern; more attention should be paid to the number of parameters in these layers instead.
1312.1858
How Santa Fe Ants Evolve
cs.NE
The Santa Fe Ant model problem has been extensively used to investigate, test and evaluate Evolutionary Computing systems and methods over the past two decades. There is however no literature on its program structures that are systematically used for fitness improvement, the geometries of those structures and their dynamics during optimization. This paper analyzes the Santa Fe Ant Problem using a new phenotypic schema and landscape analysis based on executed instruction sequences. For the first time we detail systematic structural features that give high fitness and the evolutionary dynamics of such structures. The new schema avoids variances due to introns. We develop a phenotypic variation method that tests the new understanding of the landscape. We also develop a modified function set that tests newly identified synchronization constraints. We obtain favorable computational efforts compared to those in the literature, on testing the new variation and function set on both the Santa Fe Trail, and the more computationally demanding Los Altos Trail. Our findings suggest that for the Santa Fe Ant problem, a perspective of program assembly from repetition of highly fit responses to trail conditions leads to better analysis and performance.
1312.1860
Flexible queries in XML native databases
cs.IR cs.DB
To date, most of the XML native databases (DB) flexible querying systems are based on exploiting the tree structure of their semi structured data (SSD). However, it becomes important to test the efficiency of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) formalism for this type of data since it has been proved a great performance in the field of information retrieval (IR). So, the IR in XML databases based on FCA is mainly based on the use of the lattice structure. Each concept of this lattice can be interpreted as a pair (response, query). In this work, we provide a new flexible modeling of XML DB based on fuzzy FCA as a first step towards flexible querying of SSD.
1312.1870
Energy-Efficient, Large-scale Distributed-Antenna System (L-DAS) for Multiple Users
cs.IT math.IT
Large-scale distributed-antenna system (L-DAS) with very large number of distributed antennas, possibly up to a few hundred antennas, is considered. A few major issues of the L-DAS, such as high latency, energy consumption, computational complexity, and large feedback (signaling) overhead, are identified. The potential capability of the L-DAS is illuminated in terms of an energy efficiency (EE) throughout the paper. We firstly and generally model the power consumption of an L-DAS, and formulate an EE maximization problem. To tackle two crucial issues, namely the huge computational complexity and large amount of feedback (signaling) information, we propose a channel-gain-based antenna selection (AS) method and an interference-based user clustering (UC) method. The original problem is then split into multiple subproblems by a cluster, and each cluster's precoding and power control are managed in parallel for high EE. Simulation results reveal that i) using all antennas for zero-forcing multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) is energy inefficient if there is nonnegligible overhead power consumption on MU-MIMO processing, and ii) increasing the number of antennas does not necessarily result in a high EE. Furthermore, the results validate and underpin the EE merit of the proposed L-DAS complied with the AS, UC, precoding, and power control by comparing with non-clustering L-DAS and colocated antenna systems.
1312.1882
Shannon Sampling and Parseval Frames on Compact Manifolds
cs.IT math.FA math.IT
Our article is a summary of some results for Riemannian manifolds that were obtained in \cite{gpes}-\cite{Pesssubm}. To the best of our knowledge these are the pioneering papers which contain the most general results about frames, Shannon sampling, and cubature formulas on compact and non-compact Riemannian manifolds. In particular, the paper \cite{gpes} gives an "end point" construction of tight localized frames on homogeneous compact manifolds. The paper \cite{Pessubm} is the first systematic development of localized frames on compact domains in Euclidean spaces.
1312.1887
Constraints on the search space of argumentation
cs.AI
Drawing from research on computational models of argumentation (particularly the Carneades Argumentation System), we explore the graphical representation of arguments in a dispute; then, comparing two different traditions on the limits of the justification of decisions, and devising an intermediate, semi-formal, model, we also show that it can shed light on the theory of dispute resolution. We conclude our paper with an observation on the usefulness of highly constrained reasoning for Online Dispute Resolution systems. Restricting the search space of arguments exclusively to reasons proposed by the parties (vetoing the introduction of new arguments by the human or artificial arbitrator) is the only way to introduce some kind of decidability -- together with foreseeability -- in the argumentation system.
1312.1897
Bootstrapped Grouping of Results to Ambiguous Person Name Queries
cs.IR
Some of the main ranking features of today's search engines reflect result popularity and are based on ranking models, such as PageRank, implicit feedback aggregation, and more. While such features yield satisfactory results for a wide range of queries, they aggravate the problem of search for ambiguous entities: Searching for a person yields satisfactory results only if the person we are looking for is represented by a high-ranked Web page and all required information are contained in this page. Otherwise, the user has to either reformulate/refine the query or manually inspect low-ranked results to find the person in question. A possible approach to solve this problem is to cluster the results, so that each cluster represents one of the persons occurring in the answer set. However clustering search results has proven to be a difficult endeavor by itself, where the clusters are typically of moderate quality. A wealth of useful information about persons occurs in Web 2.0 platforms, such as LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Facebook, etc. Being human-generated, the information on these platforms is clean, focused, and already disambiguated. We show that when searching for ambiguous person names the information from such platforms can be bootstrapped to group the results according to the individuals occurring in them. We have evaluated our methods on a hand-labeled dataset of around 5,000 Web pages retrieved from Google queries on 50 ambiguous person names.