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1312.4108
A MapReduce based distributed SVM algorithm for binary classification
cs.LG cs.DC
Although Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm has a high generalization property to classify for unseen examples after training phase and it has small loss value, the algorithm is not suitable for real-life classification and regression problems. SVMs cannot solve hundreds of thousands examples in training dataset. In previous studies on distributed machine learning algorithms, SVM is trained over a costly and preconfigured computer environment. In this research, we present a MapReduce based distributed parallel SVM training algorithm for binary classification problems. This work shows how to distribute optimization problem over cloud computing systems with MapReduce technique. In the second step of this work, we used statistical learning theory to find the predictive hypothesis that minimize our empirical risks from hypothesis spaces that created with reduce function of MapReduce. The results of this research are important for training of big datasets for SVM algorithm based classification problems. We provided that iterative training of split dataset with MapReduce technique; accuracy of the classifier function will converge to global optimal classifier function's accuracy in finite iteration size. The algorithm performance was measured on samples from letter recognition and pen-based recognition of handwritten digits dataset.
1312.4124
A robust Iris recognition method on adverse conditions
cs.CV
As a stable biometric system, iris has recently attracted great attention among the researchers. However, research is still needed to provide appropriate solutions to ensure the resistance of the system against error factors. The present study has tried to apply a mask to the image so that the unexpected factors affecting the location of the iris can be removed. So, pupil localization will be faster and robust. Then to locate the exact location of the iris, a simple stage of boundary displacement due to the Canny edge detector has been applied. Then, with searching left and right IRIS edge point, outer radios of IRIS will be detect. Through the process of extracting the iris features, it has been sought to obtain the distinctive iris texture features by using a discrete stationary wavelets transform 2-D (DSWT2). Using DSWT2 tool and symlet 4 wavelet, distinctive features are extracted. To reduce the computational cost, the features obtained from the application of the wavelet have been investigated and a feature selection procedure, using similarity criteria, has been implemented. Finally, the iris matching has been performed using a semi-correlation criterion. The accuracy of the proposed method for localization on CASIA-v1, CASIA-v3 is 99.73%, 98.24% and 97.04%, respectively. The accuracy of the feature extraction proposed method for CASIA3 iris images database is 97.82%, which confirms the efficiency of the proposed method.
1312.4125
Model Counting of Query Expressions: Limitations of Propositional Methods
cs.DB cs.CC
Query evaluation in tuple-independent probabilistic databases is the problem of computing the probability of an answer to a query given independent probabilities of the individual tuples in a database instance. There are two main approaches to this problem: (1) in `grounded inference' one first obtains the lineage for the query and database instance as a Boolean formula, then performs weighted model counting on the lineage (i.e., computes the probability of the lineage given probabilities of its independent Boolean variables); (2) in methods known as `lifted inference' or `extensional query evaluation', one exploits the high-level structure of the query as a first-order formula. Although it is widely believed that lifted inference is strictly more powerful than grounded inference on the lineage alone, no formal separation has previously been shown for query evaluation. In this paper we show such a formal separation for the first time. We exhibit a class of queries for which model counting can be done in polynomial time using extensional query evaluation, whereas the algorithms used in state-of-the-art exact model counters on their lineages provably require exponential time. Our lower bounds on the running times of these exact model counters follow from new exponential size lower bounds on the kinds of d-DNNF representations of the lineages that these model counters (either explicitly or implicitly) produce. Though some of these queries have been studied before, no non-trivial lower bounds on the sizes of these representations for these queries were previously known.
1312.4132
An introduction to synchronous self-learning Pareto strategy
cs.NE
In last decades optimization and control of complex systems that possessed various conflicted objectives simultaneously attracted an incremental interest of scientists. This is because of the vast applications of these systems in various fields of real life engineering phenomena that are generally multi modal, non convex and multi criterion. Hence, many researchers utilized versatile intelligent models such as Pareto based techniques, game theory (cooperative and non cooperative games), neuro evolutionary systems, fuzzy logic and advanced neural networks for handling these types of problems. In this paper a novel method called Synchronous Self Learning Pareto Strategy Algorithm (SSLPSA) is presented which utilizes Evolutionary Computing (EC), Swarm Intelligence (SI) techniques and adaptive Classical Self Organizing Map (CSOM) simultaneously incorporating with a data shuffling behavior. Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) which attempt to simulate the phenomenon of natural evolution are powerful numerical optimization algorithms that reach an approximate global maximum of a complex multi variable function over a wide search space and swarm base technique can improved the intensity and the robustness in EA. CSOM is a neural network capable of learning and can improve the quality of obtained optimal Pareto front. To prove the efficient performance of proposed algorithm, authors utilized some well known benchmark test functions. Obtained results indicate that the cited method is best suit in the case of vector optimization.
1312.4149
Autonomous Quantum Perceptron Neural Network
cs.NE
Recently, with the rapid development of technology, there are a lot of applications require to achieve low-cost learning. However the computational power of classical artificial neural networks, they are not capable to provide low-cost learning. In contrast, quantum neural networks may be representing a good computational alternate to classical neural network approaches, based on the computational power of quantum bit (qubit) over the classical bit. In this paper we present a new computational approach to the quantum perceptron neural network can achieve learning in low-cost computation. The proposed approach has only one neuron can construct self-adaptive activation operators capable to accomplish the learning process in a limited number of iterations and, thereby, reduce the overall computational cost. The proposed approach is capable to construct its own set of activation operators to be applied widely in both quantum and classical applications to overcome the linearity limitation of classical perceptron. The computational power of the proposed approach is illustrated via solving variety of problems where promising and comparable results are given.
1312.4162
New Method for Localization and Human Being Detection using UWB Technology: Helpful Solution for Rescue Robots
cs.RO
Two challenges for rescue robots are to detect human beings and to have an accurate positioning system. In indoor positioning, GPS receivers cannot be used due to the reflections or attenuation caused by obstacles. To detect human beings, sensors such as thermal camera, ultrasonic and microphone can be embedded on the rescue robot. The drawback of these sensors is the detection range. These sensors have to be in close proximity to the victim in order to detect it. UWB technology is then very helpful to ensure precise localization of the rescue robot inside the disaster site and detect human beings. We propose a new method to both detect human beings and locate the rescue robot at the same time. To achieve these goals we optimize the design of UWB pulses based on B-splines. The spectral effectiveness is optimized so the symbols are easier to detect and the mitigation with noise is reduced. Our positioning system performs to locate the rescue robot with an accuracy about 2 centimeters. During some tests we discover that UWB signal characteristics abruptly change after passing through a human body. Our system uses this particular signature to detect human body.
1312.4176
Distributed k-means algorithm
cs.LG cs.DC
In this paper we provide a fully distributed implementation of the k-means clustering algorithm, intended for wireless sensor networks where each agent is endowed with a possibly high-dimensional observation (e.g., position, humidity, temperature, etc.) The proposed algorithm, by means of one-hop communication, partitions the agents into measure-dependent groups that have small in-group and large out-group "distances". Since the partitions may not have a relation with the topology of the network--members of the same clusters may not be spatially close--the algorithm is provided with a mechanism to compute the clusters'centroids even when the clusters are disconnected in several sub-clusters.The results of the proposed distributed algorithm coincide, in terms of minimization of the objective function, with the centralized k-means algorithm. Some numerical examples illustrate the capabilities of the proposed solution.
1312.4182
Adaptive Protocols for Interactive Communication
cs.DS cs.IT math.IT
How much adversarial noise can protocols for interactive communication tolerate? This question was examined by Braverman and Rao (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, 2014) for the case of "robust" protocols, where each party sends messages only in fixed and predetermined rounds. We consider a new class of non-robust protocols for Interactive Communication, which we call adaptive protocols. Such protocols adapt structurally to the noise induced by the channel in the sense that both the order of speaking, and the length of the protocol may vary depending on observed noise. We define models that capture adaptive protocols and study upper and lower bounds on the permissible noise rate in these models. When the length of the protocol may adaptively change according to the noise, we demonstrate a protocol that tolerates noise rates up to $1/3$. When the order of speaking may adaptively change as well, we demonstrate a protocol that tolerates noise rates up to $2/3$. Hence, adaptivity circumvents an impossibility result of $1/4$ on the fraction of tolerable noise (Braverman and Rao, 2014).
1312.4185
Comment: Causal entropic forces
cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SY
In this comment I argue that the causal entropy proposed in [1] is state-independent and the entropic force is zero for state-independent noise in a discrete time formulation and that the causal entropy description is incomplete in the continuous time case.
1312.4190
One-Shot-Learning Gesture Recognition using HOG-HOF Features
cs.CV
The purpose of this paper is to describe one-shot-learning gesture recognition systems developed on the \textit{ChaLearn Gesture Dataset}. We use RGB and depth images and combine appearance (Histograms of Oriented Gradients) and motion descriptors (Histogram of Optical Flow) for parallel temporal segmentation and recognition. The Quadratic-Chi distance family is used to measure differences between histograms to capture cross-bin relationships. We also propose a new algorithm for trimming videos --- to remove all the unimportant frames from videos. We present two methods that use combination of HOG-HOF descriptors together with variants of Dynamic Time Warping technique. Both methods outperform other published methods and help narrow down the gap between human performance and algorithms on this task. The code has been made publicly available in the MLOSS repository.
1312.4207
On the Energy Self-Sustainability of IoT via Distributed Compressed Sensing
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
This paper advocates the use of the distributed compressed sensing (DCS) paradigm to deploy energy harvesting (EH) Internet of Thing (IoT) devices for energy self-sustainability. We consider networks with signal/energy models that capture the fact that both the collected signals and the harvested energy of different devices can exhibit correlation. We provide theoretical analysis on the performance of both the classical compressive sensing (CS) approach and the proposed distributed CS (DCS)-based approach to data acquisition for EH IoT. Moreover, we perform an in-depth comparison of the proposed DCS-based approach against the distributed source coding (DSC) system. These performance characterizations and comparisons embody the effect of various system phenomena and parameters including signal correlation, EH correlation, network size, and energy availability level. Our results unveil that, the proposed approach offers significant increase in data gathering capability with respect to the CS-based approach, and offers a substantial reduction of the mean-squared error distortion with respect to the DSC system.
1312.4209
Feature Graph Architectures
cs.LG
In this article we propose feature graph architectures (FGA), which are deep learning systems employing a structured initialisation and training method based on a feature graph which facilitates improved generalisation performance compared with a standard shallow architecture. The goal is to explore alternative perspectives on the problem of deep network training. We evaluate FGA performance for deep SVMs on some experimental datasets, and show how generalisation and stability results may be derived for these models. We describe the effect of permutations on the model accuracy, and give a criterion for the optimal permutation in terms of feature correlations. The experimental results show that the algorithm produces robust and significant test set improvements over a standard shallow SVM training method for a range of datasets. These gains are achieved with a moderate increase in time complexity.
1312.4224
A paradox in community detection
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Recent research has shown that virtually all algorithms aimed at the identification of communities in networks are affected by the same main limitation: the impossibility to detect communities, even when these are well-defined, if the average value of the difference between internal and external node degrees does not exceed a strictly positive value, in literature known as detectability threshold. Here, we counterintuitively show that the value of this threshold is inversely proportional to the intrinsic quality of communities: the detection of well-defined modules is thus more difficult than the identification of ill-defined communities.
1312.4231
Dependence space of matroids and its application to attribute reduction
cs.AI
Attribute reduction is a basic issue in knowledge representation and data mining. Rough sets provide a theoretical foundation for the issue. Matroids generalized from matrices have been widely used in many fields, particularly greedy algorithm design, which plays an important role in attribute reduction. Therefore, it is meaningful to combine matroids with rough sets to solve the optimization problems. In this paper, we introduce an existing algebraic structure called dependence space to study the reduction problem in terms of matroids. First, a dependence space of matroids is constructed. Second, the characterizations for the space such as consistent sets and reducts are studied through matroids. Finally, we investigate matroids by the means of the space and present two expressions for their bases. In a word, this paper provides new approaches to study attribute reduction.
1312.4232
Geometric lattice structure of covering and its application to attribute reduction through matroids
cs.AI
The reduction of covering decision systems is an important problem in data mining, and covering-based rough sets serve as an efficient technique to process the problem. Geometric lattices have been widely used in many fields, especially greedy algorithm design which plays an important role in the reduction problems. Therefore, it is meaningful to combine coverings with geometric lattices to solve the optimization problems. In this paper, we obtain geometric lattices from coverings through matroids and then apply them to the issue of attribute reduction. First, a geometric lattice structure of a covering is constructed through transversal matroids. Then its atoms are studied and used to describe the lattice. Second, considering that all the closed sets of a finite matroid form a geometric lattice, we propose a dependence space through matroids and study the attribute reduction issues of the space, which realizes the application of geometric lattices to attribute reduction. Furthermore, a special type of information system is taken as an example to illustrate the application. In a word, this work points out an interesting view, namely, geometric lattice to study the attribute reduction issues of information systems.
1312.4234
Connectedness of graphs and its application to connected matroids through covering-based rough sets
cs.AI
Graph theoretical ideas are highly utilized by computer science fields especially data mining. In this field, a data structure can be designed in the form of tree. Covering is a widely used form of data representation in data mining and covering-based rough sets provide a systematic approach to this type of representation. In this paper, we study the connectedness of graphs through covering-based rough sets and apply it to connected matroids. First, we present an approach to inducing a covering by a graph, and then study the connectedness of the graph from the viewpoint of the covering approximation operators. Second, we construct a graph from a matroid, and find the matroid and the graph have the same connectedness, which makes us to use covering-based rough sets to study connected matroids. In summary, this paper provides a new approach to studying graph theory and matroid theory.
1312.4252
Three New Families of Zero-difference Balanced Functions with Applications
cs.IT math.IT
Zero-difference balanced (ZDB) functions integrate a number of subjects in combinatorics and algebra, and have many applications in coding theory, cryptography and communications engineering. In this paper, three new families of ZDB functions are presented. The first construction, inspired by the recent work \cite{Cai13}, gives ZDB functions defined on the abelian groups $(\gf(q_1) \times \cdots \times \gf(q_k), +)$ with new and flexible parameters. The other two constructions are based on $2$-cyclotomic cosets and yield ZDB functions on $\Z_n$ with new parameters. The parameters of optimal constant composition codes, optimal and perfect difference systems of sets obtained from these new families of ZDB functions are also summarized.
1312.4259
Modification of Contract Net Protocol(CNP) : A Rule-Updation Approach
cs.MA
Coordination in multi-agent system is very essential, in order to perform complex tasks and lead MAS towards its goal. Also, the member agents of multi-agent system should be autonomous as well as collaborative to accomplish the complex task for which multi-agent system is designed specifically. Contract-Net Protocol (CNP) is one of the coordination mechanisms which is used by multi-agent systems which prefer coordination through interaction protocols. In order to overcome the limitations of conventional CNP, this paper proposes a modification in conventional CNP called updated-CNP. Updated-CNP is an effort towards updating of a CNP in terms of its limitations of modifiability and communication overhead. The limitation of the modification of tasks, if the task requirements change at any instance, corresponding to tasks which are allocated to contractor agents by manager agents is possible in our updated-CNP version, which was not possible in the case of conventional-CNP, as it has to be restarted in the case of task modification. This in turn will be reducing the communication overhead of CNP, which is time taken by various agents using CNP to pass messages to each other. For the illustration of the updated CNP, we have used a sound predator-prey case study.
1312.4280
Uniqueness Conditions for A Class of l0-Minimization Problems
cs.IT math.IT math.OC
We consider a class of l0-minimization problems, which is to search for the partial sparsest solution to an underdetermined linear system with additional constraints. We introduce several concepts, including lp-induced norm (0 < p < 1), maximal scaled spark and scaled mutual coherence, to develop several new uniqueness conditions for the partial sparsest solution to this class of l0-minimization problems. A further improvement of some of these uniqueness criteria have been also achieved through the so-called concepts such as maximal scaled (sub)coherence rank.
1312.4283
On Load Shedding in Complex Event Processing
cs.DB
Complex Event Processing (CEP) is a stream processing model that focuses on detecting event patterns in continuous event streams. While the CEP model has gained popularity in the research communities and commercial technologies, the problem of gracefully degrading performance under heavy load in the presence of resource constraints, or load shedding, has been largely overlooked. CEP is similar to "classical" stream data management, but addresses a substantially different class of queries. This unfortunately renders the load shedding algorithms developed for stream data processing inapplicable. In this paper we study CEP load shedding under various resource constraints. We formalize broad classes of CEP load-shedding scenarios as different optimization problems. We demonstrate an array of complexity results that reveal the hardness of these problems and construct shedding algorithms with performance guarantees. Our results shed some light on the difficulty of developing load-shedding algorithms that maximize utility.
1312.4287
Strategic Argumentation is NP-Complete
cs.LO cs.AI cs.CC
In this paper we study the complexity of strategic argumentation for dialogue games. A dialogue game is a 2-player game where the parties play arguments. We show how to model dialogue games in a skeptical, non-monotonic formalism, and we show that the problem of deciding what move (set of rules) to play at each turn is an NP-complete problem.
1312.4314
Learning Factored Representations in a Deep Mixture of Experts
cs.LG
Mixtures of Experts combine the outputs of several "expert" networks, each of which specializes in a different part of the input space. This is achieved by training a "gating" network that maps each input to a distribution over the experts. Such models show promise for building larger networks that are still cheap to compute at test time, and more parallelizable at training time. In this this work, we extend the Mixture of Experts to a stacked model, the Deep Mixture of Experts, with multiple sets of gating and experts. This exponentially increases the number of effective experts by associating each input with a combination of experts at each layer, yet maintains a modest model size. On a randomly translated version of the MNIST dataset, we find that the Deep Mixture of Experts automatically learns to develop location-dependent ("where") experts at the first layer, and class-specific ("what") experts at the second layer. In addition, we see that the different combinations are in use when the model is applied to a dataset of speech monophones. These demonstrate effective use of all expert combinations.
1312.4318
Computing Scalable Multivariate Glocal Invariants of Large (Brain-) Graphs
cs.SY q-bio.QM
Graphs are quickly emerging as a leading abstraction for the representation of data. One important application domain originates from an emerging discipline called "connectomics". Connectomics studies the brain as a graph; vertices correspond to neurons (or collections thereof) and edges correspond to structural or functional connections between them. To explore the variability of connectomes---to address both basic science questions regarding the structure of the brain, and medical health questions about psychiatry and neurology---one can study the topological properties of these brain-graphs. We define multivariate glocal graph invariants: these are features of the graph that capture various local and global topological properties of the graphs. We show that the collection of features can collectively be computed via a combination of daisy-chaining, sparse matrix representation and computations, and efficient approximations. Our custom open-source Python package serves as a back-end to a Web-service that we have created to enable researchers to upload graphs, and download the corresponding invariants in a number of different formats. Moreover, we built this package to support distributed processing on multicore machines. This is therefore an enabling technology for network science, lowering the barrier of entry by providing tools to biologists and analysts who otherwise lack these capabilities. As a demonstration, we run our code on 120 brain-graphs, each with approximately 16M vertices and up to 90M edges.
1312.4346
Teleoperation System Using Past Image Records Considering Narrow Communication Band
cs.RO cs.CV
Teleoperation is necessary when the robot is applied to real missions, for example surveillance, search and rescue. We proposed teleoperation system using past image records (SPIR). SPIR virtually generates the bird's-eye view image by overlaying the CG model of the robot at the corresponding current position on the background image which is captured from the camera mounted on the robot at a past time. The problem for SPIR is that the communication bandwidth is often narrow in some teleoperation tasks. In this case, the candidates of background image of SPIR are few and the position of the robot is often delayed. In this study, we propose zoom function for insufficiency of candidates of the background image and additional interpolation lines for the delay of the position data of the robot. To evaluate proposed system, an outdoor experiments are carried out. The outdoor experiment is conducted on a training course of a driving school.
1312.4353
Abstraction in decision-makers with limited information processing capabilities
cs.AI cs.IT math.IT stat.ML
A distinctive property of human and animal intelligence is the ability to form abstractions by neglecting irrelevant information which allows to separate structure from noise. From an information theoretic point of view abstractions are desirable because they allow for very efficient information processing. In artificial systems abstractions are often implemented through computationally costly formations of groups or clusters. In this work we establish the relation between the free-energy framework for decision making and rate-distortion theory and demonstrate how the application of rate-distortion for decision-making leads to the emergence of abstractions. We argue that abstractions are induced due to a limit in information processing capacity.
1312.4354
Decomposition of Optical Flow on the Sphere
math.OC cs.CV
We propose a number of variational regularisation methods for the estimation and decomposition of motion fields on the $2$-sphere. While motion estimation is based on the optical flow equation, the presented decomposition models are motivated by recent trends in image analysis. In particular we treat $u+v$ decomposition as well as hierarchical decomposition. Helmholtz decomposition of motion fields is obtained as a natural by-product of the chosen numerical method based on vector spherical harmonics. All models are tested on time-lapse microscopy data depicting fluorescently labelled endodermal cells of a zebrafish embryo.
1312.4359
Legendre transform structure and extremal properties of the relative Fisher information
cond-mat.stat-mech cs.IT math-ph math.IT math.MP
Variational extremization of the relative Fisher information (RFI, hereafter) is performed. Reciprocity relations, akin to those of thermodynamics are derived, employing the extremal results of the RFI expressed in terms of probability amplitudes. A time independent Schr\"{o}dinger-like equation (Schr\"{o}dinger-like link) for the RFI is derived. The concomitant Legendre transform structure (LTS, hereafter) is developed by utilizing a generalized RFI-Euler theorem, which shows that the entire mathematical structure of thermodynamics translates into the RFI framework, both for equilibrium and non-equilibrium cases. The qualitatively distinct nature of the present results \textit{vis-\'{a}-vis} those of prior studies utilizing the Shannon entropy and/or the Fisher information measure (FIM, hereafter) is discussed. A principled relationship between the RFI and the FIM frameworks is derived. The utility of this relationship is demonstrated by an example wherein the energy eigenvalues of the Schr\"{o}dinger-like link for the RFI is inferred solely using the quantum mechanical virial theorem and the LTS of the RFI.
1312.4370
Sampling-based Learning Control for Quantum Systems with Hamiltonian Uncertainties
cs.SY
Robust control design for quantum systems has been recognized as a key task in the development of practical quantum technology. In this paper, we present a systematic numerical methodology of sampling-based learning control (SLC) for control design of quantum systems with Hamiltonian uncertainties. The SLC method includes two steps of "training" and "testing and evaluation". In the training step, an augmented system is constructed by sampling uncertainties according to possible distributions of uncertainty parameters. A gradient flow based learning and optimization algorithm is adopted to find the control for the augmented system. In the process of testing and evaluation, a number of samples obtained through sampling the uncertainties are tested to evaluate the control performance. Numerical results demonstrate the success of the SLC approach. The SLC method has potential applications for robust control design of quantum systems.
1312.4378
Is Non-Unique Decoding Necessary?
cs.IT math.IT
In multi-terminal communication systems, signals carrying messages meant for different destinations are often observed together at any given destination receiver. Han and Kobayashi (1981) proposed a receiving strategy which performs a joint unique decoding of messages of interest along with a subset of messages which are not of interest. It is now well-known that this provides an achievable region which is, in general, larger than if the receiver treats all messages not of interest as noise. Nair and El Gamal (2009) and Chong, Motani, Garg, and El Gamal (2008) independently proposed a generalization called indirect or non-unique decoding where the receiver uses the codebook structure of the messages to uniquely decode only its messages of interest. Non-unique decoding has since been used in various scenarios. The main result in this paper is to provide an interpretation and a systematic proof technique for why non-unique decoding, in all known cases where it has been employed, can be replaced by a particularly designed joint unique decoding strategy, without any penalty from a rate region viewpoint.
1312.4384
Rectifying Self Organizing Maps for Automatic Concept Learning from Web Images
cs.CV cs.LG cs.NE
We attack the problem of learning concepts automatically from noisy web image search results. Going beyond low level attributes, such as colour and texture, we explore weakly-labelled datasets for the learning of higher level concepts, such as scene categories. The idea is based on discovering common characteristics shared among subsets of images by posing a method that is able to organise the data while eliminating irrelevant instances. We propose a novel clustering and outlier detection method, namely Rectifying Self Organizing Maps (RSOM). Given an image collection returned for a concept query, RSOM provides clusters pruned from outliers. Each cluster is used to train a model representing a different characteristics of the concept. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art studies on the task of learning low-level concepts, and it is competitive in learning higher level concepts as well. It is capable to work at large scale with no supervision through exploiting the available sources.
1312.4400
Network In Network
cs.NE cs.CV cs.LG
We propose a novel deep network structure called "Network In Network" (NIN) to enhance model discriminability for local patches within the receptive field. The conventional convolutional layer uses linear filters followed by a nonlinear activation function to scan the input. Instead, we build micro neural networks with more complex structures to abstract the data within the receptive field. We instantiate the micro neural network with a multilayer perceptron, which is a potent function approximator. The feature maps are obtained by sliding the micro networks over the input in a similar manner as CNN; they are then fed into the next layer. Deep NIN can be implemented by stacking mutiple of the above described structure. With enhanced local modeling via the micro network, we are able to utilize global average pooling over feature maps in the classification layer, which is easier to interpret and less prone to overfitting than traditional fully connected layers. We demonstrated the state-of-the-art classification performances with NIN on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, and reasonable performances on SVHN and MNIST datasets.
1312.4405
Learning Deep Representations By Distributed Random Samplings
cs.LG
In this paper, we propose an extremely simple deep model for the unsupervised nonlinear dimensionality reduction -- deep distributed random samplings, which performs like a stack of unsupervised bootstrap aggregating. First, its network structure is novel: each layer of the network is a group of mutually independent $k$-centers clusterings. Second, its learning method is extremely simple: the $k$ centers of each clustering are only $k$ randomly selected examples from the training data; for small-scale data sets, the $k$ centers are further randomly reconstructed by a simple cyclic-shift operation. Experimental results on nonlinear dimensionality reduction show that the proposed method can learn abstract representations on both large-scale and small-scale problems, and meanwhile is much faster than deep neural networks on large-scale problems.
1312.4415
Adaptive Penalty-Based Distributed Stochastic Convex Optimization
math.OC cs.DC cs.MA
In this work, we study the task of distributed optimization over a network of learners in which each learner possesses a convex cost function, a set of affine equality constraints, and a set of convex inequality constraints. We propose a fully-distributed adaptive diffusion algorithm based on penalty methods that allows the network to cooperatively optimize the global cost function, which is defined as the sum of the individual costs over the network, subject to all constraints. We show that when small constant step-sizes are employed, the expected distance between the optimal solution vector and that obtained at each node in the network can be made arbitrarily small. Two distinguishing features of the proposed solution relative to other related approaches is that the developed strategy does not require the use of projections and is able to adapt to and track drifts in the location of the minimizer due to changes in the constraints or in the aggregate cost itself. The proposed strategy is also able to cope with changing network topology, is robust to network disruptions, and does not require global information or rely on central processors.
1312.4423
Achievable Diversity-Rate Tradeoff of MIMO AF Relaying Systems with MMSE Transceivers
cs.IT math.IT
This paper investigates the diversity order of the minimum mean squared error (MMSE) based optimal transceivers in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying systems. While the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) analysis accurately predicts the behavior of the MMSE receiver for the positive multiplexing gain, it turned out that the performance is very unpredictable via DMT for the case of fixed rates, because MMSE strategies exhibit a complicated rate dependent behavior. In this paper, we establish the diversity-rate tradeoff performance of MIMO AF relaying systems with the MMSE transceivers as a closed-form for all fixed rates, thereby providing a complete characterization of the diversity order together with the earlier work on DMT.
1312.4425
An Ontology-based Model for Indexing and Retrieval
cs.IR
Starting from an unsolved problem of information retrieval this paper presents an ontology-based model for indexing and retrieval. The model combines the methods and experiences of cognitive-to-interpret indexing languages with the strengths and possibilities of formal knowledge representation. The core component of the model uses inferences along the paths of typed relations between the entities of a knowledge representation for enabling the determination of hit quantities in the context of retrieval processes. The entities are arranged in aspect-oriented facets to ensure a consistent hierarchical structure. The possible consequences for indexing and retrieval are discussed.
1312.4426
Optimization for Compressed Sensing: the Simplex Method and Kronecker Sparsification
stat.ML cs.LG
In this paper we present two new approaches to efficiently solve large-scale compressed sensing problems. These two ideas are independent of each other and can therefore be used either separately or together. We consider all possibilities. For the first approach, we note that the zero vector can be taken as the initial basic (infeasible) solution for the linear programming problem and therefore, if the true signal is very sparse, some variants of the simplex method can be expected to take only a small number of pivots to arrive at a solution. We implemented one such variant and demonstrate a dramatic improvement in computation time on very sparse signals. The second approach requires a redesigned sensing mechanism in which the vector signal is stacked into a matrix. This allows us to exploit the Kronecker compressed sensing (KCS) mechanism. We show that the Kronecker sensing requires stronger conditions for perfect recovery compared to the original vector problem. However, the Kronecker sensing, modeled correctly, is a much sparser linear optimization problem. Hence, algorithms that benefit from sparse problem representation, such as interior-point methods, can solve the Kronecker sensing problems much faster than the corresponding vector problem. In our numerical studies, we demonstrate a ten-fold improvement in the computation time.
1312.4461
Low-Rank Approximations for Conditional Feedforward Computation in Deep Neural Networks
cs.LG
Scalability properties of deep neural networks raise key research questions, particularly as the problems considered become larger and more challenging. This paper expands on the idea of conditional computation introduced by Bengio, et. al., where the nodes of a deep network are augmented by a set of gating units that determine when a node should be calculated. By factorizing the weight matrix into a low-rank approximation, an estimation of the sign of the pre-nonlinearity activation can be efficiently obtained. For networks using rectified-linear hidden units, this implies that the computation of a hidden unit with an estimated negative pre-nonlinearity can be ommitted altogether, as its value will become zero when nonlinearity is applied. For sparse neural networks, this can result in considerable speed gains. Experimental results using the MNIST and SVHN data sets with a fully-connected deep neural network demonstrate the performance robustness of the proposed scheme with respect to the error introduced by the conditional computation process.
1312.4468
Extremality for Gallager's Reliability Function $E_0$
cs.IT math.IT
We describe certain extremalities for Gallager's $E_0$ function evaluated under the uniform input distribution for binary input discrete memoryless channels. The results characterize the extremality of the $E_0(\rho)$ curves of the binary erasure channel and the binary symmetric channel among all the $E_0(\rho)$ curves that can be generated by the class of binary discrete memoryless channels whose $E_0(\rho)$ curves pass through a given point $(\rho_0, e_0)$, for some $\rho_0 > -1$.
1312.4476
Social Media Monitoring of the Campaigns for the 2013 German Bundestag Elections on Facebook and Twitter
cs.SI cs.CY
As more and more people use social media to communicate their view and perception of elections, researchers have increasingly been collecting and analyzing data from social media platforms. Our research focuses on social media communication related to the 2013 election of the German parlia-ment [translation: Bundestagswahl 2013]. We constructed several social media datasets using data from Facebook and Twitter. First, we identified the most relevant candidates (n=2,346) and checked whether they maintained social media accounts. The Facebook data was collected in November 2013 for the period of January 2009 to October 2013. On Facebook we identified 1,408 Facebook walls containing approximately 469,000 posts. Twitter data was collected between June and December 2013 finishing with the constitution of the government. On Twitter we identified 1,009 candidates and 76 other agents, for example, journalists. We estimated the number of relevant tweets to exceed eight million for the period from July 27 to September 27 alone. In this document we summarize past research in the literature, discuss possibilities for research with our data set, explain the data collection procedures, and provide a description of the data and a discussion of issues for archiving and dissemination of social media data.
1312.4477
GCG: Mining Maximal Complete Graph Patterns from Large Spatial Data
cs.DB
Recent research on pattern discovery has progressed from mining frequent patterns and sequences to mining structured patterns, such as trees and graphs. Graphs as general data structure can model complex relations among data with wide applications in web exploration and social networks. However, the process of mining large graph patterns is a challenge due to the existence of large number of subgraphs. In this paper, we aim to mine only frequent complete graph patterns. A graph g in a database is complete if every pair of distinct vertices is connected by a unique edge. Grid Complete Graph (GCG) is a mining algorithm developed to explore interesting pruning techniques to extract maximal complete graphs from large spatial dataset existing in Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data. Using a divide and conquer strategy, GCG shows high efficiency especially in the presence of large number of patterns. In this paper, we describe GCG that can mine not only simple co-location spatial patterns but also complex ones. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm used to exploit the extraction of maximal complete graphs in the process of mining complex co-location patterns in large spatial dataset.
1312.4479
Parametric Modelling of Multivariate Count Data Using Probabilistic Graphical Models
stat.ML cs.LG stat.ME
Multivariate count data are defined as the number of items of different categories issued from sampling within a population, which individuals are grouped into categories. The analysis of multivariate count data is a recurrent and crucial issue in numerous modelling problems, particularly in the fields of biology and ecology (where the data can represent, for example, children counts associated with multitype branching processes), sociology and econometrics. We focus on I) Identifying categories that appear simultaneously, or on the contrary that are mutually exclusive. This is achieved by identifying conditional independence relationships between the variables; II)Building parsimonious parametric models consistent with these relationships; III) Characterising and testing the effects of covariates on the joint distribution of the counts. To achieve these goals, we propose an approach based on graphical probabilistic models, and more specifically partially directed acyclic graphs.
1312.4490
eXamine: a Cytoscape app for exploring annotated modules in networks
q-bio.MN cs.CE cs.DS
Background. Biological networks have growing importance for the interpretation of high-throughput "omics" data. Statistical and combinatorial methods allow to obtain mechanistic insights through the extraction of smaller subnetwork modules. Further enrichment analyses provide set-based annotations of these modules. Results. We present eXamine, a set-oriented visual analysis approach for annotated modules that displays set membership as contours on top of a node-link layout. Our approach extends upon Self Organizing Maps to simultaneously lay out nodes, links, and set contours. Conclusions. We implemented eXamine as a freely available Cytoscape app. Using eXamine we study a module that is activated by the virally-encoded G-protein coupled receptor US28 and formulate a novel hypothesis about its functioning.
1312.4511
Who Watches (and Shares) What on YouTube? And When? Using Twitter to Understand YouTube Viewership
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We combine user-centric Twitter data with video-centric YouTube data to analyze who watches and shares what on YouTube. Combination of two data sets, with 87k Twitter users, 5.6mln YouTube videos and 15mln video sharing events, allows rich analysis going beyond what could be obtained with either of the two data sets individually. For Twitter, we generate user features relating to activity, interests and demographics. For YouTube, we obtain video features for topic, popularity and polarization. These two feature sets are combined through sharing events for YouTube URLs on Twitter. This combination is done both in a user-, a video- and a sharing-event-centric manner. For the user-centric analysis, we show how Twitter user features correlate both with YouTube features and with sharing-related features. As two examples, we show urban users are quicker to share than rural users and for some notions of "influence" influential users on Twitter share videos with a higher number of views. For the video-centric analysis, we find a superlinear relation between initial Twitter shares and the final amounts of views, showing the correlated behavior of Twitter. On user impact, we find the total amount of followers of users that shared the video in the first week does not affect its final popularity. However, aggregated user retweet rates serve as a better predictor for YouTube video popularity. For the sharing-centric analysis, we reveal existence of correlated behavior concerning the time between video creation and sharing within certain timescales, showing the time onset for a coherent response, and the time limit after which collective responses are extremely unlikely. We show that response times depend on video category, revealing that Twitter sharing of a video is highly dependent on its content. To the best of our knowledge this is the first large-scale study combining YouTube and Twitter data.
1312.4521
Weyl-Heisenberg Spaces for Robust Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
cs.IT math.IT
Design of Weyl-Heisenberg sets of waveforms for robust orthogonal frequency division multiplex- ing (OFDM) has been the subject of a considerable volume of work. In this paper, a complete parameterization of orthogonal Weyl-Heisenberg sets and their corresponding biorthogonal sets is given. Several examples of Weyl-Heisenberg sets designed using this parameterization are pre- sented, which in simulations show a high potential for enabling OFDM robust to frequency offset, timing mismatch, and narrow-band interference.
1312.4527
Probable convexity and its application to Correlated Topic Models
cs.LG stat.ML
Non-convex optimization problems often arise from probabilistic modeling, such as estimation of posterior distributions. Non-convexity makes the problems intractable, and poses various obstacles for us to design efficient algorithms. In this work, we attack non-convexity by first introducing the concept of \emph{probable convexity} for analyzing convexity of real functions in practice. We then use the new concept to analyze an inference problem in the \emph{Correlated Topic Model} (CTM) and related nonconjugate models. Contrary to the existing belief of intractability, we show that this inference problem is concave under certain conditions. One consequence of our analyses is a novel algorithm for learning CTM which is significantly more scalable and qualitative than existing methods. Finally, we highlight that stochastic gradient algorithms might be a practical choice to resolve efficiently non-convex problems. This finding might find beneficial in many contexts which are beyond probabilistic modeling.
1312.4551
Comparative Analysis of Viterbi Training and Maximum Likelihood Estimation for HMMs
stat.ML cs.LG
We present an asymptotic analysis of Viterbi Training (VT) and contrast it with a more conventional Maximum Likelihood (ML) approach to parameter estimation in Hidden Markov Models. While ML estimator works by (locally) maximizing the likelihood of the observed data, VT seeks to maximize the probability of the most likely hidden state sequence. We develop an analytical framework based on a generating function formalism and illustrate it on an exactly solvable model of HMM with one unambiguous symbol. For this particular model the ML objective function is continuously degenerate. VT objective, in contrast, is shown to have only finite degeneracy. Furthermore, VT converges faster and results in sparser (simpler) models, thus realizing an automatic Occam's razor for HMM learning. For more general scenario VT can be worse compared to ML but still capable of correctly recovering most of the parameters.
1312.4552
Intelligent Bug Algorithm (IBA): A Novel Strategy to Navigate Mobile Robots Autonomously
cs.RO
This research proposed an intelligent obstacle avoidance algorithm to navigate an autonomous mobile robot. The presented Intelligent Bug Algorithm (IBA) over performs and reaches the goal in relatively less time as compared to existing Bug algorithms. The improved algorithm offers a goal oriented strategy by following smooth and short trajectory. This has been achieved by continuously considering the goal position during obstacle avoidance. The proposed algorithm is computationally inexpensive and easy to tune. The paper also presents the performance comparison of IBA and reported Bug algorithms. Simulation results of robot navigation in an environment with obstacles demonstrate the performance of the improved algorithm.
1312.4564
Adaptive Stochastic Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers
stat.ML cs.LG
The Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) has been studied for years. The traditional ADMM algorithm needs to compute, at each iteration, an (empirical) expected loss function on all training examples, resulting in a computational complexity proportional to the number of training examples. To reduce the time complexity, stochastic ADMM algorithms were proposed to replace the expected function with a random loss function associated with one uniformly drawn example plus a Bregman divergence. The Bregman divergence, however, is derived from a simple second order proximal function, the half squared norm, which could be a suboptimal choice. In this paper, we present a new family of stochastic ADMM algorithms with optimal second order proximal functions, which produce a new family of adaptive subgradient methods. We theoretically prove that their regret bounds are as good as the bounds which could be achieved by the best proximal function that can be chosen in hindsight. Encouraging empirical results on a variety of real-world datasets confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms.
1312.4568
Functions with Diffusive Properties
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
While exploring desirable properties of hash functions in cryptography, the author was led to investigate three notions of functions with scattering or "diffusive" properties, where the functions map between binary strings of fixed finite length. These notions of diffusion ask for some property to be fulfilled by the Hamming distances between outputs corresponding to pairs of inputs that lie on the endpoints of edges of an $n$-dimensional hypercube. Given the dimension of the input space, we explicitly construct such functions for every dimension of the output space that allows for the functions to exist.
1312.4569
Dropout improves Recurrent Neural Networks for Handwriting Recognition
cs.CV cs.LG cs.NE
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with Long Short-Term memory cells currently hold the best known results in unconstrained handwriting recognition. We show that their performance can be greatly improved using dropout - a recently proposed regularization method for deep architectures. While previous works showed that dropout gave superior performance in the context of convolutional networks, it had never been applied to RNNs. In our approach, dropout is carefully used in the network so that it does not affect the recurrent connections, hence the power of RNNs in modeling sequence is preserved. Extensive experiments on a broad range of handwritten databases confirm the effectiveness of dropout on deep architectures even when the network mainly consists of recurrent and shared connections.
1312.4575
Branching MERA codes: a natural extension of polar codes
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
We introduce a new class of circuits for constructing efficiently decodable error-correction codes, based on a recently discovered contractible tensor network. We perform an in-depth study of a particular example that can be thought of as an extension to Arikan's polar code. Notably, our numerical simulation show that this code polarizes the logical channels more strongly while retaining the log-linear decoding complexity using the successive cancellation decoder. These codes also display improved error-correcting capability with only a minor impact on decoding complexity. Efficient decoding is realized using powerful graphical calculus tools developed in the field of quantum many-body physics. In a companion paper, we generalize our construction to the quantum setting and describe more in-depth the relation between classical and quantum error correction and the graphical calculus of tensor networks.
1312.4578
Tensor Networks and Quantum Error Correction
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
We establish several relations between quantum error correction (QEC) and tensor network (TN) methods of quantum many-body physics. We exhibit correspondences between well-known families of QEC codes and TNs, and demonstrate a formal equivalence between decoding a QEC code and contracting a TN. We build on this equivalence to propose a new family of quantum codes and decoding algorithms that generalize and improve upon quantum polar codes and successive cancellation decoding in a natural way.
1312.4587
FFTPL: An Analytic Placement Algorithm Using Fast Fourier Transform for Density Equalization
cs.CE cs.AR cs.NA
We propose a flat nonlinear placement algorithm FFTPL using fast Fourier transform for density equalization. The placement instance is modeled as an electrostatic system with the analogy of density cost to the potential energy. A well-defined Poisson's equation is proposed for gradient and cost computation. Our placer outperforms state-of-the-art placers with better solution quality and efficiency.
1312.4598
Tethered Flying Robot for Information Gathering System
cs.SY
Information from the sky is important for rescue activity in large-scale disaster or dangerous areas. Observation system using a balloon or an airplane has been studied as an information gathering system from the sky. A balloon observation system needs helium gas and relatively long time to be ready. An airplane observation system can be prepared in a short time and its mobility is good. However, a long time flight is difficult because of limited amount of fuel. This paper proposes a kite-based observation system that complements activities of balloon and airplane observation systems by short preparation time and long time flight. This research aims at construction of the autonomous flight information gathering system using a tethered flying unit that consists of the kite and the ground tether line control unit with a winding machine. This paper reports development of the kite type tethered flying robot and an autonomous flying control system inspired by how to fly a kite by a human.
1312.4599
Evolution and Computational Learning Theory: A survey on Valiant's paper
cs.LG
Darwin's theory of evolution is considered to be one of the greatest scientific gems in modern science. It not only gives us a description of how living things evolve, but also shows how a population evolves through time and also, why only the fittest individuals continue the generation forward. The paper basically gives a high level analysis of the works of Valiant[1]. Though, we know the mechanisms of evolution, but it seems that there does not exist any strong quantitative and mathematical theory of the evolution of certain mechanisms. What is defined exactly as the fitness of an individual, why is that only certain individuals in a population tend to mutate, how computation is done in finite time when we have exponentially many examples: there seems to be a lot of questions which need to be answered. [1] basically treats Darwinian theory as a form of computational learning theory, which calculates the net fitness of the hypotheses and thus distinguishes functions and their classes which could be evolvable using polynomial amount of resources. Evolution is considered as a function of the environment and the previous evolutionary stages that chooses the best hypothesis using learning techniques that makes mutation possible and hence, gives a quantitative idea that why only the fittest individuals tend to survive and have the power to mutate.
1312.4601
Strategic Control of Proximity Relationships in Heterogeneous Search and Rescue Teams
cs.RO
In the context of search and rescue, we consider the problem of mission planning for heterogeneous teams that can include human, robotic, and animal agents. The problem is tackled using a mixed integer mathematical programming formulation that jointly determines the path and the activity scheduling of each agent in the team. Based on the mathematical formulation, we propose the use of soft constraints and penalties that allow the flexible strategic control of spatio-temporal relations among the search trajectories of the agents. In this way, we can enable the mission planner to obtain solutions that maximize the area coverage and, at the same time, control the spatial proximity among the agents (e.g., to minimize mutual task interference, or to promote local cooperation and data sharing). Through simulation experiments, we show the application of the strategic framework considering a number of scenarios of interest for real-world search and rescue missions.
1312.4617
A Survey of Data Mining Techniques for Social Media Analysis
cs.SI cs.CL
Social network has gained remarkable attention in the last decade. Accessing social network sites such as Twitter, Facebook LinkedIn and Google+ through the internet and the web 2.0 technologies has become more affordable. People are becoming more interested in and relying on social network for information, news and opinion of other users on diverse subject matters. The heavy reliance on social network sites causes them to generate massive data characterised by three computational issues namely; size, noise and dynamism. These issues often make social network data very complex to analyse manually, resulting in the pertinent use of computational means of analysing them. Data mining provides a wide range of techniques for detecting useful knowledge from massive datasets like trends, patterns and rules [44]. Data mining techniques are used for information retrieval, statistical modelling and machine learning. These techniques employ data pre-processing, data analysis, and data interpretation processes in the course of data analysis. This survey discusses different data mining techniques used in mining diverse aspects of the social network over decades going from the historical techniques to the up-to-date models, including our novel technique named TRCM. All the techniques covered in this survey are listed in the Table.1 including the tools employed as well as names of their authors.
1312.4626
Compact Random Feature Maps
stat.ML cs.LG
Kernel approximation using randomized feature maps has recently gained a lot of interest. In this work, we identify that previous approaches for polynomial kernel approximation create maps that are rank deficient, and therefore do not utilize the capacity of the projected feature space effectively. To address this challenge, we propose compact random feature maps (CRAFTMaps) to approximate polynomial kernels more concisely and accurately. We prove the error bounds of CRAFTMaps demonstrating their superior kernel reconstruction performance compared to the previous approximation schemes. We show how structured random matrices can be used to efficiently generate CRAFTMaps, and present a single-pass algorithm using CRAFTMaps to learn non-linear multi-class classifiers. We present experiments on multiple standard data-sets with performance competitive with state-of-the-art results.
1312.4634
Implementation of WSN which can simultaneously monitor Temperature conditions and control robot for positional accuracy
cs.RO cs.NI
Sensor networks and robots are both quickly evolving fields, the union of two fields seems inherently symbiotic. Collecting data from stationary sensors can be time consuming task and thus can be automated by adding wireless communication capabilities to the sensors. This proposed project takes advantage of wireless sensor networks in remote handling environment which can send signals over far distances by using a mesh topology, transfers the data wirelessly and also consumes low power. In this paper a testbed is created for wireless sensor network using custom build sensor nodes for temperature monitoring in labs and to control a robot moving in another lab. The two temperature sensor nodes used here consists of a Arduino microcontroller and XBee wireless communication module based on IEEE 802.15.4 standard while the robot has inherent FPGA board as a processing unit with xbee module connected via Rs-2332 cable for serial communication between zigbee device and FPGA. A simple custom packet is designed so that uniformity is maintained while collection of data from temperature nodes and a moving robot and passing to a remote terminal. The coordinator Zigbee is connected to remote terminal (PC) through its USB port where Graphical user interface (GUI) can be run to monitor Temperature readings and position of Robot dynamically and save those readings in database.
1312.4637
Constraint Reduction using Marginal Polytope Diagrams for MAP LP Relaxations
cs.CV cs.AI
LP relaxation-based message passing algorithms provide an effective tool for MAP inference over Probabilistic Graphical Models. However, different LP relaxations often have different objective functions and variables of differing dimensions, which presents a barrier to effective comparison and analysis. In addition, the computational complexity of LP relaxation-based methods grows quickly with the number of constraints. Reducing the number of constraints without sacrificing the quality of the solutions is thus desirable. We propose a unified formulation under which existing MAP LP relaxations may be compared and analysed. Furthermore, we propose a new tool called Marginal Polytope Diagrams. Some properties of Marginal Polytope Diagrams are exploited such as node redundancy and edge equivalence. We show that using Marginal Polytope Diagrams allows the number of constraints to be reduced without loosening the LP relaxations. Then, using Marginal Polytope Diagrams and constraint reduction, we develop three novel message passing algorithms, and demonstrate that two of these show a significant improvement in speed over state-of-art algorithms while delivering a competitive, and sometimes higher, quality of solution.
1312.4638
A Class of Five-weight Cyclic Codes and Their Weight Distribution
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, a family of five-weight reducible cyclic codes is presented. Furthermore, the weight distribution of these cyclic codes is determined, which follows from the determination of value distributions of certain exponential sums.
1312.4640
A Review of Temporal Aspects of Hand Gesture Analysis Applied to Discourse Analysis and Natural Conversation
cs.HC cs.AI
Lately, there has been an increasing interest in hand gesture analysis systems. Recent works have employed pattern recognition techniques and have focused on the development of systems with more natural user interfaces. These systems may use gestures to control interfaces or recognize sign language gestures, which can provide systems with multimodal interaction; or consist in multimodal tools to help psycholinguists to understand new aspects of discourse analysis and to automate laborious tasks. Gestures are characterized by several aspects, mainly by movements and sequence of postures. Since data referring to movements or sequences carry temporal information, this paper presents a literature review about temporal aspects of hand gesture analysis, focusing on applications related to natural conversation and psycholinguistic analysis, using Systematic Literature Review methodology. In our results, we organized works according to type of analysis, methods, highlighting the use of Machine Learning techniques, and applications.
1312.4659
DeepPose: Human Pose Estimation via Deep Neural Networks
cs.CV
We propose a method for human pose estimation based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). The pose estimation is formulated as a DNN-based regression problem towards body joints. We present a cascade of such DNN regressors which results in high precision pose estimates. The approach has the advantage of reasoning about pose in a holistic fashion and has a simple but yet powerful formulation which capitalizes on recent advances in Deep Learning. We present a detailed empirical analysis with state-of-art or better performance on four academic benchmarks of diverse real-world images.
1312.4676
Une m\'ethode pour caract\'eriser les communaut\'es des r\'eseaux dynamiques \`a attributs
cs.SI
Many complex systems are modeled through complex networks whose analysis reveals typical topological properties. Amongst those, the community structure is one of the most studied. Many methods are proposed to detect communities, not only in plain, but also in attributed, directed or even dynamic networks. A community structure takes the form of a partition of the node set, which must then be characterized relatively to the properties of the studied system. We propose a method to support such a characterization task. We define a sequence-based representation of networks, combining temporal information, topological measures, and nodal attributes. We then characterize communities using the most representative emerging sequential patterns of its nodes. This also allows detecting unusual behavior in a community. We describe an empirical study of a network of scientific collaborations.---De nombreux syst\`emes complexes sont \'etudi\'es via l'analyse de r\'eseaux dits complexes ayant des propri\'et\'es topologiques typiques. Parmi cellesci, les structures de communaut\'es sont particuli\`erement \'etudi\'ees. De nombreuses m\'ethodes permettent de les d\'etecter, y compris dans des r\'eseaux contenant des attributs nodaux, des liens orient\'es ou \'evoluant dans le temps. La d\'etection prend la forme d'une partition de l'ensemble des noeuds, qu'il faut ensuite caract\'eriser relativement au syst\`eme mod\'elis\'e. Nous travaillons sur l'assistance \`a cette t\^ache de caract\'erisation. Nous proposons une repr\'esentation des r\'eseaux sous la forme de s\'equences de descripteurs de noeuds, qui combinent les informations temporelles, les mesures topologiques, et les valeurs des attributs nodaux. Les communaut\'es sont caract\'eris\'ees au moyen des motifs s\'equentiels \'emergents les plus repr\'esentatifs issus de leurs noeuds. Ceci permet notamment la d\'etection de comportements inhabituels au sein d'une communaut\'e. Nous d\'ecrivons une \'etude empirique sur un r\'eseau de collaboration scientifique.
1312.4678
Simple, compact and robust approximate string dictionary
cs.DS cs.DB
This paper is concerned with practical implementations of approximate string dictionaries that allow edit errors. In this problem, we have as input a dictionary $D$ of $d$ strings of total length $n$ over an alphabet of size $\sigma$. Given a bound $k$ and a pattern $x$ of length $m$, a query has to return all the strings of the dictionary which are at edit distance at most $k$ from $x$, where the edit distance between two strings $x$ and $y$ is defined as the minimum-cost sequence of edit operations that transform $x$ into $y$. The cost of a sequence of operations is defined as the sum of the costs of the operations involved in the sequence. In this paper, we assume that each of these operations has unit cost and consider only three operations: deletion of one character, insertion of one character and substitution of a character by another. We present a practical implementation of the data structure we recently proposed and which works only for one error. We extend the scheme to $2\leq k<m$. Our implementation has many desirable properties: it has a very fast and space-efficient building algorithm. The dictionary data structure is compact and has fast and robust query time. Finally our data structure is simple to implement as it only uses basic techniques from the literature, mainly hashing (linear probing and hash signatures) and succinct data structures (bitvectors supporting rank queries).
1312.4692
An error event sensitive trade-off between rate and coding gain in MIMO MAC
cs.IT math.IT
This work considers space-time block coding for the Rayleigh fading multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiple access channel (MAC). If we suppose that the receiver is performing joint maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding, optimizing a MIMO MAC code against a fixed error event leads to a situation where the joint codewords of the users in error can be seen as a single user MIMO code. In such a case pair-wise error probability (PEP) based determinant criterion of Tarokh et al. can be used to upper bound the error probability. It was already proven by Lahtonen et al. that irrespective of the used codes the determinants of the differences of codewords of the overall codematrices will decay as a function of the rates of the users. This work will study this decay phenomenon further and derive upper bounds for the decay of determinants corresponding any error event. Lower bounds for the optimal decay are studied by constructions based on algebraic number theory and Diophantine approximation. For some error profiles the constructed codes will be proven to be optimal. While the perspective of the paper is that of PEP, the final part of the paper proves how the achieved decay results can be turned into statements about the diversity-multiplexing gain trade-off (DMT).
1312.4695
Sparse, complex-valued representations of natural sounds learned with phase and amplitude continuity priors
cs.LG cs.SD q-bio.NC
Complex-valued sparse coding is a data representation which employs a dictionary of two-dimensional subspaces, while imposing a sparse, factorial prior on complex amplitudes. When trained on a dataset of natural image patches, it learns phase invariant features which closely resemble receptive fields of complex cells in the visual cortex. Features trained on natural sounds however, rarely reveal phase invariance and capture other aspects of the data. This observation is a starting point of the present work. As its first contribution, it provides an analysis of natural sound statistics by means of learning sparse, complex representations of short speech intervals. Secondly, it proposes priors over the basis function set, which bias them towards phase-invariant solutions. In this way, a dictionary of complex basis functions can be learned from the data statistics, while preserving the phase invariance property. Finally, representations trained on speech sounds with and without priors are compared. Prior-based basis functions reveal performance comparable to unconstrained sparse coding, while explicitely representing phase as a temporal shift. Such representations can find applications in many perceptual and machine learning tasks.
1312.4704
RDF Translator: A RESTful Multi-Format Data Converter for the Semantic Web
cs.DL cs.AI
The interdisciplinary nature of the Semantic Web and the many projects put forward by the community led to a large number of widely accepted serialization formats for RDF. Most of these RDF syntaxes have been developed out of a necessity to serve specific purposes better than existing ones, e.g. RDFa was proposed as an extension to HTML for embedding non-intrusive RDF statements in human-readable documents. Nonetheless, the RDF serialization formats are generally transducible among themselves given that they are commonly based on the RDF model. In this paper, we present (1) a RESTful Web service based on the HTTP protocol that translates between different serializations. In addition to its core functionality, our proposed solution provides (2) features to accommodate frequent needs of Semantic Web developers, namely a straightforward user interface with copy-to-clipboard functionality, syntax highlighting, persistent URI links for easy sharing, cool URI patterns, and content negotiation using respective HTTP headers. We demonstrate the benefit of our converter by presenting two use cases.
1312.4706
Designing Spontaneous Speech Search Interface for Historical Archives
cs.HC cs.CL
Spontaneous speech in the form of conversations, meetings, voice-mail, interviews, oral history, etc. is one of the most ubiquitous forms of human communication. Search engines providing access to such speech collections have the potential to better inform intelligence and make relevant data over vast audio/video archives available to users. This project presents a search user interface design supporting search tasks over a speech collection consisting of an historical archive with nearly 52,000 audiovisual testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides. The design incorporates faceted search, along with other UI elements like highlighted search items, tags, snippets, etc., to promote discovery and exploratory search. Two different designs have been created to support both manual and automated transcripts. Evaluation was performed using human subjects to measure accuracy in retrieving results, understanding user-perspective on the design elements, and ease of parsing information.
1312.4707
The Multiple Instances of Node Centrality and their Implications on the Vulnerability of ISP Networks
cs.SI
The position of the nodes within a network topology largely determines the level of their involvement in various networking functions. Yet numerous node centrality indices, proposed to quantify how central individual nodes are in this respect, yield very different views of their relative significance. Our first contribution in this paper is then an exhaustive survey and categorization of centrality indices along several attributes including the type of information (local vs. global) and processing complexity required for their computation. We next study the seven most popular of those indices in the context of Internet vulnerability to address issues that remain under-explored in literature so far. First, we carry out a correlation study to assess the consistency of the node rankings those indices generate over ISP router-level topologies. For each pair of indices, we compute the full ranking correlation, which is the standard choice in literature, and the percentage overlap between the k top nodes. Then, we let these rankings guide the removal of highly central nodes and assess the impact on both the connectivity properties and traffic-carrying capacity of the network. Our results confirm that the top-k overlap predicts the comparative impact of indices on the network vulnerability better than the full-ranking correlation. Importantly, the locally computed degree centrality index approximates closely the global indices with the most dramatic impact on the traffic-carrying capacity; whereas, its approximative power in terms of connectivity is more topology-dependent.
1312.4716
More Classes of Complete Permutation Polynomials over $\F_q$
cs.IT math.IT math.NT
In this paper, by using a powerful criterion for permutation polynomials given by Zieve, we give several classes of complete permutation monomials over $\F_{q^r}$. In addition, we present a class of complete permutation multinomials, which is a generalization of recent work.
1312.4740
Learning High-level Image Representation for Image Retrieval via Multi-Task DNN using Clickthrough Data
cs.CV
Image retrieval refers to finding relevant images from an image database for a query, which is considered difficult for the gap between low-level representation of images and high-level representation of queries. Recently further developed Deep Neural Network sheds light on automatically learning high-level image representation from raw pixels. In this paper, we proposed a multi-task DNN learned for image retrieval, which contains two parts, i.e., query-sharing layers for image representation computation and query-specific layers for relevance estimation. The weights of multi-task DNN are learned on clickthrough data by Ring Training. Experimental results on both simulated and real dataset show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
1312.4746
Co-Sparse Textural Similarity for Image Segmentation
cs.CV
We propose an algorithm for segmenting natural images based on texture and color information, which leverages the co-sparse analysis model for image segmentation within a convex multilabel optimization framework. As a key ingredient of this method, we introduce a novel textural similarity measure, which builds upon the co-sparse representation of image patches. We propose a Bayesian approach to merge textural similarity with information about color and location. Combined with recently developed convex multilabel optimization methods this leads to an efficient algorithm for both supervised and unsupervised segmentation, which is easily parallelized on graphics hardware. The approach provides competitive results in unsupervised segmentation and outperforms state-of-the-art interactive segmentation methods on the Graz Benchmark.
1312.4752
BW - Eye Ophthalmologic decision support system based on clinical workflow and data mining techniques-image registration algorithm
cs.CV
Blueworks - Medical Expert Diagnosis is developing an application, BWEye, to be used as an ophthalmology consultation decision support system. The implementation of this application involves several different tasks and one of them is the implementation of an ophthalmology images registration algorithm. The work reported in this document is related with the implementation of an algorithm to register images of angiography, colour retinography and redfree retinography. The implementations described were developed in the software MATLAB. The implemented algorithm is based in the detection of the bifurcation points (y-features) of the vascular structures of the retina that usually are visible in the referred type of images. There are proposed two approaches to establish an initial set of features correspondences. The first approach is based in the maximization of the mutual information of the bifurcation regions of the features of images. The second approach is based in the characterization of each bifurcation point and in the minimization of the Euclidean distance between the descriptions of the features of the images in the descriptors space. The final set of the matching features for a pair of images is defined through the application of the RANSAC algorithm. Although, it was not achieved the implementation of a full functional algorithm, there were made several analysis that can be important to future improvement of the current implementation.
1312.4794
Semantic Annotation: The Mainstay of Semantic Web
cs.DL cs.AI cs.IR
Given that semantic Web realization is based on the critical mass of metadata accessibility and the representation of data with formal knowledge, it needs to generate metadata that is specific, easy to understand and well-defined. However, semantic annotation of the web documents is the successful way to make the Semantic Web vision a reality. This paper introduces the Semantic Web and its vision (stack layers) with regard to some concept definitions that helps the understanding of semantic annotation. Additionally, this paper introduces the semantic annotation categories, tools, domains and models.
1312.4798
Finite Horizon Online Lazy Scheduling with Energy Harvesting Transmitters over Fading Channels
cs.IT math.IT
Lazy scheduling, i.e. setting transmit power and rate in response to data traffic as low as possible so as to satisfy delay constraints, is a known method for energy efficient transmission.This paper addresses an online lazy scheduling problem over finite time-slotted transmission window and introduces low-complexity heuristics which attain near-optimal performance.Particularly, this paper generalizes lazy scheduling problem for energy harvesting systems to deal with packet arrival, energy harvesting and time-varying channel processes simultaneously. The time-slotted formulation of the problem and depiction of its offline optimal solution provide explicit expressions allowing to derive good online policies and algorithms.
1312.4800
New Approach to Optimize the Time of Association Rules Extraction
cs.DB
The knowledge discovery algorithms have become ineffective at the abundance of data and the need for fast algorithms or optimizing methods is required. To address this limitation, the objective of this work is to adapt a new method for optimizing the time of association rules extractions from large databases. Indeed, given a relational database (one relation) represented as a set of tuples, also called set of attributes, we transform the original database as a binary table (Bitmap table) containing binary numbers. Then, we use this Bitmap table to construct a data structure called Peano Tree stored as a binary file on which we apply a new algorithm called BF-ARM (extension of the well known Apriori algorithm). Since the database is loaded into a binary file, our proposed algorithm will traverse this file, and the processes of association rules extractions will be based on the file stored on disk. The BF-ARM algorithm is implemented and compared with Apriori, Apriori+ and RS-Rules+ algorithms. The evaluation process is based on three benchmarks (Mushroom, Car Evaluation and Adult). Our preliminary experimental results showed that our algorithm produces association rules with a minimum time compared to other algorithms.
1312.4805
Array Convolutional Low-Density Parity-Check Codes
cs.IT math.IT
This paper presents a design technique for obtaining regular time-invariant low-density parity-check convolutional (RTI-LDPCC) codes with low complexity and good performance. We start from previous approaches which unwrap a low-density parity-check (LDPC) block code into an RTI-LDPCC code, and we obtain a new method to design RTI-LDPCC codes with better performance and shorter constraint length. Differently from previous techniques, we start the design from an array LDPC block code. We show that, for codes with high rate, a performance gain and a reduction in the constraint length are achieved with respect to previous proposals. Additionally, an increase in the minimum distance is observed.
1312.4811
Finite-Length Analysis of BATS Codes
cs.IT math.IT
BATS codes were proposed for communication through networks with packet loss. A BATS code consists of an outer code and an inner code. The outer code is a matrix generation of a fountain code, which works with the inner code that comprises random linear coding at the intermediate network nodes. In this paper, the performance of finite-length BATS codes is analyzed with respect to both belief propagation (BP) decoding and inactivation decoding. Our results enable us to evaluate efficiently the finite-length performance in terms of the number of batches used for decoding ranging from 1 to a given maximum number, and provide new insights on the decoding performance. Specifically, for a fixed number of input symbols and a range of the number of batches used for decoding, we obtain recursive formulae to calculate respectively the stopping time distribution of BP decoding and the inactivation probability in inactivation decoding. We also find that both the failure probability of BP decoding and the expected number of inactivations in inactivation decoding can be expressed in a power-sum form where the number of batches appears only as the exponent. This power-sum expression reveals clearly how the decoding failure probability and the expected number of inactivation decrease with the number of batches. When the number of batches used for decoding follows a Poisson distribution, we further derive recursive formulae with potentially lower computational complexity for both decoding algorithms. For the BP decoder that consumes batches one by one, three formulae are provided to characterize the expected number of consumed batches until all the input symbols are decoded.
1312.4814
Mining Malware Specifications through Static Reachability Analysis
cs.CR cs.AI cs.LO
The number of malicious software (malware) is growing out of control. Syntactic signature based detection cannot cope with such growth and manual construction of malware signature databases needs to be replaced by computer learning based approaches. Currently, a single modern signature capturing the semantics of a malicious behavior can be used to replace an arbitrarily large number of old-fashioned syntactical signatures. However teaching computers to learn such behaviors is a challenge. Existing work relies on dynamic analysis to extract malicious behaviors, but such technique does not guarantee the coverage of all behaviors. To sidestep this limitation we show how to learn malware signatures using static reachability analysis. The idea is to model binary programs using pushdown systems (that can be used to model the stack operations occurring during the binary code execution), use reachability analysis to extract behaviors in the form of trees, and use subtrees that are common among the trees extracted from a training set of malware files as signatures. To detect malware we propose to use a tree automaton to compactly store malicious behavior trees and check if any of the subtrees extracted from the file under analysis is malicious. Experimental data shows that our approach can be used to learn signatures from a training set of malware files and use them to detect a test set of malware that is 5 times the size of the training set.
1312.4824
Generation, Implementation and Appraisal of an N-gram based Stemming Algorithm
cs.IR cs.CL
A language independent stemmer has always been looked for. Single N-gram tokenization technique works well, however, it often generates stems that start with intermediate characters, rather than initial ones. We present a novel technique that takes the concept of N gram stemming one step ahead and compare our method with an established algorithm in the field, Porter's Stemmer. Results indicate that our N gram stemmer is not inferior to Porter's linguistic stemmer.
1312.4826
Geometric Methods for Invariant-Zero Cancellation in Linear Multivariable Systems: Illustrative Examples
cs.SY
This note presents some numerical examples worked out in order to show the reader how to implement, within a widely accessible computational setting, the methodology for achieving zero cancellation in linear multivariable systems discussed in [1]. The results are evaluated in the light of applicability and performance of different methods available in the literature.
1312.4828
Subjective Logic Operators in Trust Assessment: an Empirical Study
cs.CR cs.AI cs.LO
Computational trust mechanisms aim to produce trust ratings from both direct and indirect information about agents' behaviour. Subjective Logic (SL) has been widely adopted as the core of such systems via its fusion and discount operators. In recent research we revisited the semantics of these operators to explore an alternative, geometric interpretation. In this paper we present a principled desiderata for discounting and fusion operators in SL. Building upon this we present operators that satisfy these desirable properties, including a family of discount operators. We then show, through a rigorous empirical study, that specific, geometrically interpreted operators significantly outperform standard SL operators in estimating ground truth. These novel operators offer real advantages for computational models of trust and reputation, in which they may be employed without modifying other aspects of an existing system.
1312.4833
Toward Security Verification against Inference Attacks on Data Trees
cs.CR cs.DB cs.FL
This paper describes our ongoing work on security verification against inference attacks on data trees. We focus on infinite secrecy against inference attacks, which means that attackers cannot narrow down the candidates for the value of the sensitive information to finite by available information to the attackers. Our purpose is to propose a model under which infinite secrecy is decidable. To be specific, we first propose tree transducers which are expressive enough to represent practical queries. Then, in order to represent attackers' knowledge, we propose data tree types such that type inference and inverse type inference on those tree transducers are possible with respect to data tree types, and infiniteness of data tree types is decidable.
1312.4839
Reasoning about the Impacts of Information Sharing
cs.AI
In this paper we describe a decision process framework allowing an agent to decide what information it should reveal to its neighbours within a communication graph in order to maximise its utility. We assume that these neighbours can pass information onto others within the graph. The inferences made by agents receiving the messages can have a positive or negative impact on the information providing agent, and our decision process seeks to identify how a message should be modified in order to be most beneficial to the information producer. Our decision process is based on the provider's subjective beliefs about others in the system, and therefore makes extensive use of the notion of trust. Our core contributions are therefore the construction of a model of information propagation; the description of the agent's decision procedure; and an analysis of some of its properties.
1312.4851
Representing, Simulating and Analysing Ho Chi Minh City Tsunami Plan by Means of Process Models
cs.CY cs.AI
This paper considers the textual plan (guidelines) proposed by People's Committee of Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) to manage earthquake and tsunami, and try to represent it in a more formal way, in order to provide means to simulate, analyse and adapt it. We first present a state of the art about coordination models for disaster management with a focus on process oriented approaches. We give an overview of the different dimensions of the textual tsunami plan of Ho Chi Minh City and then the graphical representation of its process with BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation). We finally show how to exploit this process with workflow tools to simulate (YAWL tool) and analyse it (ProM tool).
1312.4852
Identification of Gaussian Process State-Space Models with Particle Stochastic Approximation EM
stat.ML cs.SY
Gaussian process state-space models (GP-SSMs) are a very flexible family of models of nonlinear dynamical systems. They comprise a Bayesian nonparametric representation of the dynamics of the system and additional (hyper-)parameters governing the properties of this nonparametric representation. The Bayesian formalism enables systematic reasoning about the uncertainty in the system dynamics. We present an approach to maximum likelihood identification of the parameters in GP-SSMs, while retaining the full nonparametric description of the dynamics. The method is based on a stochastic approximation version of the EM algorithm that employs recent developments in particle Markov chain Monte Carlo for efficient identification.
1312.4860
Low-rank Similarity Measure for Role Model Extraction
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Computing meaningful clusters of nodes is crucial to analyze large networks. In this paper, we present a pairwise node similarity measure that allows to extract roles, i.e. group of nodes sharing similar flow patterns within a network. We propose a low rank iterative scheme to approximate the similarity measure for very large networks. Finally, we show that our low rank similarity score successfully extracts the different roles in random graphs and that its performances are similar to the pairwise similarity measure.
1312.4875
MIGRAINE: MRI Graph Reliability Analysis and Inference for Connectomics
q-bio.QM cs.CE
Currently, connectomes (e.g., functional or structural brain graphs) can be estimated in humans at $\approx 1~mm^3$ scale using a combination of diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging, functional magnetic resonance imaging and structural magnetic resonance imaging scans. This manuscript summarizes a novel, scalable implementation of open-source algorithms to rapidly estimate magnetic resonance connectomes, using both anatomical regions of interest (ROIs) and voxel-size vertices. To assess the reliability of our pipeline, we develop a novel nonparametric non-Euclidean reliability metric. Here we provide an overview of the methods used, demonstrate our implementation, and discuss available user extensions. We conclude with results showing the efficacy and reliability of the pipeline over previous state-of-the-art.
1312.4892
A Fast Algorithm for Sparse Controller Design
math.OC cs.DC cs.SY
We consider the task of designing sparse control laws for large-scale systems by directly minimizing an infinite horizon quadratic cost with an $\ell_1$ penalty on the feedback controller gains. Our focus is on an improved algorithm that allows us to scale to large systems (i.e. those where sparsity is most useful) with convergence times that are several orders of magnitude faster than existing algorithms. In particular, we develop an efficient proximal Newton method which minimizes per-iteration cost with a coordinate descent active set approach and fast numerical solutions to the Lyapunov equations. Experimentally we demonstrate the appeal of this approach on synthetic examples and real power networks significantly larger than those previously considered in the literature.
1312.4894
Deep Convolutional Ranking for Multilabel Image Annotation
cs.CV
Multilabel image annotation is one of the most important challenges in computer vision with many real-world applications. While existing work usually use conventional visual features for multilabel annotation, features based on Deep Neural Networks have shown potential to significantly boost performance. In this work, we propose to leverage the advantage of such features and analyze key components that lead to better performances. Specifically, we show that a significant performance gain could be obtained by combining convolutional architectures with approximate top-$k$ ranking objectives, as thye naturally fit the multilabel tagging problem. Our experiments on the NUS-WIDE dataset outperforms the conventional visual features by about 10%, obtaining the best reported performance in the literature.
1312.4895
Recursive Compressed Sensing
stat.ML cs.IT math.IT
We introduce a recursive algorithm for performing compressed sensing on streaming data. The approach consists of a) recursive encoding, where we sample the input stream via overlapping windowing and make use of the previous measurement in obtaining the next one, and b) recursive decoding, where the signal estimate from the previous window is utilized in order to achieve faster convergence in an iterative optimization scheme applied to decode the new one. To remove estimation bias, a two-step estimation procedure is proposed comprising support set detection and signal amplitude estimation. Estimation accuracy is enhanced by a non-linear voting method and averaging estimates over multiple windows. We analyze the computational complexity and estimation error, and show that the normalized error variance asymptotically goes to zero for sublinear sparsity. Our simulation results show speed up of an order of magnitude over traditional CS, while obtaining significantly lower reconstruction error under mild conditions on the signal magnitudes and the noise level.
1312.4967
Estimation of Human Body Shape and Posture Under Clothing
cs.CV cs.GR
Estimating the body shape and posture of a dressed human subject in motion represented as a sequence of (possibly incomplete) 3D meshes is important for virtual change rooms and security. To solve this problem, statistical shape spaces encoding human body shape and posture variations are commonly used to constrain the search space for the shape estimate. In this work, we propose a novel method that uses a posture-invariant shape space to model body shape variation combined with a skeleton-based deformation to model posture variation. Our method can estimate the body shape and posture of both static scans and motion sequences of dressed human body scans. In case of motion sequences, our method takes advantage of motion cues to solve for a single body shape estimate along with a sequence of posture estimates. We apply our approach to both static scans and motion sequences and demonstrate that using our method, higher fitting accuracy is achieved than when using a variant of the popular SCAPE model as statistical model.
1312.4986
A Comparative Evaluation of Curriculum Learning with Filtering and Boosting
cs.LG
Not all instances in a data set are equally beneficial for inferring a model of the data. Some instances (such as outliers) are detrimental to inferring a model of the data. Several machine learning techniques treat instances in a data set differently during training such as curriculum learning, filtering, and boosting. However, an automated method for determining how beneficial an instance is for inferring a model of the data does not exist. In this paper, we present an automated method that orders the instances in a data set by complexity based on the their likelihood of being misclassified (instance hardness). The underlying assumption of this method is that instances with a high likelihood of being misclassified represent more complex concepts in a data set. Ordering the instances in a data set allows a learning algorithm to focus on the most beneficial instances and ignore the detrimental ones. We compare ordering the instances in a data set in curriculum learning, filtering and boosting. We find that ordering the instances significantly increases classification accuracy and that filtering has the largest impact on classification accuracy. On a set of 52 data sets, ordering the instances increases the average accuracy from 81% to 84%.
1312.5021
Efficient Online Bootstrapping for Large Scale Learning
cs.LG
Bootstrapping is a useful technique for estimating the uncertainty of a predictor, for example, confidence intervals for prediction. It is typically used on small to moderate sized datasets, due to its high computation cost. This work describes a highly scalable online bootstrapping strategy, implemented inside Vowpal Wabbit, that is several times faster than traditional strategies. Our experiments indicate that, in addition to providing a black box-like method for estimating uncertainty, our implementation of online bootstrapping may also help to train models with better prediction performance due to model averaging.
1312.5023
Contextually Supervised Source Separation with Application to Energy Disaggregation
stat.ML cs.LG math.OC
We propose a new framework for single-channel source separation that lies between the fully supervised and unsupervised setting. Instead of supervision, we provide input features for each source signal and use convex methods to estimate the correlations between these features and the unobserved signal decomposition. We analyze the case of $\ell_2$ loss theoretically and show that recovery of the signal components depends only on cross-correlation between features for different signals, not on correlations between features for the same signal. Contextually supervised source separation is a natural fit for domains with large amounts of data but no explicit supervision; our motivating application is energy disaggregation of hourly smart meter data (the separation of whole-home power signals into different energy uses). Here we apply contextual supervision to disaggregate the energy usage of thousands homes over four years, a significantly larger scale than previously published efforts, and demonstrate on synthetic data that our method outperforms the unsupervised approach.
1312.5033
Evaluation of Plane Detection with RANSAC According to Density of 3D Point Clouds
cs.RO cs.CV
We have implemented a method that detects planar regions from 3D scan data using Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) algorithm to address the issue of a trade-off between the scanning speed and the point density of 3D scanning. However, the limitation of the implemented method has not been clear yet. In this paper, we conducted an additional experiment to evaluate the implemented method by changing its parameter and environments in both high and low point density data. As a result, the number of detected planes in high point density data was different from that in low point density data with the same parameter value.
1312.5035
SybilBelief: A Semi-supervised Learning Approach for Structure-based Sybil Detection
cs.CR cs.SI
Sybil attacks are a fundamental threat to the security of distributed systems. Recently, there has been a growing interest in leveraging social networks to mitigate Sybil attacks. However, the existing approaches suffer from one or more drawbacks, including bootstrapping from either only known benign or known Sybil nodes, failing to tolerate noise in their prior knowledge about known benign or Sybil nodes, and being not scalable. In this work, we aim to overcome these drawbacks. Towards this goal, we introduce SybilBelief, a semi-supervised learning framework, to detect Sybil nodes. SybilBelief takes a social network of the nodes in the system, a small set of known benign nodes, and, optionally, a small set of known Sybils as input. Then SybilBelief propagates the label information from the known benign and/or Sybil nodes to the remaining nodes in the system. We evaluate SybilBelief using both synthetic and real world social network topologies. We show that SybilBelief is able to accurately identify Sybil nodes with low false positive rates and low false negative rates. SybilBelief is resilient to noise in our prior knowledge about known benign and Sybil nodes. Moreover, SybilBelief performs orders of magnitudes better than existing Sybil classification mechanisms and significantly better than existing Sybil ranking mechanisms.
1312.5045
Comparative analysis of evolutionary algorithms for image enhancement
cs.CV cs.NE
Evolutionary algorithms are metaheuristic techniques that derive inspiration from the natural process of evolution. They can efficiently solve (generate acceptable quality of solution in reasonable time) complex optimization (NP-Hard) problems. In this paper, automatic image enhancement is considered as an optimization problem and three evolutionary algorithms (Genetic Algorithm, Differential Evolution and Self Organizing Migration Algorithm) are employed to search for an optimum solution. They are used to find an optimum parameter set for an image enhancement transfer function. The aim is to maximize a fitness criterion which is a measure of image contrast and the visibility of details in the enhanced image. The enhancement results obtained using all three evolutionary algorithms are compared amongst themselves and also with the output of histogram equalization method.
1312.5047
Stable Camera Motion Estimation Using Convex Programming
cs.CV
We study the inverse problem of estimating n locations $t_1, ..., t_n$ (up to global scale, translation and negation) in $R^d$ from noisy measurements of a subset of the (unsigned) pairwise lines that connect them, that is, from noisy measurements of $\pm (t_i - t_j)/\|t_i - t_j\|$ for some pairs (i,j) (where the signs are unknown). This problem is at the core of the structure from motion (SfM) problem in computer vision, where the $t_i$'s represent camera locations in $R^3$. The noiseless version of the problem, with exact line measurements, has been considered previously under the general title of parallel rigidity theory, mainly in order to characterize the conditions for unique realization of locations. For noisy pairwise line measurements, current methods tend to produce spurious solutions that are clustered around a few locations. This sensitivity of the location estimates is a well-known problem in SfM, especially for large, irregular collections of images. In this paper we introduce a semidefinite programming (SDP) formulation, specially tailored to overcome the clustering phenomenon. We further identify the implications of parallel rigidity theory for the location estimation problem to be well-posed, and prove exact (in the noiseless case) and stable location recovery results. We also formulate an alternating direction method to solve the resulting semidefinite program, and provide a distributed version of our formulation for large numbers of locations. Specifically for the camera location estimation problem, we formulate a pairwise line estimation method based on robust camera orientation and subspace estimation. Lastly, we demonstrate the utility of our algorithm through experiments on real images.