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1312.6802
Suffix Stripping Problem as an Optimization Problem
cs.IR cs.CL
Stemming or suffix stripping, an important part of the modern Information Retrieval systems, is to find the root word (stem) out of a given cluster of words. Existing algorithms targeting this problem have been developed in a haphazard manner. In this work, we model this problem as an optimization problem. An Integer Program is being developed to overcome the shortcomings of the existing approaches. The sample results of the proposed method are also being compared with an established technique in the field for English language. An AMPL code for the same IP has also been given.
1312.6807
Iterative Nearest Neighborhood Oversampling in Semisupervised Learning from Imbalanced Data
cs.LG
Transductive graph-based semi-supervised learning methods usually build an undirected graph utilizing both labeled and unlabeled samples as vertices. Those methods propagate label information of labeled samples to neighbors through their edges in order to get the predicted labels of unlabeled samples. Most popular semi-supervised learning approaches are sensitive to initial label distribution happened in imbalanced labeled datasets. The class boundary will be severely skewed by the majority classes in an imbalanced classification. In this paper, we proposed a simple and effective approach to alleviate the unfavorable influence of imbalance problem by iteratively selecting a few unlabeled samples and adding them into the minority classes to form a balanced labeled dataset for the learning methods afterwards. The experiments on UCI datasets and MNIST handwritten digits dataset showed that the proposed approach outperforms other existing state-of-art methods.
1312.6808
Socially-Aware Venue Recommendation for Conference Participants
cs.IR cs.SI
Current research environments are witnessing high enormities of presentations occurring in different sessions at academic conferences. This situation makes it difficult for researchers (especially juniors) to attend the right presentation session(s) for effective collaboration. In this paper, we propose an innovative venue recommendation algorithm to enhance smart conference participation. Our proposed algorithm, Social Aware Recommendation of Venues and Environments (SARVE), computes the Pearson Correlation and social characteristic information of conference participants. SARVE further incorporates the current context of both the smart conference community and participants in order to model a recommendation process using distributed community detection. Through the integration of the above computations and techniques, we are able to recommend presentation sessions of active participant presenters that may be of high interest to a particular participant. We evaluate SARVE using a real world dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that SARVE outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.
1312.6809
The Micro Dynamics of Collective Violence
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Collective violence in direct confrontations between two opposing groups happens in short bursts wherein small subgroups briefly attack small numbers of opponents, while the others form a non-fighting audience. The mechanism is fighters' synchronization of intentionalities during preliminary interactions, by which they feel one and overcome their fear. To explain these bursts, subgroups' small sizes and leaders' role, a social influence model and a synchronization model are compared.
1312.6813
New explicit thresholding/shrinkage formulas for one class of regularization problems with overlapping group sparsity and their applications
math.NA cs.CV
The least-square regression problems or inverse problems have been widely studied in many fields such as compressive sensing, signal processing, and image processing. To solve this kind of ill-posed problems, a regularization term (i.e., regularizer) should be introduced, under the assumption that the solutions have some specific properties, such as sparsity and group sparsity. Widely used regularizers include the $\ell_1$ norm, total variation (TV) semi-norm, and so on. Recently, a new regularization term with overlapping group sparsity has been considered. Majorization minimization iteration method or variable duplication methods are often applied to solve them. However, there have been no direct methods for solve the relevant problems because of the difficulty of overlapping. In this paper, we proposed new explicit shrinkage formulas for one class of these relevant problems, whose regularization terms have translation invariant overlapping groups. Moreover, we apply our results in TV deblurring and denoising with overlapping group sparsity. We use alternating direction method of multipliers to iterate solve it. Numerical results also verify the validity and effectiveness of our new explicit shrinkage formulas.
1312.6820
A Fast Greedy Algorithm for Generalized Column Subset Selection
cs.DS cs.LG stat.ML
This paper defines a generalized column subset selection problem which is concerned with the selection of a few columns from a source matrix A that best approximate the span of a target matrix B. The paper then proposes a fast greedy algorithm for solving this problem and draws connections to different problems that can be efficiently solved using the proposed algorithm.
1312.6826
3D Interest Point Detection via Discriminative Learning
cs.CV
The task of detecting the interest points in 3D meshes has typically been handled by geometric methods. These methods, while greatly describing human preference, can be ill-equipped for handling the variety and subjectivity in human responses. Different tasks have different requirements for interest point detection; some tasks may necessitate high precision while other tasks may require high recall. Sometimes points with high curvature may be desirable, while in other cases high curvature may be an indication of noise. Geometric methods lack the required flexibility to adapt to such changes. As a consequence, interest point detection seems to be well suited for machine learning methods that can be trained to match the criteria applied on the annotated training data. In this paper, we formulate interest point detection as a supervised binary classification problem using a random forest as our classifier. Among other challenges, we are faced with an imbalanced learning problem due to the substantial difference in the priors between interest and non-interest points. We address this by re-sampling the training set. We validate the accuracy of our method and compare our results to those of five state of the art methods on a new, standard benchmark.
1312.6832
The Value Iteration Algorithm is Not Strongly Polynomial for Discounted Dynamic Programming
cs.AI math.OC
This note provides a simple example demonstrating that, if exact computations are allowed, the number of iterations required for the value iteration algorithm to find an optimal policy for discounted dynamic programming problems may grow arbitrarily quickly with the size of the problem. In particular, the number of iterations can be exponential in the number of actions. Thus, unlike policy iterations, the value iteration algorithm is not strongly polynomial for discounted dynamic programming.
1312.6834
Face Detection from still and Video Images using Unsupervised Cellular Automata with K means clustering algorithm
cs.CV
Pattern recognition problem rely upon the features inherent in the pattern of images. Face detection and recognition is one of the challenging research areas in the field of computer vision. In this paper, we present a method to identify skin pixels from still and video images using skin color. Face regions are identified from this skin pixel region. Facial features such as eyes, nose and mouth are then located. Faces are recognized from color images using an RBF based neural network. Unsupervised Cellular Automata with K means clustering algorithm is used to locate different facial elements. Orientation is corrected by using eyes. Parameters like inter eye distance, nose length, mouth position, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients etc. are computed and used for a Radial Basis Function (RBF) based neural network. This approach reliably works for face sequence with orientation in head, expressions etc.
1312.6838
Greedy Column Subset Selection for Large-scale Data Sets
cs.DS cs.LG
In today's information systems, the availability of massive amounts of data necessitates the development of fast and accurate algorithms to summarize these data and represent them in a succinct format. One crucial problem in big data analytics is the selection of representative instances from large and massively-distributed data, which is formally known as the Column Subset Selection (CSS) problem. The solution to this problem enables data analysts to understand the insights of the data and explore its hidden structure. The selected instances can also be used for data preprocessing tasks such as learning a low-dimensional embedding of the data points or computing a low-rank approximation of the corresponding matrix. This paper presents a fast and accurate greedy algorithm for large-scale column subset selection. The algorithm minimizes an objective function which measures the reconstruction error of the data matrix based on the subset of selected columns. The paper first presents a centralized greedy algorithm for column subset selection which depends on a novel recursive formula for calculating the reconstruction error of the data matrix. The paper then presents a MapReduce algorithm which selects a few representative columns from a matrix whose columns are massively distributed across several commodity machines. The algorithm first learns a concise representation of all columns using random projection, and it then solves a generalized column subset selection problem at each machine in which a subset of columns are selected from the sub-matrix on that machine such that the reconstruction error of the concise representation is minimized. The paper demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm through an empirical evaluation on benchmark data sets.
1312.6843
Separating signal from noise
math.PR cs.IT math.CA math.IT math.ST stat.TH
Suppose that a sequence of numbers $x_n$ (a `signal') is transmitted through a noisy channel. The receiver observes a noisy version of the signal with additive random fluctuations, $x_n + \xi_n$, where $\xi_n$ is a sequence of independent standard Gaussian random variables. Suppose further that the signal is known to come from some fixed space of possible signals. Is it possible to fully recover the transmitted signal from its noisy version? Is it possible to at least detect that a non-zero signal was transmitted? In this paper we consider the case in which signals are infinite sequences and the recovery or detection are required to hold with probability one. We provide conditions on the signal space for checking whether detection or recovery are possible. We also analyze in detail several examples including spaces of Fourier transforms of measures, spaces with fixed amplitudes and the space of almost periodic functions. Many of our examples exhibit critical phenomena, in which a sharp transition is made from a regime in which recovery is possible to a regime in which even detection is impossible.
1312.6849
Speech Recognition Front End Without Information Loss
cs.CL cs.CV cs.LG
Speech representation and modelling in high-dimensional spaces of acoustic waveforms, or a linear transformation thereof, is investigated with the aim of improving the robustness of automatic speech recognition to additive noise. The motivation behind this approach is twofold: (i) the information in acoustic waveforms that is usually removed in the process of extracting low-dimensional features might aid robust recognition by virtue of structured redundancy analogous to channel coding, (ii) linear feature domains allow for exact noise adaptation, as opposed to representations that involve non-linear processing which makes noise adaptation challenging. Thus, we develop a generative framework for phoneme modelling in high-dimensional linear feature domains, and use it in phoneme classification and recognition tasks. Results show that classification and recognition in this framework perform better than analogous PLP and MFCC classifiers below 18 dB SNR. A combination of the high-dimensional and MFCC features at the likelihood level performs uniformly better than either of the individual representations across all noise levels.
1312.6872
Matrix recovery using Split Bregman
cs.NA cs.LG
In this paper we address the problem of recovering a matrix, with inherent low rank structure, from its lower dimensional projections. This problem is frequently encountered in wide range of areas including pattern recognition, wireless sensor networks, control systems, recommender systems, image/video reconstruction etc. Both in theory and practice, the most optimal way to solve the low rank matrix recovery problem is via nuclear norm minimization. In this paper, we propose a Split Bregman algorithm for nuclear norm minimization. The use of Bregman technique improves the convergence speed of our algorithm and gives a higher success rate. Also, the accuracy of reconstruction is much better even for cases where small number of linear measurements are available. Our claim is supported by empirical results obtained using our algorithm and its comparison to other existing methods for matrix recovery. The algorithms are compared on the basis of NMSE, execution time and success rate for varying ranks and sampling ratios.
1312.6875
Refinement of the random coding bound
cs.IT math.IT
An improved pre-factor for the random coding bound is proved. Specifically, for channels with critical rate not equal to capacity, if a regularity condition is satisfied (resp. not satisfied), then for any $\epsilon >0$ a pre-factor of $O(N^{-\frac{1}{2}\left( 1 - \epsilon + \bar{\rho}^\ast_R \right)})$ (resp. $O(N^{-\frac{1}{2}})$) is achievable for rates above the critical rate, where $N$ and $R$ is the blocklength and rate, respectively. The extra term $\bar{\rho}^\ast_R$ is related to the slope of the random coding exponent. Further, the relation of these bounds with the authors' recent refinement of the sphere-packing bound, as well as the pre-factor for the random coding bound below the critical rate, is discussed.
1312.6885
Deep learning for class-generic object detection
cs.CV cs.LG cs.NE
We investigate the use of deep neural networks for the novel task of class generic object detection. We show that neural networks originally designed for image recognition can be trained to detect objects within images, regardless of their class, including objects for which no bounding box labels have been provided. In addition, we show that bounding box labels yield a 1% performance increase on the ImageNet recognition challenge.
1312.6911
QoS-Aware User Association for Load Balancing in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
To solve the problem that the low capacity in hot-spots and coverage holes of conventional cellular networks, the base stations (BSs) having lower transmit power are deployed to form heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets). However, because of these introduced disparate power BSs, the user distributions among them looked fairly unbalanced if an appropriate user association scheme hasn't been provided. For effectively tackling this problem, we jointly consider the load of each BS and user's achievable rate instead of only utilizing the latter when designing an association algorithm, and formulate it as a network-wide weighted utility maximization problem. Note that, the load mentioned above relates to the amount of required subbands decided by actual rate requirements, i.e., QoS, but the number of associated users, thus it can reflect user's actual load level. As for the proposed problem, we give a maximum probability (max-probability) algorithm by relaxing variables as well as a low-complexity distributed algorithm with a near-optimal solution that provides a theoretical performance guarantee. Experimental results show that, compared with the association strategy advocated by Ye, our strategy has a speeder convergence rate, a lower call blocking probability and a higher load balancing level.
1312.6918
Data Offloading in Load Coupled Networks: A Utility Maximization Framework
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
We provide a general framework for the problem of data offloading in a heterogeneous wireless network, where some demand of cellular users is served by a complementary network. The complementary network is either a small-cell network that shares the same resources as the cellular network, or a WiFi network that uses orthogonal resources. For a given demand served in a cellular network, the load, or the level of resource usage, of each cell depends in a non-linear manner on the load of other cells due to the mutual coupling of interference seen by one another. With load coupling, we optimize the demand to be served in the cellular or the complementary networks, so as to maximize a utility function. We consider three representative utility functions that balance, to varying degrees, the revenue from serving the users vs the user fairness. We establish conditions for which the optimization problem has a feasible solution and is convex, and hence tractable to numerical computations. Finally, we propose a strategy with theoretical justification to constrain the load to some maximum value, as required for practical implementation. Numerical studies are conducted for both under-loaded and over-loaded networks.
1312.6927
Structure Analysis on the $k$-error Linear Complexity for $2^n$-periodic Binary Sequences
cs.CR cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, in order to characterize the critical error linear complexity spectrum (CELCS) for $2^n$-periodic binary sequences, we first propose a decomposition based on the cube theory. Based on the proposed $k$-error cube decomposition, and the famous inclusion-exclusion principle, we obtain the complete characterization of $i$th descent point (critical point) of the k-error linear complexity for $i=2,3$. Second, by using the sieve method and Games-Chan algorithm, we characterize the second descent point (critical point) distribution of the $k$-error linear complexity for $2^n$-periodic binary sequences. As a consequence, we obtain the complete counting functions on the $k$-error linear complexity of $2^n$-periodic binary sequences as the second descent point for $k=3,4$. This is the first time for the second and the third descent points to be completely characterized. In fact, the proposed constructive approach has the potential to be used for constructing $2^n$-periodic binary sequences with the given linear complexity and $k$-error linear complexity (or CELCS), which is a challenging problem to be deserved for further investigation in future.
1312.6931
Multiple routes transmitted epidemics on multiplex networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
This letter investigates the multiple routes transmitted epidemic process on multiplex networks. We propose detailed theoretical analysis that allows us to accurately calculate the epidemic threshold and outbreak size. It is found that the epidemic can spread across the multiplex network even if all the network layers are well below their respective epidemic thresholds. Strong positive degree-degree correlation of nodes in multiplex network could lead to a much lower epidemic threshold and a relatively smaller outbreak size. However, the average similarity of neighbors from different layers of nodes has no obvious effect on the epidemic threshold and outbreak size.
1312.6934
Hardware and logic implementation of multiple alarm system for GSM BTS rooms
cs.SY
Cellular communication becomes the major mode of communication in present century. With the development of this phase of communication the globalization process is also in its peak of speed. The development of cellular communication is largely depending on the improvement and stability of Base Transceiver Station (BTS) room. So for the purpose of the development of cellular communication a large numbered BTS rooms are installed throughout the world. To ensure proper support from BTS rooms there must be a security system to avoid any unnecessary vulnerability. Therefore multiple alarm system is designed to secure the BTS rooms from any undesired circumstances. This system is designed with a PIC Microcontroller as a main controller and a several sensors are interfaced with it to provide high temperature alarm, smoke alarm, door alarm and water alarm. All these alarms are interfaced with the alarm box in the BTS room which provides the current status directly to Network Management Centre (NMC) of a Global System for Mobile (GSM) communication network.
1312.6936
The performance evaluation of IEEE 802.16 physical layer in the basis of bit error rate considering reference channel models
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT
Fixed Broadband Wireless Access is a promising technology which can offer high speed data rate from transmitting end to customer end which can offer high speed text, voice, and video data. IEEE 802.16 WirelessMAN is a standard that specifies medium access control layer and a set of PHY layer to fixed and mobile BWA in broad range of frequencies and it supports equipment manufacturers due to its robust performance in multipath environment. Consequently WiMAX forum has adopted this version to develop the network world wide. In this paper the performance of IEEE 802.16 OFDM PHY Layer has been investigated by using the simulation model in Matlab. The Stanford University Interim (SUI) channel models are selected for the performance evaluation of this standard. The Ideal Channel estimation is considered in this work and the performance evaluation is observed in the basis of BER.
1312.6945
Quantum Ensemble Classification: A Sampling-based Learning Control Approach
quant-ph cs.SY
Quantum ensemble classification has significant applications in discrimination of atoms (or molecules), separation of isotopic molecules and quantum information extraction. However, quantum mechanics forbids deterministic discrimination among nonorthogonal states. The classification of inhomogeneous quantum ensembles is very challenging since there exist variations in the parameters characterizing the members within different classes. In this paper, we recast quantum ensemble classification as a supervised quantum learning problem. A systematic classification methodology is presented by using a sampling-based learning control (SLC) approach for quantum discrimination. The classification task is accomplished via simultaneously steering members belonging to different classes to their corresponding target states (e.g., mutually orthogonal states). Firstly a new discrimination method is proposed for two similar quantum systems. Then an SLC method is presented for quantum ensemble classification. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for the binary classification of two-level quantum ensembles and the multiclass classification of multilevel quantum ensembles.
1312.6947
Formal Ontology Learning on Factual IS-A Corpus in English using Description Logics
cs.CL cs.AI
Ontology Learning (OL) is the computational task of generating a knowledge base in the form of an ontology given an unstructured corpus whose content is in natural language (NL). Several works can be found in this area most of which are limited to statistical and lexico-syntactic pattern matching based techniques Light-Weight OL. These techniques do not lead to very accurate learning mostly because of several linguistic nuances in NL. Formal OL is an alternative (less explored) methodology were deep linguistics analysis is made using theory and tools found in computational linguistics to generate formal axioms and definitions instead simply inducing a taxonomy. In this paper we propose "Description Logic (DL)" based formal OL framework for learning factual IS-A type sentences in English. We claim that semantic construction of IS-A sentences is non trivial. Hence, we also claim that such sentences requires special studies in the context of OL before any truly formal OL can be proposed. We introduce a learner tool, called DLOL_IS-A, that generated such ontologies in the owl format. We have adopted "Gold Standard" based OL evaluation on IS-A rich WCL v.1.1 dataset and our own Community representative IS-A dataset. We observed significant improvement of DLOL_IS-A when compared to the light-weight OL tool Text2Onto and formal OL tool FRED.
1312.6948
Description Logics based Formalization of Wh-Queries
cs.CL cs.AI
The problem of Natural Language Query Formalization (NLQF) is to translate a given user query in natural language (NL) into a formal language so that the semantic interpretation has equivalence with the NL interpretation. Formalization of NL queries enables logic based reasoning during information retrieval, database query, question-answering, etc. Formalization also helps in Web query normalization and indexing, query intent analysis, etc. In this paper we are proposing a Description Logics based formal methodology for wh-query intent (also called desire) identification and corresponding formal translation. We evaluated the scalability of our proposed formalism using Microsoft Encarta 98 query dataset and OWL-S TC v.4.0 dataset.
1312.6949
Joint Phase Tracking and Channel Decoding for OFDM Physical-Layer Network Coding
cs.IT math.IT
This paper investigates the problem of joint phase tracking and channel decoding in OFDM based Physical-layer Network Coding (PNC) systems. OFDM signaling can obviate the need for tight time synchronization among multiple simultaneous transmissions in the uplink of PNC systems. However, OFDM PNC systems are susceptible to phase drifts caused by residual carrier frequency offsets (CFOs). In the traditional OFDM system in which a receiver receives from only one transmitter, pilot tones are employed to aid phase tracking. In OFDM PNC systems, multiple transmitters transmit to a receiver, and these pilot tones must be shared among the multiple transmitters. This reduces the number of pilots that can be used by each transmitting node. Phase tracking in OFDM PNC is more challenging as a result. To overcome the degradation due to the reduced number of per-node pilots, this work supplements the pilots with the channel information contained in the data. In particular, we propose to solve the problems of phase tracking and channel decoding jointly. Our solution consists of the use of the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for phase tracking and the use of the belief propagation (BP) algorithm for channel decoding. The two problems are solved jointly through iterative processing between the EM and BP algorithms. Simulations and real experiments based on software-defined radio show that the proposed method can improve phase tracking as well as channel decoding performance.
1312.6956
Joint segmentation of multivariate time series with hidden process regression for human activity recognition
stat.ML cs.LG
The problem of human activity recognition is central for understanding and predicting the human behavior, in particular in a prospective of assistive services to humans, such as health monitoring, well being, security, etc. There is therefore a growing need to build accurate models which can take into account the variability of the human activities over time (dynamic models) rather than static ones which can have some limitations in such a dynamic context. In this paper, the problem of activity recognition is analyzed through the segmentation of the multidimensional time series of the acceleration data measured in the 3-d space using body-worn accelerometers. The proposed model for automatic temporal segmentation is a specific statistical latent process model which assumes that the observed acceleration sequence is governed by sequence of hidden (unobserved) activities. More specifically, the proposed approach is based on a specific multiple regression model incorporating a hidden discrete logistic process which governs the switching from one activity to another over time. The model is learned in an unsupervised context by maximizing the observed-data log-likelihood via a dedicated expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. We applied it on a real-world automatic human activity recognition problem and its performance was assessed by performing comparisons with alternative approaches, including well-known supervised static classifiers and the standard hidden Markov model (HMM). The obtained results are very encouraging and show that the proposed approach is quite competitive even it works in an entirely unsupervised way and does not requires a feature extraction preprocessing step.
1312.6962
Subjectivity Classification using Machine Learning Techniques for Mining Feature-Opinion Pairs from Web Opinion Sources
cs.IR cs.CL cs.LG
Due to flourish of the Web 2.0, web opinion sources are rapidly emerging containing precious information useful for both customers and manufactures. Recently, feature based opinion mining techniques are gaining momentum in which customer reviews are processed automatically for mining product features and user opinions expressed over them. However, customer reviews may contain both opinionated and factual sentences. Distillations of factual contents improve mining performance by preventing noisy and irrelevant extraction. In this paper, combination of both supervised machine learning and rule-based approaches are proposed for mining feasible feature-opinion pairs from subjective review sentences. In the first phase of the proposed approach, a supervised machine learning technique is applied for classifying subjective and objective sentences from customer reviews. In the next phase, a rule based method is implemented which applies linguistic and semantic analysis of texts to mine feasible feature-opinion pairs from subjective sentences retained after the first phase. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is established through experimentation over customer reviews on different electronic products.
1312.6965
An Unsupervised Approach for Automatic Activity Recognition based on Hidden Markov Model Regression
stat.ML cs.CV cs.LG
Using supervised machine learning approaches to recognize human activities from on-body wearable accelerometers generally requires a large amount of labelled data. When ground truth information is not available, too expensive, time consuming or difficult to collect, one has to rely on unsupervised approaches. This paper presents a new unsupervised approach for human activity recognition from raw acceleration data measured using inertial wearable sensors. The proposed method is based upon joint segmentation of multidimensional time series using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) in a multiple regression context. The model is learned in an unsupervised framework using the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm where no activity labels are needed. The proposed method takes into account the sequential appearance of the data. It is therefore adapted for the temporal acceleration data to accurately detect the activities. It allows both segmentation and classification of the human activities. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach with respect to standard supervised and unsupervised classification approaches
1312.6966
Model-based functional mixture discriminant analysis with hidden process regression for curve classification
stat.ME cs.LG math.ST stat.ML stat.TH
In this paper, we study the modeling and the classification of functional data presenting regime changes over time. We propose a new model-based functional mixture discriminant analysis approach based on a specific hidden process regression model that governs the regime changes over time. Our approach is particularly adapted to handle the problem of complex-shaped classes of curves, where each class is potentially composed of several sub-classes, and to deal with the regime changes within each homogeneous sub-class. The proposed model explicitly integrates the heterogeneity of each class of curves via a mixture model formulation, and the regime changes within each sub-class through a hidden logistic process. Each class of complex-shaped curves is modeled by a finite number of homogeneous clusters, each of them being decomposed into several regimes. The model parameters of each class are learned by maximizing the observed-data log-likelihood by using a dedicated expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Comparisons are performed with alternative curve classification approaches, including functional linear discriminant analysis and functional mixture discriminant analysis with polynomial regression mixtures and spline regression mixtures. Results obtained on simulated data and real data show that the proposed approach outperforms the alternative approaches in terms of discrimination, and significantly improves the curves approximation.
1312.6967
Model-based clustering and segmentation of time series with changes in regime
stat.ME cs.LG math.ST stat.ML stat.TH
Mixture model-based clustering, usually applied to multidimensional data, has become a popular approach in many data analysis problems, both for its good statistical properties and for the simplicity of implementation of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. Within the context of a railway application, this paper introduces a novel mixture model for dealing with time series that are subject to changes in regime. The proposed approach consists in modeling each cluster by a regression model in which the polynomial coefficients vary according to a discrete hidden process. In particular, this approach makes use of logistic functions to model the (smooth or abrupt) transitions between regimes. The model parameters are estimated by the maximum likelihood method solved by an Expectation-Maximization algorithm. The proposed approach can also be regarded as a clustering approach which operates by finding groups of time series having common changes in regime. In addition to providing a time series partition, it therefore provides a time series segmentation. The problem of selecting the optimal numbers of clusters and segments is solved by means of the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). The proposed approach is shown to be efficient using a variety of simulated time series and real-world time series of electrical power consumption from rail switching operations.
1312.6968
A hidden process regression model for functional data description. Application to curve discrimination
stat.ME cs.LG stat.ML
A new approach for functional data description is proposed in this paper. It consists of a regression model with a discrete hidden logistic process which is adapted for modeling curves with abrupt or smooth regime changes. The model parameters are estimated in a maximum likelihood framework through a dedicated Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. From the proposed generative model, a curve discrimination rule is derived using the Maximum A Posteriori rule. The proposed model is evaluated using simulated curves and real world curves acquired during railway switch operations, by performing comparisons with the piecewise regression approach in terms of curve modeling and classification.
1312.6969
Time series modeling by a regression approach based on a latent process
stat.ME cs.LG math.ST stat.ML stat.TH
Time series are used in many domains including finance, engineering, economics and bioinformatics generally to represent the change of a measurement over time. Modeling techniques may then be used to give a synthetic representation of such data. A new approach for time series modeling is proposed in this paper. It consists of a regression model incorporating a discrete hidden logistic process allowing for activating smoothly or abruptly different polynomial regression models. The model parameters are estimated by the maximum likelihood method performed by a dedicated Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. The M step of the EM algorithm uses a multi-class Iterative Reweighted Least-Squares (IRLS) algorithm to estimate the hidden process parameters. To evaluate the proposed approach, an experimental study on simulated data and real world data was performed using two alternative approaches: a heteroskedastic piecewise regression model using a global optimization algorithm based on dynamic programming, and a Hidden Markov Regression Model whose parameters are estimated by the Baum-Welch algorithm. Finally, in the context of the remote monitoring of components of the French railway infrastructure, and more particularly the switch mechanism, the proposed approach has been applied to modeling and classifying time series representing the condition measurements acquired during switch operations.
1312.6974
Piecewise regression mixture for simultaneous functional data clustering and optimal segmentation
stat.ME cs.LG math.ST stat.ML stat.TH
This paper introduces a novel mixture model-based approach for simultaneous clustering and optimal segmentation of functional data which are curves presenting regime changes. The proposed model consists in a finite mixture of piecewise polynomial regression models. Each piecewise polynomial regression model is associated with a cluster, and within each cluster, each piecewise polynomial component is associated with a regime (i.e., a segment). We derive two approaches for learning the model parameters. The former is an estimation approach and consists in maximizing the observed-data likelihood via a dedicated expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. A fuzzy partition of the curves in K clusters is then obtained at convergence by maximizing the posterior cluster probabilities. The latter however is a classification approach and optimizes a specific classification likelihood criterion through a dedicated classification expectation-maximization (CEM) algorithm. The optimal curve segmentation is performed by using dynamic programming. In the classification approach, both the curve clustering and the optimal segmentation are performed simultaneously as the CEM learning proceeds. We show that the classification approach is the probabilistic version that generalizes the deterministic K-means-like algorithm proposed in H\'ebrail et al. (2010). The proposed approach is evaluated using simulated curves and real-world curves. Comparisons with alternatives including regression mixture models and the K-means like algorithm for piecewise regression demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
1312.6978
Mod\`ele \`a processus latent et algorithme EM pour la r\'egression non lin\'eaire
math.ST cs.LG stat.ME stat.ML stat.TH
A non linear regression approach which consists of a specific regression model incorporating a latent process, allowing various polynomial regression models to be activated preferentially and smoothly, is introduced in this paper. The model parameters are estimated by maximum likelihood performed via a dedicated expecation-maximization (EM) algorithm. An experimental study using simulated and real data sets reveals good performances of the proposed approach.
1312.6994
A regression model with a hidden logistic process for signal parametrization
stat.ME cs.LG stat.ML
A new approach for signal parametrization, which consists of a specific regression model incorporating a discrete hidden logistic process, is proposed. The model parameters are estimated by the maximum likelihood method performed by a dedicated Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. The parameters of the hidden logistic process, in the inner loop of the EM algorithm, are estimated using a multi-class Iterative Reweighted Least-Squares (IRLS) algorithm. An experimental study using simulated and real data reveals good performances of the proposed approach.
1312.6995
Towards Using Unlabeled Data in a Sparse-coding Framework for Human Activity Recognition
cs.LG cs.AI stat.ML
We propose a sparse-coding framework for activity recognition in ubiquitous and mobile computing that alleviates two fundamental problems of current supervised learning approaches. (i) It automatically derives a compact, sparse and meaningful feature representation of sensor data that does not rely on prior expert knowledge and generalizes extremely well across domain boundaries. (ii) It exploits unlabeled sample data for bootstrapping effective activity recognizers, i.e., substantially reduces the amount of ground truth annotation required for model estimation. Such unlabeled data is trivial to obtain, e.g., through contemporary smartphones carried by users as they go about their everyday activities. Based on the self-taught learning paradigm we automatically derive an over-complete set of basis vectors from unlabeled data that captures inherent patterns present within activity data. Through projecting raw sensor data onto the feature space defined by such over-complete sets of basis vectors effective feature extraction is pursued. Given these learned feature representations, classification backends are then trained using small amounts of labeled training data. We study the new approach in detail using two datasets which differ in terms of the recognition tasks and sensor modalities. Primarily we focus on transportation mode analysis task, a popular task in mobile-phone based sensing. The sparse-coding framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in supervised learning approaches. Furthermore, we demonstrate the great practical potential of the new approach by successfully evaluating its generalization capabilities across both domain and sensor modalities by considering the popular Opportunity dataset. Our feature learning approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches to analyzing activities in daily living.
1312.6996
A New Approach to Constraint Weight Learning for Variable Ordering in CSPs
cs.AI
A Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) is a framework used for modeling and solving constrained problems. Tree-search algorithms like backtracking try to construct a solution to a CSP by selecting the variables of the problem one after another. The order in which these algorithm select the variables potentially have significant impact on the search performance. Various heuristics have been proposed for choosing good variable ordering. Many powerful variable ordering heuristics weigh the constraints first and then utilize the weights for selecting good order of the variables. Constraint weighting are basically employed to identify global bottlenecks in a CSP. In this paper, we propose a new approach for learning weights for the constraints using competitive coevolutionary Genetic Algorithm (GA). Weights learned by the coevolutionary GA later help to make better choices for the first few variables in a search. In the competitive coevolutionary GA, constraints and candidate solutions for a CSP evolve together through an inverse fitness interaction process. We have conducted experiments on several random, quasi-random and patterned instances to measure the efficiency of the proposed approach. The results and analysis show that the proposed approach is good at learning weights to distinguish the hard constraints for quasi-random instances and forced satisfiable random instances generated with the Model RB. For other type of instances, RNDI still seems to be the best approach as our experiments show.
1312.7001
A regression model with a hidden logistic process for feature extraction from time series
stat.ME cs.LG math.ST stat.ML stat.TH
A new approach for feature extraction from time series is proposed in this paper. This approach consists of a specific regression model incorporating a discrete hidden logistic process. The model parameters are estimated by the maximum likelihood method performed by a dedicated Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. The parameters of the hidden logistic process, in the inner loop of the EM algorithm, are estimated using a multi-class Iterative Reweighted Least-Squares (IRLS) algorithm. A piecewise regression algorithm and its iterative variant have also been considered for comparisons. An experimental study using simulated and real data reveals good performances of the proposed approach.
1312.7003
Supervised learning of a regression model based on latent process. Application to the estimation of fuel cell life time
stat.ML cs.LG stat.AP
This paper describes a pattern recognition approach aiming to estimate fuel cell duration time from electrochemical impedance spectroscopy measurements. It consists in first extracting features from both real and imaginary parts of the impedance spectrum. A parametric model is considered in the case of the real part, whereas regression model with latent variables is used in the latter case. Then, a linear regression model using different subsets of extracted features is used fo r the estimation of fuel cell time duration. The performances of the proposed approach are evaluated on experimental data set to show its feasibility. This could lead to interesting perspectives for predictive maintenance policy of fuel cell.
1312.7006
A Convex Formulation for Mixed Regression with Two Components: Minimax Optimal Rates
stat.ML cs.IT cs.LG math.IT
We consider the mixed regression problem with two components, under adversarial and stochastic noise. We give a convex optimization formulation that provably recovers the true solution, and provide upper bounds on the recovery errors for both arbitrary noise and stochastic noise settings. We also give matching minimax lower bounds (up to log factors), showing that under certain assumptions, our algorithm is information-theoretically optimal. Our results represent the first tractable algorithm guaranteeing successful recovery with tight bounds on recovery errors and sample complexity.
1312.7007
Functional Mixture Discriminant Analysis with hidden process regression for curve classification
stat.ME cs.LG stat.ML
We present a new mixture model-based discriminant analysis approach for functional data using a specific hidden process regression model. The approach allows for fitting flexible curve-models to each class of complex-shaped curves presenting regime changes. The model parameters are learned by maximizing the observed-data log-likelihood for each class by using a dedicated expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Comparisons on simulated data with alternative approaches show that the proposed approach provides better results.
1312.7018
Mixture model-based functional discriminant analysis for curve classification
stat.ME cs.LG stat.ML
Statistical approaches for Functional Data Analysis concern the paradigm for which the individuals are functions or curves rather than finite dimensional vectors. In this paper, we particularly focus on the modeling and the classification of functional data which are temporal curves presenting regime changes over time. More specifically, we propose a new mixture model-based discriminant analysis approach for functional data using a specific hidden process regression model. Our approach is particularly adapted to both handle the problem of complex-shaped classes of curves, where each class is composed of several sub-classes, and to deal with the regime changes within each homogeneous sub-class. The model explicitly integrates the heterogeneity of each class of curves via a mixture model formulation, and the regime changes within each sub-class through a hidden logistic process. The approach allows therefore for fitting flexible curve-models to each class of complex-shaped curves presenting regime changes through an unsupervised learning scheme, to automatically summarize it into a finite number of homogeneous clusters, each of them is decomposed into several regimes. The model parameters are learned by maximizing the observed-data log-likelihood for each class by using a dedicated expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Comparisons on simulated data and real data with alternative approaches, including functional linear discriminant analysis and functional mixture discriminant analysis with polynomial regression mixtures and spline regression mixtures, show that the proposed approach provides better results regarding the discrimination results and significantly improves the curves approximation.
1312.7022
Robust EM algorithm for model-based curve clustering
stat.ME cs.LG stat.ML
Model-based clustering approaches concern the paradigm of exploratory data analysis relying on the finite mixture model to automatically find a latent structure governing observed data. They are one of the most popular and successful approaches in cluster analysis. The mixture density estimation is generally performed by maximizing the observed-data log-likelihood by using the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. However, it is well-known that the EM algorithm initialization is crucial. In addition, the standard EM algorithm requires the number of clusters to be known a priori. Some solutions have been provided in [31, 12] for model-based clustering with Gaussian mixture models for multivariate data. In this paper we focus on model-based curve clustering approaches, when the data are curves rather than vectorial data, based on regression mixtures. We propose a new robust EM algorithm for clustering curves. We extend the model-based clustering approach presented in [31] for Gaussian mixture models, to the case of curve clustering by regression mixtures, including polynomial regression mixtures as well as spline or B-spline regressions mixtures. Our approach both handles the problem of initialization and the one of choosing the optimal number of clusters as the EM learning proceeds, rather than in a two-fold scheme. This is achieved by optimizing a penalized log-likelihood criterion. A simulation study confirms the potential benefit of the proposed algorithm in terms of robustness regarding initialization and funding the actual number of clusters.
1312.7024
Model-based clustering with Hidden Markov Model regression for time series with regime changes
stat.ML cs.LG stat.ME
This paper introduces a novel model-based clustering approach for clustering time series which present changes in regime. It consists of a mixture of polynomial regressions governed by hidden Markov chains. The underlying hidden process for each cluster activates successively several polynomial regimes during time. The parameter estimation is performed by the maximum likelihood method through a dedicated Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. The proposed approach is evaluated using simulated time series and real-world time series issued from a railway diagnosis application. Comparisons with existing approaches for time series clustering, including the stand EM for Gaussian mixtures, $K$-means clustering, the standard mixture of regression models and mixture of Hidden Markov Models, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
1312.7035
Shape-constrained Estimation of Value Functions
math.PR cs.CE math.OC stat.ML
We present a fully nonparametric method to estimate the value function, via simulation, in the context of expected infinite-horizon discounted rewards for Markov chains. Estimating such value functions plays an important role in approximate dynamic programming and applied probability in general. We incorporate "soft information" into the estimation algorithm, such as knowledge of convexity, monotonicity, or Lipchitz constants. In the presence of such information, a nonparametric estimator for the value function can be computed that is provably consistent as the simulated time horizon tends to infinity. As an application, we implement our method on price tolling agreement contracts in energy markets.
1312.7036
Deriving Latent Social Impulses to Determine Longevous Videos
cs.SI cs.MM
Online video websites receive huge amount of videos daily from users all around the world. How to provide valuable recommendations to viewers is an important task for both video websites and related third parties, such as search engines. Previous work conducted numerous analysis on the view counts of videos, which measure a video's value in terms of popularity. However, the long-lasting value of an online video, namely longevity, is hidden behind the history that a video accumulates its "popularity" through time. Generally speaking, a longevous video tends to constantly draw society's attention. With focus on one of the leading video websites, Youtube, this paper proposes a scoring mechanism quantifying a video's longevity. Evaluating a video's longevity can not only improve a video recommender system, but also help us to discover videos having greater advertising value, as well as adjust a video website's strategy of storing videos to shorten its responding time. In order to accurately quantify longevity, we introduce the concept of latent social impulses and how to use them measure a video's longevity. In order to derive latent social impulses, we view the video website as a digital signal filter and formulate the task as a convex minimization problem. The proposed longevity computation is based on the derived social impulses. Unfortunately, the required information to derive social impulses are not always public, which makes a third party unable to directly evaluate every video's longevity. To solve this problem, we formulate a semi-supervised learning task by using part of videos having known longevity scores to predict the unknown longevity scores. We propose a Gaussian Random Markov model with Loopy Belief Propagation to solve this problem. The conducted experiments on Youtube demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the prediction results comparing to baselines.
1312.7039
A Primal Dual Active Set Algorithm with Continuation for Compressed Sensing
cs.IT math.IT math.OC
The success of compressed sensing relies essentially on the ability to efficiently find an approximately sparse solution to an under-determined linear system. In this paper, we developed an efficient algorithm for the sparsity promoting $\ell_1$-regularized least squares problem by coupling the primal dual active set strategy with a continuation technique (on the regularization parameter). In the active set strategy, we first determine the active set from primal and dual variables, and then update the primal and dual variables by solving a low-dimensional least square problem on the active set, which makes the algorithm very efficient. The continuation technique globalizes the convergence of the algorithm, with provable global convergence under restricted isometry property (RIP). Further, we adopt two alternative methods, i.e., a modified discrepancy principle and a Bayesian information criterion, to choose the regularization parameter. Numerical experiments indicate that our algorithm is very competitive with state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of accuracy and efficiency.
1312.7050
Nash Equilibrium Computation in Subnetwork Zero-Sum Games with Switching Communications
cs.SY cs.GT math.OC
In this paper, we investigate a distributed Nash equilibrium computation problem for a time-varying multi-agent network consisting of two subnetworks, where the two subnetworks share the same objective function. We first propose a subgradient-based distributed algorithm with heterogeneous stepsizes to compute a Nash equilibrium of a zero-sum game. We then prove that the proposed algorithm can achieve a Nash equilibrium under uniformly jointly strongly connected (UJSC) weight-balanced digraphs with homogenous stepsizes. Moreover, we demonstrate that for weighted-unbalanced graphs a Nash equilibrium may not be achieved with homogenous stepsizes unless certain conditions on the objective function hold. We show that there always exist heterogeneous stepsizes for the proposed algorithm to guarantee that a Nash equilibrium can be achieved for UJSC digraphs. Finally, in two standard weight-unbalanced cases, we verify the convergence to a Nash equilibrium by adaptively updating the stepsizes along with the arc weights in the proposed algorithm.
1312.7056
Development of Display Ads Retrieval System to Match Publisher's Contents
cs.CY cs.IR
The technological transformation and automation of digital content delivery has revolutionized the media industry. Advertising landscape is gradually shifting its traditional media forms to the emergent of Internet advertising. In this paper, the types of internet advertising to be discussed on are contextual and sponsored search ads. These types of advertising have the central challenge of finding the best match between a given context and a suitable advertisement, through a principled method. Furthermore, there are four main players that exist in the Internet advertising ecosystem: users, advertisers, ad exchange and publishers. Hence, to find ways to counter the central challenge, the paper addresses two objectives: how to successfully make the best contextual ads selections to match to a web page content to ensure that there is a valuable connection between the web page and the contextual ads. All methods, discussions, conclusion and future recommendations are presented as per sections. Hence, in order to prove the working mechanism of matching contextual ads and web pages, web pages together with the ads matching system are developed as a prototype.
1312.7076
A Consensus-Focused Group Recommender System
cs.HC cs.IR cs.SI
In many cases, recommendations are consumed by groups of users rather than individuals. In this paper, we present a system which recommends social events to groups. The system helps groups to organize a joint activity and collectively select which activity to perform among several possible options. We also facilitate the consensus making, following the principle of group consensus decision making. Our system allows users to asynchronously vote, add and comment on alternatives. We observe social influence within groups through post-recommendation feedback during the group decision making process. We propose a decision cascading model and estimate such social influence, which can be used to improve the performance of group recommendation. We conduct experiments to measure the prediction performance of our model. The result shows that the model achieves better results than that of independent decision making model.
1312.7077
Language Modeling with Power Low Rank Ensembles
cs.CL cs.LG stat.ML
We present power low rank ensembles (PLRE), a flexible framework for n-gram language modeling where ensembles of low rank matrices and tensors are used to obtain smoothed probability estimates of words in context. Our method can be understood as a generalization of n-gram modeling to non-integer n, and includes standard techniques such as absolute discounting and Kneser-Ney smoothing as special cases. PLRE training is efficient and our approach outperforms state-of-the-art modified Kneser Ney baselines in terms of perplexity on large corpora as well as on BLEU score in a downstream machine translation task.
1312.7085
Finding More Relevance: Propagating Similarity on Markov Random Field for Image Retrieval
cs.CV
To effectively retrieve objects from large corpus with high accuracy is a challenge task. In this paper, we propose a method that propagates visual feature level similarities on a Markov random field (MRF) to obtain a high level correspondence in image space for image pairs. The proposed correspondence between image pair reflects not only the similarity of low-level visual features but also the relations built through other images in the database and it can be easily integrated into the existing bag-of-visual-words(BoW) based systems to reduce the missing rate. We evaluate our method on the standard Oxford-5K, Oxford-105K and Paris-6K dataset. The experiment results show that the proposed method significantly improves the retrieval accuracy on three datasets and exceeds the current state-of-the-art retrieval performance.
1312.7135
Multihop Backhaul Compression for the Uplink of Cloud Radio Access Networks
cs.IT math.IT
In cloud radio access networks (C-RANs), the baseband processing of the radio units (RUs) is migrated to remote control units (CUs). This is made possible by a network of backhaul links that connects RUs and CUs and that carries compressed baseband signals. While prior work has focused mostly on single-hop backhaul networks, this paper investigates efficient backhaul compression strategies for the uplink of C-RANs with a general multihop backhaul topology. A baseline multiplex-and-forward (MF) scheme is first studied in which each RU forwards the bit streams received from the connected RUs without any processing. It is observed that this strategy may cause significant performance degradation in the presence of a dense deployment of RUs with a well connected backhaul network. To obviate this problem, a scheme is proposed in which each RU decompresses the received bit streams and performs linear in-network processing of the decompressed signals. For both the MF and the decompress-process-and-recompress (DPR) backhaul schemes, the optimal design is addressed with the aim of maximizing the sum-rate under the backhaul capacity constraints. Recognizing the significant demands of the optimal solution of the DPR scheme in terms of channel state information (CSI) at the RUs, decentralized optimization algorithms are proposed under the assumption of limited CSI at the RUs. Numerical results are provided to compare the performance of the MF and DPR schemes, highlighting the potential advantage of in-network processing and the impact of CSI limitations.
1312.7145
Some remarks on spatial uniformity of solutions of reaction-diffusion PDE's and a related synchronization problem for ODE's
cs.SY math.AP
In this note, we present a condition which guarantees spatial uniformity for the asymptotic behavior of the solutions of a reaction-diffusion PDE with Neumann boundary conditions in one dimension, using the Jacobian matrix of the reaction term and the first Dirichlet eigenvalue of the Laplacian operator on the given spatial domain. We also derive an analog of this PDE result for the synchronization of a network of identical ODE models coupled by diffusion terms.
1312.7165
Spatially embedded growing small-world networks
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI
Networks in nature are often formed within a spatial domain in a dynamical manner, gaining links and nodes as they develop over time. We propose a class of spatially-based growing network models and investigate the relationship between the resulting statistical network properties and the dimension and topology of the space in which the networks are embedded. In particular, we consider models in which nodes are placed one by one in random locations in space, with each such placement followed by configuration relaxation toward uniform node density, and connection of the new node with spatially nearby nodes. We find that such growth processes naturally result in networks with small-world features, including a short characteristic path length and nonzero clustering. These properties do not appear to depend strongly on the topology of the embedding space, but do depend strongly on its dimension; higher-dimensional spaces result in shorter path lengths but less clustering.
1312.7167
Near-separable Non-negative Matrix Factorization with $\ell_1$- and Bregman Loss Functions
stat.ML cs.CV cs.LG
Recently, a family of tractable NMF algorithms have been proposed under the assumption that the data matrix satisfies a separability condition Donoho & Stodden (2003); Arora et al. (2012). Geometrically, this condition reformulates the NMF problem as that of finding the extreme rays of the conical hull of a finite set of vectors. In this paper, we develop several extensions of the conical hull procedures of Kumar et al. (2013) for robust ($\ell_1$) approximations and Bregman divergences. Our methods inherit all the advantages of Kumar et al. (2013) including scalability and noise-tolerance. We show that on foreground-background separation problems in computer vision, robust near-separable NMFs match the performance of Robust PCA, considered state of the art on these problems, with an order of magnitude faster training time. We also demonstrate applications in exemplar selection settings.
1312.7179
Sub-Classifier Construction for Error Correcting Output Code Using Minimum Weight Perfect Matching
cs.LG cs.IT math.IT
Multi-class classification is mandatory for real world problems and one of promising techniques for multi-class classification is Error Correcting Output Code. We propose a method for constructing the Error Correcting Output Code to obtain the suitable combination of positive and negative classes encoded to represent binary classifiers. The minimum weight perfect matching algorithm is applied to find the optimal pairs of subset of classes by using the generalization performance as a weighting criterion. Based on our method, each subset of classes with positive and negative labels is appropriately combined for learning the binary classifiers. Experimental results show that our technique gives significantly higher performance compared to traditional methods including the dense random code and the sparse random code both in terms of accuracy and classification times. Moreover, our method requires significantly smaller number of binary classifiers while maintaining accuracy compared to the One-Versus-One.
1312.7191
Special values of Kloosterman sums and binomial bent functions
cs.IT math.IT
Let $p\ge 7$, $q=p^m$. $K_q(a)=\sum_{x\in \mathbb{F}_{p^m}} \zeta^{\mathrm{Tr}^m_1(x^{p^m-2}+ax)}$ is the Kloosterman sum of $a$ on $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$, where $\zeta=e^{\frac{2\pi\sqrt{-1}}{p}}$. The value $1-\frac{2}{\zeta+\zeta^{-1}}$ of $K_q(a)$ and its conjugate have close relationship with a class of binomial function with Dillon exponent. This paper first presents some necessary conditions for $a$ such that $K_q(a)=1-\frac{2}{\zeta+\zeta^{-1}}$. Further, we prove that if $p=11$, for any $a$, $K_q(a)\neq 1-\frac{2}{\zeta+\zeta^{-1}}$. And for $p\ge 13$, if $a\in \mathbb{F}_{p^s}$ and $s=\mathrm{gcd}(2,m)$, $K_q(a)\neq 1-\frac{2}{\zeta+\zeta^{-1}}$. In application, these results explains some class of binomial regular bent functions does not exits.
1312.7198
Opportunistic Downlink Interference Alignment
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we propose an opportunistic downlink interference alignment (ODIA) for interference-limited cellular downlink, which intelligently combines user scheduling and downlink IA techniques. The proposed ODIA not only efficiently reduces the effect of inter-cell interference from other-cell base stations (BSs) but also eliminates intra-cell interference among spatial streams in the same cell. We show that the minimum number of users required to achieve a target degrees-of-freedom (DoF) can be fundamentally reduced, i.e., the fundamental user scaling law can be improved by using the ODIA, compared with the existing downlink IA schemes. In addition, we adopt a limited feedback strategy in the ODIA framework, and then analyze the required number of feedback bits leading to the same performance as that of the ODIA assuming perfect feedback. We also modify the original ODIA in order to further improve sum-rate, which achieves the optimal multiuser diversity gain, i.e., $\log \log N$, per spatial stream even in the presence of downlink inter-cell interference, where $N$ denotes the number of users in a cell. Simulation results show that the ODIA significantly outperforms existing interference management techniques in terms of sum-rate in realistic cellular environments. Note that the ODIA operates in a distributed and decoupled manner, while requiring no information exchange among BSs and no iterative beamformer optimization between BSs and users, thus leading to an easier implementation.
1312.7219
Combining persistent homology and invariance groups for shape comparison
math.AT cs.CG cs.CV
In many applications concerning the comparison of data expressed by $\mathbb{R}^m$-valued functions defined on a topological space $X$, the invariance with respect to a given group $G$ of self-homeomorphisms of $X$ is required. While persistent homology is quite efficient in the topological and qualitative comparison of this kind of data when the invariance group $G$ is the group $\mathrm{Homeo}(X)$ of all self-homeomorphisms of $X$, this theory is not tailored to manage the case in which $G$ is a proper subgroup of $\mathrm{Homeo}(X)$, and its invariance appears too general for several tasks. This paper proposes a way to adapt persistent homology in order to get invariance just with respect to a given group of self-homeomorphisms of $X$. The main idea consists in a dual approach, based on considering the set of all $G$-invariant non-expanding operators defined on the space of the admissible filtering functions on $X$. Some theoretical results concerning this approach are proven and two experiments are presented. An experiment illustrates the application of the proposed technique to compare 1D-signals, when the invariance is expressed by the group of affinities, the group of orientation-preserving affinities, the group of isometries, the group of translations and the identity group. Another experiment shows how our technique can be used for image comparison.
1312.7223
Quality Estimation of English-Hindi Outputs using Naive Bayes Classifier
cs.CL
In this paper we present an approach for estimating the quality of machine translation system. There are various methods for estimating the quality of output sentences, but in this paper we focus on Na\"ive Bayes classifier to build model using features which are extracted from the input sentences. These features are used for finding the likelihood of each of the sentences of the training data which are then further used for determining the scores of the test data. On the basis of these scores we determine the class labels of the test data.
1312.7249
Maximum Coverage and Maximum Connected Covering in Social Networks with Partial Topology Information
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Viral marketing campaigns seek to recruit the most influential individuals to cover the largest target audience. This can be modeled as the well-studied maximum coverage problem. There is a related problem when the recruited nodes are connected. It is called the maximum connected cover problem. This problem ensures a strong coordination between the influential nodes which are the backbone of the marketing campaign. In this work, we are interested on both of these problems. Most of the related literature assumes knowledge about the topology of the network. Even in that case, the problem is known to be NP-hard. In this work, we propose heuristics to the maximum connected cover problem and the maximum coverage problem with different knowledge levels about the topology of the network. We quantify the difference between these heuristics and the local and global greedy algorithms.
1312.7258
Active Discovery of Network Roles for Predicting the Classes of Network Nodes
cs.LG cs.SI stat.ML
Nodes in real world networks often have class labels, or underlying attributes, that are related to the way in which they connect to other nodes. Sometimes this relationship is simple, for instance nodes of the same class are may be more likely to be connected. In other cases, however, this is not true, and the way that nodes link in a network exhibits a different, more complex relationship to their attributes. Here, we consider networks in which we know how the nodes are connected, but we do not know the class labels of the nodes or how class labels relate to the network links. We wish to identify the best subset of nodes to label in order to learn this relationship between node attributes and network links. We can then use this discovered relationship to accurately predict the class labels of the rest of the network nodes. We present a model that identifies groups of nodes with similar link patterns, which we call network roles, using a generative blockmodel. The model then predicts labels by learning the mapping from network roles to class labels using a maximum margin classifier. We choose a subset of nodes to label according to an iterative margin-based active learning strategy. By integrating the discovery of network roles with the classifier optimisation, the active learning process can adapt the network roles to better represent the network for node classification. We demonstrate the model by exploring a selection of real world networks, including a marine food web and a network of English words. We show that, in contrast to other network classifiers, this model achieves good classification accuracy for a range of networks with different relationships between class labels and network links.
1312.7292
Two Timescale Convergent Q-learning for Sleep--Scheduling in Wireless Sensor Networks
cs.SY cs.LG
In this paper, we consider an intrusion detection application for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). We study the problem of scheduling the sleep times of the individual sensors to maximize the network lifetime while keeping the tracking error to a minimum. We formulate this problem as a partially-observable Markov decision process (POMDP) with continuous state-action spaces, in a manner similar to (Fuemmeler and Veeravalli [2008]). However, unlike their formulation, we consider infinite horizon discounted and average cost objectives as performance criteria. For each criterion, we propose a convergent on-policy Q-learning algorithm that operates on two timescales, while employing function approximation to handle the curse of dimensionality associated with the underlying POMDP. Our proposed algorithm incorporates a policy gradient update using a one-simulation simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) estimate on the faster timescale, while the Q-value parameter (arising from a linear function approximation for the Q-values) is updated in an on-policy temporal difference (TD) algorithm-like fashion on the slower timescale. The feature selection scheme employed in each of our algorithms manages the energy and tracking components in a manner that assists the search for the optimal sleep-scheduling policy. For the sake of comparison, in both discounted and average settings, we also develop a function approximation analogue of the Q-learning algorithm. This algorithm, unlike the two-timescale variant, does not possess theoretical convergence guarantees. Finally, we also adapt our algorithms to include a stochastic iterative estimation scheme for the intruder's mobility model. Our simulation results on a 2-dimensional network setting suggest that our algorithms result in better tracking accuracy at the cost of only a few additional sensors, in comparison to a recent prior work.
1312.7302
Learning Human Pose Estimation Features with Convolutional Networks
cs.CV cs.LG cs.NE
This paper introduces a new architecture for human pose estimation using a multi- layer convolutional network architecture and a modified learning technique that learns low-level features and higher-level weak spatial models. Unconstrained human pose estimation is one of the hardest problems in computer vision, and our new architecture and learning schema shows significant improvement over the current state-of-the-art results. The main contribution of this paper is showing, for the first time, that a specific variation of deep learning is able to outperform all existing traditional architectures on this task. The paper also discusses several lessons learned while researching alternatives, most notably, that it is possible to learn strong low-level feature detectors on features that might even just cover a few pixels in the image. Higher-level spatial models improve somewhat the overall result, but to a much lesser extent then expected. Many researchers previously argued that the kinematic structure and top-down information is crucial for this domain, but with our purely bottom up, and weak spatial model, we could improve other more complicated architectures that currently produce the best results. This mirrors what many other researchers, like those in the speech recognition, object recognition, and other domains have experienced.
1312.7308
lil' UCB : An Optimal Exploration Algorithm for Multi-Armed Bandits
stat.ML cs.LG
The paper proposes a novel upper confidence bound (UCB) procedure for identifying the arm with the largest mean in a multi-armed bandit game in the fixed confidence setting using a small number of total samples. The procedure cannot be improved in the sense that the number of samples required to identify the best arm is within a constant factor of a lower bound based on the law of the iterated logarithm (LIL). Inspired by the LIL, we construct our confidence bounds to explicitly account for the infinite time horizon of the algorithm. In addition, by using a novel stopping time for the algorithm we avoid a union bound over the arms that has been observed in other UCB-type algorithms. We prove that the algorithm is optimal up to constants and also show through simulations that it provides superior performance with respect to the state-of-the-art.
1312.7326
Replica Exchange using q-Gaussian Swarm Quantum Particle Intelligence Method
cs.AI
We present a newly developed Replica Exchange algorithm using q -Gaussian Swarm Quantum Particle Optimization (REX@q-GSQPO) method for solving the problem of finding the global optimum. The basis of the algorithm is to run multiple copies of independent swarms at different values of q parameter. Based on an energy criterion, chosen to satisfy the detailed balance, we are swapping the particle coordinates of neighboring swarms at regular iteration intervals. The swarm replicas with high q values are characterized by high diversity of particles allowing escaping local minima faster, while the low q replicas, characterized by low diversity of particles, are used to sample more efficiently the local basins. We compare the new algorithm with the standard Gaussian Swarm Quantum Particle Optimization (GSQPO) and q-Gaussian Swarm Quantum Particle Optimization (q-GSQPO) algorithms, and we found that the new algorithm is more robust in terms of the number of fitness function calls, and more efficient in terms ability convergence to the global minimum. In additional, we also provide a method of optimally allocating the swarm replicas among different q values. Our algorithm is tested for three benchmark functions, which are known to be multimodal problems, at different dimensionalities. In addition, we considered a polyalanine peptide of 12 residues modeled using a G\=o coarse-graining potential energy function.
1312.7335
Correlation-based construction of neighborhood and edge features
cs.CV cs.LG stat.ML
Motivated by an abstract notion of low-level edge detector filters, we propose a simple method of unsupervised feature construction based on pairwise statistics of features. In the first step, we construct neighborhoods of features by regrouping features that correlate. Then we use these subsets as filters to produce new neighborhood features. Next, we connect neighborhood features that correlate, and construct edge features by subtracting the correlated neighborhood features of each other. To validate the usefulness of the constructed features, we ran AdaBoost.MH on four multi-class classification problems. Our most significant result is a test error of 0.94% on MNIST with an algorithm which is essentially free of any image-specific priors. On CIFAR-10 our method is suboptimal compared to today's best deep learning techniques, nevertheless, we show that the proposed method outperforms not only boosting on the raw pixels, but also boosting on Haar filters.
1312.7345
Lesion Border Detection in Dermoscopy Images Using Ensembles of Thresholding Methods
cs.CV
Dermoscopy is one of the major imaging modalities used in the diagnosis of melanoma and other pigmented skin lesions. Due to the difficulty and subjectivity of human interpretation, automated analysis of dermoscopy images has become an important research area. Border detection is often the first step in this analysis. In many cases, the lesion can be roughly separated from the background skin using a thresholding method applied to the blue channel. However, no single thresholding method appears to be robust enough to successfully handle the wide variety of dermoscopy images encountered in clinical practice. In this paper, we present an automated method for detecting lesion borders in dermoscopy images using ensembles of thresholding methods. Experiments on a difficult set of 90 images demonstrate that the proposed method is robust, fast, and accurate when compared to nine state-of-the-art methods.
1312.7366
Monte Carlo non local means: Random sampling for large-scale image filtering
cs.CV stat.CO
We propose a randomized version of the non-local means (NLM) algorithm for large-scale image filtering. The new algorithm, called Monte Carlo non-local means (MCNLM), speeds up the classical NLM by computing a small subset of image patch distances, which are randomly selected according to a designed sampling pattern. We make two contributions. First, we analyze the performance of the MCNLM algorithm and show that, for large images or large external image databases, the random outcomes of MCNLM are tightly concentrated around the deterministic full NLM result. In particular, our error probability bounds show that, at any given sampling ratio, the probability for MCNLM to have a large deviation from the original NLM solution decays exponentially as the size of the image or database grows. Second, we derive explicit formulas for optimal sampling patterns that minimize the error probability bound by exploiting partial knowledge of the pairwise similarity weights. Numerical experiments show that MCNLM is competitive with other state-of-the-art fast NLM algorithms for single-image denoising. When applied to denoising images using an external database containing ten billion patches, MCNLM returns a randomized solution that is within 0.2 dB of the full NLM solution while reducing the runtime by three orders of magnitude.
1312.7373
Extending Contexts with Ontologies for Multidimensional Data Quality Assessment
cs.DB
Data quality and data cleaning are context dependent activities. Starting from this observation, in previous work a context model for the assessment of the quality of a database instance was proposed. In that framework, the context takes the form of a possibly virtual database or data integration system into which a database instance under quality assessment is mapped, for additional analysis and processing, enabling quality assessment. In this work we extend contexts with dimensions, and by doing so, we make possible a multidimensional assessment of data quality assessment. Multidimensional contexts are represented as ontologies written in Datalog+-. We use this language for representing dimensional constraints, and dimensional rules, and also for doing query answering based on dimensional navigation, which becomes an important auxiliary activity in the assessment of data. We show ideas and mechanisms by means of examples.
1312.7377
Designing Fully Distributed Consensus Protocols for Linear Multi-agent Systems with Directed Graphs
math.OC cs.SY
This paper addresses the distributed consensus protocol design problem for multi-agent systems with general linear dynamics and directed communication graphs. Existing works usually design consensus protocols using the smallest real part of the nonzero eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix associated with the communication graph, which however is global information. In this paper, based on only the agent dynamics and the relative states of neighboring agents, a distributed adaptive consensus protocol is designed to achieve leader-follower consensus for any communication graph containing a directed spanning tree with the leader as the root node. The proposed adaptive protocol is independent of any global information of the communication graph and thereby is fully distributed. Extensions to the case with multiple leaders are further studied.
1312.7381
Rate-Distortion Auto-Encoders
cs.LG
A rekindled the interest in auto-encoder algorithms has been spurred by recent work on deep learning. Current efforts have been directed towards effective training of auto-encoder architectures with a large number of coding units. Here, we propose a learning algorithm for auto-encoders based on a rate-distortion objective that minimizes the mutual information between the inputs and the outputs of the auto-encoder subject to a fidelity constraint. The goal is to learn a representation that is minimally committed to the input data, but that is rich enough to reconstruct the inputs up to certain level of distortion. Minimizing the mutual information acts as a regularization term whereas the fidelity constraint can be understood as a risk functional in the conventional statistical learning setting. The proposed algorithm uses a recently introduced measure of entropy based on infinitely divisible matrices that avoids the plug in estimation of densities. Experiments using over-complete bases show that the rate-distortion auto-encoders can learn a regularized input-output mapping in an implicit manner.
1312.7412
Model reduction of networked passive systems through clustering
cs.SY math.DS
In this paper, a model reduction procedure for a network of interconnected identical passive subsystems is presented. Here, rather than performing model reduction on the subsystems, adjacent subsystems are clustered, leading to a reduced-order networked system that allows for a convenient physical interpretation. The identification of the subsystems to be clustered is performed through controllability and observability analysis of an associated edge system and it is shown that the property of synchronization (i.e., the convergence of trajectories of the subsystems to each other) is preserved during reduction. The results are illustrated by means of an example.
1312.7414
Stopping Rules for Bag-of-Words Image Search and Its Application in Appearance-Based Localization
cs.CV cs.RO
We propose a technique to improve the search efficiency of the bag-of-words (BoW) method for image retrieval. We introduce a notion of difficulty for the image matching problems and propose methods that reduce the amount of computations required for the feature vector-quantization task in BoW by exploiting the fact that easier queries need less computational resources. Measuring the difficulty of a query and stopping the search accordingly is formulated as a stopping problem. We introduce stopping rules that terminate the image search depending on the difficulty of each query, thereby significantly reducing the computational cost. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach when it is applied to appearance-based localization problem.
1312.7422
Proceedings of Answer Set Programming and Other Computing Paradigms (ASPOCP 2013), 6th International Workshop, August 25, 2013, Istanbul, Turkey
cs.AI
This volume contains the papers presented at the sixth workshop on Answer Set Programming and Other Computing Paradigms (ASPOCP 2013) held on August 25th, 2013 in Istanbul, co-located with the 29th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2013). It thus continues a series of previous events co-located with ICLP, aiming at facilitating the discussion about crossing the boundaries of current ASP techniques in theory, solving, and applications, in combination with or inspired by other computing paradigms.
1312.7430
Simultaneous Perturbation Methods for Adaptive Labor Staffing in Service Systems
cs.SY
Service systems are labor intensive due to the large variation in the tasks required to address service requests from multiple customers. Aligning the staffing levels to the forecasted workloads adaptively in such systems is nontrivial because of a large number of parameters and operational variations leading to a huge search space. A challenging problem here is to optimize the staffing while maintaining the system in steady-state and compliant to aggregate service level agreement (SLA) constraints. Further, because these parameters change on a weekly basis, the optimization should not take longer than a few hours. We formulate this problem as a constrained Markov cost process parameterized by the (discrete) staffing levels. We propose novel simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) based SASOC (Staff Allocation using Stochastic Optimization with Constraints) algorithms for solving the above problem. The algorithms include both first order as well as second order methods and incorporate SPSA based gradient estimates in the primal, with dual ascent for the Lagrange multipliers. Both the algorithms that we propose are online, incremental and easy to implement. Further, they involve a certain generalized smooth projection operator, which is essential to project the continuous-valued worker parameter tuned by SASOC algorithms onto the discrete set. We validated our algorithms on five real-life service systems and compared them with a state-of-the-art optimization tool-kit OptQuest. Being 25 times faster than OptQuest, our algorithms are particularly suitable for adaptive labor staffing. Also, we observe that our algorithms guarantee convergence and find better solutions than OptQuest in many cases.
1312.7432
A network analysis of Sibiu County, Romania
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Network science methods have proved to be able to provide useful insights from both a theoretical and a practical point of view in that they can better inform governance policies in complex dynamic environments. The tourism research community has provided an increasing number of works that analyse destinations from a network science perspective. However, most of the studies refer to relatively small samples of actors and linkages. With this note we provide a full network study, although at a preliminary stage, that reports a complete analysis of a Romanian destination (Sibiu). Our intention is to increase the set of similar studies with the aim of supporting the investigations in structural and dynamical characteristics of tourism destinations.
1312.7445
Distributed average tracking for multiple reference signals with general linear dynamics
cs.SY
This technical note studies the distributed average tracking problem for multiple time-varying signals with general linear dynamics, whose reference inputs are nonzero and not available to any agent in the network. In distributed fashion, a pair of continuous algorithms with, respectively, static and adaptive coupling strengths are designed. Based on the boundary layer concept, the proposed continuous algorithm with static coupling strengths can asymptotically track the average of the multiple reference signals without chattering phenomenon. Furthermore, for the case of algorithms with adaptive coupling strengths, the average tracking errors are uniformly ultimately bounded and exponentially converge to a small adjustable bounded set. Finally, a simulation example is presented to show the validity of the theoretical results.
1312.7446
Shape Primitive Histogram: A Novel Low-Level Face Representation for Face Recognition
cs.CV
We further exploit the representational power of Haar wavelet and present a novel low-level face representation named Shape Primitives Histogram (SPH) for face recognition. Since human faces exist abundant shape features, we address the face representation issue from the perspective of the shape feature extraction. In our approach, we divide faces into a number of tiny shape fragments and reduce these shape fragments to several uniform atomic shape patterns called Shape Primitives. A convolution with Haar Wavelet templates is applied to each shape fragment to identify its belonging shape primitive. After that, we do a histogram statistic of shape primitives in each spatial local image patch for incorporating the spatial information. Finally, each face is represented as a feature vector via concatenating all the local histograms of shape primitives. Four popular face databases, namely ORL, AR, Yale-B and LFW-a databases, are employed to evaluate SPH and experimentally study the choices of the parameters. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperform the state-of-the-arts.
1312.7447
Containment Control of Linear Multi-Agent Systems with Multiple Leaders of Bounded Inputs Using Distributed Continuous Controllers
cs.SY math.OC
This paper considers the containment control problem for multi-agent systems with general linear dynamics and multiple leaders whose control inputs are possibly nonzero and time varying. Based on the relative states of neighboring agents, a distributed static continuous controller is designed, under which the containment error is uniformly ultimately bounded and the upper bound of the containment error can be made arbitrarily small, if the subgraph associated with the followers is undirected and for each follower there exists at least one leader that has a directed path to that follower. It is noted that the design of the static controller requires the knowledge of the eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix and the upper bounds of the leaders' control inputs. In order to remove these requirements, a distributed adaptive continuous controller is further proposed, which can be designed and implemented by each follower in a fully distributed fashion. Extensions to the case where only local output information is available are discussed.
1312.7463
Generalized Ambiguity Decomposition for Understanding Ensemble Diversity
stat.ML cs.CV cs.LG
Diversity or complementarity of experts in ensemble pattern recognition and information processing systems is widely-observed by researchers to be crucial for achieving performance improvement upon fusion. Understanding this link between ensemble diversity and fusion performance is thus an important research question. However, prior works have theoretically characterized ensemble diversity and have linked it with ensemble performance in very restricted settings. We present a generalized ambiguity decomposition (GAD) theorem as a broad framework for answering these questions. The GAD theorem applies to a generic convex ensemble of experts for any arbitrary twice-differentiable loss function. It shows that the ensemble performance approximately decomposes into a difference of the average expert performance and the diversity of the ensemble. It thus provides a theoretical explanation for the empirically-observed benefit of fusing outputs from diverse classifiers and regressors. It also provides a loss function-dependent, ensemble-dependent, and data-dependent definition of diversity. We present extensions of this decomposition to common regression and classification loss functions, and report a simulation-based analysis of the diversity term and the accuracy of the decomposition. We finally present experiments on standard pattern recognition data sets which indicate the accuracy of the decomposition for real-world classification and regression problems.
1312.7469
Collaborative Discriminant Locality Preserving Projections With its Application to Face Recognition
cs.CV
We present a novel Discriminant Locality Preserving Projections (DLPP) algorithm named Collaborative Discriminant Locality Preserving Projection (CDLPP). In our algorithm, the discriminating power of DLPP are further exploited from two aspects. On the one hand, the global optimum of class scattering is guaranteed via using the between-class scatter matrix to replace the original denominator of DLPP. On the other hand, motivated by collaborative representation, an $L_2$-norm constraint is imposed to the projections to discover the collaborations of dimensions in the sample space. We apply our algorithm to face recognition. Three popular face databases, namely AR, ORL and LFW-A, are employed for evaluating the performance of CDLPP. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that CDLPP significantly improves the discriminating power of DLPP and outperforms the state-of-the-arts.
1312.7477
Covering with Excess One: Seeing the Topology
math.GN cs.CG cs.RO
We have initiated the study of topology of the space of coverings on grid domains. The space has the following constraint: while all the covering agents can move freely (we allow overlapping) on the domain, their union must cover the whole domain. A minimal number $N$ of the covering agents is required for a successful covering of the domain. In this paper, we demonstrate beautiful topological structures of this space on grid domains in 2D with $N+1$ coverings, the topology of the space has the homotopy type of $1$ dimensional complex, regardless of the domain shape. We also present the Euler characteristic formula which connects the topology of the space with that of the domain itself.
1312.7482
Element-wise uniqueness, prior knowledge, and data-dependent resolution
math.OC cs.IT math.IT math.NA
Techniques for finding regularized solutions to underdetermined linear systems can be viewed as imposing prior knowledge on the unknown vector. The success of modern techniques, which can impose priors such as sparsity and non-negativity, is the result of advances in optimization algorithms to solve problems which lack closed-form solutions. Techniques for characterization and analysis of the system to determined when information is recoverable, however, still typically rely on closed-form solution techniques such as singular value decomposition or a filter cutoff, for example. In this letter we pose optimization approaches to broaden the approach to system characterization. We start by deriving conditions for when each unknown element of a system admits a unique solution, subject to a broad class of types of prior knowledge. With this approach we can pose a convex optimization problem to find "how unique" each element of the solution is, which may be viewed as a generalization of resolution to incorporate prior knowledge. We find that the result varies with the unknown vector itself, i.e. is data-dependent, such as when the sparsity of the solution improves the chance it can be uniquely reconstructed. The approach can be used to analyze systems on a case-by-case basis, estimate the amount of important information present in the data, and quantitatively understand the degree to which the regularized solution may be trusted.
1312.7485
A General Algorithm for Deciding Transportability of Experimental Results
cs.AI stat.ME stat.ML
Generalizing empirical findings to new environments, settings, or populations is essential in most scientific explorations. This article treats a particular problem of generalizability, called "transportability", defined as a license to transfer information learned in experimental studies to a different population, on which only observational studies can be conducted. Given a set of assumptions concerning commonalities and differences between the two populations, Pearl and Bareinboim (2011) derived sufficient conditions that permit such transfer to take place. This article summarizes their findings and supplements them with an effective procedure for deciding when and how transportability is feasible. It establishes a necessary and sufficient condition for deciding when causal effects in the target population are estimable from both the statistical information available and the causal information transferred from the experiments. The article further provides a complete algorithm for computing the transport formula, that is, a way of combining observational and experimental information to synthesize bias-free estimate of the desired causal relation. Finally, the article examines the differences between transportability and other variants of generalizability.
1312.7511
A Novel Scheme for Generating Secure Face Templates Using BDA
cs.CV cs.CR
In identity management system, frequently used biometric recognition system needs awareness towards issue of protecting biometric template as far as more reliable solution is apprehensive. In sight of this biometric template protection algorithm should gratify the basic requirements viz. security, discriminability and cancelability. As no single template protection method is capable of satisfying these requirements, a novel scheme for face template generation and protection is proposed. The novel scheme is proposed to provide security and accuracy in new user enrolment and authentication process. This novel scheme takes advantage of both the hybrid approach and the binary discriminant analysis algorithm. This algorithm is designed on the basis of random projection, binary discriminant analysis and fuzzy commitment scheme. Publicly available benchmark face databases (FERET, FRGC, CMU-PIE) and other datasets are used for evaluation. The proposed novel scheme enhances the discriminability and recognition accuracy in terms of matching score of the face images for each stage and provides high security against potential attacks namely brute force and smart attacks. In this paper, we discuss results viz. averages matching score, computation time and security for hybrid approach and novel approach.
1312.7513
Distributed Game Theoretic Optimization and Management of Multichannel ALOHA Networks
cs.NI cs.GT cs.IT math.IT
The problem of distributed rate maximization in multi-channel ALOHA networks is considered. First, we study the problem of constrained distributed rate maximization, where user rates are subject to total transmission probability constraints. We propose a best-response algorithm, where each user updates its strategy to increase its rate according to the channel state information and the current channel utilization. We prove the convergence of the algorithm to a Nash equilibrium in both homogeneous and heterogeneous networks using the theory of potential games. The performance of the best-response dynamic is analyzed and compared to a simple transmission scheme, where users transmit over the channel with the highest collision-free utility. Then, we consider the case where users are not restricted by transmission probability constraints. Distributed rate maximization under uncertainty is considered to achieve both efficiency and fairness among users. We propose a distributed scheme where users adjust their transmission probability to maximize their rates according to the current network state, while maintaining the desired load on the channels. We show that our approach plays an important role in achieving the Nash bargaining solution among users. Sequential and parallel algorithms are proposed to achieve the target solution in a distributed manner. The efficiencies of the algorithms are demonstrated through both theoretical and simulation results.
1312.7523
Learning Temporal Logical Properties Discriminating ECG models of Cardiac Arrhytmias
cs.LO cs.CV q-bio.QM
We present a novel approach to learn the formulae characterising the emergent behaviour of a dynamical system from system observations. At a high level, the approach starts by devising a statistical dynamical model of the system which optimally fits the observations. We then propose general optimisation strategies for selecting high support formulae (under the learnt model of the system) either within a discrete set of formulae of bounded complexity, or a parametric family of formulae. We illustrate and apply the methodology on an in-depth case study of characterising cardiac malfunction from electro-cardiogram data, where our approach enables us to quantitatively determine the diagnostic power of a formula in discriminating between different cardiac conditions.
1312.7542
Towards Connected Enterprises: The Business Network System
cs.DB
The discovery, representation and reconstruction of Business Networks (BN) from Network Mining (NM) raw data is a difficult problem for enterprises. This is due to huge amounts of complex business processes within and across enterprise boundaries, heterogeneous technology stacks, and fragmented data. To remain competitive, visibility into the enterprise and partner networks on different, interrelated abstraction levels is desirable. We present a novel data discovery, mining and network inference system, called Business Network System (BNS), that reconstructs the BN--integration and business process networks--from raw data, hidden in the enterprises' landscapes. BNS provides a new, declarative foundation for gathering information, defining a network model, inferring the network and check its conformance to the real-world "as-is" network. The paper covers both the foundation and the key features of BNS, including its underlying technologies, its overall system architecture, and its most interesting capabilities.
1312.7551
Information-theoretic interpretation of quantum formalism
cs.IT math.IT quant-ph
We present an information-theoretic interpretation of quantum formalism based on a Bayesian framework and devoid of any extra axiom or principle. Quantum information is construed as a technique for analyzing a logical system subject to classical constraints, based on a question-and-answer procedure. The problem is posed from a particular batch of queries while the constraints are represented by the truth table of a set of Boolean functions. The Bayesian inference technique consists in assigning a probability distribution within a real-valued probability space to the joint set of queries in order to satisfy the constraints. The initial query batch is not unique and alternative batches can be considered at will. They are enabled mechanically from the initial batch, quite simply by transcribing the probability space into a Hilbert space. It turns out that this sole procedure leads to exactly recover the standard quantum information theory and thus provides an information-theoretic rationale to its technical rules. In this framework, the great challenges of quantum mechanics become simple platitudes: Why is the theory probabilistic? Why is the theory linear? Where does the Hilbert space come from? In addition, most of the paradoxes, such as uncertainty principle, entanglement, contextuality, nonsignaling correlation, measurement problem, etc., become straightforwards features. In the end, our major conclusion is that quantum information is nothing but classical information processed by a mature form of Bayesian inference technique and, as such, consubstantial with Aristotelian logic.
1312.7557
A Novel Retinal Vessel Segmentation Based On Histogram Transformation Using 2-D Morlet Wavelet and Supervised Classification
cs.CV
The appearance and structure of blood vessels in retinal images have an important role in diagnosis of diseases. This paper proposes a method for automatic retinal vessel segmentation. In this work, a novel preprocessing based on local histogram equalization is used to enhance the original image then pixels are classified as vessel and non-vessel using a classifier. For this classification, special feature vectors are organized based on responses to Morlet wavelet. Morlet wavelet is a continues transform which has the ability to filter existing noises after preprocessing. Bayesian classifier is used and Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is its likelihood function. The probability distributions are approximated according to training set of manual that has been segmented by a specialist. After this, morphological transforms are used in different directions to make the existing discontinuities uniform on the DRIVE database, it achieves the accuracy about 0.9571 which shows that it is an accurate method among the available ones for retinal vessel segmentation.
1312.7560
Implementation of Hand Detection based Techniques for Human Computer Interaction
cs.CV cs.HC
The computer industry is developing at a fast pace. With this development almost all of the fields under computers have advanced in the past couple of decades. But the same technology is being used for human computer interaction that was used in 1970s. Even today the same type of keyboard and mouse is used for interacting with computer systems. With the recent boom in the mobile segment touchscreens have become popular for interaction with cell phones. But these touchscreens are rarely used on traditional systems. This paper tries to introduce methods for human computer interaction using the users hand which can be used both on traditional computer platforms as well as cell phones. The methods explain how the users detected hand can be used as input for applications and also explain applications that can take advantage of this type of interaction mechanism.
1312.7567
Nonparametric Inference For Density Modes
stat.ME cs.LG
We derive nonparametric confidence intervals for the eigenvalues of the Hessian at modes of a density estimate. This provides information about the strength and shape of modes and can also be used as a significance test. We use a data-splitting approach in which potential modes are identified using the first half of the data and inference is done with the second half of the data. To get valid confidence sets for the eigenvalues, we use a bootstrap based on an elementary-symmetric-polynomial (ESP) transformation. This leads to valid bootstrap confidence sets regardless of any multiplicities in the eigenvalues. We also suggest a new method for bandwidth selection, namely, choosing the bandwidth to maximize the number of significant modes. We show by example that this method works well. Even when the true distribution is singular, and hence does not have a density, (in which case cross validation chooses a zero bandwidth), our method chooses a reasonable bandwidth.
1312.7570
Actions in the Eye: Dynamic Gaze Datasets and Learnt Saliency Models for Visual Recognition
cs.CV
Systems based on bag-of-words models from image features collected at maxima of sparse interest point operators have been used successfully for both computer visual object and action recognition tasks. While the sparse, interest-point based approach to recognition is not inconsistent with visual processing in biological systems that operate in `saccade and fixate' regimes, the methodology and emphasis in the human and the computer vision communities remains sharply distinct. Here, we make three contributions aiming to bridge this gap. First, we complement existing state-of-the art large scale dynamic computer vision annotated datasets like Hollywood-2 and UCF Sports with human eye movements collected under the ecological constraints of the visual action recognition task. To our knowledge these are the first large human eye tracking datasets to be collected and made publicly available for video, vision.imar.ro/eyetracking (497,107 frames, each viewed by 16 subjects), unique in terms of their (a) large scale and computer vision relevance, (b) dynamic, video stimuli, (c) task control, as opposed to free-viewing. Second, we introduce novel sequential consistency and alignment measures, which underline the remarkable stability of patterns of visual search among subjects. Third, we leverage the significant amount of collected data in order to pursue studies and build automatic, end-to-end trainable computer vision systems based on human eye movements. Our studies not only shed light on the differences between computer vision spatio-temporal interest point image sampling strategies and the human fixations, as well as their impact for visual recognition performance, but also demonstrate that human fixations can be accurately predicted, and when used in an end-to-end automatic system, leveraging some of the advanced computer vision practice, can lead to state of the art results.
1312.7572
A Top-Down Approach to Managing Variability in Robotics Algorithms
cs.RO
One of the defining features of the field of robotics is its breadth and heterogeneity. Unfortunately, despite the availability of several robotics middleware services, robotics software still fails to smoothly handle at least two kinds of variability: algorithmic variability and lower-level variability. The consequence is that implementations of algorithms are hard to understand and impacted by changes to lower-level details such as the choice or configuration of sensors or actuators. Moreover, when several algorithms or algorithmic variants are available it is difficult to compare and combine them. In order to alleviate these problems we propose a top-down approach to express and implement robotics algorithms and families of algorithms so that they are both less dependent on lower-level details and easier to understand and combine. This approach goes top-down from the algorithms and shields them from lower-level details by introducing very high level abstractions atop the intermediate abstractions of robotics middleware. This approach is illustrated on 7 variants of the Bug family that were implemented using both laser and infra-red sensors.
1312.7573
A Novel Method for Automatic Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Images
cs.CV
The brain tumor segmentation on MRI images is a very difficult and important task which is used in surgical and medical planning and assessments. If experts do the segmentation manually with their own medical knowledge, it will be time-consuming. Therefore, researchers propose methods and systems which can do the segmentation automatically and without any interference. In this article, an unsupervised automatic method for brain tumor segmentation on MRI images is presented. In this method, at first in the pre-processing level, the extra parts which are outside the skull and don't have any helpful information are removed and then anisotropic diffusion filter with 8-connected neighborhood is applied to the MRI images to remove noise. By applying the fast bounding box(FBB) algorithm, the tumor area is displayed on the MRI image with a bounding box and the central part is selected as sample points for training of a One Class SVM classifier. A database is also provided by the Zanjan MRI Center. The MRI images are related to 10 patients who have brain tumor. 100 T2-weighted MRI images are used in this study. Experimental results show the high precision and dependability of the proposed algorithm. The results are also highly helpful for specialists and radiologists to easily estimate the size and position of a tumor.
1312.7580
On the Learning Behavior of Adaptive Networks - Part II: Performance Analysis
cs.MA cs.SY math.OC
Part I of this work examined the mean-square stability and convergence of the learning process of distributed strategies over graphs. The results identified conditions on the network topology, utilities, and data in order to ensure stability; the results also identified three distinct stages in the learning behavior of multi-agent networks related to transient phases I and II and the steady-state phase. This Part II examines the steady-state phase of distributed learning by networked agents. Apart from characterizing the performance of the individual agents, it is shown that the network induces a useful equalization effect across all agents. In this way, the performance of noisier agents is enhanced to the same level as the performance of agents with less noisy data. It is further shown that in the small step-size regime, each agent in the network is able to achieve the same performance level as that of a centralized strategy corresponding to a fully connected network. The results in this part reveal explicitly which aspects of the network topology and operation influence performance and provide important insights into the design of effective mechanisms for the processing and diffusion of information over networks.
1312.7581
On the Learning Behavior of Adaptive Networks - Part I: Transient Analysis
cs.MA cs.SY math.OC
This work carries out a detailed transient analysis of the learning behavior of multi-agent networks, and reveals interesting results about the learning abilities of distributed strategies. Among other results, the analysis reveals how combination policies influence the learning process of networked agents, and how these policies can steer the convergence point towards any of many possible Pareto optimal solutions. The results also establish that the learning process of an adaptive network undergoes three (rather than two) well-defined stages of evolution with distinctive convergence rates during the first two stages, while attaining a finite mean-square-error (MSE) level in the last stage. The analysis reveals what aspects of the network topology influence performance directly and suggests design procedures that can optimize performance by adjusting the relevant topology parameters. Interestingly, it is further shown that, in the adaptation regime, each agent in a sparsely connected network is able to achieve the same performance level as that of a centralized stochastic-gradient strategy even for left-stochastic combination strategies. These results lead to a deeper understanding and useful insights on the convergence behavior of coupled distributed learners. The results also lead to effective design mechanisms to help diffuse information more thoroughly over networks.
1312.7595
Phase transition in the controllability of temporal networks
cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI physics.soc-ph
The control of complex systems is an ongoing challenge of complexity research. Recent advances using concepts of structural control deduce a wide range of control related properties from the network representation of complex systems. Here, we examine the controllability of complex systems for which the timescale of the dynamics we control and the timescale of changes in the network are comparable. We provide both analytical and computational tools to study controllability based on temporal network characteristics. We apply these results to investigate the controllable subnetwork using a single input, present analytical results for a generic class of temporal network models, and preform measurements using data collected from a real system. Depending upon the density of the interactions compared to the timescale of the dynamics, we witness a phase transition describing the sudden emergence of a giant controllable subspace spanning a finite fraction of the network. We also study the role of temporal patterns and network topology in real data making use of various randomization procedures, finding that the overall activity and the degree distribution of the underlying network are the main features influencing controllability.