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1401.0872
Binary Linear Classification and Feature Selection via Generalized Approximate Message Passing
cs.IT math.IT stat.ML
For the problem of binary linear classification and feature selection, we propose algorithmic approaches to classifier design based on the generalized approximate message passing (GAMP) algorithm, recently proposed in the context of compressive sensing. We are particularly motivated by problems where the number of features greatly exceeds the number of training examples, but where only a few features suffice for accurate classification. We show that sum-product GAMP can be used to (approximately) minimize the classification error rate and max-sum GAMP can be used to minimize a wide variety of regularized loss functions. Furthermore, we describe an expectation-maximization (EM)-based scheme to learn the associated model parameters online, as an alternative to cross-validation, and we show that GAMP's state-evolution framework can be used to accurately predict the misclassification rate. Finally, we present a detailed numerical study to confirm the accuracy, speed, and flexibility afforded by our GAMP-based approaches to binary linear classification and feature selection.
1401.0877
Space-Time Coded Spatial Modulated Physical Layer Network Coding for Two-Way Relaying
cs.IT math.IT
Using the spatial modulation approach, where only one transmit antenna is active at a time, we propose two transmission schemes for two-way relay channel using physical layer network coding with space time coding using Coordinate Interleaved Orthogonal Designs (CIOD's). It is shown that using two uncorrelated transmit antennas at the nodes, but using only one RF transmit chain and space-time coding across these antennas can give a better performance without using any extra resources and without increasing the hardware implementation cost and complexity. In the first transmission scheme, two antennas are used only at the relay, Adaptive Network Coding (ANC) is employed at the relay and the relay transmits a CIOD Space Time Block Code (STBC). This gives a better performance compared to an existing ANC scheme for two-way relay channel which uses one antenna each at all the three nodes. It is shown that for this scheme at high SNR the average end-to-end symbol error probability (SEP) is upper bounded by twice the SEP of a point-to-point fading channel. In the second transmission scheme, two transmit antennas are used at all the three nodes, CIOD STBC's are transmitted in multiple access and broadcast phases. This scheme provides a diversity order of two for the average end-to-end SEP with an increased decoding complexity of $\mathcal{O}(M^3)$ for an arbitrary signal set and $\mathcal{O}(M^2\sqrt{M})$ for square QAM signal set.
1401.0886
Spectrum Hole Prediction Based On Historical Data: A Neural Network Approach
cs.NE
The concept of cognitive radio pioneered by Mitola promises to change the future of wireless communication especially in the area of spectrum management. Currently, the command and control strategy employed in spectrum assignment is too rigid and needs to be reviewed. Recent studies have shown that assigned spectrum is underutilized spectrally and temporally. Cognitive radio provides a viable solution whereby licensed users can share the spectrum with unlicensed users opportunistically without causing interference. Unlicensed users must be able to sense weather the channel is busy or idle, failure to do so will lead to interference to the licensed user. In this paper, a neural network based prediction model for predicting the channel status using historical data obtained during a spectrum occupancy measurement is presented. Genetic algorithm is combined with LM BP for increasing the probability of obtaining the best weights thus optimizing the network. The results obtained indicate high prediction accuracy over all bands considered
1401.0887
Learning parametric dictionaries for graph signals
cs.LG cs.SI stat.ML
In sparse signal representation, the choice of a dictionary often involves a tradeoff between two desirable properties -- the ability to adapt to specific signal data and a fast implementation of the dictionary. To sparsely represent signals residing on weighted graphs, an additional design challenge is to incorporate the intrinsic geometric structure of the irregular data domain into the atoms of the dictionary. In this work, we propose a parametric dictionary learning algorithm to design data-adapted, structured dictionaries that sparsely represent graph signals. In particular, we model graph signals as combinations of overlapping local patterns. We impose the constraint that each dictionary is a concatenation of subdictionaries, with each subdictionary being a polynomial of the graph Laplacian matrix, representing a single pattern translated to different areas of the graph. The learning algorithm adapts the patterns to a training set of graph signals. Experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the dictionaries learned by the proposed algorithm are competitive with and often better than unstructured dictionaries learned by state-of-the-art numerical learning algorithms in terms of sparse approximation of graph signals. In contrast to the unstructured dictionaries, however, the dictionaries learned by the proposed algorithm feature localized atoms and can be implemented in a computationally efficient manner in signal processing tasks such as compression, denoising, and classification.
1401.0889
Research on the mobile robots intelligent path planning based on ant colony algorithm application in manufacturing logistics
cs.RO
With the development of robotics and artificial intelligence field unceasingly thorough, path planning as an important field of robot calculation has been widespread concern. This paper analyzes the current development of robot and path planning algorithm and focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of the traditional intelligent path planning as well as the path planning. The problem of mobile robot path planning is studied by using ant colony algorithm, and it also provides some solving methods.
1401.0892
Optimum Trade-offs Between the Error Exponent and the Excess-Rate Exponent of Variable-Rate Slepian-Wolf Coding
cs.IT math.IT
We analyze the optimal trade-off between the error exponent and the excess-rate exponent for variable-rate Slepian-Wolf codes. In particular, we first derive upper (converse) bounds on the optimal error and excess-rate exponents, and then lower (achievable) bounds, via a simple class of variable-rate codes which assign the same rate to all source blocks of the same type class. Then, using the exponent bounds, we derive bounds on the optimal rate functions, namely, the minimal rate assigned to each type class, needed in order to achieve a given target error exponent. The resulting excess-rate exponent is then evaluated. Iterative algorithms are provided for the computation of both bounds on the optimal rate functions and their excess-rate exponents. The resulting Slepian-Wolf codes bridge between the two extremes of fixed-rate coding, which has minimal error exponent and maximal excess-rate exponent, and average-rate coding, which has maximal error exponent and minimal excess-rate exponent.
1401.0898
Feature Selection Using Classifier in High Dimensional Data
cs.CV cs.LG stat.ML
Feature selection is frequently used as a pre-processing step to machine learning. It is a process of choosing a subset of original features so that the feature space is optimally reduced according to a certain evaluation criterion. The central objective of this paper is to reduce the dimension of the data by finding a small set of important features which can give good classification performance. We have applied filter and wrapper approach with different classifiers QDA and LDA respectively. A widely-used filter method is used for bioinformatics data i.e. a univariate criterion separately on each feature, assuming that there is no interaction between features and then applied Sequential Feature Selection method. Experimental results show that filter approach gives better performance in respect of Misclassification Error Rate.
1401.0918
Nonlinear q-voter model with deadlocks on the Watts-Strogatz graph
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
We study the nonlinear $q$-voter model with deadlocks on a Watts-Strogats graph. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we obtain so called exit probability and exit time. We determine how network properties, such as randomness or density of links influence exit properties of a model.
1401.0926
A Class of LTI Distributed Observers for LTI Plants: Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Stabilizability
cs.SY
Consider that an autonomous linear time-invariant (LTI) plant is given and that a network of LTI observers assesses its output vector. The dissemination of information within the network is dictated by a pre-specified directed graph in which each vertex represents an observer. Each observer computes its own state estimate using only the portion of the output vector accessible to it and the state estimates of other observers that are transmitted to it by its neighbors, according to the graph. This paper proposes an update rule that is a natural generalization of consensus, and for which we determine necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of parameters for the update rule that lead to asymptotic omniscience of the state of the plant at all observers. The conditions reduce to certain detectability requirements that imply that if omniscience is not possible under the proposed scheme then it is not viable under any other scheme that is subject to the same communication graph, including nonlinear and time-varying ones.
1401.0943
LB2CO: A Semantic Ontology Framework for B2C eCommerce Transaction on the Internet
cs.CY cs.AI
Business ontology can enhance the successful development of complex enterprise system; this is being achieved through knowledge sharing and the ease of communication between every entity in the domain. Through human semantic interaction with the web resources, machines to interpret the data published in a machine interpretable form under web. However, the theoretical practice of business ontology in eCommerce domain is quite a few especially in the section of electronic transaction, and the various techniques used to obtain efficient communication across spheres are error prone and are not always guaranteed to be efficient in obtaining desired result due to poor semantic integration between entities. To overcome the poor semantic integration this research focuses on proposed ontology called LB2CO, which combines the framework of IDEF5 & SNAP as an analysis tool, for automated recommendation of product and services and create effective ontological framework for B2C transaction & communication across different business domains that facilitates the interoperability & integration of B2C transactions over the web.
1401.0975
Analyzing Behavioural Scenarios over Tabular Specifications Using Model Checking
cs.SE cs.SY
Tabular notations, in particular SCR specifications, have proved to be a useful means for formally describing complex requirements. The SCR method offers a powerful family of analysis tools, known as the SCR Toolset, but its availability is restricted by the Naval Research Laboratory of the USA. This toolset applies different kinds of analysis considering the whole set of behaviours associated with a requirements specification. In this paper we present a tool for describing and analyzing SCR requirements descriptions, that complements the SCR Toolset in two aspects. First, its use is not limited by any institution, and resorts to a standard model checking tool for analysis; and second, it allows to concentrate the analysis to particular sets of behaviours (subsets of the whole specifications), that correspond to particular scenarios explicitly mentioned in the specification. We take an operational notation that allows the engineer to describe behavioural "scenarios" by means of programs, and provide a translation into Promela to perform the analysis via Spin, an efficient off-the-shelf model checker freely available. In addition, we apply the SCR method to a Pacemaker system and we use its tabular specification as a running example of this article.
1401.0978
A Principled Infotheoretic \phi-like Measure
cs.IT math.IT
Integrated information theory is a mathematical, quantifiable theory of conscious experience. The linchpin of this theory, the $\phi$ measure, quantifies a system's irreducibility to disjoint parts. Purely as a measure of irreducibility, we pinpoint three concerns about $\phi$ and propose a revised measure, $\psi$, which addresses them. Our measure $\psi$ is rigorously grounded in Partial Information Decomposition and is faster to compute than $\phi$.
1401.0987
Differentially Private Data Releasing for Smooth Queries with Synthetic Database Output
cs.DB stat.ML
We consider accurately answering smooth queries while preserving differential privacy. A query is said to be $K$-smooth if it is specified by a function defined on $[-1,1]^d$ whose partial derivatives up to order $K$ are all bounded. We develop an $\epsilon$-differentially private mechanism for the class of $K$-smooth queries. The major advantage of the algorithm is that it outputs a synthetic database. In real applications, a synthetic database output is appealing. Our mechanism achieves an accuracy of $O (n^{-\frac{K}{2d+K}}/\epsilon )$, and runs in polynomial time. We also generalize the mechanism to preserve $(\epsilon, \delta)$-differential privacy with slightly improved accuracy. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the mechanisms have good accuracy and are efficient.
1401.0994
When Does Relay Transmission Give a More Secure Connection in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks?
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
Relay transmission can enhance coverage and throughput, while it can be vulnerable to eavesdropping attacks due to the additional transmission of the source message at the relay. Thus, whether or not one should use relay transmission for secure communication is an interesting and important problem. In this paper, we consider the transmission of a confidential message from a source to a destination in a decentralized wireless network in the presence of randomly distributed eavesdroppers. The source-destination pair can be potentially assisted by randomly distributed relays. For an arbitrary relay, we derive exact expressions of secure connection probability for both colluding and non-colluding eavesdroppers. We further obtain lower bound expressions on the secure connection probability, which are accurate when the eavesdropper density is small. By utilizing these lower bound expressions, we propose a relay selection strategy to improve the secure connection probability. By analytically comparing the secure connection probability for direct transmission and relay transmission, we address the important problem of whether or not to relay and discuss the condition for relay transmission in terms of the relay density and source-destination distance. These analytical results are accurate in the small eavesdropper density regime.
1401.1011
Outage Probability of Dual-Hop Multiple Antenna AF Systems with Linear Processing in the Presence of Co-Channel Interference
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers a dual-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying system where the relay is equipped with multiple antennas, while the source and the destination are equipped with a single antenna. Assuming that the relay is subjected to co-channel interference (CCI) and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) while the destination is corrupted by AWGN only, we propose three heuristic relay precoding schemes to combat the CCI, namely, 1) Maximum ratio combining/maximal ratio transmission (MRC/MRT), 2) Zero-forcing/MRT (ZF/MRT), 3) Minimum mean-square error/MRT (MMSE/MRT). We derive new exact outage expressions as well as simple high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) outage approximations for all three schemes. Our findings suggest that both the MRC/MRT and the MMSE/MRT schemes achieve a full diversity of N, while the ZF/MRT scheme achieves a diversity order of N-M, where N is the number of relay antennas and M is the number of interferers. In addition, we show that the MMSE/MRT scheme always achieves the best outage performance, and the ZF/MRT scheme outperforms the MRC/MRT scheme in the low SNR regime, while becomes inferior to the MRC/MRT scheme in the high SNR regime. Finally, in the large N regime, we show that both the ZF/MRT and MMSE/MRT schemes are capable of completely eliminating the CCI, while perfect interference cancelation is not possible with the MRC/MRT scheme.
1401.1016
Factor Graph Based LMMSE Filtering for Colored Gaussian Processes
cs.IT math.IT
We propose a low complexity, graph based linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) filter in which the non-white characteristics of a random process are taken into account. Our method corresponds to block LMMSE filtering, and has the advantage of complexity linearly increasing with the block length and the ease of incorporating the a priori information of the input signals whenever possible. The proposed method can be used with any random process with a known autocorrelation function with the help of an approximation to an autoregressive (AR) process. We show through extensive simulations that our method performs very close to the optimal block LMMSE filtering for Gaussian input signals.
1401.1024
Solver Scheduling via Answer Set Programming
cs.AI cs.LO
Although Boolean Constraint Technology has made tremendous progress over the last decade, the efficacy of state-of-the-art solvers is known to vary considerably across different types of problem instances and is known to depend strongly on algorithm parameters. This problem was addressed by means of a simple, yet effective approach using handmade, uniform and unordered schedules of multiple solvers in ppfolio, which showed very impressive performance in the 2011 SAT Competition. Inspired by this, we take advantage of the modeling and solving capacities of Answer Set Programming (ASP) to automatically determine more refined, that is, non-uniform and ordered solver schedules from existing benchmarking data. We begin by formulating the determination of such schedules as multi-criteria optimization problems and provide corresponding ASP encodings. The resulting encodings are easily customizable for different settings and the computation of optimum schedules can mostly be done in the blink of an eye, even when dealing with large runtime data sets stemming from many solvers on hundreds to thousands of instances. Also, the fact that our approach can be customized easily enabled us to swiftly adapt it to generate parallel schedules for multi-processor machines.
1401.1031
Constraint Solvers for User Interface Layout
cs.HC cs.AI
Constraints have played an important role in the construction of GUIs, where they are mainly used to define the layout of the widgets. Resizing behavior is very important in GUIs because areas have domain specific parameters such as form the resizing of windows. If linear objective function is used and window is resized then error is not distributed equally. To distribute the error equally, a quadratic objective function is introduced. Different algorithms are widely used for solving linear constraints and quadratic problems in a variety of different scientific areas. The linear relxation, Kaczmarz, direct and linear programming methods are common methods for solving linear constraints for GUI layout. The interior point and active set methods are most commonly used techniques to solve quadratic programming problems. Current constraint solvers designed for GUI layout do not use interior point methods for solving a quadratic objective function subject to linear equality and inequality constraints. In this paper, performance aspects and the convergence speed of interior point and active set methods are compared along with one most commonly used linear programming method when they are implemented for graphical user interface layout. The performance and convergence of the proposed algorithms are evaluated empirically using randomly generated UI layout specifications of various sizes. The results show that the interior point algorithms perform significantly better than the Simplex method and QOCA-solver, which uses the active set method implementation for solving quadratic optimization.
1401.1032
Opinion Formation and the Collective Dynamics of Risk Perception
physics.soc-ph cs.SI nlin.AO
The formation of collective opinion is a complex phenomenon that results from the combined effects of mass media exposure and social influence between individuals. The present work introduces a model of opinion formation specifically designed to address risk judgments, such as attitudes towards climate change, terrorist threats, or children vaccination. The model assumes that people collect risk information from the media environment and exchange them locally with other individuals. Even though individuals are initially exposed to the same sample of information, the model predicts the emergence of opinion polarization and clustering. In particular, numerical simulations highlight two crucial factors that determine the collective outcome: the propensity of individuals to search for independent information, and the strength of social influence. This work provides a quantitative framework to anticipate and manage how the public responds to a given risk, and could help understanding the systemic amplification of fears and worries, or the underestimation of real dangers.
1401.1043
Discovering Compressing Serial Episodes from Event Sequences
cs.DB
Most pattern mining methods output a very large number of frequent patterns and isolating a small but relevant subset is a challenging problem of current interest in frequent pattern mining. In this paper we consider discovery of a small set of relevant frequent episodes from data sequences. We make use of the Minimum Description Length principle to formulate the problem of selecting a subset of episodes. Using an interesting class of serial episodes with inter-event constraints and a novel encoding scheme for data using such episodes, we present algorithms for discovering small set of episodes that achieve good data compression. Using an example of the data streams obtained from distributed sensors in a composable coupled conveyor system, we show that our method is very effective in unearthing highly relevant episodes and that our scheme also achieves good data compression.
1401.1059
"Information-Friction" and its implications on minimum energy required for communication
cs.IT cs.CC math-ph math.IT math.MP
Just as there are frictional losses associated with moving masses on a surface, what if there were frictional losses associated with moving information on a substrate? Indeed, many modes of communication suffer from such frictional losses. We propose to model these losses as proportional to "bit-meters," i.e., the product of mass of information (i.e., the number of bits) and the distance of information transport. We use this "information- friction" model to understand fundamental energy requirements on encoding and decoding in communication circuitry. First, for communication across a binary input AWGN channel, we arrive at fundamental limits on bit-meters (and thus energy consumption) for decoding implementations that have a predetermined input-independent length of messages. For encoding, we relax the fixed-length assumption and derive bounds for flexible-message- length implementations. Using these lower bounds we show that the total (transmit + encoding + decoding) energy-per-bit must diverge to infinity as the target error probability is lowered to zero. Further, the closer the communication rate is maintained to the channel capacity (as the target error-probability is lowered to zero), the faster the required decoding energy diverges to infinity.
1401.1061
Learning optimization models in the presence of unknown relations
cs.AI cs.GT
In a sequential auction with multiple bidding agents, it is highly challenging to determine the ordering of the items to sell in order to maximize the revenue due to the fact that the autonomy and private information of the agents heavily influence the outcome of the auction. The main contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we demonstrate how to apply machine learning techniques to solve the optimal ordering problem in sequential auctions. We learn regression models from historical auctions, which are subsequently used to predict the expected value of orderings for new auctions. Given the learned models, we propose two types of optimization methods: a black-box best-first search approach, and a novel white-box approach that maps learned models to integer linear programs (ILP) which can then be solved by any ILP-solver. Although the studied auction design problem is hard, our proposed optimization methods obtain good orderings with high revenues. Our second main contribution is the insight that the internal structure of regression models can be efficiently evaluated inside an ILP solver for optimization purposes. To this end, we provide efficient encodings of regression trees and linear regression models as ILP constraints. This new way of using learned models for optimization is promising. As the experimental results show, it significantly outperforms the black-box best-first search in nearly all settings.
1401.1086
Power Grid Defense Against Malicious Cascading Failure
cs.CR cs.MA physics.soc-ph
An adversary looking to disrupt a power grid may look to target certain substations and sources of power generation to initiate a cascading failure that maximizes the number of customers without electricity. This is particularly an important concern when the enemy has the capability to launch cyber-attacks as practical concerns (i.e. avoiding disruption of service, presence of legacy systems, etc.) may hinder security. Hence, a defender can harden the security posture at certain power stations but may lack the time and resources to do this for the entire power grid. We model a power grid as a graph and introduce the cascading failure game in which both the defender and attacker choose a subset of power stations such as to minimize (maximize) the number of consumers having access to producers of power. We formalize problems for identifying both mixed and deterministic strategies for both players, prove complexity results under a variety of different scenarios, identify tractable cases, and develop algorithms for these problems. We also perform an experimental evaluation of the model and game on a real-world power grid network. Empirically, we noted that the game favors the attacker as he benefits more from increased resources than the defender. Further, the minimax defense produces roughly the same expected payoff as an easy-to-compute deterministic load based (DLB) defense when played against a minimax attack strategy. However, DLB performs more poorly than minimax defense when faced with the attacker's best response to DLB. This is likely due to the presence of low-load yet high-payoff nodes, which we also found in our empirical analysis.
1401.1106
Structured random measurements in signal processing
cs.IT math.IT
Compressed sensing and its extensions have recently triggered interest in randomized signal acquisition. A key finding is that random measurements provide sparse signal reconstruction guarantees for efficient and stable algorithms with a minimal number of samples. While this was first shown for (unstructured) Gaussian random measurement matrices, applications require certain structure of the measurements leading to structured random measurement matrices. Near optimal recovery guarantees for such structured measurements have been developed over the past years in a variety of contexts. This article surveys the theory in three scenarios: compressed sensing (sparse recovery), low rank matrix recovery, and phaseless estimation. The random measurement matrices to be considered include random partial Fourier matrices, partial random circulant matrices (subsampled convolutions), matrix completion, and phase estimation from magnitudes of Fourier type measurements. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the mathematical techniques for the analysis of such structured random measurements.
1401.1117
On the Communication Complexity of Secret Key Generation in the Multiterminal Source Model
cs.IT math.IT
Communication complexity refers to the minimum rate of public communication required for generating a maximal-rate secret key (SK) in the multiterminal source model of Csiszar and Narayan. Tyagi recently characterized this communication complexity for a two-terminal system. We extend the ideas in Tyagi's work to derive a lower bound on communication complexity in the general multiterminal setting. In the important special case of the complete graph pairwise independent network (PIN) model, our bound allows us to determine the exact linear communication complexity, i.e., the communication complexity when the communication and SK are restricted to be linear functions of the randomness available at the terminals.
1401.1123
Exploration vs Exploitation vs Safety: Risk-averse Multi-Armed Bandits
cs.LG
Motivated by applications in energy management, this paper presents the Multi-Armed Risk-Aware Bandit (MARAB) algorithm. With the goal of limiting the exploration of risky arms, MARAB takes as arm quality its conditional value at risk. When the user-supplied risk level goes to 0, the arm quality tends toward the essential infimum of the arm distribution density, and MARAB tends toward the MIN multi-armed bandit algorithm, aimed at the arm with maximal minimal value. As a first contribution, this paper presents a theoretical analysis of the MIN algorithm under mild assumptions, establishing its robustness comparatively to UCB. The analysis is supported by extensive experimental validation of MIN and MARAB compared to UCB and state-of-art risk-aware MAB algorithms on artificial and real-world problems.
1401.1124
A binary differential evolution algorithm learning from explored solutions
cs.NE
Although real-coded differential evolution (DE) algorithms can perform well on continuous optimization problems (CoOPs), it is still a challenging task to design an efficient binary-coded DE algorithm. Inspired by the learning mechanism of particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithms, we propose a binary learning differential evolution (BLDE) algorithm that can efficiently locate the global optimal solutions by learning from the last population. Then, we theoretically prove the global convergence of BLDE, and compare it with some existing binary-coded evolutionary algorithms (EAs) via numerical experiments. Numerical results show that BLDE is competitive to the compared EAs, and meanwhile, further study is performed via the change curves of a renewal metric and a refinement metric to investigate why BLDE cannot outperform some compared EAs for several selected benchmark problems. Finally, we employ BLDE solving the unit commitment problem (UCP) in power systems to show its applicability in practical problems.
1401.1137
Sparse graphs using exchangeable random measures
stat.ME cs.SI math.ST stat.ML stat.TH
Statistical network modeling has focused on representing the graph as a discrete structure, namely the adjacency matrix, and considering the exchangeability of this array. In such cases, the Aldous-Hoover representation theorem (Aldous, 1981;Hoover, 1979} applies and informs us that the graph is necessarily either dense or empty. In this paper, we instead consider representing the graph as a measure on $\mathbb{R}_+^2$. For the associated definition of exchangeability in this continuous space, we rely on the Kallenberg representation theorem (Kallenberg, 2005). We show that for certain choices of such exchangeable random measures underlying our graph construction, our network process is sparse with power-law degree distribution. In particular, we build on the framework of completely random measures (CRMs) and use the theory associated with such processes to derive important network properties, such as an urn representation for our analysis and network simulation. Our theoretical results are explored empirically and compared to common network models. We then present a Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm for efficient exploration of the posterior distribution and demonstrate that we are able to recover graphs ranging from dense to sparse--and perform associated tests--based on our flexible CRM-based formulation. We explore network properties in a range of real datasets, including Facebook social circles, a political blogosphere, protein networks, citation networks, and world wide web networks, including networks with hundreds of thousands of nodes and millions of edges.
1401.1138
Analysis of the Local Quasi-Stationarity of Measured Dual-Polarized MIMO Channels
cs.IT math.IT
It is common practice in wireless communications to assume strict or wide-sense stationarity of the wireless channel in time and frequency. While this approximation has some physical justification, it is only valid inside certain time-frequency regions. This paper presents an elaborate characterization of the non-stationarity of wireless dual-polarized channels in time. The evaluation is based on urban macrocell measurements performed at 2.53 GHz. In order to define local quasi-stationarity (LQS) regions, i.e., regions in which the change of certain channel statistics is deemed insignificant, we resort to the performance degradation of selected algorithms specific to channel estimation and beamforming. Additionally, we compare our results to commonly used measures in the literature. We find that the polarization, the antenna spacing, and the opening angle of the antennas into the propagation channel can strongly influence the non-stationarity of the observed channel. The obtained LQS regions can be of significant size, i.e., several meters, and thus the reuse of channel statistics over large distances is meaningful (in an average sense) for certain algorithms. Furthermore, we conclude that, from a system perspective, a proper non-stationarity analysis should be based on the considered algorithm.
1401.1152
Hygro-thermo-mechanical analysis of spalling in concrete walls at high temperatures as a moving boundary problem
cs.CE
A mathematical model allowing coupled hygro-thermo-mechanical analysis of spalling in concrete walls at high temperatures by means of the moving boundary problem is presented. A simplified mechanical approach to account for effects of thermal stresses and pore pressure build-up on spalling is incorporated into the model. The numerical algorithm based on finite element discretization in space and the semi-implicit method for discretization in time is presented. The validity of the developed model is carefully examined by a comparison between experimental tests performed by Kalifa et al. (2000) and Mindeguia (2009) on concrete prismatic specimens under unidirectional heating of temperature of 600 ${\deg}$C and ISO 834 fire curve and the results obtained from the numerical model.
1401.1158
Effective Slot Filling Based on Shallow Distant Supervision Methods
cs.CL
Spoken Language Systems at Saarland University (LSV) participated this year with 5 runs at the TAC KBP English slot filling track. Effective algorithms for all parts of the pipeline, from document retrieval to relation prediction and response post-processing, are bundled in a modular end-to-end relation extraction system called RelationFactory. The main run solely focuses on shallow techniques and achieved significant improvements over LSV's last year's system, while using the same training data and patterns. Improvements mainly have been obtained by a feature representation focusing on surface skip n-grams and improved scoring for extracted distant supervision patterns. Important factors for effective extraction are the training and tuning scheme for distant supervision classifiers, and the query expansion by a translation model based on Wikipedia links. In the TAC KBP 2013 English Slotfilling evaluation, the submitted main run of the LSV RelationFactory system achieved the top-ranked F1-score of 37.3%.
1401.1170
The Asymptotics of Large Constrained Graphs
math.CO cs.SI math-ph math.MP
We show, through local estimates and simulation, that if one constrains simple graphs by their densities $\varepsilon$ of edges and $\tau$ of triangles, then asymptotically (in the number of vertices) for over $95\%$ of the possible range of those densities there is a well-defined typical graph, and it has a very simple structure: the vertices are decomposed into two subsets $V_1$ and $V_2$ of fixed relative size $c$ and $1-c$, and there are well-defined probabilities of edges, $g_{jk}$, between $v_j\in V_j$, and $v_k\in V_k$. Furthermore the four parameters $c, g_{11}, g_{22}$ and $g_{12}$ are smooth functions of $(\varepsilon,\tau)$ except at two smooth `phase transition' curves.
1401.1171
Using Delta-Sigma Modulators in Visible Light OFDM Systems
cs.IT math.IT
Visible light communications (VLC) are motivated by the radio-frequency (RF) spectrum crunch and fast-growing solid-state lighting technology. VLC relies on white light emitting diodes (LEDs) to provide communication and illumination simultaneously. Simple two-level on-off keying (OOK) and pulse-position modulation (PPM) are supported in IEEE standard due to their compatibility with existing constant current LED drivers, but their low spectral efficiency have limited the achievable data rates of VLC. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been applied to VLC due to its high spectral efficiency and ability to combat inter-symbol-interference (ISI). However, VLC-OFDM inherits the disadvantage of high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) from RF-OFDM. Besides, the continuous magnitude of OFDM signals requires complicated mixed-signal digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and modification of LED drivers. We propose the use of delta-sigma modulators in visible light OFDM systems to convert continuous magnitude OFDM symbols into LED driver signals. The proposed system has the communication theory advantages of OFDM along with the practical analog and optical advantages of simple two level driver signals. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the proposed system.
1401.1174
Towards Breaking the Curse of Dimensionality for High-Dimensional Privacy: An Extended Version
cs.DB
The curse of dimensionality has remained a challenge for a wide variety of algorithms in data mining, clustering, classification and privacy. Recently, it was shown that an increasing dimensionality makes the data resistant to effective privacy. The theoretical results seem to suggest that the dimensionality curse is a fundamental barrier to privacy preservation. However, in practice, we show that some of the common properties of real data can be leveraged in order to greatly ameliorate the negative effects of the curse of dimensionality. In real data sets, many dimensions contain high levels of inter-attribute correlations. Such correlations enable the use of a process known as vertical fragmentation in order to decompose the data into vertical subsets of smaller dimensionality. An information-theoretic criterion of mutual information is used in the vertical decomposition process. This allows the use of an anonymization process, which is based on combining results from multiple independent fragments. We present a general approach which can be applied to the k-anonymity, l-diversity, and t-closeness models. In the presence of inter-attribute correlations, such an approach continues to be much more robust in higher dimensionality, without losing accuracy. We present experimental results illustrating the effectiveness of the approach. This approach is resilient enough to prevent identity, attribute, and membership disclosure attack.
1401.1190
Bangla Text Recognition from Video Sequence: A New Focus
cs.CV
Extraction and recognition of Bangla text from video frame images is challenging due to complex color background, low-resolution etc. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for extraction and recognition of Bangla text form such video frames with complex background. Here, a two-step approach has been proposed. First, the text line is segmented into words using information based on line contours. First order gradient value of the text blocks are used to find the word gap. Next, a local binarization technique is applied on each word and text line is reconstructed using those words. Secondly, this binarized text block is sent to OCR for recognition purpose.
1401.1191
DASS: Distributed Adaptive Sparse Sensing
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
Wireless sensor networks are often designed to perform two tasks: sensing a physical field and transmitting the data to end-users. A crucial aspect of the design of a WSN is the minimization of the overall energy consumption. Previous researchers aim at optimizing the energy spent for the communication, while mostly ignoring the energy cost due to sensing. Recently, it has been shown that considering the sensing energy cost can be beneficial for further improving the overall energy efficiency. More precisely, sparse sensing techniques were proposed to reduce the amount of collected samples and recover the missing data by using data statistics. While the majority of these techniques use fixed or random sampling patterns, we propose to adaptively learn the signal model from the measurements and use the model to schedule when and where to sample the physical field. The proposed method requires minimal on-board computation, no inter-node communications and still achieves appealing reconstruction performance. With experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate significant improvements over both traditional sensing schemes and the state-of-the-art sparse sensing schemes, particularly when the measured data is characterized by a strong intra-sensor (temporal) or inter-sensors (spatial) correlation.
1401.1203
A Comparative Study of Downlink MIMO Cellular Networks with Co-located and Distributed Base-Station Antennas
cs.IT math.IT
Despite the common belief that substantial capacity gains can be achieved by using more antennas at the base-station (BS) side in cellular networks, the effect of BS antenna topology on the capacity scaling behavior is little understood. In this paper, we present a comparative study on the ergodic capacity of a downlink single-user multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system where BS antennas are either co-located at the center or grouped into uniformly distributed antenna clusters in a circular cell. By assuming that the number of BS antennas and the number of user antennas go to infinity with a fixed ratio $L\gg 1$, the asymptotic analysis reveals that the average per-antenna capacities in both cases logarithmically increase with $L$, but in the orders of $\log_2 L$ and $\tfrac{\alpha}{2}\log_2 L$, for the co-located and distributed BS antenna layouts, respectively, where $\alpha>2$ denotes the path-loss factor. The analysis is further extended to the multi-user case where a 1-tier (7-cell) MIMO cellular network with $K\gg 1$ uniformly distributed users in each cell is considered. By assuming that the number of BS antennas and the number of user antennas go to infinity with a fixed ratio $L\gg K$, an asymptotic analysis is presented on the downlink rate performance with block diagonalization (BD) adopted at each BS. It is shown that the average per-antenna rates with the co-located and distributed BS antenna layouts scale in the orders of $\log_2 \tfrac{L}{K}$ and $\log_2 \frac{(L-K+1)^{\alpha/2}}{K}$, respectively. The rate performance of MIMO cellular networks with small cells is also discussed, which highlights the importance of employing a large number of distributed BS antennas for the next-generation cellular networks.
1401.1206
A Fast Decodable Full-Rate STBC with High Coding Gain for 4x2 MIMO Systems
cs.IT math.IT
In this work, a new fast-decodable space-time block code (STBC) is proposed. The code is full-rate and full-diversity for 4x2 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission. Due to the unique structure of the codeword, the proposed code requires a much lower computational complexity to provide maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding performance. It is shown that the ML decoding complexity is only O(M^{4.5}) when M-ary square QAM constellation is used. Finally, the proposed code has highest minimum determinant among the fast-decodable STBCs known in the literature. Simulation results prove that the proposed code provides the best bit error rate (BER) performance among the state-of-the-art STBCs.
1401.1236
Structural patterns in complex systems using multidendrograms
physics.data-an cs.IR cs.SI physics.comp-ph physics.soc-ph
Complex systems are usually represented as an intricate set of relations between their components forming a complex graph or network. The understanding of their functioning and emergent properties are strongly related to their structural properties. The finding of structural patterns is of utmost importance to reduce the problem of understanding the structure-function relationships. Here we propose the analysis of similarity measures between nodes using hierarchical clustering methods. The discrete nature of the networks usually leads to a small set of different similarity values, making standard hierarchical clustering algorithms ambiguous. We propose the use of "multidendrograms", an algorithm that computes agglomerative hierarchical clusterings implementing a variable-group technique that solves the non-uniqueness problem found in the standard pair-group algorithm. This problem arises when there are more than two clusters separated by the same maximum similarity (or minimum distance) during the agglomerative process. Forcing binary trees in this case means breaking ties in some way, thus giving rise to different output clusterings depending on the criterion used. Multidendrograms solves this problem grouping more than two clusters at the same time when ties occur.
1401.1239
The Capacity of Three-Receiver AWGN Broadcast Channels with Receiver Message Side Information
cs.IT math.IT
This paper investigates the capacity region of three-receiver AWGN broadcast channels where the receivers (i) have private-message requests and (ii) know the messages requested by some other receivers as side information. We classify these channels based on their side information into eight groups, and construct different transmission schemes for the groups. For six groups, we characterize the capacity region, and show that it improves both the best known inner and outer bounds. For the remaining two groups, we improve the best known inner bound by using side information during channel decoding at the receivers.
1401.1247
Tractability through Exchangeability: A New Perspective on Efficient Probabilistic Inference
cs.AI
Exchangeability is a central notion in statistics and probability theory. The assumption that an infinite sequence of data points is exchangeable is at the core of Bayesian statistics. However, finite exchangeability as a statistical property that renders probabilistic inference tractable is less well-understood. We develop a theory of finite exchangeability and its relation to tractable probabilistic inference. The theory is complementary to that of independence and conditional independence. We show that tractable inference in probabilistic models with high treewidth and millions of variables can be understood using the notion of finite (partial) exchangeability. We also show that existing lifted inference algorithms implicitly utilize a combination of conditional independence and partial exchangeability.
1401.1257
Optimal network modularity for information diffusion
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
We investigate the impact of community structure on information diffusion with the linear threshold model. Our results demonstrate that modular structure may have counter-intuitive effects on information diffusion when social reinforcement is present. We show that strong communities can facilitate global diffusion by enhancing local, intra-community spreading. Using both analytic approaches and numerical simulations, we demonstrate the existence of an optimal network modularity, where global diffusion require the minimal number of early adopters.
1401.1274
Quantifying Information Flow During Emergencies
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Recent advances on human dynamics have focused on the normal patterns of human activities, with the quantitative understanding of human behavior under extreme events remaining a crucial missing chapter. This has a wide array of potential applications, ranging from emergency response and detection to traffic control and management. Previous studies have shown that human communications are both temporally and spatially localized following the onset of emergencies, indicating that social propagation is a primary means to propagate situational awareness. We study real anomalous events using country-wide mobile phone data, finding that information flow during emergencies is dominated by repeated communications. We further demonstrate that the observed communication patterns cannot be explained by inherent reciprocity in social networks, and are universal across different demographics.
1401.1294
Analysis and Optimization of Random Sensing Order in Cognitive Radio Networks
cs.IT cs.PF math.IT math.PR
Developing an efficient spectrum access policy enables cognitive radios to dramatically increase spectrum utilization while ensuring predetermined quality of service levels for primary users. In this paper, modeling, performance analysis, and optimization of a distributed secondary network with random sensing order policy are studied. Specifically, the secondary users create a random order of available channels upon primary users return, and then find optimal transmission and handoff opportunities in a distributed manner. By a Markov chain analysis, the average throughputs of the secondary users and average interference level among the secondary and primary users are investigated. A maximization of the secondary network performance in terms of the throughput while keeping under control the average interference is proposed. It is shown that despite of traditional view, non-zero false alarm in the channel sensing can increase channel utilization, especially in a dense secondary network where the contention is too high. Then, two simple and practical adaptive algorithms are established to optimize the network. The second algorithm follows the variations of the wireless channels in non-stationary conditions and outperforms even static brute force optimization, while demanding few computations. The convergence of the distributed algorithms are theoretically investigated based on the analytical performance indicators established by the Markov chain analysis. Finally, numerical results validate the analytical derivations and demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed schemes. It is concluded that fully distributed sensing order algorithms can lead to substantial performance improvements in cognitive radio networks without the need of centralized management or message passing among the users.
1401.1302
Optimization in Knowledge-Intensive Crowdsourcing
cs.DB cs.SI
We present SmartCrowd, a framework for optimizing collaborative knowledge-intensive crowdsourcing. SmartCrowd distinguishes itself by accounting for human factors in the process of assigning tasks to workers. Human factors designate workers' expertise in different skills, their expected minimum wage, and their availability. In SmartCrowd, we formulate task assignment as an optimization problem, and rely on pre-indexing workers and maintaining the indexes adaptively, in such a way that the task assignment process gets optimized both qualitatively, and computation time-wise. We present rigorous theoretical analyses of the optimization problem and propose optimal and approximation algorithms. We finally perform extensive performance and quality experiments using real and synthetic data to demonstrate that adaptive indexing in SmartCrowd is necessary to achieve efficient high quality task assignment.
1401.1308
Dynamic Assignment in Microsimulations of Pedestrians
cs.CE cs.MA physics.soc-ph
A generic method for dynamic assignment used with microsimulation of pedestrian dynamics is introduced. As pedestrians - unlike vehicles - do not move on a network, but on areas they in principle can choose among an infinite number of routes. To apply assignment algorithms one has to select for each OD pair a finite (realistically a small) number of relevant representatives from these routes. This geometric task is the main focus of this contribution. The main task is to find for an OD pair the relevant routes to be used with common assignment methods. The method is demonstrated for one single OD pair and exemplified with an example.
1401.1313
Proving Abstractions of Dynamical Systems through Numerical Simulations
cs.SY
A key question that arises in rigorous analysis of cyberphysical systems under attack involves establishing whether or not the attacked system deviates significantly from the ideal allowed behavior. This is the problem of deciding whether or not the ideal system is an abstraction of the attacked system. A quantitative variation of this question can capture how much the attacked system deviates from the ideal. Thus, algorithms for deciding abstraction relations can help measure the effect of attacks on cyberphysical systems and to develop attack detection strategies. In this paper, we present a decision procedure for proving that one nonlinear dynamical system is a quantitative abstraction of another. Directly computing the reach sets of these nonlinear systems are undecidable in general and reach set over-approximations do not give a direct way for proving abstraction. Our procedure uses (possibly inaccurate) numerical simulations and a model annotation to compute tight approximations of the observable behaviors of the system and then uses these approximations to decide on abstraction. We show that the procedure is sound and that it is guaranteed to terminate under reasonable robustness assumptions.
1401.1333
Time series forecasting using neural networks
cs.NE
Recent studies have shown the classification and prediction power of the Neural Networks. It has been demonstrated that a NN can approximate any continuous function. Neural networks have been successfully used for forecasting of financial data series. The classical methods used for time series prediction like Box-Jenkins or ARIMA assumes that there is a linear relationship between inputs and outputs. Neural Networks have the advantage that can approximate nonlinear functions. In this paper we compared the performances of different feed forward and recurrent neural networks and training algorithms for predicting the exchange rate EUR/RON and USD/RON. We used data series with daily exchange rates starting from 2005 until 2013.
1401.1346
Quadrature Compressive Sampling for Radar Signals
cs.IT math.IT
Quadrature sampling has been widely applied in coherent radar systems to extract in-phase and quadrature (I and Q) components in the received radar signal. However, the sampling is inefficient because the received signal contains only a small number of significant target signals. This paper incorporates the compressive sampling (CS) theory into the design of the quadrature sampling system, and develops a quadrature compressive sampling (QuadCS) system to acquire the I and Q components with low sampling rate. The QuadCS system first randomly projects the received signal into a compressive bandpass signal and then utilizes the quadrature sampling to output compressive I and Q components. The compressive outputs are used to reconstruct the I and Q components. To understand the system performance, we establish the frequency domain representation of the QuadCS system. With the waveform-matched dictionary, we prove that the QuadCS system satisfies the restricted isometry property with overwhelming probability. For K target signals in the observation interval T, simulations show that the QuadCS requires just O(Klog(BT/K)) samples to stably reconstruct the signal, where B is the signal bandwidth. The reconstructed signal-to-noise ratio decreases by 3dB for every octave increase in the target number K and increases by 3dB for every octave increase in the compressive bandwidth. Theoretical analyses and simulations verify that the proposed QuadCS is a valid system to acquire the I and Q components in the received radar signals.
1401.1376
Towards A Domain-specific Language For Pick-And-Place Applications
cs.RO
Programming robots is a complicated and time-consuming task. A robot is essentially a real-time, distributed embedded system. Often, control and communication paths within the system are tightly coupled to the actual physical configuration of the robot. Thus, programming a robot is a very challenging task for domain experts who do not have a dedicated background in robotics. In this paper we present an approach towards a domain specific language, which is intended to reduce the efforts and the complexity which is required when developing robotic applications. Furthermore we apply a software product line approach to realize a configurable code generator which produces C++ code which can either be run on real robots or on a robot simulator.
1401.1381
Reduced-complexity maximum-likelihood decoding for 3D MIMO code
cs.IT math.IT
The 3D MIMO code is a robust and efficient space-time coding scheme for the distributed MIMO broadcasting. However, it suffers from the high computational complexity if the optimal maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding is used. In this paper we first investigate the unique properties of the 3D MIMO code and consequently propose a simplified decoding algorithm without sacrificing the ML optimality. Analysis shows that the decoding complexity is reduced from O(M^8) to O(M^{4.5}) in quasi-static channels when M-ary square QAM constellation is used. Moreover, we propose an efficient implementation of the simplified ML decoder which achieves a much lower decoding time delay compared to the classical sphere decoder with Schnorr-Euchner enumeration.
1401.1406
BigDataBench: a Big Data Benchmark Suite from Internet Services
cs.DB
As architecture, systems, and data management communities pay greater attention to innovative big data systems and architectures, the pressure of benchmarking and evaluating these systems rises. Considering the broad use of big data systems, big data benchmarks must include diversity of data and workloads. Most of the state-of-the-art big data benchmarking efforts target evaluating specific types of applications or system software stacks, and hence they are not qualified for serving the purposes mentioned above. This paper presents our joint research efforts on this issue with several industrial partners. Our big data benchmark suite BigDataBench not only covers broad application scenarios, but also includes diverse and representative data sets. BigDataBench is publicly available from http://prof.ict.ac.cn/BigDataBench . Also, we comprehensively characterize 19 big data workloads included in BigDataBench with varying data inputs. On a typical state-of-practice processor, Intel Xeon E5645, we have the following observations: First, in comparison with the traditional benchmarks: including PARSEC, HPCC, and SPECCPU, big data applications have very low operation intensity; Second, the volume of data input has non-negligible impact on micro-architecture characteristics, which may impose challenges for simulation-based big data architecture research; Last but not least, corroborating the observations in CloudSuite and DCBench (which use smaller data inputs), we find that the numbers of L1 instruction cache misses per 1000 instructions of the big data applications are higher than in the traditional benchmarks; also, we find that L3 caches are effective for the big data applications, corroborating the observation in DCBench.
1401.1456
Using temporal IDF for efficient novelty detection in text streams
cs.IR
Novelty detection in text streams is a challenging task that emerges in quite a few different scenarios, ranging from email thread filtering to RSS news feed recommendation on a smartphone. An efficient novelty detection algorithm can save the user a great deal of time and resources when browsing through relevant yet usually previously-seen content. Most of the recent research on detection of novel documents in text streams has been building upon either geometric distances or distributional similarities, with the former typically performing better but being much slower due to the need of comparing an incoming document with all the previously-seen ones. In this paper, we propose a new approach to novelty detection in text streams. We describe a resource-aware mechanism that is able to handle massive text streams such as the ones present today thanks to the burst of social media and the emergence of the Web as the main source of information. We capitalize on the historical Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) that was known for capturing well term specificity and we show that it can be used successfully at the document level as a measure of document novelty. This enables us to avoid similarity comparisons with previous documents in the text stream, thus scaling better and leading to faster execution times. Moreover, as the collection of documents evolves over time, we use a temporal variant of IDF not only to maintain an efficient representation of what has already been seen but also to decay the document frequencies as the time goes by. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach on a real-world news articles dataset created for this task. The results show that the proposed method outperforms all of the baselines while managing to operate efficiently in terms of time complexity and memory usage, which are of great importance in a mobile setting scenario.
1401.1458
Generalized friendship paradox in complex networks: The case of scientific collaboration
cs.SI physics.data-an physics.soc-ph
The friendship paradox states that your friends have on average more friends than you have. Does the paradox "hold" for other individual characteristics like income or happiness? To address this question, we generalize the friendship paradox for arbitrary node characteristics in complex networks. By analyzing two coauthorship networks of Physical Review journals and Google Scholar profiles, we find that the generalized friendship paradox (GFP) holds at the individual and network levels for various characteristics, including the number of coauthors, the number of citations, and the number of publications. The origin of the GFP is shown to be rooted in positive correlations between degree and characteristics. As a fruitful application of the GFP, we suggest effective and efficient sampling methods for identifying high characteristic nodes in large-scale networks. Our study on the GFP can shed lights on understanding the interplay between network structure and node characteristics in complex networks.
1401.1465
Cortical prediction markets
cs.AI cs.GT cs.LG cs.MA q-bio.NC
We investigate cortical learning from the perspective of mechanism design. First, we show that discretizing standard models of neurons and synaptic plasticity leads to rational agents maximizing simple scoring rules. Second, our main result is that the scoring rules are proper, implying that neurons faithfully encode expected utilities in their synaptic weights and encode high-scoring outcomes in their spikes. Third, with this foundation in hand, we propose a biologically plausible mechanism whereby neurons backpropagate incentives which allows them to optimize their usefulness to the rest of cortex. Finally, experiments show that networks that backpropagate incentives can learn simple tasks.
1401.1467
The sum $2^{\mathit{KA}(x)-\mathit{KP}(x)}$ over all prefixes $x$ of some binary sequence can be infinite
cs.IT math.IT
We consider two quantities that measure complexity of binary strings: $\mathit{KA}(x)$ is defined as the minus logarithm of continuous a priori probability on the binary tree, and $\mathit{KP}(x)$ denotes prefix complexity of a binary string $x$. In this paper we answer a question posed by Joseph Miller and prove that there exists an infinite binary sequence $\omega$ such that the sum of $2^{\mathit{KA}(x)-\mathit{KP}(x)}$ over all prefixes $x$ of $\omega$ is infinite. Such a sequence can be chosen among characteristic sequences of computably enumerable sets.
1401.1475
Belief Revision in Structured Probabilistic Argumentation
cs.LO cs.AI
In real-world applications, knowledge bases consisting of all the information at hand for a specific domain, along with the current state of affairs, are bound to contain contradictory data coming from different sources, as well as data with varying degrees of uncertainty attached. Likewise, an important aspect of the effort associated with maintaining knowledge bases is deciding what information is no longer useful; pieces of information (such as intelligence reports) may be outdated, may come from sources that have recently been discovered to be of low quality, or abundant evidence may be available that contradicts them. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic structured argumentation framework that arises from the extension of Presumptive Defeasible Logic Programming (PreDeLP) with probabilistic models, and argue that this formalism is capable of addressing the basic issues of handling contradictory and uncertain data. Then, to address the last issue, we focus on the study of non-prioritized belief revision operations over probabilistic PreDeLP programs. We propose a set of rationality postulates -- based on well-known ones developed for classical knowledge bases -- that characterize how such operations should behave, and study a class of operators along with theoretical relationships with the proposed postulates, including a representation theorem stating the equivalence between this class and the class of operators characterized by the postulates.
1401.1480
Lower Bounds and Approximations for the Information Rate of the ISI Channel
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the discrete-time intersymbol interference (ISI) channel model, with additive Gaussian noise and fixed i.i.d. inputs. In this setting, we investigate the expression put forth by Shamai and Laroia as a conjectured lower bound for the input-output mutual information after application of a MMSE-DFE receiver. A low-SNR expansion is used to prove that the conjectured bound does not hold under general conditions, and to characterize inputs for which it is particularly ill-suited. One such input is used to construct a counterexample, indicating that the Shamai-Laroia expression does not always bound even the achievable rate of the channel, thus excluding a natural relaxation of the original conjectured bound. However, this relaxed bound is then shown to hold for any finite entropy input and ISI channel, when the SNR is sufficiently high. Finally, new simple bounds for the achievable rate are proven, and compared to other known bounds. Information-Estimation relations and estimation-theoretic bounds play a key role in establishing our results.
1401.1486
Design & Development of the Graphical User Interface for Sindhi Language
cs.HC cs.CL
This paper describes the design and implementation of a Unicode-based GUISL (Graphical User Interface for Sindhi Language). The idea is to provide a software platform to the people of Sindh as well as Sindhi diasporas living across the globe to make use of computing for basic tasks such as editing, composition, formatting, and printing of documents in Sindhi by using GUISL. The implementation of the GUISL has been done in the Java technology to make the system platform independent. The paper describes several design issues of Sindhi GUI in the context of existing software tools and technologies and explains how mapping and concatenation techniques have been employed to achieve the cursive shape of Sindhi script.
1401.1489
Key point selection and clustering of swimmer coordination through Sparse Fisher-EM
stat.ML cs.CV cs.LG physics.data-an stat.AP
To answer the existence of optimal swimmer learning/teaching strategies, this work introduces a two-level clustering in order to analyze temporal dynamics of motor learning in breaststroke swimming. Each level have been performed through Sparse Fisher-EM, a unsupervised framework which can be applied efficiently on large and correlated datasets. The induced sparsity selects key points of the coordination phase without any prior knowledge.
1401.1513
On the Stability of Random Multiple Access with Feedback Exploitation and Queue Priority
cs.IT cs.NI cs.PF math.IT
In this paper, we study the stability of two interacting queues under random multiple access in which the queues leverage the feedback information. We derive the stability region under random multiple access where one of the two queues exploits the feedback information and backs off under negative acknowledgement (NACK) and the other, higher priority, queue will access the channel with probability one. We characterize the stability region of this feedback-based random access protocol and prove that this derived stability region encloses the stability region of the conventional random access (RA) scheme that does not exploit the feedback information.
1401.1533
Proposta di nuovi strumenti per comprendere come funziona la cognizione (Novel tools to understand how cognition works)
cs.AI
I think that the main reason why we do not understand the general principles of how knowledge works (and probably also the reason why we have not yet designed and built efficient machines capable of artificial intelligence), is not the excessive complexity of cognitive phenomena, but the lack of the conceptual and methodological tools to properly address the problem. It is like trying to build up Physics without the concept of number, or to understand the origin of species without including the mechanism of natural selection. In this paper I propose some new conceptual and methodological tools, which seem to offer a real opportunity to understand the logic of cognitive processes. I propose a new method to properly treat the concepts of structure and schema, and to perform on them operations of structural analysis. These operations allow to move straightforwardly from concrete to more abstract representations. With these tools I will suggest a definition for the concept of rule, of regularity and of emergent phenomena. From the analysis of some important aspects of the rules, I suggest to distinguish them in operational and associative rules. I propose that associative rules assume a dominant role in cognition. I also propose a definition for the concept of problem. At the end I will briefly illustrate a possible general model for cognitive systems.
1401.1545
A Round-Robin Protocol for Distributed Estimation with $H_\infty$ Consensus
math.OC cs.SY
The paper considers a distributed robust estimation problem over a network with directed topology involving continuous time observers. While measurements are available to the observers continuously, the nodes interact according to a Round-Robin rule, at discrete time instances. The results of the paper are sufficient conditions which guarantee a suboptimal $H_\infty$ level of consensus between observers with sampled interconnections.
1401.1549
Optimal Demand Response Using Device Based Reinforcement Learning
cs.LG cs.AI cs.SY
Demand response (DR) for residential and small commercial buildings is estimated to account for as much as 65% of the total energy savings potential of DR, and previous work shows that a fully automated Energy Management System (EMS) is a necessary prerequisite to DR in these areas. In this paper, we propose a novel EMS formulation for DR problems in these sectors. Specifically, we formulate a fully automated EMS's rescheduling problem as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem, and argue that this RL problem can be approximately solved by decomposing it over device clusters. Compared with existing formulations, our new formulation (1) does not require explicitly modeling the user's dissatisfaction on job rescheduling, (2) enables the EMS to self-initiate jobs, (3) allows the user to initiate more flexible requests and (4) has a computational complexity linear in the number of devices. We also demonstrate the simulation results of applying Q-learning, one of the most popular and classical RL algorithms, to a representative example.
1401.1551
Updating Neighbour Cell List via Crowdsourced User Reports: a Framework for Measuring Time Performance
cs.NI cs.SI
In this paper we introduce the idea of estimating local topology in wireless networks by means of crowdsourced user reports. In this approach each user periodically reports to the serving basestation information about the set of neighbouring basestations observed by the user. We show that, by mapping the local topological structure of the network onto states of increasing knowledge, a crisp mathematical framework can be obtained, which allows in turn for the use of a variety of user mobility models. Using a simplified mobility model we show how obtain useful upper bounds on the expected time for a basestation to gain full knowledge of its local neighbourhood, answering the fundamental question about which classes of network deployments can effectively benefit from a crowdsourcing approach.
1401.1558
The Continuity of Images by Transmission Imaging Revisited
math.DG cs.CV math.NA
Transmission imaging, as an important imaging technique widely used in astronomy, medical diagnosis, and biology science, has been shown in [49] quite different from reflection imaging used in our everyday life. Understanding the structures of images (the prior information) is important for designing, testing, and choosing image processing methods, and good image processing methods are helpful for further uses of the image data, e.g., increasing the accuracy of the object reconstruction methods in transmission imaging applications. In reflection imaging, the images are usually modeled as discontinuous functions and even piecewise constant functions. In transmission imaging, it was shown very recently in [49] that almost all images are continuous functions. However, the author in [49] considered only the case of parallel beam geometry and used some too strong assumptions in the proof, which exclude some common cases such as cylindrical objects. In this paper, we consider more general beam geometries and simplify the assumptions by using totally different techniques. In particular, we will prove that almost all images in transmission imaging with both parallel and divergent beam geometries (two most typical beam geometries) are continuous functions, under much weaker assumptions than those in [49], which admit almost all practical cases. Besides, taking into accounts our analysis, we compare two image processing methods for Poisson noise (which is the most significant noise in transmission imaging) removal. Numerical experiments will be provided to demonstrate our analysis.
1401.1560
Beyond One-Step-Ahead Forecasting: Evaluation of Alternative Multi-Step-Ahead Forecasting Models for Crude Oil Prices
cs.LG cs.AI
An accurate prediction of crude oil prices over long future horizons is challenging and of great interest to governments, enterprises, and investors. This paper proposes a revised hybrid model built upon empirical mode decomposition (EMD) based on the feed-forward neural network (FNN) modeling framework incorporating the slope-based method (SBM), which is capable of capturing the complex dynamic of crude oil prices. Three commonly used multi-step-ahead prediction strategies proposed in the literature, including iterated strategy, direct strategy, and MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) strategy, are examined and compared, and practical considerations for the selection of a prediction strategy for multi-step-ahead forecasting relating to crude oil prices are identified. The weekly data from the WTI (West Texas Intermediate) crude oil spot price are used to compare the performance of the alternative models under the EMD-SBM-FNN modeling framework with selected counterparts. The quantitative and comprehensive assessments are performed on the basis of prediction accuracy and computational cost. The results obtained in this study indicate that the proposed EMD-SBM-FNN model using the MIMO strategy is the best in terms of prediction accuracy with accredited computational load.
1401.1577
Discrete-Time Output-Feedback Robust Repetitive Control for a Class of Nonlinear Systems by Additive State Decomposition
cs.SY
The discrete-time robust repetitive control (RC, or repetitive controller, also designated RC) problem for nonlinear systems is both challenging and practical. This paper proposes a discrete-time output-feedback RC design for a class of systems subject to measurable nonlinearities to track reference robustly with respect to the period variation. The design relies on additive state decomposition, by which the output-feedback RC problem is decomposed into an output-feedback RC problem for a linear time-invariant system and a state-feedback stabilization problem for a nonlinear system. Thanks to the decomposition, existing controller design methods in both the frequency domain and time domain can be employed to make the robustness and discretization for a nonlinear system tractable. To demonstrate the effectiveness, an illustrative example is given.
1401.1580
A New Causal Ideal Internal Dynamics Generator
cs.SY
The design of ideal internal dynamics (IID) generators, namely solving IID, is a fundamental problem, which is a key step to handle the nonminimum-phase output tracking problem. In this paper, for a class of unstable matrix differential equations, a new causal dynamic IID generator is proposed, whose parameters are partly chosen via H_2/H_inf optimization. Compared with existing similar generators, it is applicable to matrix differential equations with singular system matrices and is easily extended to slowly time-varying matrix differential equations without extra computation.
1401.1605
Fast nonparametric clustering of structured time-series
cs.LG cs.CV stat.ML
In this publication, we combine two Bayesian non-parametric models: the Gaussian Process (GP) and the Dirichlet Process (DP). Our innovation in the GP model is to introduce a variation on the GP prior which enables us to model structured time-series data, i.e. data containing groups where we wish to model inter- and intra-group variability. Our innovation in the DP model is an implementation of a new fast collapsed variational inference procedure which enables us to optimize our variationala pproximation significantly faster than standard VB approaches. In a biological time series application we show how our model better captures salient features of the data, leading to better consistency with existing biological classifications, while the associated inference algorithm provides a twofold speed-up over EM-based variational inference.
1401.1626
Coded Slotted ALOHA: A Graph-Based Method for Uncoordinated Multiple Access
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, a random access scheme is introduced which relies on the combination of packet erasure correcting codes and successive interference cancellation (SIC). The scheme is named coded slotted ALOHA. A bipartite graph representation of the SIC process, resembling iterative decoding of generalized low-density parity-check codes over the erasure channel, is exploited to optimize the selection probabilities of the component erasure correcting codes via density evolution analysis. The capacity (in packets per slot) of the scheme is then analyzed in the context of the collision channel without feedback. Moreover, a capacity bound is developed and component code distributions tightly approaching the bound are derived.
1401.1632
Fuzzy Inference System for VOLT/VAR control in distribution substations in isolated power systems
cs.SY
This paper presents a fuzzy inference system for voltage/reactive power control in distribution substations. The purpose is go forward to automation distribution and its implementation in isolated power systems where control capabilities are limited and it is common using the same applications as in continental power systems. This means that lot of functionalities do not apply and computational burden generates high response times. A fuzzy controller, with logic guidelines embedded based upon heuristic rules resulting from operators at dispatch control center past experience, has been designed. Working as an on-line tool, it has been tested under real conditions and it has managed the operation during a whole day in a distribution substation. Within the limits of control capabilities of the system, the controller maintained successfully an acceptable voltage profile, power factor values over 0,98 and it has ostensibly improved the performance given by an optimal power flow based automation system.
1401.1669
Smart machines and the SP theory of intelligence
cs.AI
These notes describe how the "SP theory of intelligence", and its embodiment in the "SP machine", may help to realise cognitive computing, as described in the book "Smart Machines". In the SP system, information compression and a concept of "multiple alignment" are centre stage. The system is designed to integrate such things as unsupervised learning, pattern recognition, probabilistic reasoning, and more. It may help to overcome the problem of variety in big data, it may serve in pattern recognition and in the unsupervised learning of structure in data, and it may facilitate the management and transmission of big data. There is potential, via information compression, for substantial gains in computational efficiency, especially in the use of energy. The SP system may help to realise data-centric computing, perhaps via a development of Hebb's concept of a "cell assembly", or via the use of light or DNA for the processing of information. It has potential in the management of errors and uncertainty in data, in medical diagnosis, in processing streams of data, and in promoting adaptability in robots.
1401.1671
Distributed Energy Efficient Channel Allocation
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT
Design of energy efficient protocols for modern wireless systems has become an important area of research. In this paper, we propose a distributed optimization algorithm for the channel assignment problem for multiple interfering transceiver pairs that cannot communicate with each other. We first modify the auction algorithm for maximal energy efficiency and show that the problem can be solved without explicit message passing using the carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) protocols. We then develop a novel scheme by converting the channel assignment problem into perfect matchings on bipartite graphs. The proposed scheme improves the energy efficiency and does not require any explicit message passing or a shared memory between the users. We derive bounds on the convergence rate and show that the proposed algorithm converges faster than the distributed auction algorithm and achieves near-optimal performance under Rayleigh fading channels. We also present an asymptotic performance analysis of the fast matching algorithm for energy efficient resource allocation and prove the optimality for large enough number of users and number of channels. Finally, we provide numerical assessments that confirm the energy efficiency gains compared to the state of the art.
1401.1686
Pedestrian Route Choice by Iterated Equilibrium Search
cs.MA cs.CE nlin.AO physics.soc-ph
In vehicular traffic planning it is a long standing problem how to assign demand such on the available model of a road network that an equilibrium with regard to travel time or generalized costs is realized. For pedestrian traffic this question can be asked as well. However, as the infrastructure of pedestrian dynamics is not a network (a graph), but two-dimensional, there is in principle an infinitely large set of routes. As a consequence none of the iterating assignment methods developed for road traffic can be applied for pedestrians. In this contribution a method to overcome this problem is briefly summarized and applied with an example geometry which as a result is enhanced with routes with intermediate destination areas of certain shape. The enhanced geometry is used in some exemplary assignment calculations.
1401.1711
Energy-Efficient Communication over the Unsynchronized Gaussian Diamond Network
cs.IT math.IT
Communication networks are often designed and analyzed assuming tight synchronization among nodes. However, in applications that require communication in the energy-efficient regime of low signal-to-noise ratios, establishing tight synchronization among nodes in the network can result in a significant energy overhead. Motivated by a recent result showing that near-optimal energy efficiency can be achieved over the AWGN channel without requiring tight synchronization, we consider the question of whether the potential gains of cooperative communication can be achieved in the absence of synchronization. We focus on the symmetric Gaussian diamond network and establish that cooperative-communication gains are indeed feasible even with unsynchronized nodes. More precisely, we show that the capacity per unit energy of the unsynchronized symmetric Gaussian diamond network is within a constant factor of the capacity per unit energy of the corresponding synchronized network. To this end, we propose a distributed relaying scheme that does not require tight synchronization but nevertheless achieves most of the energy gains of coherent combining.
1401.1714
Exploiting Capture Effect in Frameless ALOHA for Massive Wireless Random Access
cs.IT math.IT
The analogies between successive interference cancellation (SIC) in slotted ALOHA framework and iterative belief-propagation erasure-decoding, established recently, enabled the application of the erasure-coding theory and tools to design random access schemes. This approach leads to throughput substantially higher than the one offered by the traditional slotted ALOHA. In the simplest setting, SIC progresses when a successful decoding occurs for a single user transmission. In this paper we consider a more general setting of a channel with capture and explore how such physical model affects the design of the coded random access protocol. Specifically, we assess the impact of capture effect in Rayleigh fading scenario on the design of SIC-enabled slotted ALOHA schemes. We provide analytical treatment of frameless ALOHA, which is a special case of SIC-enabled ALOHA scheme. We demonstrate both through analytical and simulation results that the capture effect can be very beneficial in terms of achieved throughput.
1401.1732
Looking at Vector Space and Language Models for IR using Density Matrices
cs.IR
In this work, we conduct a joint analysis of both Vector Space and Language Models for IR using the mathematical framework of Quantum Theory. We shed light on how both models allocate the space of density matrices. A density matrix is shown to be a general representational tool capable of leveraging capabilities of both VSM and LM representations thus paving the way for a new generation of retrieval models. We analyze the possible implications suggested by our findings.
1401.1742
Content Based Image Indexing and Retrieval
cs.CV cs.GR cs.IR cs.MM
In this paper, we present the efficient content based image retrieval systems which employ the color, texture and shape information of images to facilitate the retrieval process. For efficient feature extraction, we extract the color, texture and shape feature of images automatically using edge detection which is widely used in signal processing and image compression. For facilitated the speedy retrieval we are implements the antipole-tree algorithm for indexing the images.
1401.1752
Speeding up SOR Solvers for Constraint-based GUIs with a Warm-Start Strategy
cs.HC cs.AI cs.NA
Many computer programs have graphical user interfaces (GUIs), which need good layout to make efficient use of the available screen real estate. Most GUIs do not have a fixed layout, but are resizable and able to adapt themselves. Constraints are a powerful tool for specifying adaptable GUI layouts: they are used to specify a layout in a general form, and a constraint solver is used to find a satisfying concrete layout, e.g.\ for a specific GUI size. The constraint solver has to calculate a new layout every time a GUI is resized or changed, so it needs to be efficient to ensure a good user experience. One approach for constraint solvers is based on the Gauss-Seidel algorithm and successive over-relaxation (SOR). Our observation is that a solution after resizing or changing is similar in structure to a previous solution. Thus, our hypothesis is that we can increase the computational performance of an SOR-based constraint solver if we reuse the solution of a previous layout to warm-start the solving of a new layout. In this paper we report on experiments to test this hypothesis experimentally for three common use cases: big-step resizing, small-step resizing and constraint change. In our experiments, we measured the solving time for randomly generated GUI layout specifications of various sizes. For all three cases we found that the performance is improved if an existing solution is used as a starting solution for a new layout.
1401.1753
A Solution of Degree Constrained Spanning Tree Using Hybrid GA
cs.NE cs.DS
In real life, it is always an urge to reach our goal in minimum effort i.e., it should have a minimum constrained path. The path may be shortest route in practical life, either physical or electronic medium. The scenario is to represents the ambiance as a graph and to find a spanning tree with custom design criteria. Here, we have chosen a minimum degree spanning tree, which can be generated in real time with minimum turnaround time. The problem is NP-complete in nature [1, 2]. The solution approach, in general, is approximate. We have used a heuristic approach, namely hybrid genetic algorithm (GA), with motivated criteria of encoded data structures of graph. We compare the experimental result with the existing approximate algorithm and the result is so encouraging that we are interested to use it in our future applications.
1401.1757
An efficient algorithm for the calculation of reserves for non-unit linked life policies
q-fin.CP cs.CE
The underlying stochastic nature of the requirements for the Solvency II regulations has introduced significant challenges if the required calculations are to be performed correctly, without resorting to excessive approximations, within practical timescales. It is generally acknowledged by practising actuaries within UK life offices that it is currently impossible to correctly fulfil the requirements imposed by Solvency II using existing computational techniques based on commercially available valuation packages. Our work has already shown that it is possible to perform profitability calculations at a far higher rate than is achievable using commercial packages. One of the key factors in achieving these gains is to calculate reserves using recurrence relations that scale linearly with the number of time steps. Here, we present a general vector recurrence relation which can be used for a wide range of non-unit linked policies that are covered by Solvency II; such contracts include annuities, term assurances, and endowments. Our results suggest that by using an optimised parallel implementation of this algorithm, on an affordable hardware platform, it is possible to perform the `brute force' approach to demonstrating solvency in a realistic timescale (of the order of a few hours).
1401.1766
G-Bean: an ontology-graph based web tool for biomedical literature retrieval
cs.IR
Currently, most people use PubMed to search the MEDLINE database, an important bibliographical information source for life science and biomedical information. However, PubMed has some drawbacks that make it difficult to find relevant publications pertaining to users' individual intentions, especially for non-expert users. To ameliorate the disadvantages of PubMed, we developed G-Bean, a graph based biomedical search engine, to search biomedical articles in MEDLINE database more efficiently.G-Bean addresses PubMed's limitations with three innovations: parallel document index creation,ontology-graph based query expansion, and retrieval and re-ranking of documents based on user's search intention.Performance evaluation with 106 OHSUMED benchmark queries shows that G-Bean returns more relevant results than PubMed does when using these queries to search the MEDLINE database. PubMed could not even return any search result for some OHSUMED queries because it failed to form the appropriate Boolean query statement automatically from the natural language query strings. G-Bean is available at http://bioinformatics.clemson.edu/G-Bean/index.php.G-Bean addresses PubMed's limitations with ontology-graph based query expansion, automatic document indexing, and user search intention discovery. It shows significant advantages in finding relevant articles from the MEDLINE database to meet the information need of the user.
1401.1771
Simple linear algorithms for mining graph cores
cs.DS cs.SI
Batagelj and Zaversnik proposed a linear algorithm for the well-known $k$-core decomposition problem. However, when $k$-cores are desired for a given $k$, we find that a simple linear algorithm requiring no sorting works for mining $k$-cores. In addition, this algorithm can be extended to mine $(k_1, k_2,\ldots, k_p)$-cores from $p$-partite graphs in linear time, and this mining approach can be efficiently implemented in a distributed computing environment with a lower message complexity bound in comparison with the best known method of distributed $k$-core decomposition.
1401.1778
Large Scale Visual Recommendations From Street Fashion Images
cs.CV
We describe a completely automated large scale visual recommendation system for fashion. Our focus is to efficiently harness the availability of large quantities of online fashion images and their rich meta-data. Specifically, we propose four data driven models in the form of Complementary Nearest Neighbor Consensus, Gaussian Mixture Models, Texture Agnostic Retrieval and Markov Chain LDA for solving this problem. We analyze relative merits and pitfalls of these algorithms through extensive experimentation on a large-scale data set and baseline them against existing ideas from color science. We also illustrate key fashion insights learned through these experiments and show how they can be employed to design better recommendation systems. Finally, we also outline a large-scale annotated data set of fashion images (Fashion-136K) that can be exploited for future vision research.
1401.1803
Learning Multilingual Word Representations using a Bag-of-Words Autoencoder
cs.CL cs.LG stat.ML
Recent work on learning multilingual word representations usually relies on the use of word-level alignements (e.g. infered with the help of GIZA++) between translated sentences, in order to align the word embeddings in different languages. In this workshop paper, we investigate an autoencoder model for learning multilingual word representations that does without such word-level alignements. The autoencoder is trained to reconstruct the bag-of-word representation of given sentence from an encoded representation extracted from its translation. We evaluate our approach on a multilingual document classification task, where labeled data is available only for one language (e.g. English) while classification must be performed in a different language (e.g. French). In our experiments, we observe that our method compares favorably with a previously proposed method that exploits word-level alignments to learn word representations.
1401.1842
Robust Large Scale Non-negative Matrix Factorization using Proximal Point Algorithm
stat.ML cs.IT cs.LG cs.NA math.IT
A robust algorithm for non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is presented in this paper with the purpose of dealing with large-scale data, where the separability assumption is satisfied. In particular, we modify the Linear Programming (LP) algorithm of [9] by introducing a reduced set of constraints for exact NMF. In contrast to the previous approaches, the proposed algorithm does not require the knowledge of factorization rank (extreme rays [3] or topics [7]). Furthermore, motivated by a similar problem arising in the context of metabolic network analysis [13], we consider an entirely different regime where the number of extreme rays or topics can be much larger than the dimension of the data vectors. The performance of the algorithm for different synthetic data sets are provided.
1401.1872
Skew in Parallel Query Processing
cs.DB cs.DS
We study the problem of computing a conjunctive query q in parallel, using p of servers, on a large database. We consider algorithms with one round of communication, and study the complexity of the communication. We are especially interested in the case where the data is skewed, which is a major challenge for scalable parallel query processing. We establish a tight connection between the fractional edge packings of the query and the amount of communication, in two cases. First, in the case when the only statistics on the database are the cardinalities of the input relations, and the data is skew-free, we provide matching upper and lower bounds (up to a poly log p factor) expressed in terms of fractional edge packings of the query q. Second, in the case when the relations are skewed and the heavy hitters and their frequencies are known, we provide upper and lower bounds (up to a poly log p factor) expressed in terms of packings of residual queries obtained by specializing the query to a heavy hitter. All our lower bounds are expressed in the strongest form, as number of bits needed to be communicated between processors with unlimited computational power. Our results generalizes some prior results on uniform databases (where each relation is a matching) [4], and other lower bounds for the MapReduce model [1].
1401.1876
Equivalent relaxations of optimal power flow
cs.SY
Several convex relaxations of the optimal power flow (OPF) problem have recently been developed using both bus injection models and branch flow models. In this paper, we prove relations among three convex relaxations: a semidefinite relaxation that computes a full matrix, a chordal relaxation based on a chordal extension of the network graph, and a second-order cone relaxation that computes the smallest partial matrix. We prove a bijection between the feasible sets of the OPF in the bus injection model and the branch flow model, establishing the equivalence of these two models and their second-order cone relaxations. Our results imply that, for radial networks, all these relaxations are equivalent and one should always solve the second-order cone relaxation. For mesh networks, the semidefinite relaxation is tighter than the second-order cone relaxation but requires a heavier computational effort, and the chordal relaxation strikes a good balance. Simulations are used to illustrate these results.
1401.1880
DJ-MC: A Reinforcement-Learning Agent for Music Playlist Recommendation
cs.LG
In recent years, there has been growing focus on the study of automated recommender systems. Music recommendation systems serve as a prominent domain for such works, both from an academic and a commercial perspective. A fundamental aspect of music perception is that music is experienced in temporal context and in sequence. In this work we present DJ-MC, a novel reinforcement-learning framework for music recommendation that does not recommend songs individually but rather song sequences, or playlists, based on a model of preferences for both songs and song transitions. The model is learned online and is uniquely adapted for each listener. To reduce exploration time, DJ-MC exploits user feedback to initialize a model, which it subsequently updates by reinforcement. We evaluate our framework with human participants using both real song and playlist data. Our results indicate that DJ-MC's ability to recommend sequences of songs provides a significant improvement over more straightforward approaches, which do not take transitions into account.
1401.1882
Image reconstruction from few views by L0-norm optimization
cs.IT cs.CV math.IT
The L1-norm of the gradient-magnitude images (GMI), which is the well-known total variation (TV) model, is widely used as regularization in the few views CT reconstruction. As the L1-norm TV regularization is tending to uniformly penalize the image gradient and the low-contrast structures are sometimes over smoothed, we proposed a new algorithm based on the L0-norm of the GMI to deal with the few views problem. To rise to the challenges introduced by the L0-norm DGT, the algorithm uses a pseudo-inverse transform of DGT and adapts an iterative hard thresholding (IHT) algorithm, whose convergence and effective efficiency have been theoretically proven. The simulation indicates that the algorithm proposed in this paper can obviously improve the reconstruction quality.
1401.1887
On the Weight Distribution of Cyclic Codes with Niho Exponents
cs.IT math.IT
Recently, there has been intensive research on the weight distributions of cyclic codes. In this paper, we compute the weight distributions of three classes of cyclic codes with Niho exponents. More specifically, we obtain two classes of binary three-weight and four-weight cyclic codes and a class of nonbinary four-weight cyclic codes. The weight distributions follow from the determination of value distributions of certain exponential sums. Several examples are presented to show that some of our codes are optimal and some have the best known parameters.
1401.1888
Dynamical Models of Stock Prices Based on Technical Trading Rules Part I: The Models
q-fin.TR cs.CE q-fin.ST
In this paper we use fuzzy systems theory to convert the technical trading rules commonly used by stock practitioners into excess demand functions which are then used to drive the price dynamics. The technical trading rules are recorded in natural languages where fuzzy words and vague expressions abound. In Part I of this paper, we will show the details of how to transform the technical trading heuristics into nonlinear dynamic equations. First, we define fuzzy sets to represent the fuzzy terms in the technical trading rules; second, we translate each technical trading heuristic into a group of fuzzy IF-THEN rules; third, we combine the fuzzy IF-THEN rules in a group into a fuzzy system; and finally, the linear combination of these fuzzy systems is used as the excess demand function in the price dynamic equation. We transform a wide variety of technical trading rules into fuzzy systems, including moving average rules, support and resistance rules, trend line rules, big buyer, big seller and manipulator rules, band and stop rules, and volume and relative strength rules. Simulation results show that the price dynamics driven by these technical trading rules are complex and chaotic, and some common phenomena in real stock prices such as jumps, trending and self-fulfilling appear naturally.
1401.1891
Dynamical Models of Stock Prices Based on Technical Trading Rules Part II: Analysis of the Models
q-fin.TR cs.CE q-fin.ST
In Part II of this paper, we concentrate our analysis on the price dynamical model with the moving average rules developed in Part I of this paper. By decomposing the excessive demand function, we reveal that it is the interplay between trend-following and contrarian actions that generates the price chaos, and give parameter ranges for the price series to change from divergence to chaos and to oscillation. We prove that the price dynamical model has an infinite number of equilibrium points but all these equilibrium points are unstable. We demonstrate the short-term predictability of the return volatility and derive the detailed formula of the Lyapunov exponent as function of the model parameters. We show that although the price is chaotic, the volatility converges to some constant very quickly at the rate of the Lyapunov exponent. We extract the formula relating the converged volatility to the model parameters based on Monte-Carlo simulations. We explore the circumstances under which the returns show independency and illustrate in details how the independency index changes with the model parameters. Finally, we plot the strange attractor and return distribution of the chaotic price model to illustrate the complex structure and fat-tailed distribution of the returns.
1401.1892
Dynamical Models of Stock Prices Based on Technical Trading Rules Part III: Application to Hong Kong Stocks
q-fin.TR cs.CE q-fin.ST
In Part III of this study, we apply the price dynamical model with big buyers and big sellers developed in Part I of this paper to the daily closing prices of the top 20 banking and real estate stocks listed in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The basic idea is to estimate the strength parameters of the big buyers and the big sellers in the model and make buy/sell decisions based on these parameter estimates. We propose two trading strategies: (i) Follow-the-Big-Buyer which buys when big buyer begins to appear and there is no sign of big sellers, holds the stock as long as the big buyer is still there, and sells the stock once the big buyer disappears; and (ii) Ride-the-Mood which buys as soon as the big buyer strength begins to surpass the big seller strength, and sells the stock once the opposite happens. Based on the testing over 245 two-year intervals uniformly distributed across the seven years from 03-July-2007 to 02-July-2014 which includes a variety of scenarios, the net profits would increase 67% or 120% on average if an investor switched from the benchmark Buy-and-Hold strategy to the Follow-the-Big-Buyer or Ride-the-Mood strategies during this period, respectively.
1401.1895
Efficient unimodality test in clustering by signature testing
cs.LG stat.ML
This paper provides a new unimodality test with application in hierarchical clustering methods. The proposed method denoted by signature test (Sigtest), transforms the data based on its statistics. The transformed data has much smaller variation compared to the original data and can be evaluated in a simple proposed unimodality test. Compared with the existing unimodality tests, Sigtest is more accurate in detecting the overlapped clusters and has a much less computational complexity. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of this statistic test for both real and synthetic data sets.
1401.1905
A Parameterized Complexity Analysis of Bi-level Optimisation with Evolutionary Algorithms
cs.NE
Bi-level optimisation problems have gained increasing interest in the field of combinatorial optimisation in recent years. With this paper, we start the runtime analysis of evolutionary algorithms for bi-level optimisation problems. We examine two NP-hard problems, the generalised minimum spanning tree problem (GMST), and the generalised travelling salesman problem (GTSP) in the context of parameterised complexity. For the generalised minimum spanning tree problem, we analyse the two approaches presented by Hu and Raidl (2012) with respect to the number of clusters that distinguish each other by the chosen representation of possible solutions. Our results show that a (1+1) EA working with the spanning nodes representation is not a fixed-parameter evolutionary algorithm for the problem, whereas the global structure representation enables to solve the problem in fixed-parameter time. We present hard instances for each approach and show that the two approaches are highly complementary by proving that they solve each other's hard instances very efficiently. For the generalised travelling salesman problem, we analyse the problem with respect to the number of clusters in the problem instance. Our results show that a (1+1) EA working with the global structure representation is a fixed-parameter evolutionary algorithm for the problem.
1401.1916
Multiple-output support vector regression with a firefly algorithm for interval-valued stock price index forecasting
cs.CE cs.LG q-fin.ST
Highly accurate interval forecasting of a stock price index is fundamental to successfully making a profit when making investment decisions, by providing a range of values rather than a point estimate. In this study, we investigate the possibility of forecasting an interval-valued stock price index series over short and long horizons using multi-output support vector regression (MSVR). Furthermore, this study proposes a firefly algorithm (FA)-based approach, built on the established MSVR, for determining the parameters of MSVR (abbreviated as FA-MSVR). Three globally traded broad market indices are used to compare the performance of the proposed FA-MSVR method with selected counterparts. The quantitative and comprehensive assessments are performed on the basis of statistical criteria, economic criteria, and computational cost. In terms of statistical criteria, we compare the out-of-sample forecasting using goodness-of-forecast measures and testing approaches. In terms of economic criteria, we assess the relative forecast performance with a simple trading strategy. The results obtained in this study indicate that the proposed FA-MSVR method is a promising alternative for forecasting interval-valued financial time series.
1401.1919
Temporal Graph Traversals: Definitions, Algorithms, and Applications
cs.DS cs.DB
A temporal graph is a graph in which connections between vertices are active at specific times, and such temporal information leads to completely new patterns and knowledge that are not present in a non-temporal graph. In this paper, we study traversal problems in a temporal graph. Graph traversals, such as DFS and BFS, are basic operations for processing and studying a graph. While both DFS and BFS are well-known simple concepts, it is non-trivial to adopt the same notions from a non-temporal graph to a temporal graph. We analyze the difficulties of defining temporal graph traversals and propose new definitions of DFS and BFS for a temporal graph. We investigate the properties of temporal DFS and BFS, and propose efficient algorithms with optimal complexity. In particular, we also study important applications of temporal DFS and BFS. We verify the efficiency and importance of our graph traversal algorithms in real world temporal graphs.
1401.1926
A PSO and Pattern Search based Memetic Algorithm for SVMs Parameters Optimization
cs.LG cs.AI cs.NE stat.ML
Addressing the issue of SVMs parameters optimization, this study proposes an efficient memetic algorithm based on Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (PSO) and Pattern Search (PS). In the proposed memetic algorithm, PSO is responsible for exploration of the search space and the detection of the potential regions with optimum solutions, while pattern search (PS) is used to produce an effective exploitation on the potential regions obtained by PSO. Moreover, a novel probabilistic selection strategy is proposed to select the appropriate individuals among the current population to undergo local refinement, keeping a well balance between exploration and exploitation. Experimental results confirm that the local refinement with PS and our proposed selection strategy are effective, and finally demonstrate effectiveness and robustness of the proposed PSO-PS based MA for SVMs parameters optimization.