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1312.5096
Analysis of MIMO Systems used in planning a 4G-WiMAX Network in Ghana
cs.IT math.IT
With the increasing demand for mobile data services, Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) is emerging as one of the fastest growing areas within mobile communications. Innovative wireless communication systems, such as WiMAX, are expected to offer highly reliable broadband radio access in order to meet the increasing demands of emerging high speed data and multimedia services. In Ghana, deployment of WiMAX technology has recently begun. Planning these high capacity networks in the presence of multiple interferences in order to achieve the aim of enabling users enjoy cheap and reliable internet services is a critical design issue. This paper has used a deterministic approach for simulating the Bit-Error-Rate (BER) of initial MIMO antenna configurations which were considered in deploying a high capacity 4G-WiMAX network in Ghana. The radiation pattern of the antenna used in the deploying the network has been simulated with Genex-Unet and NEC and results presented. An adaptive 4x4 MIMO antenna configuration with optimally suppressed sidelobes has been suggested for future network deployment since the adaptive 2x2 MIMO antenna configuration, which was used in the initial network deployment provides poor estimates for average BER performance as compared to 4x4 antenna configuration which seem less affected in the presence of multiple interferers.
1312.5097
A Cellular Automaton Based Controller for a Ms. Pac-Man Agent
cs.AI
Video games can be used as an excellent test bed for Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. They are challenging and non-deterministic, this makes it very difficult to write strong AI players. An example of such a video game is Ms. Pac-Man. In this paper we will outline some of the previous techniques used to build AI controllers for Ms. Pac-Man as well as presenting a new and novel solution. My technique utilises a Cellular Automaton (CA) to build a representation of the environment at each time step of the game. The basis of the representation is a 2-D grid of cells. Each cell has a state and a set of rules which determine whether or not that cell will dominate (i.e. pass its state value onto) adjacent cells at each update. Once a certain number of update iterations have been completed, the CA represents the state of the environment in the game, the goals and the dangers. At this point, Ms. Pac-Man will decide her next move based only on her adjacent cells, that is to say, she has no knowledge of the state of the environment as a whole, she will simply follow the strongest path. This technique shows promise and allows the controller to achieve high scores in a live game, the behaviour it exhibits is interesting and complex. Moreover, this behaviour is produced by using very simple rules which are applied many times to each cell in the grid. Simple local interactions with complex global results are truly achieved.
1312.5106
Codes between MBR and MSR Points with Exact Repair Property
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper distributed storage systems with exact repair are studied. A construction for regenerating codes between the minimum storage regenerating (MSR) and the minimum bandwidth regenerating (MBR) points is given. To the best of author's knowledge, no previous construction of exact-regenerating codes between MBR and MSR points is done except in the work by Tian et al. On contrast to their work, the methods used here are elementary. In this paper it is shown that in the case that the parameters $n$, $k$, and $d$ are close to each other, the given construction is close to optimal when comparing to the known functional repair capacity. This is done by showing that when the distances of the parameters $n$, $k$, and $d$ are fixed but the actual values approach to infinity, the fraction of the performance of constructed codes with exact repair and the known capacity of codes with functional repair, approaches to one. Also a simple variation of the constructed codes with almost the same performance is given.
1312.5111
Long Time No See: The Probability of Reusing Tags as a Function of Frequency and Recency
cs.IR
In this paper, we introduce a tag recommendation algorithm that mimics the way humans draw on items in their long-term memory. This approach uses the frequency and recency of previous tag assignments to estimate the probability of reusing a particular tag. Using three real-world folksonomies gathered from bookmarks in BibSonomy, CiteULike and Flickr, we show how adding a time-dependent component outperforms conventional "most popular tags" approaches and another existing and very effective but less theory-driven, time-dependent recommendation mechanism. By combining our approach with a simple resource-specific frequency analysis, our algorithm outperforms other well-established algorithms, such as FolkRank, Pairwise Interaction Tensor Factorization and Collaborative Filtering. We conclude that our approach provides an accurate and computationally efficient model of a user's temporal tagging behavior. We show how effective principles for information retrieval can be designed and implemented if human memory processes are taken into account.
1312.5124
Permuted NMF: A Simple Algorithm Intended to Minimize the Volume of the Score Matrix
stat.AP cs.LG stat.ML
Non-Negative Matrix Factorization, NMF, attempts to find a number of archetypal response profiles, or parts, such that any sample profile in the dataset can be approximated by a close profile among these archetypes or a linear combination of these profiles. The non-negativity constraint is imposed while estimating archetypal profiles, due to the non-negative nature of the observed signal. Apart from non negativity, a volume constraint can be applied on the Score matrix W to enhance the ability of learning parts of NMF. In this report, we describe a very simple algorithm, which in effect achieves volume minimization, although indirectly.
1312.5129
Deep Learning Embeddings for Discontinuous Linguistic Units
cs.CL
Deep learning embeddings have been successfully used for many natural language processing problems. Embeddings are mostly computed for word forms although a number of recent papers have extended this to other linguistic units like morphemes and phrases. In this paper, we argue that learning embeddings for discontinuous linguistic units should also be considered. In an experimental evaluation on coreference resolution, we show that such embeddings perform better than word form embeddings.
1312.5138
Locating Multiple Ultrasound Targets in Chorus
cs.IT math.IT
Ranging by Time of Arrival (TOA) of Narrow-band ultrasound (NBU) has been widely used by many locating systems for its characteristics of low cost and high accuracy. However, because it is hard to support code division multiple access in narrowband signal, to track multiple targets, existing NBU-based locating systems generally need to assign exclusive time slot to each target to avoid the signal conflicts. Because the propagation speed of ultrasound is slow in air, dividing exclusive time slots on a single channel causes the location updating rate for each target rather low, leading to unsatisfied tracking performances as the number of targets increases. In this paper, we investigated a new multiple target locating method using NBU, called UltraChorus, which is to locate multiple targets while allowing them sending NBU signals simultaneously, i.e., in chorus mode. It can dramatically increase the location updating rate. In particular, we investigated by both experiments and theoretical analysis on the necessary and sufficient conditions for resolving the conflicts of multiple NBU signals on a single channel, which is referred as the conditions for chorus ranging and chorus locating. To tackle the difficulty caused by the anonymity of the measured distances, we further developed consistent position generation algorithm and probabilistic particle filter algorithm}to label the distances by sources, to generate reasonable location estimations, and to disambiguate the motion trajectories of the multiple concurrent targets based on the anonymous distance measurements. Extensive evaluations by both simulation and testbed were carried out, which verified the effectiveness of our proposed theories and algorithms.
1312.5148
Object Selection under Team Context
cs.DB
Context-aware database has drawn increasing attention from both industry and academia recently by taking users' current situation and environment into consideration. However, most of the literature focus on individual context, overlooking the team users. In this paper, we investigate how to integrate team context into database query process to help the users' get top-ranked database tuples and make the team more competitive. We introduce naive and optimized query algorithm to select the suitable records and show that they output the same results while the latter is more computational efficient. Extensive empirical studies are conducted to evaluate the query approaches and demonstrate their effectiveness and efficiency.
1312.5155
On the Effectiveness of Polynomial Realization of Reed-Solomon Codes for Storage Systems
cs.IT cs.PF math.IT
There are different ways to realize Reed Solomon (RS) codes. While in the storage community, using the generator matrices to implement RS codes is more popular, in the coding theory community the generator polynomials are typically used to realize RS codes. Prominent exceptions include HDFS-RAID, which uses generator polynomial based erasure codes, and extends the Apache Hadoop's file system. In this paper we evaluate the performance of an implementation of polynomial realization of Reed-Solomon codes, along with our optimized version of it, against that of a widely-used library (Jerasure) that implements the main matrix realization alternatives. Our experimental study shows that despite significant performance gains yielded by our optimizations, the polynomial implementations' performance is constantly inferior to those of matrix realization alternatives in general, and that of Cauchy bit matrices in particular.
1312.5162
Sistem pendukung keputusan kelayakan TKI ke luar negeri menggunakan FMADM
cs.AI
BP3TKI Palembang is the government agencies that coordinate, execute and selection of prospective migrants registration and placement. To simplify the existing procedures and improve decision-making is necessary to build a decision support system (DSS) to determine eligibility for employment abroad by applying Fuzzy Multiple Attribute Decision Making (FMADM), using the linear sequential systems development methods. The system is built using Microsoft Visual Basic. Net 2010 and SQL Server 2008 database. The design of the system using use case diagrams and class diagrams to identify the needs of users and systems as well as systems implementation guidelines. This Decision Support System able to rank and produce the prospective migrants, making it easier for parties to take decision BP3TKI the workers who will be working out of the country.
1312.5173
New Repair strategy of Hadamard Minimum Storage Regenerating Code for Distributed Storage System
cs.IT math.IT
The newly presented $(k+2,k)$ Hadamard minimum storage regenerating (MSR) code is the first class of high rate storage code with optimal repair property for all single node failures. In this paper, we propose a new simple repair strategy, which can considerably reduces the computation load of the node repair in contrast to the original one.
1312.5179
The Total Variation on Hypergraphs - Learning on Hypergraphs Revisited
stat.ML cs.LG math.OC
Hypergraphs allow one to encode higher-order relationships in data and are thus a very flexible modeling tool. Current learning methods are either based on approximations of the hypergraphs via graphs or on tensor methods which are only applicable under special conditions. In this paper, we present a new learning framework on hypergraphs which fully uses the hypergraph structure. The key element is a family of regularization functionals based on the total variation on hypergraphs.
1312.5192
Nonlinear Eigenproblems in Data Analysis - Balanced Graph Cuts and the RatioDCA-Prox
stat.ML cs.LG math.OC
It has been recently shown that a large class of balanced graph cuts allows for an exact relaxation into a nonlinear eigenproblem. We review briefly some of these results and propose a family of algorithms to compute nonlinear eigenvectors which encompasses previous work as special cases. We provide a detailed analysis of the properties and the convergence behavior of these algorithms and then discuss their application in the area of balanced graph cuts.
1312.5198
Learning Semantic Script Knowledge with Event Embeddings
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CL stat.ML
Induction of common sense knowledge about prototypical sequences of events has recently received much attention. Instead of inducing this knowledge in the form of graphs, as in much of the previous work, in our method, distributed representations of event realizations are computed based on distributed representations of predicates and their arguments, and then these representations are used to predict prototypical event orderings. The parameters of the compositional process for computing the event representations and the ranking component of the model are jointly estimated from texts. We show that this approach results in a substantial boost in ordering performance with respect to previous methods.
1312.5202
Consensus in the presence of interference
cs.SY
This paper studies distributed strategies for average-consensus of arbitrary vectors in the presence of network interference. We assume that the underlying communication on any \emph{link} suffers from \emph{additive interference} caused due to the communication by other agents following their own consensus protocol. Additionally, no agent knows how many or which agents are interfering with its communication. Clearly, the standard consensus protocol does not remain applicable in such scenarios. In this paper, we cast an algebraic structure over the interference and show that the standard protocol can be modified such that the average is reachable in a subspace whose dimension is complimentary to the maximal dimension of the interference subspaces (over all of the communication links). To develop the results, we use \emph{information alignment} to align the intended transmission (over each link) to the null-space of the interference (on that link). We show that this alignment is indeed invertible, i.e. the intended transmission can be recovered over which, subsequently, consensus protocol is implemented. That \emph{local} protocols exist even when the collection of the interference subspaces span the entire vector space is somewhat surprising.
1312.5242
Unsupervised feature learning by augmenting single images
cs.CV cs.LG cs.NE
When deep learning is applied to visual object recognition, data augmentation is often used to generate additional training data without extra labeling cost. It helps to reduce overfitting and increase the performance of the algorithm. In this paper we investigate if it is possible to use data augmentation as the main component of an unsupervised feature learning architecture. To that end we sample a set of random image patches and declare each of them to be a separate single-image surrogate class. We then extend these trivial one-element classes by applying a variety of transformations to the initial 'seed' patches. Finally we train a convolutional neural network to discriminate between these surrogate classes. The feature representation learned by the network can then be used in various vision tasks. We find that this simple feature learning algorithm is surprisingly successful, achieving competitive classification results on several popular vision datasets (STL-10, CIFAR-10, Caltech-101).
1312.5258
On the Challenges of Physical Implementations of RBMs
stat.ML cs.LG
Restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) are powerful machine learning models, but learning and some kinds of inference in the model require sampling-based approximations, which, in classical digital computers, are implemented using expensive MCMC. Physical computation offers the opportunity to reduce the cost of sampling by building physical systems whose natural dynamics correspond to drawing samples from the desired RBM distribution. Such a system avoids the burn-in and mixing cost of a Markov chain. However, hardware implementations of this variety usually entail limitations such as low-precision and limited range of the parameters and restrictions on the size and topology of the RBM. We conduct software simulations to determine how harmful each of these restrictions is. Our simulations are designed to reproduce aspects of the D-Wave quantum computer, but the issues we investigate arise in most forms of physical computation.
1312.5271
Systematic and multifactor risk models revisited
q-fin.RM cs.CE math.LO q-fin.CP stat.ML
Systematic and multifactor risk models are revisited via methods which were already successfully developed in signal processing and in automatic control. The results, which bypass the usual criticisms on those risk modeling, are illustrated by several successful computer experiments.
1312.5276
Integration by parts and representation of information functionals
math.PR cs.IT math.IT
We introduce a new formalism for computing expectations of functionals of arbitrary random vectors, by using generalised integration by parts formulae. In doing so we extend recent representation formulae for the score function introduced in Nourdin, Peccati and Swan (JFA, to appear) and also provide a new proof of a central identity first discovered in Guo, Shamai, and Verd{\'u} (IEEE Trans. Information Theory, 2005). We derive a representation for the standardized Fisher information of sums of i.i.d. random vectors which use our identities to provide rates of convergence in information theoretic central limit theorems (both in Fisher information distance and in relative entropy).
1312.5297
Tweet, but Verify: Epistemic Study of Information Verification on Twitter
cs.SI cs.CY
While Twitter provides an unprecedented opportunity to learn about breaking news and current events as they happen, it often produces skepticism among users as not all the information is accurate but also hoaxes are sometimes spread. While avoiding the diffusion of hoaxes is a major concern during fast-paced events such as natural disasters, the study of how users trust and verify information from tweets in these contexts has received little attention so far. We survey users on credibility perceptions regarding witness pictures posted on Twitter related to Hurricane Sandy. By examining credibility perceptions on features suggested for information verification in the field of Epistemology, we evaluate their accuracy in determining whether pictures were real or fake compared to professional evaluations performed by experts. Our study unveils insight about tweet presentation, as well as features that users should look at when assessing the veracity of tweets in the context of fast-paced events. Some of our main findings include that while author details not readily available on Twitter feeds should be emphasized in order to facilitate verification of tweets, showing multiple tweets corroborating a fact misleads users to trusting what actually is a hoax. We contrast some of the behavioral patterns found on tweets with literature in Psychology research.
1312.5306
Network histograms and universality of blockmodel approximation
stat.ME cs.SI math.CO math.ST stat.TH
In this article we introduce the network histogram: a statistical summary of network interactions, to be used as a tool for exploratory data analysis. A network histogram is obtained by fitting a stochastic blockmodel to a single observation of a network dataset. Blocks of edges play the role of histogram bins, and community sizes that of histogram bandwidths or bin sizes. Just as standard histograms allow for varying bandwidths, different blockmodel estimates can all be considered valid representations of an underlying probability model, subject to bandwidth constraints. Here we provide methods for automatic bandwidth selection, by which the network histogram approximates the generating mechanism that gives rise to exchangeable random graphs. This makes the blockmodel a universal network representation for unlabeled graphs. With this insight, we discuss the interpretation of network communities in light of the fact that many different community assignments can all give an equally valid representation of such a network. To demonstrate the fidelity-versus-interpretability tradeoff inherent in considering different numbers and sizes of communities, we analyze two publicly available networks - political weblogs and student friendships - and discuss how to interpret the network histogram when additional information related to node and edge labeling is present.
1312.5345
Min Flow Rate Maximization for Software Defined Radio Access Networks
cs.IT math.IT
We consider a heterogeneous network (HetNet) of base stations (BSs) connected via a backhaul network of routers and wired/wireless links with limited capacity. The optimal provision of such networks requires proper resource allocation across the radio access links in conjunction with appropriate traffic engineering within the backhaul network. In this paper we propose an efficient algorithm for joint resource allocation across the wireless links and the flow control within the backhaul network. The proposed algorithm, which maximizes the minimum rate among all the users and/or flows, is based on a decomposition approach that leverages both the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) and the weighted-MMSE (WMMSE) algorithm. We show that this algorithm is easily parallelizable and converges globally to a stationary solution of the joint optimization problem. The proposed algorithm can also be extended to deal with per-flow quality of service constraint, or to networks with multi-antenna nodes.
1312.5349
Moving-Horizon Dynamic Power System State Estimation Using Semidefinite Relaxation
cs.SY
Accurate power system state estimation (PSSE) is an essential prerequisite for reliable operation of power systems. Different from static PSSE, dynamic PSSE can exploit past measurements based on a dynamical state evolution model, offering improved accuracy and state predictability. A key challenge is the nonlinear measurement model, which is often tackled using linearization, despite divergence and local optimality issues. In this work, a moving-horizon estimation (MHE) strategy is advocated, where model nonlinearity can be accurately captured with strong performance guarantees. To mitigate local optimality, a semidefinite relaxation approach is adopted, which often provides solutions close to the global optimum. Numerical tests show that the proposed method can markedly improve upon an extended Kalman filter (EKF)-based alternative.
1312.5354
Classification of Human Ventricular Arrhythmia in High Dimensional Representation Spaces
cs.CE cs.LG
We studied classification of human ECGs labelled as normal sinus rhythm, ventricular fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia by means of support vector machines in different representation spaces, using different observation lengths. ECG waveform segments of duration 0.5-4 s, their Fourier magnitude spectra, and lower dimensional projections of Fourier magnitude spectra were used for classification. All considered representations were of much higher dimension than in published studies. Classification accuracy improved with segment duration up to 2 s, with 4 s providing little improvement. We found that it is possible to discriminate between ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation by the present approach with much shorter runs of ECG (2 s, minimum 86% sensitivity per class) than previously imagined. Ensembles of classifiers acting on 1 s segments taken over 5 s observation windows gave best results, with sensitivities of detection for all classes exceeding 93%.
1312.5355
Generative NeuroEvolution for Deep Learning
cs.NE cs.CV
An important goal for the machine learning (ML) community is to create approaches that can learn solutions with human-level capability. One domain where humans have held a significant advantage is visual processing. A significant approach to addressing this gap has been machine learning approaches that are inspired from the natural systems, such as artificial neural networks (ANNs), evolutionary computation (EC), and generative and developmental systems (GDS). Research into deep learning has demonstrated that such architectures can achieve performance competitive with humans on some visual tasks; however, these systems have been primarily trained through supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms. Alternatively, research is showing that evolution may have a significant role in the development of visual systems. Thus this paper investigates the role neuro-evolution (NE) can take in deep learning. In particular, the Hypercube-based NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies is a NE approach that can effectively learn large neural structures by training an indirect encoding that compresses the ANN weight pattern as a function of geometry. The results show that HyperNEAT struggles with performing image classification by itself, but can be effective in training a feature extractor that other ML approaches can learn from. Thus NeuroEvolution combined with other ML methods provides an intriguing area of research that can replicate the processes in nature.
1312.5371
Investigating early warning signs of oscillatory instability in simulated phasor measurements
nlin.CD cs.SY physics.soc-ph
This paper shows that the variance of load bus voltage magnitude in a small power system test case increases monotonically as the system approaches a Hopf bifurcation. This property can potentially be used as a method for monitoring oscillatory stability in power grid using high-resolution phasor measurements. Increasing variance in data from a dynamical system is a common sign of a phenomenon known as critical slowing down (CSD). CSD is slower recovery of dynamical systems from perturbations as they approach critical transitions. Earlier work has focused on studying CSD in systems approaching voltage collapse; In this paper, we investigate its occurrence as a power system approaches a Hopf bifurcation.
1312.5378
Skolemization for Weighted First-Order Model Counting
cs.AI
First-order model counting emerged recently as a novel reasoning task, at the core of efficient algorithms for probabilistic logics. We present a Skolemization algorithm for model counting problems that eliminates existential quantifiers from a first-order logic theory without changing its weighted model count. For certain subsets of first-order logic, lifted model counters were shown to run in time polynomial in the number of objects in the domain of discourse, where propositional model counters require exponential time. However, these guarantees apply only to Skolem normal form theories (i.e., no existential quantifiers) as the presence of existential quantifiers reduces lifted model counters to propositional ones. Since textbook Skolemization is not sound for model counting, these restrictions precluded efficient model counting for directed models, such as probabilistic logic programs, which rely on existential quantification. Our Skolemization procedure extends the applicability of first-order model counters to these representations. Moreover, it simplifies the design of lifted model counting algorithms.
1312.5394
Missing Value Imputation With Unsupervised Backpropagation
cs.NE cs.LG stat.ML
Many data mining and data analysis techniques operate on dense matrices or complete tables of data. Real-world data sets, however, often contain unknown values. Even many classification algorithms that are designed to operate with missing values still exhibit deteriorated accuracy. One approach to handling missing values is to fill in (impute) the missing values. In this paper, we present a technique for unsupervised learning called Unsupervised Backpropagation (UBP), which trains a multi-layer perceptron to fit to the manifold sampled by a set of observed point-vectors. We evaluate UBP with the task of imputing missing values in datasets, and show that UBP is able to predict missing values with significantly lower sum-squared error than other collaborative filtering and imputation techniques. We also demonstrate with 24 datasets and 9 supervised learning algorithms that classification accuracy is usually higher when randomly-withheld values are imputed using UBP, rather than with other methods.
1312.5398
Continuous Learning: Engineering Super Features With Feature Algebras
cs.LG stat.ML
In this paper we consider a problem of searching a space of predictive models for a given training data set. We propose an iterative procedure for deriving a sequence of improving models and a corresponding sequence of sets of non-linear features on the original input space. After a finite number of iterations N, the non-linear features become 2^N -degree polynomials on the original space. We show that in a limit of an infinite number of iterations derived non-linear features must form an associative algebra: a product of two features is equal to a linear combination of features from the same feature space for any given input point. Because each iteration consists of solving a series of convex problems that contain all previous solutions, the likelihood of the models in the sequence is increasing with each iteration while the dimension of the model parameter space is set to a limited controlled value.
1312.5402
Some Improvements on Deep Convolutional Neural Network Based Image Classification
cs.CV
We investigate multiple techniques to improve upon the current state of the art deep convolutional neural network based image classification pipeline. The techiques include adding more image transformations to training data, adding more transformations to generate additional predictions at test time and using complementary models applied to higher resolution images. This paper summarizes our entry in the Imagenet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2013. Our system achieved a top 5 classification error rate of 13.55% using no external data which is over a 20% relative improvement on the previous year's winner.
1312.5412
Approximated Infomax Early Stopping: Revisiting Gaussian RBMs on Natural Images
stat.ML cs.LG
We pursue an early stopping technique that helps Gaussian Restricted Boltzmann Machines (GRBMs) to gain good natural image representations in terms of overcompleteness and data fitting. GRBMs are widely considered as an unsuitable model for natural images because they gain non-overcomplete representations which include uniform filters that do not represent useful image features. We have recently found that GRBMs once gain and subsequently lose useful filters during their training, contrary to this common perspective. We attribute this phenomenon to a tradeoff between overcompleteness of GRBM representations and data fitting. To gain GRBM representations that are overcomplete and fit data well, we propose a measure for GRBM representation quality, approximated mutual information, and an early stopping technique based on this measure. The proposed method boosts performance of classifiers trained on GRBM representations.
1312.5419
Large-scale Multi-label Text Classification - Revisiting Neural Networks
cs.LG
Neural networks have recently been proposed for multi-label classification because they are able to capture and model label dependencies in the output layer. In this work, we investigate limitations of BP-MLL, a neural network (NN) architecture that aims at minimizing pairwise ranking error. Instead, we propose to use a comparably simple NN approach with recently proposed learning techniques for large-scale multi-label text classification tasks. In particular, we show that BP-MLL's ranking loss minimization can be efficiently and effectively replaced with the commonly used cross entropy error function, and demonstrate that several advances in neural network training that have been developed in the realm of deep learning can be effectively employed in this setting. Our experimental results show that simple NN models equipped with advanced techniques such as rectified linear units, dropout, and AdaGrad perform as well as or even outperform state-of-the-art approaches on six large-scale textual datasets with diverse characteristics.
1312.5434
Asynchronous Adaptation and Learning over Networks --- Part I: Modeling and Stability Analysis
cs.SY cs.IT cs.LG math.IT math.OC
In this work and the supporting Parts II [2] and III [3], we provide a rather detailed analysis of the stability and performance of asynchronous strategies for solving distributed optimization and adaptation problems over networks. We examine asynchronous networks that are subject to fairly general sources of uncertainties, such as changing topologies, random link failures, random data arrival times, and agents turning on and off randomly. Under this model, agents in the network may stop updating their solutions or may stop sending or receiving information in a random manner and without coordination with other agents. We establish in Part I conditions on the first and second-order moments of the relevant parameter distributions to ensure mean-square stable behavior. We derive in Part II expressions that reveal how the various parameters of the asynchronous behavior influence network performance. We compare in Part III the performance of asynchronous networks to the performance of both centralized solutions and synchronous networks. One notable conclusion is that the mean-square-error performance of asynchronous networks shows a degradation only of the order of $O(\nu)$, where $\nu$ is a small step-size parameter, while the convergence rate remains largely unaltered. The results provide a solid justification for the remarkable resilience of cooperative networks in the face of random failures at multiple levels: agents, links, data arrivals, and topology.
1312.5438
Asynchronous Adaptation and Learning over Networks - Part II: Performance Analysis
cs.SY cs.IT cs.LG math.IT math.OC
In Part I \cite{Zhao13TSPasync1}, we introduced a fairly general model for asynchronous events over adaptive networks including random topologies, random link failures, random data arrival times, and agents turning on and off randomly. We performed a stability analysis and established the notable fact that the network is still able to converge in the mean-square-error sense to the desired solution. Once stable behavior is guaranteed, it becomes important to evaluate how fast the iterates converge and how close they get to the optimal solution. This is a demanding task due to the various asynchronous events and due to the fact that agents influence each other. In this Part II, we carry out a detailed analysis of the mean-square-error performance of asynchronous strategies for solving distributed optimization and adaptation problems over networks. We derive analytical expressions for the mean-square convergence rate and the steady-state mean-square-deviation. The expressions reveal how the various parameters of the asynchronous behavior influence network performance. In the process, we establish the interesting conclusion that even under the influence of asynchronous events, all agents in the adaptive network can still reach an $O(\nu^{1 + \gamma_o'})$ near-agreement with some $\gamma_o' > 0$ while approaching the desired solution within $O(\nu)$ accuracy, where $\nu$ is proportional to the small step-size parameter for adaptation.
1312.5439
Asynchronous Adaptation and Learning over Networks - Part III: Comparison Analysis
cs.SY cs.IT cs.LG math.IT math.OC
In Part II [3] we carried out a detailed mean-square-error analysis of the performance of asynchronous adaptation and learning over networks under a fairly general model for asynchronous events including random topologies, random link failures, random data arrival times, and agents turning on and off randomly. In this Part III, we compare the performance of synchronous and asynchronous networks. We also compare the performance of decentralized adaptation against centralized stochastic-gradient (batch) solutions. Two interesting conclusions stand out. First, the results establish that the performance of adaptive networks is largely immune to the effect of asynchronous events: the mean and mean-square convergence rates and the asymptotic bias values are not degraded relative to synchronous or centralized implementations. Only the steady-state mean-square-deviation suffers a degradation in the order of $\nu$, which represents the small step-size parameters used for adaptation. Second, the results show that the adaptive distributed network matches the performance of the centralized solution. These conclusions highlight another critical benefit of cooperation by networked agents: cooperation does not only enhance performance in comparison to stand-alone single-agent processing, but it also endows the network with remarkable resilience to various forms of random failure events and is able to deliver performance that is as powerful as batch solutions.
1312.5444
Blind Denoising with Random Greedy Pursuits
cs.IT math.IT
Denoising methods require some assumptions about the signal of interest and the noise. While most denoising procedures require some knowledge about the noise level, which may be unknown in practice, here we assume that the signal expansion in a given dictionary has a distribution that is more heavy-tailed than the noise. We show how this hypothesis leads to a stopping criterion for greedy pursuit algorithms which is independent from the noise level. Inspired by the success of ensemble methods in machine learning, we propose a strategy to reduce the variance of greedy estimates by averaging pursuits obtained from randomly subsampled dictionaries. We call this denoising procedure Blind Random Pursuit Denoising (BIRD). We offer a generalization to multidimensional signals, with a structured sparse model (S-BIRD). The relevance of this approach is demonstrated on synthetic and experimental MEG signals where, without any parameter tuning, BIRD outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms even when they are informed by the noise level. Code is available to reproduce all experiments.
1312.5457
Codebook based Audio Feature Representation for Music Information Retrieval
cs.IR cs.LG cs.MM
Digital music has become prolific in the web in recent decades. Automated recommendation systems are essential for users to discover music they love and for artists to reach appropriate audience. When manual annotations and user preference data is lacking (e.g. for new artists) these systems must rely on \emph{content based} methods. Besides powerful machine learning tools for classification and retrieval, a key component for successful recommendation is the \emph{audio content representation}. Good representations should capture informative musical patterns in the audio signal of songs. These representations should be concise, to enable efficient (low storage, easy indexing, fast search) management of huge music repositories, and should also be easy and fast to compute, to enable real-time interaction with a user supplying new songs to the system. Before designing new audio features, we explore the usage of traditional local features, while adding a stage of encoding with a pre-computed \emph{codebook} and a stage of pooling to get compact vectorial representations. We experiment with different encoding methods, namely \emph{the LASSO}, \emph{vector quantization (VQ)} and \emph{cosine similarity (CS)}. We evaluate the representations' quality in two music information retrieval applications: query-by-tag and query-by-example. Our results show that concise representations can be used for successful performance in both applications. We recommend using top-$\tau$ VQ encoding, which consistently performs well in both applications, and requires much less computation time than the LASSO.
1312.5465
Learning rates of $l^q$ coefficient regularization learning with Gaussian kernel
cs.LG stat.ML
Regularization is a well recognized powerful strategy to improve the performance of a learning machine and $l^q$ regularization schemes with $0<q<\infty$ are central in use. It is known that different $q$ leads to different properties of the deduced estimators, say, $l^2$ regularization leads to smooth estimators while $l^1$ regularization leads to sparse estimators. Then, how does the generalization capabilities of $l^q$ regularization learning vary with $q$? In this paper, we study this problem in the framework of statistical learning theory and show that implementing $l^q$ coefficient regularization schemes in the sample dependent hypothesis space associated with Gaussian kernel can attain the same almost optimal learning rates for all $0<q<\infty$. That is, the upper and lower bounds of learning rates for $l^q$ regularization learning are asymptotically identical for all $0<q<\infty$. Our finding tentatively reveals that, in some modeling contexts, the choice of $q$ might not have a strong impact with respect to the generalization capability. From this perspective, $q$ can be arbitrarily specified, or specified merely by other no generalization criteria like smoothness, computational complexity, sparsity, etc..
1312.5479
Sparse similarity-preserving hashing
cs.CV cs.DS
In recent years, a lot of attention has been devoted to efficient nearest neighbor search by means of similarity-preserving hashing. One of the plights of existing hashing techniques is the intrinsic trade-off between performance and computational complexity: while longer hash codes allow for lower false positive rates, it is very difficult to increase the embedding dimensionality without incurring in very high false negatives rates or prohibiting computational costs. In this paper, we propose a way to overcome this limitation by enforcing the hash codes to be sparse. Sparse high-dimensional codes enjoy from the low false positive rates typical of long hashes, while keeping the false negative rates similar to those of a shorter dense hashing scheme with equal number of degrees of freedom. We use a tailored feed-forward neural network for the hashing function. Extensive experimental evaluation involving visual and multi-modal data shows the benefits of the proposed method.
1312.5486
Molecular communication networks with general molecular circuit receivers
q-bio.MN cs.IT math.IT
In a molecular communication network, transmitters may encode information in concentration or frequency of signalling molecules. When the signalling molecules reach the receivers, they react, via a set of chemical reactions or a molecular circuit, to produce output molecules. The counts of output molecules over time is the output signal of the receiver. The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of different reaction types on the information transmission capacity of molecular communication networks. We realise this aim by using a general molecular circuit model. We derive general expressions of mean receiver output, and signal and noise spectra. We use these expressions to investigate the information transmission capacities of a number of molecular circuits.
1312.5515
Conservative, Proportional and Optimistic Contextual Discounting in the Belief Functions Theory
cs.AI
Information discounting plays an important role in the theory of belief functions and, generally, in information fusion. Nevertheless, neither classical uniform discounting nor contextual cannot model certain use cases, notably temporal discounting. In this article, new contextual discounting schemes, conservative, proportional and optimistic, are proposed. Some properties of these discounting operations are examined. Classical discounting is shown to be a special case of these schemes. Two motivating cases are discussed: modelling of source reliability and application to temporal discounting.
1312.5542
Word Emdeddings through Hellinger PCA
cs.CL cs.LG
Word embeddings resulting from neural language models have been shown to be successful for a large variety of NLP tasks. However, such architecture might be difficult to train and time-consuming. Instead, we propose to drastically simplify the word embeddings computation through a Hellinger PCA of the word co-occurence matrix. We compare those new word embeddings with some well-known embeddings on NER and movie review tasks and show that we can reach similar or even better performance. Although deep learning is not really necessary for generating good word embeddings, we show that it can provide an easy way to adapt embeddings to specific tasks.
1312.5548
My First Deep Learning System of 1991 + Deep Learning Timeline 1962-2013
cs.NE
Deep Learning has attracted significant attention in recent years. Here I present a brief overview of my first Deep Learner of 1991, and its historic context, with a timeline of Deep Learning highlights.
1312.5559
Distributional Models and Deep Learning Embeddings: Combining the Best of Both Worlds
cs.CL
There are two main approaches to the distributed representation of words: low-dimensional deep learning embeddings and high-dimensional distributional models, in which each dimension corresponds to a context word. In this paper, we combine these two approaches by learning embeddings based on distributional-model vectors - as opposed to one-hot vectors as is standardly done in deep learning. We show that the combined approach has better performance on a word relatedness judgment task.
1312.5568
An Adaptive Dictionary Learning Approach for Modeling Dynamical Textures
cs.CV
Video representation is an important and challenging task in the computer vision community. In this paper, we assume that image frames of a moving scene can be modeled as a Linear Dynamical System. We propose a sparse coding framework, named adaptive video dictionary learning (AVDL), to model a video adaptively. The developed framework is able to capture the dynamics of a moving scene by exploring both sparse properties and the temporal correlations of consecutive video frames. The proposed method is compared with state of the art video processing methods on several benchmark data sequences, which exhibit appearance changes and heavy occlusions.
1312.5578
Multimodal Transitions for Generative Stochastic Networks
cs.LG stat.ML
Generative Stochastic Networks (GSNs) have been recently introduced as an alternative to traditional probabilistic modeling: instead of parametrizing the data distribution directly, one parametrizes a transition operator for a Markov chain whose stationary distribution is an estimator of the data generating distribution. The result of training is therefore a machine that generates samples through this Markov chain. However, the previously introduced GSN consistency theorems suggest that in order to capture a wide class of distributions, the transition operator in general should be multimodal, something that has not been done before this paper. We introduce for the first time multimodal transition distributions for GSNs, in particular using models in the NADE family (Neural Autoregressive Density Estimator) as output distributions of the transition operator. A NADE model is related to an RBM (and can thus model multimodal distributions) but its likelihood (and likelihood gradient) can be computed easily. The parameters of the NADE are obtained as a learned function of the previous state of the learned Markov chain. Experiments clearly illustrate the advantage of such multimodal transition distributions over unimodal GSNs.
1312.5598
Vulnerability and power on networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Inspired by socio-political scenarios, like dictatorships, in which a minority of people exercise control over a majority of weakly interconnected individuals, we propose vulnerability and power measures defined on groups of actors of networks. We establish an unexpected connection between network vulnerability and graph regularizability. We use the Shapley value of coalition games to introduce fresh notions of vulnerability and power at node level defined in terms of the corresponding measures at group level. We investigate the computational complexity of computing the defined measures, both at group and node levels, and provide effective methods to quantify them. Finally we test vulnerability and power on both artificial and real networks.
1312.5602
Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning
cs.LG
We present the first deep learning model to successfully learn control policies directly from high-dimensional sensory input using reinforcement learning. The model is a convolutional neural network, trained with a variant of Q-learning, whose input is raw pixels and whose output is a value function estimating future rewards. We apply our method to seven Atari 2600 games from the Arcade Learning Environment, with no adjustment of the architecture or learning algorithm. We find that it outperforms all previous approaches on six of the games and surpasses a human expert on three of them.
1312.5604
Learning Transformations for Classification Forests
cs.CV cs.LG stat.ML
This work introduces a transformation-based learner model for classification forests. The weak learner at each split node plays a crucial role in a classification tree. We propose to optimize the splitting objective by learning a linear transformation on subspaces using nuclear norm as the optimization criteria. The learned linear transformation restores a low-rank structure for data from the same class, and, at the same time, maximizes the separation between different classes, thereby improving the performance of the split function. Theoretical and experimental results support the proposed framework.
1312.5641
Recursive Robust PCA or Recursive Sparse Recovery in Large but Structured Noise (parts 1 and 2 combined)
cs.IT math.IT
This work studies the recursive robust principal components analysis (PCA) problem. If the outlier is the signal-of-interest, this problem can be interpreted as one of recursively recovering a time sequence of sparse vectors, $S_t$, in the presence of large but structured noise, $L_t$. The structure that we assume on $L_t$ is that $L_t$ is dense and lies in a low dimensional subspace that is either fixed or changes "slowly enough". A key application where this problem occurs is in video surveillance where the goal is to separate a slowly changing background ($L_t$) from moving foreground objects ($S_t$) on-the-fly. To solve the above problem, in recent work, we introduced a novel solution called Recursive Projected CS (ReProCS). In this work we develop a simple modification of the original ReProCS idea and analyze it. This modification assumes knowledge of a subspace change model on the $L_t$'s. Under mild assumptions and a denseness assumption on the unestimated part of the subspace of $L_t$ at various times, we show that, with high probability (w.h.p.), the proposed approach can exactly recover the support set of $S_t$ at all times; and the reconstruction errors of both $S_t$ and $L_t$ are upper bounded by a time-invariant and small value. In simulation experiments, we observe that the last assumption holds as long as there is some support change of $S_t$ every few frames.
1312.5650
Zero-Shot Learning by Convex Combination of Semantic Embeddings
cs.LG
Several recent publications have proposed methods for mapping images into continuous semantic embedding spaces. In some cases the embedding space is trained jointly with the image transformation. In other cases the semantic embedding space is established by an independent natural language processing task, and then the image transformation into that space is learned in a second stage. Proponents of these image embedding systems have stressed their advantages over the traditional \nway{} classification framing of image understanding, particularly in terms of the promise for zero-shot learning -- the ability to correctly annotate images of previously unseen object categories. In this paper, we propose a simple method for constructing an image embedding system from any existing \nway{} image classifier and a semantic word embedding model, which contains the $\n$ class labels in its vocabulary. Our method maps images into the semantic embedding space via convex combination of the class label embedding vectors, and requires no additional training. We show that this simple and direct method confers many of the advantages associated with more complex image embedding schemes, and indeed outperforms state of the art methods on the ImageNet zero-shot learning task.
1312.5663
k-Sparse Autoencoders
cs.LG
Recently, it has been observed that when representations are learnt in a way that encourages sparsity, improved performance is obtained on classification tasks. These methods involve combinations of activation functions, sampling steps and different kinds of penalties. To investigate the effectiveness of sparsity by itself, we propose the k-sparse autoencoder, which is an autoencoder with linear activation function, where in hidden layers only the k highest activities are kept. When applied to the MNIST and NORB datasets, we find that this method achieves better classification results than denoising autoencoders, networks trained with dropout, and RBMs. k-sparse autoencoders are simple to train and the encoding stage is very fast, making them well-suited to large problem sizes, where conventional sparse coding algorithms cannot be applied.
1312.5673
Flower Pollination Algorithm for Global Optimization
math.OC cs.NE nlin.AO
Flower pollination is an intriguing process in the natural world. Its evolutionary characteristics can be used to design new optimization algorithms. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, namely, flower pollination algorithm, inspired by the pollination process of flowers. We first use ten test functions to validate the new algorithm, and compare its performance with genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimization. Our simulation results show the flower algorithm is more efficient than both GA and PSO. We also use the flower algorithm to solve a nonlinear design benchmark, which shows the convergence rate is almost exponential.
1312.5697
Using Web Co-occurrence Statistics for Improving Image Categorization
cs.CV cs.LG
Object recognition and localization are important tasks in computer vision. The focus of this work is the incorporation of contextual information in order to improve object recognition and localization. For instance, it is natural to expect not to see an elephant to appear in the middle of an ocean. We consider a simple approach to encapsulate such common sense knowledge using co-occurrence statistics from web documents. By merely counting the number of times nouns (such as elephants, sharks, oceans, etc.) co-occur in web documents, we obtain a good estimate of expected co-occurrences in visual data. We then cast the problem of combining textual co-occurrence statistics with the predictions of image-based classifiers as an optimization problem. The resulting optimization problem serves as a surrogate for our inference procedure. Albeit the simplicity of the resulting optimization problem, it is effective in improving both recognition and localization accuracy. Concretely, we observe significant improvements in recognition and localization rates for both ImageNet Detection 2012 and Sun 2012 datasets.
1312.5704
Design of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Based Emulators for Motor Control Applications
cs.SY
Problem Statement: Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) circuits play a significant role in major recent embedded process control designs. However, exploiting these platforms requires deep hardware conception skills and remains an important time consuming stage in a design flow. High Level Synthesis technique avoids this bottleneck and increases design productivity as witnessed by industry specialists. Approach: This study proposes to apply this technique for the conception and implementation of a Real Time Direct Current Machine (RTDCM) emulator for an embedded control application. Results: Several FPGA-based configuration scenarios are studied. A series of tests including design and timing-precision analysis were conducted to discuss and validate the obtained hardware architectures. Conclusion/Recommendations: The proposed methodology has accelerated the design time besides it has provided an extra time to refine the hardware core of the DCM emulator. The high level synthesis technique can be applied to the control field especially to test with low cost and short delays newest algorithms and motor models.
1312.5713
Giving the AI definition a form suitable for the engineer
cs.AI
Artificial Intelligence - what is this? That is the question! In earlier papers we already gave a formal definition for AI, but if one desires to build an actual AI implementation, the following issues require attention and are treated here: the data format to be used, the idea of Undef and Nothing symbols, various ways for defining the "meaning of life", and finally, a new notion of "incorrect move". These questions are of minor importance in the theoretical discussion, but we already know the answer of the question "Does AI exist?" Now we want to make the next step and to create this program.
1312.5714
Avoiding Confusion between Predictors and Inhibitors in Value Function Approximation
cs.AI
In reinforcement learning, the goal is to seek rewards and avoid punishments. A simple scalar captures the value of a state or of taking an action, where expected future rewards increase and punishments decrease this quantity. Naturally an agent should learn to predict this quantity to take beneficial actions, and many value function approximators exist for this purpose. In the present work, however, we show how value function approximators can cause confusion between predictors of an outcome of one valence (e.g., a signal of reward) and the inhibitor of the opposite valence (e.g., a signal canceling expectation of punishment). We show this to be a problem for both linear and non-linear value function approximators, especially when the amount of data (or experience) is limited. We propose and evaluate a simple resolution: to instead predict reward and punishment values separately, and rectify and add them to get the value needed for decision making. We evaluate several function approximators in this slightly different value function approximation architecture and show that this approach is able to circumvent the confusion and thereby achieve lower value-prediction errors.
1312.5734
Time-varying Learning and Content Analytics via Sparse Factor Analysis
stat.ML cs.LG math.OC stat.AP
We propose SPARFA-Trace, a new machine learning-based framework for time-varying learning and content analytics for education applications. We develop a novel message passing-based, blind, approximate Kalman filter for sparse factor analysis (SPARFA), that jointly (i) traces learner concept knowledge over time, (ii) analyzes learner concept knowledge state transitions (induced by interacting with learning resources, such as textbook sections, lecture videos, etc, or the forgetting effect), and (iii) estimates the content organization and intrinsic difficulty of the assessment questions. These quantities are estimated solely from binary-valued (correct/incorrect) graded learner response data and a summary of the specific actions each learner performs (e.g., answering a question or studying a learning resource) at each time instance. Experimental results on two online course datasets demonstrate that SPARFA-Trace is capable of tracing each learner's concept knowledge evolution over time, as well as analyzing the quality and content organization of learning resources, the question-concept associations, and the question intrinsic difficulties. Moreover, we show that SPARFA-Trace achieves comparable or better performance in predicting unobserved learner responses than existing collaborative filtering and knowledge tracing approaches for personalized education.
1312.5753
SOMz: photometric redshift PDFs with self organizing maps and random atlas
astro-ph.IM astro-ph.CO cs.LG stat.ML
In this paper we explore the applicability of the unsupervised machine learning technique of Self Organizing Maps (SOM) to estimate galaxy photometric redshift probability density functions (PDFs). This technique takes a spectroscopic training set, and maps the photometric attributes, but not the redshifts, to a two dimensional surface by using a process of competitive learning where neurons compete to more closely resemble the training data multidimensional space. The key feature of a SOM is that it retains the topology of the input set, revealing correlations between the attributes that are not easily identified. We test three different 2D topological mapping: rectangular, hexagonal, and spherical, by using data from the DEEP2 survey. We also explore different implementations and boundary conditions on the map and also introduce the idea of a random atlas where a large number of different maps are created and their individual predictions are aggregated to produce a more robust photometric redshift PDF. We also introduced a new metric, the $I$-score, which efficiently incorporates different metrics, making it easier to compare different results (from different parameters or different photometric redshift codes). We find that by using a spherical topology mapping we obtain a better representation of the underlying multidimensional topology, which provides more accurate results that are comparable to other, state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. Our results illustrate that unsupervised approaches have great potential for many astronomical problems, and in particular for the computation of photometric redshifts.
1312.5763
Identification of Employees Using RFID in IE-NTUA
cs.SY
During the last decade with the rapid increase in indoor wireless communications, location-aware services have received a great deal of attention for commercial, public-safety, and a military application, the greatest challenge associated with indoor positioning methods is moving object data and identification. Mobility tracking and localization are multifaceted problems, which have been studied for a long time in different contexts. Many potential applications in the domain of WSNs require such capabilities. The mobility tracking needs inherent in many surveillance, security and logistic applications. This paper presents the identification of employees in National Technical University in Athens (IE-NTUA), when the employees access to a certain area of the building (enters and leaves to/from the college), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) applied for identification by offering special badges containing RFID-tags.
1312.5765
Multi-Branch Matching Pursuit with applications to MIMO radar
cs.IT math.IT math.OC
We present an algorithm, dubbed Multi-Branch Matching Pursuit (MBMP), to solve the sparse recovery problem over redundant dictionaries. MBMP combines three different paradigms: being a greedy method, it performs iterative signal support estimation; as a rank-aware method, it is able to exploit signal subspace information when multiple snapshots are available; and, as its name foretells, it leverages a multi-branch (i.e., tree-search) strategy that allows us to trade-off hardware complexity (e.g. measurements) for computational complexity. We derive a sufficient condition under which MBMP can recover a sparse signal from noiseless measurements. This condition, named MB-coherence, is met when the dictionary is sufficiently incoherent. It incorporates the number of branches of MBMP and it requires fewer measurements than other conditions (e.g. the Neuman ERC or the cumulative coherence). As such, successful recovery with MBMP is guaranteed for dictionaries that do not satisfy previously known conditions.
1312.5766
Structure-Aware Dynamic Scheduler for Parallel Machine Learning
stat.ML cs.LG
Training large machine learning (ML) models with many variables or parameters can take a long time if one employs sequential procedures even with stochastic updates. A natural solution is to turn to distributed computing on a cluster; however, naive, unstructured parallelization of ML algorithms does not usually lead to a proportional speedup and can even result in divergence, because dependencies between model elements can attenuate the computational gains from parallelization and compromise correctness of inference. Recent efforts toward this issue have benefited from exploiting the static, a priori block structures residing in ML algorithms. In this paper, we take this path further by exploring the dynamic block structures and workloads therein present during ML program execution, which offers new opportunities for improving convergence, correctness, and load balancing in distributed ML. We propose and showcase a general-purpose scheduler, STRADS, for coordinating distributed updates in ML algorithms, which harnesses the aforementioned opportunities in a systematic way. We provide theoretical guarantees for our scheduler, and demonstrate its efficacy versus static block structures on Lasso and Matrix Factorization.
1312.5770
Consistency of Causal Inference under the Additive Noise Model
cs.LG stat.ML
We analyze a family of methods for statistical causal inference from sample under the so-called Additive Noise Model. While most work on the subject has concentrated on establishing the soundness of the Additive Noise Model, the statistical consistency of the resulting inference methods has received little attention. We derive general conditions under which the given family of inference methods consistently infers the causal direction in a nonparametric setting.
1312.5783
Unsupervised Feature Learning by Deep Sparse Coding
cs.LG cs.CV cs.NE
In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised feature learning framework, namely Deep Sparse Coding (DeepSC), that extends sparse coding to a multi-layer architecture for visual object recognition tasks. The main innovation of the framework is that it connects the sparse-encoders from different layers by a sparse-to-dense module. The sparse-to-dense module is a composition of a local spatial pooling step and a low-dimensional embedding process, which takes advantage of the spatial smoothness information in the image. As a result, the new method is able to learn several levels of sparse representation of the image which capture features at a variety of abstraction levels and simultaneously preserve the spatial smoothness between the neighboring image patches. Combining the feature representations from multiple layers, DeepSC achieves the state-of-the-art performance on multiple object recognition tasks.
1312.5785
EXMOVES: Classifier-based Features for Scalable Action Recognition
cs.CV
This paper introduces EXMOVES, learned exemplar-based features for efficient recognition of actions in videos. The entries in our descriptor are produced by evaluating a set of movement classifiers over spatial-temporal volumes of the input sequence. Each movement classifier is a simple exemplar-SVM trained on low-level features, i.e., an SVM learned using a single annotated positive space-time volume and a large number of unannotated videos. Our representation offers two main advantages. First, since our mid-level features are learned from individual video exemplars, they require minimal amount of supervision. Second, we show that simple linear classification models trained on our global video descriptor yield action recognition accuracy approaching the state-of-the-art but at orders of magnitude lower cost, since at test-time no sliding window is necessary and linear models are efficient to train and test. This enables scalable action recognition, i.e., efficient classification of a large number of different actions even in large video databases. We show the generality of our approach by building our mid-level descriptors from two different low-level feature representations. The accuracy and efficiency of the approach are demonstrated on several large-scale action recognition benchmarks.
1312.5794
Random Basketball Routing for ZigBee based Sensor Networks
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT
Random basketball routing (BR) \cite {Hwang} is a simple protocol that integrates MAC and multihop routing in a cross-layer optimized manner. Due to its lightness and performance, BR would be quite suitable for sensor networks, where communication nodes are usually simple devices. In this paper, we describe how we implemented BR in a ZigBee-based (IEEE 802.15.4) sensor network. In \cite{Hwang}, it is verified that BR takes advantages of dynamic environments (in particular, node mobility), however, here we focus on how BR works under static situations. For implementation purposes, we add some features such as destination RSSI measuring and loop-free procedure, to the original BR. With implemented testbed, we compare the performance of BR with that of the simplified AODV with CSMA/CA. The result is that BR has merits in terms of number of hops to traverse the network. Considering the simple structure of BR and its possible energy-efficiency, we can conclude that BR can be a good candidate for sensor networks both under dynamic- and static environments.
1312.5797
Network Coded Rate Scheduling for Two-way Relay Networks
cs.IT math.IT
We investigate a scheduling scheme incorporating network coding and channel varying information for the two-way relay networks. Our scheduler aims at minimizing the time span needed to send all the data of each source of the network. We consider three channel models, time invariant channels, time varying channels with finite states and time varying Rayleigh fading channels. We formulate the problem into a manageable optimization problem, and get a closed form scheduler under time invariant channels and time varying channel with finite channel states. For Rayleigh fading channels, we focus on the relay node operation and propose heuristic power allocation algorithm resemblant to water filling algorithm. By simulations, we find that even if the channel fluctuates randomly, the average time span is minimized when the relay node transmits/schedules network coded data as much as possible.
1312.5800
An Iterative Algorithm for Optimal Carrier Sensing Threshold in Random CSMA/CA Wireless Networks
cs.IT math.IT
We investigate the optimal carrier sensing threshold in random CSMA/CA networks considering the effect of binary exponential backoff. We propose an iterative algorithm for optimizing the carrier sensing threshold and hence maximizing the area spectral efficiency. We verify that simulations are consistent with our analytical results.
1312.5813
Unsupervised Pretraining Encourages Moderate-Sparseness
cs.LG cs.NE
It is well known that direct training of deep neural networks will generally lead to poor results. A major progress in recent years is the invention of various pretraining methods to initialize network parameters and it was shown that such methods lead to good prediction performance. However, the reason for the success of pretraining has not been fully understood, although it was argued that regularization and better optimization play certain roles. This paper provides another explanation for the effectiveness of pretraining, where we show pretraining leads to a sparseness of hidden unit activation in the resulting neural networks. The main reason is that the pretraining models can be interpreted as an adaptive sparse coding. Compared to deep neural network with sigmoid function, our experimental results on MNIST and Birdsong further support this sparseness observation.
1312.5814
Optimal parameter selection for unsupervised neural network using genetic algorithm
cs.NE
K-means Fast Learning Artificial Neural Network (K-FLANN) is an unsupervised neural network requires two parameters: tolerance and vigilance. Best Clustering results are feasible only by finest parameters specified to the neural network. Selecting optimal values for these parameters is a major problem. To solve this issue, Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to determine optimal parameters of K-FLANN for finding groups in multidimensional data. K-FLANN is a simple topological network, in which output nodes grows dynamically during the clustering process on receiving input patterns. Original K-FLANN is enhanced to select winner unit out of the matched nodes so that stable clusters are formed with in a less number of epochs. The experimental results show that the GA is efficient in finding optimal values of parameters from the large search space and is tested using artificial and synthetic data sets.
1312.5830
An Introduction to Socially Connected Machines: Characteristics and Applications
cs.SI cs.CY
Due to the development of information and communication technologies, it is difficult to handle the billions of connected machines. In this paper, to cope with the problem, we introduce machine social networks, where they freely follow each other and share common interests with their neighbors. We classify characteristics and describe required functionalities of socially connected machines. We also illustrate two examples; a twit-bot and maze scenario.
1312.5841
Fisher Information and the Fourth Moment Theorem
math.PR cs.IT math.IT
Using a representation of the score function by means of the divergence operator we exhibit a sufficient condition, in terms of the negative moments of the norm of the Malliavin derivative, under which convergence in Fisher information to the standard Gaussian of sequences belonging to a given Wiener chaos is actually equivalent to convergence of only the fourth moment. Thus, our result may be considered as a further building block associated to the recent but already rich literature dedicated to the Fourth Moment Theorem of Nualart and Peccati. To illustrate the power of our approach we prove a local limit theorem together with some rates of convergence for the normal convergence of a standardized version of the quadratic variation of the fractional Brownian motion.
1312.5845
Competitive Learning with Feedforward Supervisory Signal for Pre-trained Multilayered Networks
cs.NE cs.CV cs.LG stat.ML
We propose a novel learning method for multilayered neural networks which uses feedforward supervisory signal and associates classification of a new input with that of pre-trained input. The proposed method effectively uses rich input information in the earlier layer for robust leaning and revising internal representation in a multilayer neural network.
1312.5847
Deep learning for neuroimaging: a validation study
cs.NE cs.LG stat.ML
Deep learning methods have recently made notable advances in the tasks of classification and representation learning. These tasks are important for brain imaging and neuroscience discovery, making the methods attractive for porting to a neuroimager's toolbox. Success of these methods is, in part, explained by the flexibility of deep learning models. However, this flexibility makes the process of porting to new areas a difficult parameter optimization problem. In this work we demonstrate our results (and feasible parameter ranges) in application of deep learning methods to structural and functional brain imaging data. We also describe a novel constraint-based approach to visualizing high dimensional data. We use it to analyze the effect of parameter choices on data transformations. Our results show that deep learning methods are able to learn physiologically important representations and detect latent relations in neuroimaging data.
1312.5851
Fast Training of Convolutional Networks through FFTs
cs.CV cs.LG cs.NE
Convolutional networks are one of the most widely employed architectures in computer vision and machine learning. In order to leverage their ability to learn complex functions, large amounts of data are required for training. Training a large convolutional network to produce state-of-the-art results can take weeks, even when using modern GPUs. Producing labels using a trained network can also be costly when dealing with web-scale datasets. In this work, we present a simple algorithm which accelerates training and inference by a significant factor, and can yield improvements of over an order of magnitude compared to existing state-of-the-art implementations. This is done by computing convolutions as pointwise products in the Fourier domain while reusing the same transformed feature map many times. The algorithm is implemented on a GPU architecture and addresses a number of related challenges.
1312.5853
Multi-GPU Training of ConvNets
cs.LG cs.NE
In this work we evaluate different approaches to parallelize computation of convolutional neural networks across several GPUs.
1312.5857
A Generative Product-of-Filters Model of Audio
stat.ML cs.LG
We propose the product-of-filters (PoF) model, a generative model that decomposes audio spectra as sparse linear combinations of "filters" in the log-spectral domain. PoF makes similar assumptions to those used in the classic homomorphic filtering approach to signal processing, but replaces hand-designed decompositions built of basic signal processing operations with a learned decomposition based on statistical inference. This paper formulates the PoF model and derives a mean-field method for posterior inference and a variational EM algorithm to estimate the model's free parameters. We demonstrate PoF's potential for audio processing on a bandwidth expansion task, and show that PoF can serve as an effective unsupervised feature extractor for a speaker identification task.
1312.5869
Principled Non-Linear Feature Selection
cs.LG
Recent non-linear feature selection approaches employing greedy optimisation of Centred Kernel Target Alignment(KTA) exhibit strong results in terms of generalisation accuracy and sparsity. However, they are computationally prohibitive for large datasets. We propose randSel, a randomised feature selection algorithm, with attractive scaling properties. Our theoretical analysis of randSel provides strong probabilistic guarantees for correct identification of relevant features. RandSel's characteristics make it an ideal candidate for identifying informative learned representations. We've conducted experimentation to establish the performance of this approach, and present encouraging results, including a 3rd position result in the recent ICML black box learning challenge as well as competitive results for signal peptide prediction, an important problem in bioinformatics.
1312.5891
The Sparse Principal Component of a Constant-rank Matrix
cs.IT math.IT stat.ML
The computation of the sparse principal component of a matrix is equivalent to the identification of its principal submatrix with the largest maximum eigenvalue. Finding this optimal submatrix is what renders the problem ${\mathcal{NP}}$-hard. In this work, we prove that, if the matrix is positive semidefinite and its rank is constant, then its sparse principal component is polynomially computable. Our proof utilizes the auxiliary unit vector technique that has been recently developed to identify problems that are polynomially solvable. Moreover, we use this technique to design an algorithm which, for any sparsity value, computes the sparse principal component with complexity ${\mathcal O}\left(N^{D+1}\right)$, where $N$ and $D$ are the matrix size and rank, respectively. Our algorithm is fully parallelizable and memory efficient.
1312.5892
Support for Error Tolerance in the Real-Time Transport Protocol
cs.NI cs.IT cs.OS math.IT
Streaming applications often tolerate bit errors in their received data well. This is contrasted by the enforcement of correctness of the packet headers and payload by network protocols. We investigate a solution for the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) that is tolerant to errors by accepting erroneous data. It passes potentially corrupted stream data payloads to the codecs. If errors occur in the header, our solution recovers from these by leveraging the known state and expected header values for each stream. The solution is fully receiver-based and incrementally deployable, and as such requires neither support from the sender nor changes to the RTP specification. Evaluations show that our header error recovery scheme can recover from almost all errors, with virtually no erroneous recoveries, up to bit error rates of about 10%.
1312.5912
Containment of Schema Mappings for Data Exchange (Preliminary Report)
cs.DB
In data exchange, data are materialised from a source schema to a target schema, according to suitable source-to-target constraints. Constraints are also expressed on the target schema to represent the domain of interest. A schema mapping is the union of the source-to-target and of the target constraints. In this paper, we address the problem of containment of schema mappings for data exchange, which has been recently proposed in this framework as a step towards the optimization of data exchange settings. We refer to a natural notion of containment that relies on the behaviour of schema mappings with respect to conjunctive query answering, in the presence of so-called LAV TGDs as target constraints. Our contribution is a practical technique for testing the containment based on the existence of a homomorphism between special "dummy" instances, which can be easily built from schema mappings. We argue that containment of schema mappings is decidable for most practical cases, and we set the basis for further investigations in the topic. This paper extends our preliminary results.
1312.5914
Deep Separability of Ontological Constraints
cs.DB
When data schemata are enriched with expressive constraints that aim at representing the domain of interest, in order to answer queries one needs to consider the logical theory consisting of both the data and the constraints. Query answering in such a context is called ontological query answering. Commonly adopted database constraints in this field are tuple-generating dependencies (TGDs) and equality-generating dependencies (EGDs). It is well known that their interaction leads to intractability or undecidability of query answering even in the case of simple subclasses. Several conditions have been found to guarantee separability, that is lack of interaction, between TGDs and EGDs. Separability makes EGDs (mostly) irrelevant for query answering and therefore often guarantees tractability, as long as the theory is satisfiable. In this paper we review the two notions of separability found in the literature, as well as several syntactic conditions that are sufficient to prove them. We then shed light on the issue of satisfiability checking, showing that under a sufficient condition called deep separability it can be done by considering the TGDs only. We show that, fortunately, in the case of TGDs and EGDs, separability implies deep separability. This result generalizes several analogous ones, proved ad hoc for particular classes of constraints. Applications include the class of sticky TGDs and EGDs, for which we provide a syntactic separability condition which extends the analogous one for linear TGDs; preliminary experiments show the feasibility of query answering in this case.
1312.5921
Group-sparse Embeddings in Collective Matrix Factorization
stat.ML cs.LG
CMF is a technique for simultaneously learning low-rank representations based on a collection of matrices with shared entities. A typical example is the joint modeling of user-item, item-property, and user-feature matrices in a recommender system. The key idea in CMF is that the embeddings are shared across the matrices, which enables transferring information between them. The existing solutions, however, break down when the individual matrices have low-rank structure not shared with others. In this work we present a novel CMF solution that allows each of the matrices to have a separate low-rank structure that is independent of the other matrices, as well as structures that are shared only by a subset of them. We compare MAP and variational Bayesian solutions based on alternating optimization algorithms and show that the model automatically infers the nature of each factor using group-wise sparsity. Our approach supports in a principled way continuous, binary and count observations and is efficient for sparse matrices involving missing data. We illustrate the solution on a number of examples, focusing in particular on an interesting use-case of augmented multi-view learning.
1312.5938
Dual-Branch MRC Receivers under Spatial Interference Correlation and Nakagami Fading
cs.IT math.IT math.PR
Despite being ubiquitous in practice, the performance of maximal-ratio combining (MRC) in the presence of interference is not well understood. Because the interference received at each antenna originates from the same set of interferers, but partially de-correlates over the fading channel, it possesses a complex correlation structure. This work develops a realistic analytic model that accurately accounts for the interference correlation using stochastic geometry. Modeling interference by a Poisson shot noise process with independent Nakagami fading, we derive the link success probability for dual-branch interference-aware MRC. Using this result, we show that the common assumption that all receive antennas experience equal interference power underestimates the true performance, although this gap rapidly decays with increasing the Nakagami parameter $m_{\text{I}}$ of the interfering links. In contrast, ignoring interference correlation leads to a highly optimistic performance estimate for MRC, especially for large $m_{\text{I}}$. In the low outage probability regime, our success probability expression can be considerably simplified. Observations following from the analysis include: (i) for small path loss exponents, MRC and minimum mean square error combining exhibit similar performance, and (ii) the gains of MRC over selection combining are smaller in the interference-limited case than in the well-studied noise-limited case.
1312.5940
Generic Deep Networks with Wavelet Scattering
cs.CV
We introduce a two-layer wavelet scattering network, for object classification. This scattering transform computes a spatial wavelet transform on the first layer and a new joint wavelet transform along spatial, angular and scale variables in the second layer. Numerical experiments demonstrate that this two layer convolution network, which involves no learning and no max pooling, performs efficiently on complex image data sets such as CalTech, with structural objects variability and clutter. It opens the possibility to simplify deep neural network learning by initializing the first layers with wavelet filters.
1312.5941
Developing a model of evacuation after an earthquake in Lebanon
cs.MA
This article describes the development of an agent-based model (AMEL, Agent-based Model for Earthquake evacuation in Lebanon) that aims at simulating the movement of pedestrians shortly after an earthquake. The GAMA platform was chosen to implement the model. AMEL is applied to a real case study, a district of the city of Beirut, Lebanon, which potentially could be stricken by a M7 earthquake. The objective of the model is to reproduce real life mobility behaviours that have been gathered through a survey in Beirut and to test different future scenarios, which may help the local authorities to target information campaigns.
1312.5946
Adaptive Seeding for Gaussian Mixture Models
cs.LG
We present new initialization methods for the expectation-maximization algorithm for multivariate Gaussian mixture models. Our methods are adaptions of the well-known $K$-means++ initialization and the Gonzalez algorithm. Thereby we aim to close the gap between simple random, e.g. uniform, and complex methods, that crucially depend on the right choice of hyperparameters. Our extensive experiments indicate the usefulness of our methods compared to common techniques and methods, which e.g. apply the original $K$-means++ and Gonzalez directly, with respect to artificial as well as real-world data sets.
1312.5952
Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Domain-Specific Languages and Models for Robotic Systems (DSLRob 2013)
cs.RO
The Fourth International Workshop on Domain-Specific Languages and Models for Robotic Systems (DSLRob'13) was held in conjunction with the 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2013), November 2013 in Tokyo, Japan. The main topics of the workshop were Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) and Model-driven Software Development (MDSD) for robotics. A domain-specific language is a programming language dedicated to a particular problem domain that offers specific notations and abstractions that increase programmer productivity within that domain. Model-driven software development offers a high-level way for domain users to specify the functionality of their system at the right level of abstraction. DSLs and models have historically been used for programming complex systems. However recently they have garnered interest as a separate field of study. Robotic systems blend hardware and software in a holistic way that intrinsically raises many crosscutting concerns (concurrency, uncertainty, time constraints, ...), for which reason, traditional general-purpose languages often lead to a poor fit between the language features and the implementation requirements. DSLs and models offer a powerful, systematic way to overcome this problem, enabling the programmer to quickly and precisely implement novel software solutions to complex problems within the robotics domain.
1312.5985
Learning Type-Driven Tensor-Based Meaning Representations
cs.CL cs.LG
This paper investigates the learning of 3rd-order tensors representing the semantics of transitive verbs. The meaning representations are part of a type-driven tensor-based semantic framework, from the newly emerging field of compositional distributional semantics. Standard techniques from the neural networks literature are used to learn the tensors, which are tested on a selectional preference-style task with a simple 2-dimensional sentence space. Promising results are obtained against a competitive corpus-based baseline. We argue that extending this work beyond transitive verbs, and to higher-dimensional sentence spaces, is an interesting and challenging problem for the machine learning community to consider.
1312.5990
Universal Polar Codes for More Capable and Less Noisy Channels and Sources
cs.IT math.IT
We prove two results on the universality of polar codes for source coding and channel communication. First, we show that for any polar code built for a source $P_{X,Z}$ there exists a slightly modified polar code - having the same rate, the same encoding and decoding complexity and the same error rate - that is universal for every source $P_{X,Y}$ when using successive cancellation decoding, at least when the channel $P_{Y|X}$ is more capable than $P_{Z|X}$ and $P_X$ is such that it maximizes $I(X;Y) - I(X;Z)$ for the given channels $P_{Y|X}$ and $P_{Z|X}$. This result extends to channel coding for discrete memoryless channels. Second, we prove that polar codes using successive cancellation decoding are universal for less noisy discrete memoryless channels.
1312.6002
Stochastic Gradient Estimate Variance in Contrastive Divergence and Persistent Contrastive Divergence
cs.NE cs.LG stat.ML
Contrastive Divergence (CD) and Persistent Contrastive Divergence (PCD) are popular methods for training the weights of Restricted Boltzmann Machines. However, both methods use an approximate method for sampling from the model distribution. As a side effect, these approximations yield significantly different biases and variances for stochastic gradient estimates of individual data points. It is well known that CD yields a biased gradient estimate. In this paper we however show empirically that CD has a lower stochastic gradient estimate variance than exact sampling, while the mean of subsequent PCD estimates has a higher variance than exact sampling. The results give one explanation to the finding that CD can be used with smaller minibatches or higher learning rates than PCD.
1312.6024
Occupancy Detection in Vehicles Using Fisher Vector Image Representation
cs.CV
Due to the high volume of traffic on modern roadways, transportation agencies have proposed High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes and High Occupancy Tolling (HOT) lanes to promote car pooling. However, enforcement of the rules of these lanes is currently performed by roadside enforcement officers using visual observation. Manual roadside enforcement is known to be inefficient, costly, potentially dangerous, and ultimately ineffective. Violation rates up to 50%-80% have been reported, while manual enforcement rates of less than 10% are typical. Therefore, there is a need for automated vehicle occupancy detection to support HOV/HOT lane enforcement. A key component of determining vehicle occupancy is to determine whether or not the vehicle's front passenger seat is occupied. In this paper, we examine two methods of determining vehicle front seat occupancy using a near infrared (NIR) camera system pointed at the vehicle's front windshield. The first method examines a state-of-the-art deformable part model (DPM) based face detection system that is robust to facial pose. The second method examines state-of- the-art local aggregation based image classification using bag-of-visual-words (BOW) and Fisher vectors (FV). A dataset of 3000 images was collected on a public roadway and is used to perform the comparison. From these experiments it is clear that the image classification approach is superior for this problem.
1312.6026
How to Construct Deep Recurrent Neural Networks
cs.NE cs.LG stat.ML
In this paper, we explore different ways to extend a recurrent neural network (RNN) to a \textit{deep} RNN. We start by arguing that the concept of depth in an RNN is not as clear as it is in feedforward neural networks. By carefully analyzing and understanding the architecture of an RNN, however, we find three points of an RNN which may be made deeper; (1) input-to-hidden function, (2) hidden-to-hidden transition and (3) hidden-to-output function. Based on this observation, we propose two novel architectures of a deep RNN which are orthogonal to an earlier attempt of stacking multiple recurrent layers to build a deep RNN (Schmidhuber, 1992; El Hihi and Bengio, 1996). We provide an alternative interpretation of these deep RNNs using a novel framework based on neural operators. The proposed deep RNNs are empirically evaluated on the tasks of polyphonic music prediction and language modeling. The experimental result supports our claim that the proposed deep RNNs benefit from the depth and outperform the conventional, shallow RNNs.
1312.6034
Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps
cs.CV
This paper addresses the visualisation of image classification models, learnt using deep Convolutional Networks (ConvNets). We consider two visualisation techniques, based on computing the gradient of the class score with respect to the input image. The first one generates an image, which maximises the class score [Erhan et al., 2009], thus visualising the notion of the class, captured by a ConvNet. The second technique computes a class saliency map, specific to a given image and class. We show that such maps can be employed for weakly supervised object segmentation using classification ConvNets. Finally, we establish the connection between the gradient-based ConvNet visualisation methods and deconvolutional networks [Zeiler et al., 2013].
1312.6042
Learning States Representations in POMDP
cs.LG
We propose to deal with sequential processes where only partial observations are available by learning a latent representation space on which policies may be accurately learned.
1312.6055
Unit Tests for Stochastic Optimization
cs.LG
Optimization by stochastic gradient descent is an important component of many large-scale machine learning algorithms. A wide variety of such optimization algorithms have been devised; however, it is unclear whether these algorithms are robust and widely applicable across many different optimization landscapes. In this paper we develop a collection of unit tests for stochastic optimization. Each unit test rapidly evaluates an optimization algorithm on a small-scale, isolated, and well-understood difficulty, rather than in real-world scenarios where many such issues are entangled. Passing these unit tests is not sufficient, but absolutely necessary for any algorithms with claims to generality or robustness. We give initial quantitative and qualitative results on numerous established algorithms. The testing framework is open-source, extensible, and easy to apply to new algorithms.
1312.6057
On the Joint Impact of Beamwidth and Orientation Error on Throughput in Directional Wireless Poisson Networks
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
We introduce a model for capturing the effects of beam misdirection on coverage and throughput in a directional wireless network using stochastic geometry. In networks employing ideal sector antennas without sidelobes, we find that concavity of the orientation error distribution is sufficient to prove monotonicity and quasi-concavity (both with respect to antenna beamwidth) of spatial throughput and transmission capacity, respectively. Additionally, we identify network conditions that produce opposite extremal choices in beamwidth (absolutely directed versus omni-directional) that maximize the two related throughput metrics. We conclude our paper with a numerical exploration of the relationship between mean orientation error, throughput-maximizing beamwidths, and maximum throughput, across radiation patterns of varied complexity.
1312.6061
Driving forces in researchers mobility
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Starting from the dataset of the publication corpus of the APS during the period 1955-2009, we reconstruct the individual researchers trajectories, namely the list of the consecutive affiliations for each scholar. Crossing this information with different geographic datasets we embed these trajectories in a spatial framework. Using methods from network theory and complex systems analysis we characterise these patterns in terms of topological network properties and we analyse the dependence of an academic path across different dimensions: the distance between two subsequent positions, the relative importance of the institutions (in terms of number of publications) and some socio-cultural traits. We show that distance is not always a good predictor for the next affiliation while other factors like "the previous steps" of the career of the researchers (in particular the first position) or the linguistic and historical similarity between two countries can have an important impact. Finally we show that the dataset exhibit a memory effect, hence the fate of a career strongly depends from the first two affiliations.
1312.6062
Stopping Criteria in Contrastive Divergence: Alternatives to the Reconstruction Error
cs.LG
Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) are general unsupervised learning devices to ascertain generative models of data distributions. RBMs are often trained using the Contrastive Divergence learning algorithm (CD), an approximation to the gradient of the data log-likelihood. A simple reconstruction error is often used to decide whether the approximation provided by the CD algorithm is good enough, though several authors (Schulz et al., 2010; Fischer & Igel, 2010) have raised doubts concerning the feasibility of this procedure. However, not many alternatives to the reconstruction error have been used in the literature. In this manuscript we investigate simple alternatives to the reconstruction error in order to detect as soon as possible the decrease in the log-likelihood during learning.
1312.6064
Extending Construction X for Quantum Error-Correcting Codes
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper we extend the work of Lisonek and Singh on construction X for quantum error-correcting codes to finite fields of order $p^2^ where p is prime. The results obtained are applied to the dual of Hermitian repeated root cyclic codes to generate new quantum error-correcting codes.