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1401.3890
Analyzing Search Topology Without Running Any Search: On the Connection Between Causal Graphs and h+
cs.AI
The ignoring delete lists relaxation is of paramount importance for both satisficing and optimal planning. In earlier work, it was observed that the optimal relaxation heuristic h+ has amazing qualities in many classical planning benchmarks, in particular pertaining to the complete absence of local minima. The proofs of this are hand-made, raising the question whether such proofs can be lead automatically by domain analysis techniques. In contrast to earlier disappointing results -- the analysis method has exponential runtime and succeeds only in two extremely simple benchmark domains -- we herein answer this question in the affirmative. We establish connections between causal graph structure and h+ topology. This results in low-order polynomial time analysis methods, implemented in a tool we call TorchLight. Of the 12 domains where the absence of local minima has been proved, TorchLight gives strong success guarantees in 8 domains. Empirically, its analysis exhibits strong performance in a further 2 of these domains, plus in 4 more domains where local minima may exist but are rare. In this way, TorchLight can distinguish easy domains from hard ones. By summarizing structural reasons for analysis failure, TorchLight also provides diagnostic output indicating domain aspects that may cause local minima.
1401.3892
Sequential Diagnosis by Abstraction
cs.AI
When a system behaves abnormally, sequential diagnosis takes a sequence of measurements of the system until the faults causing the abnormality are identified, and the goal is to reduce the diagnostic cost, defined here as the number of measurements. To propose measurement points, previous work employs a heuristic based on reducing the entropy over a computed set of diagnoses. This approach generally has good performance in terms of diagnostic cost, but can fail to diagnose large systems when the set of diagnoses is too large. Focusing on a smaller set of probable diagnoses scales the approach but generally leads to increased average diagnostic costs. In this paper, we propose a new diagnostic framework employing four new techniques, which scales to much larger systems with good performance in terms of diagnostic cost. First, we propose a new heuristic for measurement point selection that can be computed efficiently, without requiring the set of diagnoses, once the system is modeled as a Bayesian network and compiled into a logical form known as d-DNNF. Second, we extend hierarchical diagnosis, a technique based on system abstraction from our previous work, to handle probabilities so that it can be applied to sequential diagnosis to allow larger systems to be diagnosed. Third, for the largest systems where even hierarchical diagnosis fails, we propose a novel method that converts the system into one that has a smaller abstraction and whose diagnoses form a superset of those of the original system; the new system can then be diagnosed and the result mapped back to the original system. Finally, we propose a novel cost estimation function which can be used to choose an abstraction of the system that is more likely to provide optimal average cost. Experiments with ISCAS-85 benchmark circuits indicate that our approach scales to all circuits in the suite except one that has a flat structure not susceptible to useful abstraction.
1401.3893
Most Relevant Explanation in Bayesian Networks
cs.AI
A major inference task in Bayesian networks is explaining why some variables are observed in their particular states using a set of target variables. Existing methods for solving this problem often generate explanations that are either too simple (underspecified) or too complex (overspecified). In this paper, we introduce a method called Most Relevant Explanation (MRE) which finds a partial instantiation of the target variables that maximizes the generalized Bayes factor (GBF) as the best explanation for the given evidence. Our study shows that GBF has several theoretical properties that enable MRE to automatically identify the most relevant target variables in forming its explanation. In particular, conditional Bayes factor (CBF), defined as the GBF of a new explanation conditioned on an existing explanation, provides a soft measure on the degree of relevance of the variables in the new explanation in explaining the evidence given the existing explanation. As a result, MRE is able to automatically prune less relevant variables from its explanation. We also show that CBF is able to capture well the explaining-away phenomenon that is often represented in Bayesian networks. Moreover, we define two dominance relations between the candidate solutions and use the relations to generalize MRE to find a set of top explanations that is both diverse and representative. Case studies on several benchmark diagnostic Bayesian networks show that MRE is often able to find explanatory hypotheses that are not only precise but also concise.
1401.3894
Efficient Multi-Start Strategies for Local Search Algorithms
cs.LG cs.AI stat.ML
Local search algorithms applied to optimization problems often suffer from getting trapped in a local optimum. The common solution for this deficiency is to restart the algorithm when no progress is observed. Alternatively, one can start multiple instances of a local search algorithm, and allocate computational resources (in particular, processing time) to the instances depending on their behavior. Hence, a multi-start strategy has to decide (dynamically) when to allocate additional resources to a particular instance and when to start new instances. In this paper we propose multi-start strategies motivated by works on multi-armed bandit problems and Lipschitz optimization with an unknown constant. The strategies continuously estimate the potential performance of each algorithm instance by supposing a convergence rate of the local search algorithm up to an unknown constant, and in every phase allocate resources to those instances that could converge to the optimum for a particular range of the constant. Asymptotic bounds are given on the performance of the strategies. In particular, we prove that at most a quadratic increase in the number of times the target function is evaluated is needed to achieve the performance of a local search algorithm started from the attraction region of the optimum. Experiments are provided using SPSA (Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation) and k-means as local search algorithms, and the results indicate that the proposed strategies work well in practice, and, in all cases studied, need only logarithmically more evaluations of the target function as opposed to the theoretically suggested quadratic increase.
1401.3895
On the Intertranslatability of Argumentation Semantics
cs.AI
Translations between different nonmonotonic formalisms always have been an important topic in the field, in particular to understand the knowledge-representation capabilities those formalisms offer. We provide such an investigation in terms of different semantics proposed for abstract argumentation frameworks, a nonmonotonic yet simple formalism which received increasing interest within the last decade. Although the properties of these different semantics are nowadays well understood, there are no explicit results about intertranslatability. We provide such translations wrt. different properties and also give a few novel complexity results which underlie some negative results.
1401.3896
The Opposite of Smoothing: A Language Model Approach to Ranking Query-Specific Document Clusters
cs.IR
Exploiting information induced from (query-specific) clustering of top-retrieved documents has long been proposed as a means for improving precision at the very top ranks of the returned results. We present a novel language model approach to ranking query-specific clusters by the presumed percentage of relevant documents that they contain. While most previous cluster ranking approaches focus on the cluster as a whole, our model utilizes also information induced from documents associated with the cluster. Our model substantially outperforms previous approaches for identifying clusters containing a high relevant-document percentage. Furthermore, using the model to produce document ranking yields precision-at-top-ranks performance that is consistently better than that of the initial ranking upon which clustering is performed. The performance also favorably compares with that of a state-of-the-art pseudo-feedback-based retrieval method.
1401.3897
Interpolable Formulas in Equilibrium Logic and Answer Set Programming
cs.LO cs.AI
Interpolation is an important property of classical and many non-classical logics that has been shown to have interesting applications in computer science and AI. Here we study the Interpolation Property for the the non-monotonic system of equilibrium logic, establishing weaker or stronger forms of interpolation depending on the precise interpretation of the inference relation. These results also yield a form of interpolation for ground logic programs under the answer sets semantics. For disjunctive logic programs we also study the property of uniform interpolation that is closely related to the concept of variable forgetting. The first-order version of equilibrium logic has analogous Interpolation properties whenever the collection of equilibrium models is (first-order) definable. Since this is the case for so-called safe programs and theories, it applies to the usual situations that arise in practical answer set programming.
1401.3898
First-Order Stable Model Semantics and First-Order Loop Formulas
cs.LO cs.AI
Lin and Zhaos theorem on loop formulas states that in the propositional case the stable model semantics of a logic program can be completely characterized by propositional loop formulas, but this result does not fully carry over to the first-order case. We investigate the precise relationship between the first-order stable model semantics and first-order loop formulas, and study conditions under which the former can be represented by the latter. In order to facilitate the comparison, we extend the definition of a first-order loop formula which was limited to a nondisjunctive program, to a disjunctive program and to an arbitrary first-order theory. Based on the studied relationship we extend the syntax of a logic program with explicit quantifiers, which allows us to do reasoning involving non-Herbrand stable models using first-order reasoners. Such programs can be viewed as a special class of first-order theories under the stable model semantics, which yields more succinct loop formulas than the general language due to their restricted syntax.
1401.3899
Representing and Reasoning with Qualitative Preferences for Compositional Systems
cs.AI
Many applications, e.g., Web service composition, complex system design, team formation, etc., rely on methods for identifying collections of objects or entities satisfying some functional requirement. Among the collections that satisfy the functional requirement, it is often necessary to identify one or more collections that are optimal with respect to user preferences over a set of attributes that describe the non-functional properties of the collection. We develop a formalism that lets users express the relative importance among attributes and qualitative preferences over the valuations of each attribute. We define a dominance relation that allows us to compare collections of objects in terms of preferences over attributes of the objects that make up the collection. We establish some key properties of the dominance relation. In particular, we show that the dominance relation is a strict partial order when the intra-attribute preference relations are strict partial orders and the relative importance preference relation is an interval order. We provide algorithms that use this dominance relation to identify the set of most preferred collections. We show that under certain conditions, the algorithms are guaranteed to return only (sound), all (complete), or at least one (weakly complete) of the most preferred collections. We present results of simulation experiments comparing the proposed algorithms with respect to (a) the quality of solutions (number of most preferred solutions) produced by the algorithms, and (b) their performance and efficiency. We also explore some interesting conjectures suggested by the results of our experiments that relate the properties of the user preferences, the dominance relation, and the algorithms.
1401.3900
Decidability and Undecidability Results for Propositional Schemata
cs.LO cs.AI
We define a logic of propositional formula schemata adding to the syntax of propositional logic indexed propositions and iterated connectives ranging over intervals parameterized by arithmetic variables. The satisfiability problem is shown to be undecidable for this new logic, but we introduce a very general class of schemata, called bound-linear, for which this problem becomes decidable. This result is obtained by reduction to a particular class of schemata called regular, for which we provide a sound and complete terminating proof procedure. This schemata calculus allows one to capture proof patterns corresponding to a large class of problems specified in propositional logic. We also show that the satisfiability problem becomes again undecidable for slight extensions of this class, thus demonstrating that bound-linear schemata represent a good compromise between expressivity and decidability.
1401.3901
Defeasible Inclusions in Low-Complexity DLs
cs.LO cs.AI
Some of the applications of OWL and RDF (e.g. biomedical knowledge representation and semantic policy formulation) call for extensions of these languages with nonmonotonic constructs such as inheritance with overriding. Nonmonotonic description logics have been studied for many years, however no practical such knowledge representation languages exist, due to a combination of semantic difficulties and high computational complexity. Independently, low-complexity description logics such as DL-lite and EL have been introduced and incorporated in the OWL standard. Therefore, it is interesting to see whether the syntactic restrictions characterizing DL-lite and EL bring computational benefits to their nonmonotonic versions, too. In this paper we extensively investigate the computational complexity of Circumscription when knowledge bases are formulated in DL-lite_R, EL, and fragments thereof. We identify fragments whose complexity ranges from P to the second level of the polynomial hierarchy, as well as fragments whose complexity raises to PSPACE and beyond.
1401.3902
On the Link between Partial Meet, Kernel, and Infra Contraction and its Application to Horn Logic
cs.AI cs.LO
Standard belief change assumes an underlying logic containing full classical propositional logic. However, there are good reasons for considering belief change in less expressive logics as well. In this paper we build on recent investigations by Delgrande on contraction for Horn logic. We show that the standard basic form of contraction, partial meet, is too strong in the Horn case. This result stands in contrast to Delgrande's conjecture that orderly maxichoice is the appropriate form of contraction for Horn logic. We then define a more appropriate notion of basic contraction for the Horn case, influenced by the convexity property holding for full propositional logic and which we refer to as infra contraction. The main contribution of this work is a result which shows that the construction method for Horn contraction for belief sets based on our infra remainder sets corresponds exactly to Hansson's classical kernel contraction for belief sets, when restricted to Horn logic. This result is obtained via a detour through contraction for belief bases. We prove that kernel contraction for belief bases produces precisely the same results as the belief base version of infra contraction. The use of belief bases to obtain this result provides evidence for the conjecture that Horn belief change is best viewed as a hybrid version of belief set change and belief base change. One of the consequences of the link with base contraction is the provision of a representation result for Horn contraction for belief sets in which a version of the Core-retainment postulate features.
1401.3903
Multi-Robot Adversarial Patrolling: Facing a Full-Knowledge Opponent
cs.MA cs.RO
The problem of adversarial multi-robot patrol has gained interest in recent years, mainly due to its immediate relevance to various security applications. In this problem, robots are required to repeatedly visit a target area in a way that maximizes their chances of detecting an adversary trying to penetrate through the patrol path. When facing a strong adversary that knows the patrol strategy of the robots, if the robots use a deterministic patrol algorithm, then in many cases it is easy for the adversary to penetrate undetected (in fact, in some of those cases the adversary can guarantee penetration). Therefore this paper presents a non-deterministic patrol framework for the robots. Assuming that the strong adversary will take advantage of its knowledge and try to penetrate through the patrols weakest spot, hence an optimal algorithm is one that maximizes the chances of detection in that point. We therefore present a polynomial-time algorithm for determining an optimal patrol under the Markovian strategy assumption for the robots, such that the probability of detecting the adversary in the patrols weakest spot is maximized. We build upon this framework and describe an optimal patrol strategy for several robotic models based on their movement abilities (directed or undirected) and sensing abilities (perfect or imperfect), and in different environment models - either patrol around a perimeter (closed polygon) or an open fence (open polyline).
1401.3905
MAPP: a Scalable Multi-Agent Path Planning Algorithm with Tractability and Completeness Guarantees
cs.AI
Multi-agent path planning is a challenging problem with numerous real-life applications. Running a centralized search such as A* in the combined state space of all units is complete and cost-optimal, but scales poorly, as the state space size is exponential in the number of mobile units. Traditional decentralized approaches, such as FAR and WHCA*, are faster and more scalable, being based on problem decomposition. However, such methods are incomplete and provide no guarantees with respect to the running time or the solution quality. They are not necessarily able to tell in a reasonable time whether they would succeed in finding a solution to a given instance. We introduce MAPP, a tractable algorithm for multi-agent path planning on undirected graphs. We present a basic version and several extensions. They have low-polynomial worst-case upper bounds for the running time, the memory requirements, and the length of solutions. Even though all algorithmic versions are incomplete in the general case, each provides formal guarantees on problems it can solve. For each version, we discuss the algorithms completeness with respect to clearly defined subclasses of instances. Experiments were run on realistic game grid maps. MAPP solved 99.86% of all mobile units, which is 18--22% better than the percentage of FAR and WHCA*. MAPP marked 98.82% of all units as provably solvable during the first stage of plan computation. Parts of MAPPs computation can be re-used across instances on the same map. Speed-wise, MAPP is competitive or significantly faster than WHCA*, depending on whether MAPP performs all computations from scratch. When data that MAPP can re-use are preprocessed offline and readily available, MAPP is slower than the very fast FAR algorithm by a factor of 2.18 on average. MAPPs solutions are on average 20% longer than FARs solutions and 7--31% longer than WHCA*s solutions.
1401.3906
Making Decisions Using Sets of Probabilities: Updating, Time Consistency, and Calibration
cs.AI cs.GT
We consider how an agent should update her beliefs when her beliefs are represented by a set P of probability distributions, given that the agent makes decisions using the minimax criterion, perhaps the best-studied and most commonly-used criterion in the literature. We adopt a game-theoretic framework, where the agent plays against a bookie, who chooses some distribution from P. We consider two reasonable games that differ in what the bookie knows when he makes his choice. Anomalies that have been observed before, like time inconsistency, can be understood as arising because different games are being played, against bookies with different information. We characterize the important special cases in which the optimal decision rules according to the minimax criterion amount to either conditioning or simply ignoring the information. Finally, we consider the relationship between updating and calibration when uncertainty is described by sets of probabilities. Our results emphasize the key role of the rectangularity condition of Epstein and Schneider.
1401.3907
Policy Invariance under Reward Transformations for General-Sum Stochastic Games
cs.GT cs.LG
We extend the potential-based shaping method from Markov decision processes to multi-player general-sum stochastic games. We prove that the Nash equilibria in a stochastic game remains unchanged after potential-based shaping is applied to the environment. The property of policy invariance provides a possible way of speeding convergence when learning to play a stochastic game.
1401.3908
Centrality-as-Relevance: Support Sets and Similarity as Geometric Proximity
cs.IR cs.CL
In automatic summarization, centrality-as-relevance means that the most important content of an information source, or a collection of information sources, corresponds to the most central passages, considering a representation where such notion makes sense (graph, spatial, etc.). We assess the main paradigms, and introduce a new centrality-based relevance model for automatic summarization that relies on the use of support sets to better estimate the relevant content. Geometric proximity is used to compute semantic relatedness. Centrality (relevance) is determined by considering the whole input source (and not only local information), and by taking into account the existence of minor topics or lateral subjects in the information sources to be summarized. The method consists in creating, for each passage of the input source, a support set consisting only of the most semantically related passages. Then, the determination of the most relevant content is achieved by selecting the passages that occur in the largest number of support sets. This model produces extractive summaries that are generic, and language- and domain-independent. Thorough automatic evaluation shows that the method achieves state-of-the-art performance, both in written text, and automatically transcribed speech summarization, including when compared to considerably more complex approaches.
1401.3909
Scheduling Bipartite Tournaments to Minimize Total Travel Distance
cs.AI cs.DS
In many professional sports leagues, teams from opposing leagues/conferences compete against one another, playing inter-league games. This is an example of a bipartite tournament. In this paper, we consider the problem of reducing the total travel distance of bipartite tournaments, by analyzing inter-league scheduling from the perspective of discrete optimization. This research has natural applications to sports scheduling, especially for leagues such as the National Basketball Association (NBA) where teams must travel long distances across North America to play all their games, thus consuming much time, money, and greenhouse gas emissions. We introduce the Bipartite Traveling Tournament Problem (BTTP), the inter-league variant of the well-studied Traveling Tournament Problem. We prove that the 2n-team BTTP is NP-complete, but for small values of n, a distance-optimal inter-league schedule can be generated from an algorithm based on minimum-weight 4-cycle-covers. We apply our theoretical results to the 12-team Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) league in Japan, producing a provably-optimal schedule requiring 42950 kilometres of total team travel, a 16% reduction compared to the actual distance traveled by these teams during the 2010 NPB season. We also develop a nearly-optimal inter-league tournament for the 30-team NBA league, just 3.8% higher than the trivial theoretical lower bound.
1401.3910
Topological Value Iteration Algorithms
cs.AI
Value iteration is a powerful yet inefficient algorithm for Markov decision processes (MDPs) because it puts the majority of its effort into backing up the entire state space, which turns out to be unnecessary in many cases. In order to overcome this problem, many approaches have been proposed. Among them, ILAO* and variants of RTDP are state-of-the-art ones. These methods use reachability analysis and heuristic search to avoid some unnecessary backups. However, none of these approaches build the graphical structure of the state transitions in a pre-processing step or use the structural information to systematically decompose a problem, whereby generating an intelligent backup sequence of the state space. In this paper, we present two optimal MDP algorithms. The first algorithm, topological value iteration (TVI), detects the structure of MDPs and backs up states based on topological sequences. It (1) divides an MDP into strongly-connected components (SCCs), and (2) solves these components sequentially. TVI outperforms VI and other state-of-the-art algorithms vastly when an MDP has multiple, close-to-equal-sized SCCs. The second algorithm, focused topological value iteration (FTVI), is an extension of TVI. FTVI restricts its attention to connected components that are relevant for solving the MDP. Specifically, it uses a small amount of heuristic search to eliminate provably sub-optimal actions; this pruning allows FTVI to find smaller connected components, thus running faster. We demonstrate that FTVI outperforms TVI by an order of magnitude, averaged across several domains. Surprisingly, FTVI also significantly outperforms popular heuristically-informed MDP algorithms such as ILAO*, LRTDP, BRTDP and Bayesian-RTDP in many domains, sometimes by as much as two orders of magnitude. Finally, we characterize the type of domains where FTVI excels --- suggesting a way to an informed choice of solver.
1401.3915
Community Detection in Networks using Graph Distance
stat.ML cs.SI
The study of networks has received increased attention recently not only from the social sciences and statistics but also from physicists, computer scientists and mathematicians. One of the principal problem in networks is community detection. Many algorithms have been proposed for community finding but most of them do not have have theoretical guarantee for sparse networks and networks close to the phase transition boundary proposed by physicists. There are some exceptions but all have some incomplete theoretical basis. Here we propose an algorithm based on the graph distance of vertices in the network. We give theoretical guarantees that our method works in identifying communities for block models and can be extended for degree-corrected block models and block models with the number of communities growing with number of vertices. Despite favorable simulation results, we are not yet able to conclude that our method is satisfactory for worst possible case. We illustrate on a network of political blogs, Facebook networks and some other networks.
1401.3918
A universal law in human mobility
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
The intrinsic factor that drives the human movement remains unclear for decades. While our observations from intra-urban and inter-urban trips both demonstrate a universal law in human mobility. Be specific, the probability from one location to another is inversely proportional to the number of population living in locations which are closer than the destination. A simple rank-based model is then presented, which is parameterless but predicts human flows with a convincing fidelity. Besides, comparison with other models shows that our model is more stable and fundamental at different spatial scales by implying the strong correlation between human mobility and social relationship.
1401.3922
Discrete Convexity and Stochastic Approximation for Cross-layer On-off Transmission Control
cs.IT cs.SY math.IT
This paper considers the discrete convexity of a cross-layer on-off transmission control problem in wireless communications. In this system, a scheduler decides whether or not to transmit in order to optimize the long-term quality of service (QoS) incurred by the queueing effects in the data link layer and the transmission power consumption in the physical (PHY) layer simultaneously. Using a Markov decision process (MDP) formulation, we show that the optimal policy can be determined by solving a minimization problem over a set of queue thresholds if the dynamic programming (DP) is submodular. We prove that this minimization problem is discrete convex. In order to search the minimizer, we consider two discrete stochastic approximation (DSA) algorithms: discrete simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (DSPSA) and L-natural-convex stochastic approximation (L-natural-convex SA). Through numerical studies, we show that the two DSA algorithms converge significantly faster than the existing continuous simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (CSPSA) algorithm in multi-user systems. Finally, we compare the convergence results and complexity of two DSA and CSPSA algorithms where we show that DSPSA achieves the best trade-off between complexity and accuracy in multi-user systems.
1401.3928
Multiply Constant-Weight Codes and the Reliability of Loop Physically Unclonable Functions
cs.IT math.CO math.IT
We introduce the class of multiply constant-weight codes to improve the reliability of certain physically unclonable function (PUF) response. We extend classical coding methods to construct multiply constant-weight codes from known $q$-ary and constant-weight codes. Analogues of Johnson bounds are derived and are shown to be asymptotically tight to a constant factor under certain conditions. We also examine the rates of the multiply constant-weight codes and interestingly, demonstrate that these rates are the same as those of constant-weight codes of suitable parameters. Asymptotic analysis of our code constructions is provided.
1401.3938
Robust Modulation Technique for Diffusion-based Molecular Communication in Nanonetworks
cs.IT math.IT
Diffusion-based molecular communication over nanonetworks is an emerging communication paradigm that enables nanomachines to communicate by using molecules as the information carrier. For such a communication paradigm, Concentration Shift Keying (CSK) has been considered as one of the most promising techniques for modulating information symbols, owing to its inherent simplicity and practicality. CSK modulated subsequent information symbols, however, may interfere with each other due to the random amount of time that molecules of each modulated symbols take to reach the receiver nanomachine. To alleviate Inter Symbol Interference (ISI) problem associated with CSK, we propose a new modulation technique called Zebra-CSK. The proposed Zebra-CSK adds inhibitor molecules in CSK-modulated molecular signal to selectively suppress ISI causing molecules. Numerical results from our newly developed probabilistic analytical model show that Zebra-CSK not only enhances capacity of the molecular channel but also reduces symbol error probability observed at the receiver nanomachine.
1401.3941
Network Coding for $3$s$/n$t Sum-Networks
cs.IT math.IT
A sum-network is a directed acyclic network where each source independently generates one symbol from a given field $\mathbb F$ and each terminal wants to receive the sum $($over $\mathbb F)$ of the source symbols. For sum-networks with two sources or two terminals, the solvability is characterized by the connection condition of each source-terminal pair [3]. A necessary and sufficient condition for the solvability of the $3$-source $3$-terminal $(3$s$/3$t$)$ sum-networks was given by Shenvi and Dey [6]. However, the general case of arbitrary sources/sinks is still open. In this paper, we investigate the sum-network with three sources and $n$ sinks using a region decomposition method. A sufficient and necessary condition is established for a class of $3$s$/n$t sum-networks. As a direct application of this result, a necessary and sufficient condition of solvability is obtained for the special case of $3$s$/3$t sum-networks.
1401.3945
Distributed Remote Vector Gaussian Source Coding for Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we consider the problem of remote vector Gaussian source coding for a wireless acoustic sensor network. Each node receives messages from multiple nodes in the network and decodes these messages using its own measurement of the sound field as side information. The node's measurement and the estimates of the source resulting from decoding the received messages are then jointly encoded and transmitted to a neighboring node in the network. We show that for this distributed source coding scenario, one can encode a so-called conditional sufficient statistic of the sources instead of jointly encoding multiple sources. We focus on the case where node measurements are in form of noisy linearly mixed combinations of the sources and the acoustic channel mixing matrices are invertible. For this problem, we derive the rate-distortion function for vector Gaussian sources and under covariance distortion constraints.
1401.3973
An Empirical Evaluation of Similarity Measures for Time Series Classification
cs.LG cs.CV stat.ML
Time series are ubiquitous, and a measure to assess their similarity is a core part of many computational systems. In particular, the similarity measure is the most essential ingredient of time series clustering and classification systems. Because of this importance, countless approaches to estimate time series similarity have been proposed. However, there is a lack of comparative studies using empirical, rigorous, quantitative, and large-scale assessment strategies. In this article, we provide an extensive evaluation of similarity measures for time series classification following the aforementioned principles. We consider 7 different measures coming from alternative measure `families', and 45 publicly-available time series data sets coming from a wide variety of scientific domains. We focus on out-of-sample classification accuracy, but in-sample accuracies and parameter choices are also discussed. Our work is based on rigorous evaluation methodologies and includes the use of powerful statistical significance tests to derive meaningful conclusions. The obtained results show the equivalence, in terms of accuracy, of a number of measures, but with one single candidate outperforming the rest. Such findings, together with the followed methodology, invite researchers on the field to adopt a more consistent evaluation criteria and a more informed decision regarding the baseline measures to which new developments should be compared.
1401.3985
Engineering the Hardware/Software Interface for Robotic Platforms - A Comparison of Applied Model Checking with Prolog and Alloy
cs.SE cs.RO
Robotic platforms serve different use cases ranging from experiments for prototyping assistive applications up to embedded systems for realizing cyber-physical systems in various domains. We are using 1:10 scale miniature vehicles as a robotic platform to conduct research in the domain of self-driving cars and collaborative vehicle fleets. Thus, experiments with different sensors like e.g.~ultra-sonic, infrared, and rotary encoders need to be prepared and realized using our vehicle platform. For each setup, we need to configure the hardware/software interface board to handle all sensors and actors. Therefore, we need to find a specific configuration setting for each pin of the interface board that can handle our current hardware setup but which is also flexible enough to support further sensors or actors for future use cases. In this paper, we show how to model the domain of the configuration space for a hardware/software interface board to enable model checking for solving the tasks of finding any, all, and the best possible pin configuration. We present results from a formal experiment applying the declarative languages Alloy and Prolog to guide the process of engineering the hardware/software interface for robotic platforms on the example of a configuration complexity up to ten pins resulting in a configuration space greater than 14.5 million possibilities. Our results show that our domain model in Alloy performs better compared to Prolog to find feasible solutions for larger configurations with an average time of 0.58s. To find the best solution, our model for Prolog performs better taking only 1.38s for the largest desired configuration; however, this important use case is currently not covered by the existing tools for the hardware used as an example in this article.
1401.3995
$Y$-$\Delta$ Product in 3-Way $\Delta$ and Y-Channels for Cyclic Interference and Signal Alignment
cs.IT math.IT
In a full-duplex 3-way $\Delta$ channel, three transceivers communicate to each other, so that a number of six messages is exchanged. In a $Y$-channel, however, these three transceivers are connected to an intermediate full-duplex relay. Loop-back self-interference is suppressed perfectly. The relay forwards network-coded messages to their dedicated users by means of interference alignment (IA) and signal alignment. A conceptual channel model with cyclic shifts described by a polynomial ring is considered for these two related channels. The maximally achievable rates in terms of the degrees of freedom measure are derived. We observe that the Y-channel and the 3-way $\Delta$ channel provide a $Y$-$\Delta$ product relationship. Moreover, we briefly discuss how this analysis relates to spatial IA and MIMO IA.
1401.3998
Performance Evaluation of Bit Division Multiplexing combined with Non-Uniform QAM
cs.IT math.IT
Broadcasting systems have to deal with channel variability in order to offer the best spectral efficiency to the receivers. However, the transmission parameters that maximise the spectral efficiency generally leads to a large link unavailability. In this paper, we study analytically the trade-off between spectral efficiency and coverage for various channel resource allocation strategies when broadcasting two services. More precisely, we consider the following strategies: time sharing, hierarchical modulation and bit division multiplexing. Our main contribution is the combination of bit division multiplexing with non-uniform QAM to improve the performance of broadcasting systems. The results show that this scheme outperforms all the previous channel resource allocation strategies.
1401.4020
Robust Recursive State Estimation with Random Measurements Droppings
cs.SY
A recursive state estimation procedure is derived for a linear time varying system with both parametric uncertainties and stochastic measurement droppings. This estimator has a similar form as that of the Kalman filter with intermittent observations, but its parameters should be adjusted when a plant output measurement arrives. A new recursive form is derived for the pseudo-covariance matrix of estimation errors, which plays important roles in analyzing its asymptotic properties. Based on a Riemannian metric for positive definite matrices, some necessary and sufficient conditions have been obtained for the strict contractiveness of an iteration of this recursion. It has also been proved that under some controllability and observability conditions, as well as some weak requirements on measurement arrival probability, the gain matrix of this recursive robust state estimator converges in probability one to a stationary distribution. Numerical simulation results show that estimation accuracy of the suggested procedure is more robust against parametric modelling errors than the Kalman filter.
1401.4023
Asymptotic Behavior of the Pseudo-Covariance Matrix of a Robust State Estimator with Intermittent Measurements
cs.SY cs.IT math.IT
Ergodic properties and asymptotic stationarity are investigated in this paper for the pseudo-covariance matrix (PCM) of a recursive state estimator which is robust against parametric uncertainties and is based on plant output measurements that may be randomly dropped. When the measurement dropping process is described by a Markov chain and the modified plant is both controllable and observable, it is proved that if the dropping probability is less than 1, this PCM converges to a stationary distribution that is independent of its initial values. A convergence rate is also provided. In addition, it has also been made clear that when the initial value of the PCM is set to the stabilizing solution of the algebraic Riccati equation related to the robust state estimator without measurement dropping, this PCM converges to an ergodic process. Based on these results, two approximations are derived for the probability distribution function of the stationary PCM, as well as a bound of approximation errors. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the obtained theoretical results.
1401.4068
Efficient transfer entropy analysis of non-stationary neural time series
cs.IT math.IT q-bio.NC
Information theory allows us to investigate information processing in neural systems in terms of information transfer, storage and modification. Especially the measure of information transfer, transfer entropy, has seen a dramatic surge of interest in neuroscience. Estimating transfer entropy from two processes requires the observation of multiple realizations of these processes to estimate associated probability density functions. To obtain these observations, available estimators assume stationarity of processes to allow pooling of observations over time. This assumption however, is a major obstacle to the application of these estimators in neuroscience as observed processes are often non-stationary. As a solution, Gomez-Herrero and colleagues theoretically showed that the stationarity assumption may be avoided by estimating transfer entropy from an ensemble of realizations. Such an ensemble is often readily available in neuroscience experiments in the form of experimental trials. Thus, in this work we combine the ensemble method with a recently proposed transfer entropy estimator to make transfer entropy estimation applicable to non-stationary time series. We present an efficient implementation of the approach that deals with the increased computational demand of the ensemble method's practical application. In particular, we use a massively parallel implementation for a graphics processing unit to handle the computationally most heavy aspects of the ensemble method. We test the performance and robustness of our implementation on data from simulated stochastic processes and demonstrate the method's applicability to magnetoencephalographic data. While we mainly evaluate the proposed method for neuroscientific data, we expect it to be applicable in a variety of fields that are concerned with the analysis of information transfer in complex biological, social, and artificial systems.
1401.4082
Stochastic Backpropagation and Approximate Inference in Deep Generative Models
stat.ML cs.AI cs.LG stat.CO stat.ME
We marry ideas from deep neural networks and approximate Bayesian inference to derive a generalised class of deep, directed generative models, endowed with a new algorithm for scalable inference and learning. Our algorithm introduces a recognition model to represent approximate posterior distributions, and that acts as a stochastic encoder of the data. We develop stochastic back-propagation -- rules for back-propagation through stochastic variables -- and use this to develop an algorithm that allows for joint optimisation of the parameters of both the generative and recognition model. We demonstrate on several real-world data sets that the model generates realistic samples, provides accurate imputations of missing data and is a useful tool for high-dimensional data visualisation.
1401.4105
Learning $\ell_1$-based analysis and synthesis sparsity priors using bi-level optimization
cs.CV
We consider the analysis operator and synthesis dictionary learning problems based on the the $\ell_1$ regularized sparse representation model. We reveal the internal relations between the $\ell_1$-based analysis model and synthesis model. We then introduce an approach to learn both analysis operator and synthesis dictionary simultaneously by using a unified framework of bi-level optimization. Our aim is to learn a meaningful operator (dictionary) such that the minimum energy solution of the analysis (synthesis)-prior based model is as close as possible to the ground-truth. We solve the bi-level optimization problem using the implicit differentiation technique. Moreover, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our leaning approach by applying the learned analysis operator (dictionary) to the image denoising task and comparing its performance with state-of-the-art methods. Under this unified framework, we can compare the performance of the two types of priors.
1401.4107
Revisiting loss-specific training of filter-based MRFs for image restoration
cs.CV
It is now well known that Markov random fields (MRFs) are particularly effective for modeling image priors in low-level vision. Recent years have seen the emergence of two main approaches for learning the parameters in MRFs: (1) probabilistic learning using sampling-based algorithms and (2) loss-specific training based on MAP estimate. After investigating existing training approaches, it turns out that the performance of the loss-specific training has been significantly underestimated in existing work. In this paper, we revisit this approach and use techniques from bi-level optimization to solve it. We show that we can get a substantial gain in the final performance by solving the lower-level problem in the bi-level framework with high accuracy using our newly proposed algorithm. As a result, our trained model is on par with highly specialized image denoising algorithms and clearly outperforms probabilistically trained MRF models. Our findings suggest that for the loss-specific training scheme, solving the lower-level problem with higher accuracy is beneficial. Our trained model comes along with the additional advantage, that inference is extremely efficient. Our GPU-based implementation takes less than 1s to produce state-of-the-art performance.
1401.4112
A bi-level view of inpainting - based image compression
cs.CV
Inpainting based image compression approaches, especially linear and non-linear diffusion models, are an active research topic for lossy image compression. The major challenge in these compression models is to find a small set of descriptive supporting points, which allow for an accurate reconstruction of the original image. It turns out in practice that this is a challenging problem even for the simplest Laplacian interpolation model. In this paper, we revisit the Laplacian interpolation compression model and introduce two fast algorithms, namely successive preconditioning primal dual algorithm and the recently proposed iPiano algorithm, to solve this problem efficiently. Furthermore, we extend the Laplacian interpolation based compression model to a more general form, which is based on principles from bi-level optimization. We investigate two different variants of the Laplacian model, namely biharmonic interpolation and smoothed Total Variation regularization. Our numerical results show that significant improvements can be obtained from the biharmonic interpolation model, and it can recover an image with very high quality from only 5% pixels.
1401.4126
Lower bounds on the communication complexity of two-party (quantum) processes
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
The process of state preparation, its transmission and subsequent measurement can be classically simulated through the communication of some amount of classical information. Recently, we proved that the minimal communication cost is the minimum of a convex functional over a space of suitable probability distributions. It is now proved that this optimization problem is the dual of a geometric programming maximization problem, which displays some appealing properties. First, the number of variables grows linearly with the input size. Second, the objective function is linear in the input parameters and the variables. Finally, the constraints do not depend on the input parameters. These properties imply that, once a feasible point is found, the computation of a lower bound on the communication cost in any two-party process is linearly complex. The studied scenario goes beyond quantum processes and includes the communication complexity scenario introduced by Yao. We illustrate the method by analytically deriving some non-trivial lower bounds. Finally, we conjecture the lower bound $n 2^n$ for a noiseless quantum channel with capacity $n$ qubits. This bound can have an interesting consequence in the context of the recent quantum-foundational debate on the reality of the quantum state.
1401.4127
Cognitive Robotics: for never was a story of more woe than this
cs.RO cs.CY q-bio.NC
We are now on the verge of the next technical revolution - robots are going to invade our lives. However, to interact with humans or to be incorporated into a human "collective" robots have to be provided with some human-like cognitive abilities. What does it mean? - nobody knows. But robotics research communities are trying hard to find out a way to cope with this problem. Meanwhile, despite abundant funding these efforts did not lead to any meaningful result (only in Europe, only in the past ten years, Cognitive Robotics research funding has reached a ceiling of 1.39 billion euros). In the next ten years, a similar budget is going to be spent to tackle the Cognitive Robotics problems in the frame of the Human Brain Project. There is no reason to expect that this time the result will be different. I would like to try to explain why I'm so unhappy about this.
1401.4128
Towards the selection of patients requiring ICD implantation by automatic classification from Holter monitoring indices
cs.LG stat.AP
The purpose of this study is to optimize the selection of prophylactic cardioverter defibrillator implantation candidates. Currently, the main criterion for implantation is a low Left Ventricular Ejection Fraction (LVEF) whose specificity is relatively poor. We designed two classifiers aimed to predict, from long term ECG recordings (Holter), whether a low-LVEF patient is likely or not to undergo ventricular arrhythmia in the next six months. One classifier is a single hidden layer neural network whose variables are the most relevant features extracted from Holter recordings, and the other classifier has a structure that capitalizes on the physiological decomposition of the arrhythmogenic factors into three disjoint groups: the myocardial substrate, the triggers and the autonomic nervous system (ANS). In this ad hoc network, the features were assigned to each group; one neural network classifier per group was designed and its complexity was optimized. The outputs of the classifiers were fed to a single neuron that provided the required probability estimate. The latter was thresholded for final discrimination A dataset composed of 186 pre-implantation 30-mn Holter recordings of patients equipped with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) in primary prevention was used in order to design and test this classifier. 44 out of 186 patients underwent at least one treated ventricular arrhythmia during the six-month follow-up period. Performances of the designed classifier were evaluated using a cross-test strategy that consists in splitting the database into several combinations of a training set and a test set. The average arrhythmia prediction performances of the ad-hoc classifier are NPV = 77% $\pm$ 13% and PPV = 31% $\pm$ 19% (Negative Predictive Value $\pm$ std, Positive Predictive Value $\pm$ std). According to our study, improving prophylactic ICD-implantation candidate selection by automatic classification from ECG features may be possible, but the availability of a sizable dataset appears to be essential to decrease the number of False Negatives.
1401.4134
A conditional compression distance that unveils insights of the genomic evolution
q-bio.GN cs.IT math.IT
We describe a compression-based distance for genomic sequences. Instead of using the usual conjoint information content, as in the classical Normalized Compression Distance (NCD), it uses the conditional information content. To compute this Normalized Conditional Compression Distance (NCCD), we need a normal conditional compressor, that we built using a mixture of static and dynamic finite-context models. Using this approach, we measured chromosomal distances between Hominidae primates and also between Muroidea (rat and mouse), observing several insights of evolution that so far have not been reported in the literature.
1401.4140
Statistics of co-occurring keywords on Twitter
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Online social media such as the micro-blogging site Twitter has become a rich source of real-time data on online human behaviors. Here we analyze the occurrence and co-occurrence frequency of keywords in user posts on Twitter. From the occurrence rate of major international brand names, we provide examples on predictions of brand-user behaviors. From the co-occurrence rates, we further analyze the user-perceived relationships between international brand names and construct the corresponding relationship networks. In general the user activity on Twitter is highly intermittent and we show that the occurrence rate of brand names forms a highly correlated time signal.
1401.4143
Convex Optimization for Binary Classifier Aggregation in Multiclass Problems
cs.LG
Multiclass problems are often decomposed into multiple binary problems that are solved by individual binary classifiers whose results are integrated into a final answer. Various methods, including all-pairs (APs), one-versus-all (OVA), and error correcting output code (ECOC), have been studied, to decompose multiclass problems into binary problems. However, little study has been made to optimally aggregate binary problems to determine a final answer to the multiclass problem. In this paper we present a convex optimization method for an optimal aggregation of binary classifiers to estimate class membership probabilities in multiclass problems. We model the class membership probability as a softmax function which takes a conic combination of discrepancies induced by individual binary classifiers, as an input. With this model, we formulate the regularized maximum likelihood estimation as a convex optimization problem, which is solved by the primal-dual interior point method. Connections of our method to large margin classifiers are presented, showing that the large margin formulation can be considered as a limiting case of our convex formulation. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real-world data sets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing aggregation methods as well as direct methods, in terms of the classification accuracy and the quality of class membership probability estimates.
1401.4144
Arguments using ontological and causal knowledge
cs.AI
We investigate an approach to reasoning about causes through argumentation. We consider a causal model for a physical system, and look for arguments about facts. Some arguments are meant to provide explanations of facts whereas some challenge these explanations and so on. At the root of argumentation here, are causal links ({A_1, ... ,A_n} causes B) and ontological links (o_1 is_a o_2). We present a system that provides a candidate explanation ({A_1, ... ,A_n} explains {B_1, ... ,B_m}) by resorting to an underlying causal link substantiated with appropriate ontological links. Argumentation is then at work from these various explaining links. A case study is developed: a severe storm Xynthia that devastated part of France in 2010, with an unaccountably high number of casualties.
1401.4147
Simple Semi-Distributed Lifetime Maximizing Strategy via Power Allocation in Collaborative Beamforming for Wireless Sensor Networks
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
Energy-efficient communication is an important issue in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consisting of large number of energy-constrained sensor nodes. Indeed, sensor nodes have different energy budgets assigned to data transmission at individual nodes. Therefore, without energy-aware transmission schemes, energy can deplete from sensor nodes with smaller energy budget faster than from the rest of the sensor nodes in WSNs. This reduces the coverage area as well as the lifetime of WSNs. Collaborative beamforming (CB) has been proposed originally to achieve directional gain, however, it also inherently distributes the corresponding energy consumption over the collaborative sensor nodes. In fact, CB can be seen as a physical layer solution (versus the media access control/network layer solution) to balance the lifetimes of individual sensor nodes and extend the lifetime of the whole WSN. However, the introduction of energy-aware CB schemes is critical for extending the WSNs lifetime. In this paper, CB with power allocation (CB-PA) is developed to extend the lifetime of a cluster of collaborative sensor nodes by balancing the individual sensor node lifetimes. A novel strategy is proposed to utilize the residual energy information available at each sensor node. It adjusts the energy consumption rate at each sensor node while achieving the required average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the destination. It is a semi-distributed strategy and it maintains average SNR. Different factors affecting the energy consumption are studied as well. Simulation results show that CB-PA outperforms CB with Equal Power Allocation (CB-EPA) in terms of extending the lifetime of a cluster of collaborative nodes.
1401.4158
Embodied social interaction constitutes social cognition in pairs of humans: A minimalist virtual reality experiment
nlin.AO cs.HC cs.MA
Scientists have traditionally limited the mechanisms of social cognition to one brain, but recent approaches claim that interaction also realizes cognitive work. Experiments under constrained virtual settings revealed that interaction dynamics implicitly guide social cognition. Here we show that embodied social interaction can be constitutive of agency detection and of experiencing another`s presence. Pairs of participants moved their "avatars" along an invisible virtual line and could make haptic contact with three identical objects, two of which embodied the other`s motions, but only one, the other`s avatar, also embodied the other`s contact sensor and thereby enabled responsive interaction. Co-regulated interactions were significantly correlated with identifications of the other`s avatar and reports of the clearest awareness of the other`s presence. These results challenge folk psychological notions about the boundaries of mind, but make sense from evolutionary and developmental perspectives: an extendible mind can offload cognitive work into its environment.
1401.4161
Strong converse for the classical capacity of optical quantum communication channels
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
We establish the classical capacity of optical quantum channels as a sharp transition between two regimes---one which is an error-free regime for communication rates below the capacity, and the other in which the probability of correctly decoding a classical message converges exponentially fast to zero if the communication rate exceeds the classical capacity. This result is obtained by proving a strong converse theorem for the classical capacity of all phase-insensitive bosonic Gaussian channels, a well-established model of optical quantum communication channels, such as lossy optical fibers, amplifier and free-space communication. The theorem holds under a particular photon-number occupation constraint, which we describe in detail in the paper. Our result bolsters the understanding of the classical capacity of these channels and opens the path to applications, such as proving the security of noisy quantum storage models of cryptography with optical links.
1401.4189
Scalable Capacity Bounding Models for Wireless Networks
cs.IT math.IT
The framework of network equivalence theory developed by Koetter et al. introduces a notion of channel emulation to construct noiseless networks as upper (resp. lower) bounding models, which can be used to calculate the outer (resp. inner) bounds for the capacity region of the original noisy network. Based on the network equivalence framework, this paper presents scalable upper and lower bounding models for wireless networks with potentially many nodes. A channel decoupling method is proposed to decompose wireless networks into decoupled multiple-access channels (MACs) and broadcast channels (BCs). The upper bounding model, consisting of only point-to-point bit pipes, is constructed by firstly extending the "one-shot" upper bounding models developed by Calmon et al. and then integrating them with network equivalence tools. The lower bounding model, consisting of both point-to-point and point-to-points bit pipes, is constructed based on a two-step update of the lower bounding models to incorporate the broadcast nature of wireless transmission. The main advantages of the proposed methods are their simplicity and the fact that they can be extended easily to large networks with a complexity that grows linearly with the number of nodes. It is demonstrated that the resulting upper and lower bounds can approach the capacity in some setups.
1401.4205
Entropy analysis of word-length series of natural language texts: Effects of text language and genre
cs.CL physics.data-an
We estimate the $n$-gram entropies of natural language texts in word-length representation and find that these are sensitive to text language and genre. We attribute this sensitivity to changes in the probability distribution of the lengths of single words and emphasize the crucial role of the uniformity of probabilities of having words with length between five and ten. Furthermore, comparison with the entropies of shuffled data reveals the impact of word length correlations on the estimated $n$-gram entropies.
1401.4208
Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
The last decade has seen the rise of immense online social networks (OSNs) such as MySpace and Facebook. In this paper we use epidemiological models to explain user adoption and abandonment of OSNs, where adoption is analogous to infection and abandonment is analogous to recovery. We modify the traditional SIR model of disease spread by incorporating infectious recovery dynamics such that contact between a recovered and infected member of the population is required for recovery. The proposed infectious recovery SIR model (irSIR model) is validated using publicly available Google search query data for "MySpace" as a case study of an OSN that has exhibited both adoption and abandonment phases. The irSIR model is then applied to search query data for "Facebook," which is just beginning to show the onset of an abandonment phase. Extrapolating the best fit model into the future predicts a rapid decline in Facebook activity in the next few years.
1401.4221
Distortion-driven Turbulence Effect Removal using Variational Model
cs.CV
It remains a challenge to simultaneously remove geometric distortion and space-time-varying blur in frames captured through a turbulent atmospheric medium. To solve, or at least reduce these effects, we propose a new scheme to recover a latent image from observed frames by integrating a new variational model and distortion-driven spatial-temporal kernel regression. The proposed scheme first constructs a high-quality reference image from the observed frames using low-rank decomposition. Then, to generate an improved registered sequence, the reference image is iteratively optimized using a variational model containing a new spatial-temporal regularization. The proposed fast algorithm efficiently solves this model without the use of partial differential equations (PDEs). Next, to reduce blur variation, distortion-driven spatial-temporal kernel regression is carried out to fuse the registered sequence into one image by introducing the concept of the near-stationary patch. Applying a blind deconvolution algorithm to the fused image produces the final output. Extensive experimental testing shows, both qualitatively and quantitatively, that the proposed method can effectively alleviate distortion and blur and recover details of the original scene compared to state-of-the-art methods.
1401.4230
Electricity Pooling Markets with Strategic Producers Possessing Asymmetric Information I: Elastic Demand
cs.GT cs.SY
In the restructured electricity industry, electricity pooling markets are an oligopoly with strategic producers possessing private information (private production cost function). We focus on pooling markets where aggregate demand is represented by a non-strategic agent. We consider demand to be elastic. We propose a market mechanism that has the following features. (F1) It is individually rational. (F2) It is budget balanced. (F3) It is price efficient, that is, at equilibrium the price of electricity is equal to the marginal cost of production. (F4) The energy production profile corresponding to every non-zero Nash equilibrium of the game induced by the mechanism is a solution of the corresponding centralized problem where the objective is the maximization of the sum of the producers' and consumers' utilities. We identify some open problems associated with our approach to electricity pooling markets.
1401.4234
The power of indirect social ties
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
While direct social ties have been intensely studied in the context of computer-mediated social networks, indirect ties (e.g., friends of friends) have seen little attention. Yet in real life, we often rely on friends of our friends for recommendations (of good doctors, good schools, or good babysitters), for introduction to a new job opportunity, and for many other occasional needs. In this work we attempt to 1) quantify the strength of indirect social ties, 2) validate it, and 3) empirically demonstrate its usefulness for distributed applications on two examples. We quantify social strength of indirect ties using a(ny) measure of the strength of the direct ties that connect two people and the intuition provided by the sociology literature. We validate the proposed metric experimentally by comparing correlations with other direct social tie evaluators. We show via data-driven experiments that the proposed metric for social strength can be used successfully for social applications. Specifically, we show that it alleviates known problems in friend-to-friend storage systems by addressing two previously documented shortcomings: reduced set of storage candidates and data availability correlations. We also show that it can be used for predicting the effects of a social diffusion with an accuracy of up to 93.5%.
1401.4236
The Impact of Phase Fading on the Dirty Paper Channel
cs.IT math.IT
The impact of phase fading on the classical Costa dirty paper coding channel is studied. We consider a variation of this channel model in which the amplitude of the interference sequence is known at the transmitter while its phase is known at the receiver. Although the capacity of this channel has already been established, it is expressed using an auxiliary random variable and as the solution of a maximization problem. To circumvent the difficulty evaluating capacity, we derive alternative inner and outer bounds and show that the two expressions are to within a finite distance. This provide an approximate characterization of the capacity which depends only on the channel parameters. We consider, in particular, two distributions of the phase fading: circular binomial and circular uniform. The first distribution models the scenario in which the transmitter has a minimal uncertainty over the phase of the interference while the second distribution models complete uncertainty. For circular binomial fading, we show that binning with Gaussian signaling still approaches capacity, as in the channel without phase fading. In the case of circular uniform fading, instead, binning with Gaussian signaling is no longer effective and novel interference avoidance strategies are developed to approach capacity.
1401.4237
The Cognitive Compressive Sensing Problem
cs.IT math.IT math.OC
In the Cognitive Compressive Sensing (CCS) problem, a Cognitive Receiver (CR) seeks to optimize the reward obtained by sensing an underlying $N$ dimensional random vector, by collecting at most $K$ arbitrary projections of it. The $N$ components of the latent vector represent sub-channels states, that change dynamically from "busy" to "idle" and vice versa, as a Markov chain that is biased towards producing sparse vectors. To identify the optimal strategy we formulate the Multi-Armed Bandit Compressive Sensing (MAB-CS) problem, generalizing the popular Cognitive Spectrum Sensing model, in which the CR can sense $K$ out of the $N$ sub-channels, as well as the typical static setting of Compressive Sensing, in which the CR observes $K$ linear combinations of the $N$ dimensional sparse vector. The CR opportunistic choice of the sensing matrix should balance the desire of revealing the state of as many dimensions of the latent vector as possible, while not exceeding the limits beyond which the vector support is no longer uniquely identifiable.
1401.4248
Complexity Analysis of Heuristic Pulse Interleaving Algorithms for Multi-Target Tracking with Multiple Simultaneous Receive Beams
cs.SY
This paper presents heuristic algorithms for interleaved pulse scheduling problems on multi-target tracking in pulse Doppler phased array radars that can process multiple simultaneous received beams. The interleaved pulse scheduling problems for element and subarray level digital beamforming architectures are formulated as the same integer program and the asymptotic time complexities of the algorithms are analyzed.
1401.4251
Bitwise MAP Algorithm for Group Testing based on Holographic Transformation
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, an exact bitwise MAP (Maximum A Posteriori) estimation algorithm for group testing problems is presented. We assume a simplest non-adaptive group testing scenario including N-objects with binary status and M-disjunctive tests. If a group contains a positive object, the test result for the group is assumed to be one; otherwise, the test result becomes zero. Our inference problem is to evaluate the posterior probabilities of the objects from the observation of M-test results and from our knowledge on the prior probabilities for objects. The heart of the algorithm is the dual expression of the posterior values. The derivation of the dual expression can be naturally described based on a holographic transformation to the normal factor graph (NFG) representing the inference problem.
1401.4269
SUPER: Sparse signals with Unknown Phases Efficiently Recovered
cs.IT math.IT
Suppose ${\bf x}$ is any exactly $k$-sparse vector in $\mathbb{C}^{n}$. We present a class of phase measurement matrix $A$ in $\mathbb{C}^{m\times n}$, and a corresponding algorithm, called SUPER, that can resolve ${\bf x}$ up to a global phase from intensity measurements $|A{\bf x}|$ with high probability over $A$. Here $|A{\bf x}|$ is a vector of component-wise magnitudes of $A{\bf x}$. The SUPER algorithm is the first to simultaneously have the following properties: (a) it requires only ${\cal O}(k)$ (order-optimal) measurements, (b) the computational complexity of decoding is ${\cal O}(k\log k)$ (near order-optimal) arithmetic operations.
1401.4271
R\'enyi entropies and nonlinear diffusion equations
math-ph cs.IT math.IT math.MP
Since their introduction in the early sixties, the R\'enyi entropies have been used in many contexts, ranging from information theory to astrophysics, turbulence phenomena and others. In this note, we enlighten the main connections between R\'enyi entropies and nonlinear diffusion equations. In particular, it is shown that these relationships allow to prove various functional inequalities in sharp form.
1401.4273
Nuclear Norm Subspace Identification (N2SID) for short data batches
cs.SY
Subspace identification is revisited in the scope of nuclear norm minimization methods. It is shown that essential structural knowledge about the unknown data matrices in the data equation that relates Hankel matrices constructed from input and output data can be used in the first step of the numerical solution presented. The structural knowledge comprises the low rank property of a matrix that is the product of the extended observability matrix and the state sequence and the Toeplitz structure of the matrix of Markov parameters (of the system in innovation form). The new subspace identification method is referred to as the N2SID (twice the N of Nuclear Norm and SID for Subspace IDentification) method. In addition to include key structural knowledge in the solution it integrates the subspace calculation with minimization of a classical prediction error cost function. The nuclear norm relaxation enables us to perform such integration while preserving convexity. The advantages of N2SID are demonstrated in a numerical open- and closed-loop simulation study. Here a comparison is made with another widely used SID method, i.e. N4SID. The comparison focusses on the identification with short data batches, i.e. where the number of measurements is a small multiple of the system order.
1401.4276
Modeling Emotion Influence from Images in Social Networks
cs.SI cs.HC cs.MM
Images become an important and prevalent way to express users' activities, opinions and emotions. In a social network, individual emotions may be influenced by others, in particular by close friends. We focus on understanding how users embed emotions into the images they uploaded to the social websites and how social influence plays a role in changing users' emotions. We first verify the existence of emotion influence in the image networks, and then propose a probabilistic factor graph based emotion influence model to answer the questions of "who influences whom". Employing a real network from Flickr as experimental data, we study the effectiveness of factors in the proposed model with in-depth data analysis. Our experiments also show that our model, by incorporating the emotion influence, can significantly improve the accuracy (+5%) for predicting emotions from images. Finally, a case study is used as the anecdotal evidence to further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.
1401.4312
Super-Resolution Compressed Sensing: An Iterative Reweighted Algorithm for Joint Parameter Learning and Sparse Signal Recovery
cs.IT math.IT
In many practical applications such as direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation and line spectral estimation, the sparsifying dictionary is usually characterized by a set of unknown parameters in a continuous domain. To apply the conventional compressed sensing to such applications, the continuous parameter space has to be discretized to a finite set of grid points. Discretization, however, incurs errors and leads to deteriorated recovery performance. To address this issue, we propose an iterative reweighted method which jointly estimates the unknown parameters and the sparse signals. Specifically, the proposed algorithm is developed by iteratively decreasing a surrogate function majorizing a given objective function, which results in a gradual and interweaved iterative process to refine the unknown parameters and the sparse signal. Numerical results show that the algorithm provides superior performance in resolving closely-spaced frequency components.
1401.4313
Robust Bayesian compressed sensing over finite fields: asymptotic performance analysis
cs.IT math.IT
This paper addresses the topic of robust Bayesian compressed sensing over finite fields. For stationary and ergodic sources, it provides asymptotic (with the size of the vector to estimate) necessary and sufficient conditions on the number of required measurements to achieve vanishing reconstruction error, in presence of sensing and communication noise. In all considered cases, the necessary and sufficient conditions asymptotically coincide. Conditions on the sparsity of the sensing matrix are established in presence of communication noise. Several previously published results are generalized and extended.
1401.4335
On the Controllability and Observability of Networked Dynamic Systems
cs.SY
Some necessary and sufficient conditions are obtained for the controllability and observability of a networked system with linear time invariant (LTI) dynamics. The topology of this system is fixed but arbitrary, and every subsystem is permitted to have different dynamic input-output relations. These conditions essentially depend only on transmission zeros of every subsystem and the connection matrix among subsystems, which makes them attractive in the analysis and synthesis of a large scale networked system. As an application, these conditions are utilized to characterize systems whose steady state estimation accuracy with the distributed predictor developed in (Zhou, 2013) is equal to that of the lumped Kalman filter. Some necessary and sufficient conditions on system matrices are derived for this equivalence. It has been made clear that to guarantee this equivalence, the steady state update gain matrix of the Kalman filter must be block diagonal.
1401.4337
On the Design of Fast Convergent LDPC Codes: An Optimization Approach
cs.IT math.IT
The complexity-performance trade-off is a fundamental aspect of the design of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. In this paper, we consider LDPC codes for the binary erasure channel (BEC), use code rate for performance metric, and number of decoding iterations to achieve a certain residual erasure probability for complexity metric. We first propose a quite accurate approximation of the number of iterations for the BEC. Moreover, a simple but efficient utility function corresponding to the number of iterations is developed. Using the aforementioned approximation and the utility function, two optimization problems w.r.t. complexity are formulated to find the code degree distributions. We show that both optimization problems are convex. In particular, the problem with the proposed approximation belongs to the class of semi-infinite problems which are computationally challenging to be solved. However, the problem with the proposed utility function falls into the class of semi-definite programming (SDP) and thus, the global solution can be found efficiently using available SDP solvers. Numerical results reveal the superiority of the proposed code design compared to existing code designs from literature.
1401.4381
Intelligent Techniques for Resolving Conflicts of Knowledge in Multi-Agent Decision Support Systems
cs.MA
This paper focuses on some of the key intelligent techniques for conflict resolution in Multi-Agent Decision Support Systems.
1401.4383
On the Hegselmann-Krause conjecture in opinion dynamics
math.DS cs.SI
We give an elementary proof of a conjecture by Hegselmann and Krause in opinion dynamics, concerning a symmetric bounded confidence interval model: If there is a truth and all individuals take each other seriously by a positive amount bounded away from zero, then all truth seekers will converge to the truth. Here truth seekers are the individuals which are attracted by the truth by a positive amount. In the absence of truth seekers it was already shown by Hegselmann and Krause that the opinions of the individuals converge.
1401.4387
A Multiple Network Approach to Corporate Governance
q-fin.GN cs.SI physics.soc-ph
In this work, we consider Corporate Governance (CG) ties among companies from a multiple network perspective. Such a structure naturally arises from the close interrelation between the Shareholding Network (SH) and the Board of Directors network (BD). In order to capture the simultaneous effects of both networks on CG, we propose to model the CG multiple network structure via tensor analysis. In particular, we consider the TOPHITS model, based on the PARAFAC tensor decomposition, to show that tensor techniques can be successfully applied in this context. By providing some empirical results from the Italian financial market in the univariate case, we then show that a tensor--based multiple network approach can reveal important information.
1401.4436
Cause Identification from Aviation Safety Incident Reports via Weakly Supervised Semantic Lexicon Construction
cs.CL cs.LG
The Aviation Safety Reporting System collects voluntarily submitted reports on aviation safety incidents to facilitate research work aiming to reduce such incidents. To effectively reduce these incidents, it is vital to accurately identify why these incidents occurred. More precisely, given a set of possible causes, or shaping factors, this task of cause identification involves identifying all and only those shaping factors that are responsible for the incidents described in a report. We investigate two approaches to cause identification. Both approaches exploit information provided by a semantic lexicon, which is automatically constructed via Thelen and Riloffs Basilisk framework augmented with our linguistic and algorithmic modifications. The first approach labels a report using a simple heuristic, which looks for the words and phrases acquired during the semantic lexicon learning process in the report. The second approach recasts cause identification as a text classification problem, employing supervised and transductive text classification algorithms to learn models from incident reports labeled with shaping factors and using the models to label unseen reports. Our experiments show that both the heuristic-based approach and the learning-based approach (when given sufficient training data) outperform the baseline system significantly.
1401.4446
Humanoid Robot With Vision Recognition Control System
cs.RO
This paper presents a solution to controlling humanoid robotic systems. The robot can be programmed to execute certain complex actions based on basic motion primitives. The humanoid robot is programmed using a PC. The software running on the PC can obtain at any given moment information about the state of the robot, or it can program the robot to execute a different action, providing the possibility of implementing a complex behavior. We want to provide the robotic system the ability to understand more on the external real world. In this paper we describe a method for detecting ellipses in real world images using the Randomized Hough Transform with Result Clustering. Real world images are preprocessed, noise reduction, greyscale transform, edge detection and finaly binarization in order to be processed by the actual ellipse detector. After all the ellipses are detected a post processing phase clusters the results.
1401.4447
Leaf Classification Using Shape, Color, and Texture Features
cs.CV cs.CY
Several methods to identify plants have been proposed by several researchers. Commonly, the methods did not capture color information, because color was not recognized as an important aspect to the identification. In this research, shape and vein, color, and texture features were incorporated to classify a leaf. In this case, a neural network called Probabilistic Neural network (PNN) was used as a classifier. The experimental result shows that the method for classification gives average accuracy of 93.75% when it was tested on Flavia dataset, that contains 32 kinds of plant leaves. It means that the method gives better performance compared to the original work.
1401.4451
Reliable, Deniable, and Hidable Communication over Multipath Networks
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the scenario wherein Alice wants to (potentially) communicate to the intended receiver Bob over a network consisting of multiple parallel links in the presence of a passive eavesdropper Willie, who observes an unknown subset of links. A primary goal of our communication protocol is to make the communication "deniable", {\it i.e.}, Willie should not be able to {\it reliably} estimate whether or not Alice is transmitting any {\it covert} information to Bob. Moreover, if Alice is indeed actively communicating, her covert messages should be information-theoretically "hidable" in the sense that Willie's observations should not {\it leak any information} about Alice's (potential) message to Bob -- our notion of hidability is slightly stronger than the notion of information-theoretic strong secrecy well-studied in the literature, and may be of independent interest. It can be shown that deniability does not imply either hidability or (weak or strong) information-theoretic secrecy; nor does any form of information-theoretic secrecy imply deniability. We present matching inner and outer bounds on the capacity for deniable and hidable communication over {\it multipath networks}.
1401.4472
YASCA: A collective intelligence approach for community detection in complex networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
In this paper we present an original approach for community detection in complex networks. The approach belongs to the family of seed-centric algorithms. However, instead of expanding communities around selected seeds as most of existing approaches do, we explore here applying an ensemble clustering approach to different network partitions derived from ego-centered communities computed for each selected seed. Ego-centered communities are themselves computed applying a recently proposed ensemble ranking based approach that allow to efficiently combine various local modularities used to guide a greedy optimisation process. Results of first experiments on real world networks for which a ground truth decomposition into communities are known, argue for the validity of our approach.
1401.4473
The Impact of the Topology on Cascading Failures in Electric Power Grids
physics.soc-ph cs.SY
Cascading failures are one of the main reasons for blackouts in power transmission grids. The topology of a power grid, together with its operative state determine, for the most part, the robustness of the power grid against cascading failures. Secure electrical power supply requires, together with careful operation, a robust design of the electrical power grid topology. This paper investigates the impact of a power grid topology on its robustness against cascading failures. Currently, the impact of the topology on a grid robustness is mainly assessed by using purely topological approaches that fail to capture the essence of electric power flow. This paper proposes a metric, the effective graph resistance, that relates the topology of a power grid to its robustness against cascading failures by deliberate attacks, while also taking the fundamental characteristics of the electric power grid into account such as power flow allocation according to Kirchoff Laws. Experimental verification shows that the proposed metric anticipates the grid robustness accurately. The proposed metric is used to optimize a grid topology for a higher level of robustness. To demonstrate its applicability, the metric is applied on the IEEE 118 bus power system to improve its robustness against cascading failures.
1401.4484
Constrained Codes for Rank Modulation
cs.IT math.IT
Motivated by the rank modulation scheme, a recent work by Sala and Dolecek explored the study of constraint codes for permutations. The constraint studied by them is inherited by the inter-cell interference phenomenon in flash memories, where high-level cells can inadvertently increase the level of low-level cells. In this paper, the model studied by Sala and Dolecek is extended into two constraints. A permutation $\sigma \in S_n$ satisfies the \emph{two-neighbor $k$-constraint} if for all $2 \leq i \leq n-1$ either $|\sigma(i-1)-\sigma(i)|\leq k$ or $|\sigma(i)-\sigma(i+1)|\leq k$, and it satisfies the \emph{asymmetric two-neighbor $k$-constraint} if for all $2 \leq i \leq n-1$, either $\sigma(i-1)-\sigma(i) < k$ or $\sigma(i+1)-\sigma(i) < k$. We show that the capacity of the first constraint is $(1+\epsilon)/2$ in case that $k=\Theta(n^{\epsilon})$ and the capacity of the second constraint is 1 regardless to the value of $k$. We also extend our results and study the capacity of these two constraints combined with error-correction codes in the Kendall's $\tau$ metric.
1401.4489
An Analysis of Random Projections in Cancelable Biometrics
cs.CV cs.LG stat.ML
With increasing concerns about security, the need for highly secure physical biometrics-based authentication systems utilizing \emph{cancelable biometric} technologies is on the rise. Because the problem of cancelable template generation deals with the trade-off between template security and matching performance, many state-of-the-art algorithms successful in generating high quality cancelable biometrics all have random projection as one of their early processing steps. This paper therefore presents a formal analysis of why random projections is an essential step in cancelable biometrics. By formally defining the notion of an \textit{Independent Subspace Structure} for datasets, it can be shown that random projection preserves the subspace structure of data vectors generated from a union of independent linear subspaces. The bound on the minimum number of random vectors required for this to hold is also derived and is shown to depend logarithmically on the number of data samples, not only in independent subspaces but in disjoint subspace settings as well. The theoretical analysis presented is supported in detail with empirical results on real-world face recognition datasets.
1401.4506
Detection and Decoding for 2D Magnetic Recording Channels with 2D Intersymbol Interference
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers iterative detection and decoding on the concatenated communication channel consisting of a two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) channel modeled by the four-grain rectangular discrete grain model (DGM) proposed by Kavcic et. al., followed by a two-dimensional intersymbol interference (2D-ISI) channel modeled by linear convolution of the DGM model's output with a finite-extent 2D blurring mask followed by addition of white Gaussian noise. An iterative detection and decoding scheme combines TDMR detection, 2D-ISI detection, and soft-in/soft-out (SISO) channel decoding in a structure with two iteration loops. In the first loop, the 2D-ISI channel detector exchanges log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) with the TDMR detector. In the second loop, the TDMR detector exchanges LLRs with a serially concatenated convolutional code (SCCC) decoder. Simulation results for the concatenated TDMR and 2 x 2 averaging mask ISI channel with 10 dB SNR show that densities of 0.48 user bits per grain and above can be achieved, corresponding to an areal density of about 9.6 Terabits per square inch, over the entire range of grain probabilities in the TDMR model.
1401.4509
When and By How Much Can Helper Node Selection Improve Regenerating Codes?
cs.IT math.IT
Regenerating codes (RCs) can significantly reduce the repair-bandwidth of distributed storage networks. Initially, the analysis of RCs was based on the assumption that during the repair process, the newcomer does not distinguish (among all surviving nodes) which nodes to access, i.e., the newcomer is oblivious to the set of helpers being used. Such a scheme is termed the blind repair (BR) scheme. Nonetheless, it is intuitive in practice that the newcomer should choose to access only those "good" helpers. In this paper, a new characterization of the effect of choosing the helper nodes in terms of the storage-bandwidth tradeoff is given. Specifically, answers to the following fundamental questions are given: Under what conditions does proactively choosing the helper nodes improve the storage-bandwidth tradeoff? Can this improvement be analytically quantified? This paper answers the former question by providing a necessary and sufficient condition under which optimally choosing good helpers strictly improves the storage-bandwidth tradeoff. To answer the latter question, a low-complexity helper selection solution, termed the family repair (FR) scheme, is proposed and the corresponding storage/repair-bandwidth curve is characterized. For example, consider a distributed storage network with 60 total number of nodes and the network is resilient against 50 node failures. If the number of helper nodes is 10, then the FR scheme and its variant demonstrate 27% reduction in the repair-bandwidth when compared to the BR solution. This paper also proves that under some design parameters, the FR scheme is indeed optimal among all helper selection schemes. An explicit construction of an exact-repair code is also proposed that can achieve the minimum-bandwidth-regenerating point of the FR scheme. The new exact-repair code can be viewed as a generalization of the existing fractional repetition code.
1401.4529
General factorization framework for context-aware recommendations
cs.IR cs.LG
Context-aware recommendation algorithms focus on refining recommendations by considering additional information, available to the system. This topic has gained a lot of attention recently. Among others, several factorization methods were proposed to solve the problem, although most of them assume explicit feedback which strongly limits their real-world applicability. While these algorithms apply various loss functions and optimization strategies, the preference modeling under context is less explored due to the lack of tools allowing for easy experimentation with various models. As context dimensions are introduced beyond users and items, the space of possible preference models and the importance of proper modeling largely increases. In this paper we propose a General Factorization Framework (GFF), a single flexible algorithm that takes the preference model as an input and computes latent feature matrices for the input dimensions. GFF allows us to easily experiment with various linear models on any context-aware recommendation task, be it explicit or implicit feedback based. The scaling properties makes it usable under real life circumstances as well. We demonstrate the framework's potential by exploring various preference models on a 4-dimensional context-aware problem with contexts that are available for almost any real life datasets. We show in our experiments -- performed on five real life, implicit feedback datasets -- that proper preference modelling significantly increases recommendation accuracy, and previously unused models outperform the traditional ones. Novel models in GFF also outperform state-of-the-art factorization algorithms. We also extend the method to be fully compliant to the Multidimensional Dataspace Model, one of the most extensive data models of context-enriched data. Extended GFF allows the seamless incorporation of information into the fac[truncated]
1401.4532
Polar Lattices for Strong Secrecy Over the Mod-$\Lambda$ Gaussian Wiretap Channel
cs.IT math.IT
Polar lattices, which are constructed from polar codes, are provably good for the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. In this work, we propose a new polar lattice construction that achieves the secrecy capacity under the strong secrecy criterion over the mod-$\Lambda$ Gaussian wiretap channel. This construction leads to an AWGN-good lattice and a secrecy-good lattice simultaneously. The design methodology is mainly based on the equivalence in terms of polarization between the $\Lambda/\Lambda'$ channel in lattice coding and the equivalent channel derived from the chain rule of mutual information in multilevel coding.
1401.4533
Government and Social Media: A Case Study of 31 Informational World Cities
cs.CY cs.DL cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Social media platforms are increasingly being used by governments to foster user interaction. Particularly in cities with enhanced ICT infrastructures (i.e., Informational World Cities) and high internet penetration rates, social media platforms are valuable tools for reaching high numbers of citizens. This empirical investigation of 31 Informational World Cities will provide an overview of social media services used for governmental purposes, of their popularity among governments, and of their usage intensity in broadcasting information online.
1401.4539
Solving the Minimum Common String Partition Problem with the Help of Ants
cs.AI
In this paper, we consider the problem of finding a minimum common partition of two strings. The problem has its application in genome comparison. As it is an NP-hard, discrete combinatorial optimization problem, we employ a metaheuristic technique, namely, MAX-MIN ant system to solve this problem. To achieve better efficiency we first map the problem instance into a special kind of graph. Subsequently, we employ a MAX-MIN ant system to achieve high quality solutions for the problem. Experimental results show the superiority of our algorithm in comparison with the state of art algorithm in the literature. The improvement achieved is also justified by standard statistical test.
1401.4543
On the Potential of Twitter for Understanding the Tunisia of the Post-Arab Spring
cs.SI cs.CY physics.soc-ph
Micro-blogging through Twitter has made information short and to the point, and more importantly systematically searchable. This work is the first of a series in which quotidian observations about Tunisia are obtained using the micro-blogging site Twitter. Data was extracted using the open source Twitter API v1.1. Specific tweets were obtained using functional search operators in particular thematic hash tags, geo-location, date, time and language. The presence of Tunisia in the international tweet stream, the language of communication of Tunisian residents through Twitter as well as Twitter usage across Tunisia are the center of attention of this article.
1401.4566
Excess Risk Bounds for Exponentially Concave Losses
cs.LG stat.ML
The overarching goal of this paper is to derive excess risk bounds for learning from exp-concave loss functions in passive and sequential learning settings. Exp-concave loss functions encompass several fundamental problems in machine learning such as squared loss in linear regression, logistic loss in classification, and negative logarithm loss in portfolio management. In batch setting, we obtain sharp bounds on the performance of empirical risk minimization performed in a linear hypothesis space and with respect to the exp-concave loss functions. We also extend the results to the online setting where the learner receives the training examples in a sequential manner. We propose an online learning algorithm that is a properly modified version of online Newton method to obtain sharp risk bounds. Under an additional mild assumption on the loss function, we show that in both settings we are able to achieve an excess risk bound of $O(d\log n/n)$ that holds with a high probability.
1401.4575
Various Views on the Trapdoor Channel and an Upper Bound on its Capacity
cs.IT math.IT
Two novel views are presented on the trapdoor channel. First, by deriving the underlying iterated function system (IFS), it is shown that the trapdoor channel with input blocks of length $n$ can be regarded as the $n$th element of a sequence of shapes approximating a fractal. Second, an algorithm is presented that fully characterizes the trapdoor channel and resembles the recursion of generating all permutations of a given string. Subsequently, the problem of maximizing a $n$-letter mutual information is considered. It is shown that $\frac{1}{2}\log_2\left(\frac{5}{2}\right)\approx 0.6610$ bits per use is an upper bound on the capacity of the trapdoor channel. This upper bound, which is the tightest upper bound known proves that feedback increases capacity of the trapdoor channel.
1401.4580
Graph eigenvectors, fundamental weights and centrality metrics for nodes in networks
math.SP cond-mat.stat-mech cs.DM cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Several expressions for the $j$-th component $\left( x_{k}\right)_{j}$ of the $k$-th eigenvector $x_{k}$ of a symmetric matrix $A$ belonging to eigenvalue $\lambda_{k}$ and normalized as $x_{k}^{T}x_{k}=1$ are presented. In particular, the expression \[ \left( x_{k}\right)_{j}^{2}=-\frac{1}{c_{A}^{\prime}\left( \lambda_{k}\right) }\det\left( A_{\backslash\left\{ j\right\} }-\lambda_{k}I\right) \] where $c_{A}\left( \lambda\right) =\det\left( A-\lambda I\right) $ is the characteristic polynomial of $A$, $c_{A}^{\prime}\left( \lambda\right) =\frac{dc_{A}\left( \lambda\right) }{d\lambda}$ and $A_{\backslash\left\{ j\right\} }$ is obtained from $A$ by removal of row $j$ and column $j$, suggests us to consider the square eigenvector component as a graph centrality metric for node $j$ that reflects the impact of the removal of node $j$ from the graph at an eigenfrequency/eigenvalue $\lambda_{k}$ of a graph related matrix (such as the adjacency or Laplacian matrix). Removal of nodes in a graph relates to the robustness of a graph. The set of such nodal centrality metrics, the squared eigenvector components $\left( x_{k}\right)_{j}^{2}$ of the adjacency matrix over all eigenvalue $\lambda_{k}$ for each node $j$, is 'ideal' in the sense of being complete, \emph{almost} uncorrelated and mathematically precisely defined and computable. Fundamental weights (column sum of $X$) and dual fundamental weights (row sum of $X$) are introduced as spectral metrics that condense information embedded in the orthogonal eigenvector matrix $X$, with elements $X_{ij}=\left( x_{j}\right)_{i}$. In addition to the criterion {\em If the algebraic connectivity is positive, then the graph is connected}, we found an alternative condition: {\em If $\min_{1\leq k\leq N}\left( \lambda_{k}^{2}(A)\right) =d_{\min}$, then the graph is disconnected.}
1401.4589
miRNA and Gene Expression based Cancer Classification using Self- Learning and Co-Training Approaches
cs.CE cs.LG
miRNA and gene expression profiles have been proved useful for classifying cancer samples. Efficient classifiers have been recently sought and developed. A number of attempts to classify cancer samples using miRNA/gene expression profiles are known in literature. However, the use of semi-supervised learning models have been used recently in bioinformatics, to exploit the huge corpuses of publicly available sets. Using both labeled and unlabeled sets to train sample classifiers, have not been previously considered when gene and miRNA expression sets are used. Moreover, there is a motivation to integrate both miRNA and gene expression for a semi-supervised cancer classification as that provides more information on the characteristics of cancer samples. In this paper, two semi-supervised machine learning approaches, namely self-learning and co-training, are adapted to enhance the quality of cancer sample classification. These approaches exploit the huge public corpuses to enrich the training data. In self-learning, miRNA and gene based classifiers are enhanced independently. While in co-training, both miRNA and gene expression profiles are used simultaneously to provide different views of cancer samples. To our knowledge, it is the first attempt to apply these learning approaches to cancer classification. The approaches were evaluated using breast cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and lung cancer expression sets. Results show up to 20% improvement in F1-measure over Random Forests and SVM classifiers. Co-Training also outperforms Low Density Separation (LDS) approach by around 25% improvement in F1-measure in breast cancer.
1401.4590
Combining Evaluation Metrics via the Unanimous Improvement Ratio and its Application to Clustering Tasks
cs.AI cs.LG
Many Artificial Intelligence tasks cannot be evaluated with a single quality criterion and some sort of weighted combination is needed to provide system rankings. A problem of weighted combination measures is that slight changes in the relative weights may produce substantial changes in the system rankings. This paper introduces the Unanimous Improvement Ratio (UIR), a measure that complements standard metric combination criteria (such as van Rijsbergen's F-measure) and indicates how robust the measured differences are to changes in the relative weights of the individual metrics. UIR is meant to elucidate whether a perceived difference between two systems is an artifact of how individual metrics are weighted. Besides discussing the theoretical foundations of UIR, this paper presents empirical results that confirm the validity and usefulness of the metric for the Text Clustering problem, where there is a tradeoff between precision and recall based metrics and results are particularly sensitive to the weighting scheme used to combine them. Remarkably, our experiments show that UIR can be used as a predictor of how well differences between systems measured on a given test bed will also hold in a different test bed.
1401.4592
Proximity-Based Non-uniform Abstractions for Approximate Planning
cs.AI
In a deterministic world, a planning agent can be certain of the consequences of its planned sequence of actions. Not so, however, in dynamic, stochastic domains where Markov decision processes are commonly used. Unfortunately these suffer from the curse of dimensionality: if the state space is a Cartesian product of many small sets (dimensions), planning is exponential in the number of those dimensions. Our new technique exploits the intuitive strategy of selectively ignoring various dimensions in different parts of the state space. The resulting non-uniformity has strong implications, since the approximation is no longer Markovian, requiring the use of a modified planner. We also use a spatial and temporal proximity measure, which responds to continued planning as well as movement of the agent through the state space, to dynamically adapt the abstraction as planning progresses. We present qualitative and quantitative results across a range of experimental domains showing that an agent exploiting this novel approximation method successfully finds solutions to the planning problem using much less than the full state space. We assess and analyse the features of domains which our method can exploit.
1401.4593
Location-Based Reasoning about Complex Multi-Agent Behavior
cs.MA cs.AI
Recent research has shown that surprisingly rich models of human activity can be learned from GPS (positional) data. However, most effort to date has concentrated on modeling single individuals or statistical properties of groups of people. Moreover, prior work focused solely on modeling actual successful executions (and not failed or attempted executions) of the activities of interest. We, in contrast, take on the task of understanding human interactions, attempted interactions, and intentions from noisy sensor data in a fully relational multi-agent setting. We use a real-world game of capture the flag to illustrate our approach in a well-defined domain that involves many distinct cooperative and competitive joint activities. We model the domain using Markov logic, a statistical-relational language, and learn a theory that jointly denoises the data and infers occurrences of high-level activities, such as a player capturing an enemy. Our unified model combines constraints imposed by the geometry of the game area, the motion model of the players, and by the rules and dynamics of the game in a probabilistically and logically sound fashion. We show that while it may be impossible to directly detect a multi-agent activity due to sensor noise or malfunction, the occurrence of the activity can still be inferred by considering both its impact on the future behaviors of the people involved as well as the events that could have preceded it. Further, we show that given a model of successfully performed multi-agent activities, along with a set of examples of failed attempts at the same activities, our system automatically learns an augmented model that is capable of recognizing success and failure, as well as goals of peoples actions with high accuracy. We compare our approach with other alternatives and show that our unified model, which takes into account not only relationships among individual players, but also relationships among activities over the entire length of a game, although more computationally costly, is significantly more accurate. Finally, we demonstrate that explicitly modeling unsuccessful attempts boosts performance on other important recognition tasks.
1401.4595
Robust Local Search for Solving RCPSP/max with Durational Uncertainty
cs.AI
Scheduling problems in manufacturing, logistics and project management have frequently been modeled using the framework of Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problems with minimum and maximum time lags (RCPSP/max). Due to the importance of these problems, providing scalable solution schedules for RCPSP/max problems is a topic of extensive research. However, all existing methods for solving RCPSP/max assume that durations of activities are known with certainty, an assumption that does not hold in real world scheduling problems where unexpected external events such as manpower availability, weather changes, etc. lead to delays or advances in completion of activities. Thus, in this paper, our focus is on providing a scalable method for solving RCPSP/max problems with durational uncertainty. To that end, we introduce the robust local search method consisting of three key ideas: (a) Introducing and studying the properties of two decision rule approximations used to compute start times of activities with respect to dynamic realizations of the durational uncertainty; (b) Deriving the expression for robust makespan of an execution strategy based on decision rule approximations; and (c) A robust local search mechanism to efficiently compute activity execution strategies that are robust against durational uncertainty. Furthermore, we also provide enhancements to local search that exploit temporal dependencies between activities. Our experimental results illustrate that robust local search is able to provide robust execution strategies efficiently.
1401.4596
Unfounded Sets and Well-Founded Semantics of Answer Set Programs with Aggregates
cs.LO cs.AI
Logic programs with aggregates (LPA) are one of the major linguistic extensions to Logic Programming (LP). In this work, we propose a generalization of the notions of unfounded set and well-founded semantics for programs with monotone and antimonotone aggregates (LPAma programs). In particular, we present a new notion of unfounded set for LPAma programs, which is a sound generalization of the original definition for standard (aggregate-free) LP. On this basis, we define a well-founded operator for LPAma programs, the fixpoint of which is called well-founded model (or well-founded semantics) for LPAma programs. The most important properties of unfounded sets and the well-founded semantics for standard LP are retained by this generalization, notably existence and uniqueness of the well-founded model, together with a strong relationship to the answer set semantics for LPAma programs. We show that one of the D-well-founded semantics, defined by Pelov, Denecker, and Bruynooghe for a broader class of aggregates using approximating operators, coincides with the well-founded model as defined in this work on LPAma programs. We also discuss some complexity issues, most importantly we give a formal proof of tractable computation of the well-founded model for LPA programs. Moreover, we prove that for general LPA programs, which may contain aggregates that are neither monotone nor antimonotone, deciding satisfaction of aggregate expressions with respect to partial interpretations is coNP-complete. As a consequence, a well-founded semantics for general LPA programs that allows for tractable computation is unlikely to exist, which justifies the restriction on LPAma programs. Finally, we present a prototype system extending DLV, which supports the well-founded semantics for LPAma programs, at the time of writing the only implemented system that does so. Experiments with this prototype show significant computational advantages of aggregate constructs over equivalent aggregate-free encodings.
1401.4597
Dr.Fill: Crosswords and an Implemented Solver for Singly Weighted CSPs
cs.AI
We describe Dr.Fill, a program that solves American-style crossword puzzles. From a technical perspective, Dr.Fill works by converting crosswords to weighted CSPs, and then using a variety of novel techniques to find a solution. These techniques include generally applicable heuristics for variable and value selection, a variant of limited discrepancy search, and postprocessing and partitioning ideas. Branch and bound is not used, as it was incompatible with postprocessing and was determined experimentally to be of little practical value. Dr.Fillls performance on crosswords from the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament suggests that it ranks among the top fifty or so crossword solvers in the world.
1401.4598
SAS+ Planning as Satisfiability
cs.AI
Planning as satisfiability is a principal approach to planning with many eminent advantages. The existing planning as satisfiability techniques usually use encodings compiled from STRIPS. We introduce a novel SAT encoding scheme (SASE) based on the SAS+ formalism. The new scheme exploits the structural information in SAS+, resulting in an encoding that is both more compact and efficient for planning. We prove the correctness of the new encoding by establishing an isomorphism between the solution plans of SASE and that of STRIPS based encodings. We further analyze the transition variables newly introduced in SASE to explain why it accommodates modern SAT solving algorithms and improves performance. We give empirical statistical results to support our analysis. We also develop a number of techniques to further reduce the encoding size of SASE, and conduct experimental studies to show the strength of each individual technique. Finally, we report extensive experimental results to demonstrate significant improvements of SASE over the state-of-the-art STRIPS based encoding schemes in terms of both time and memory efficiency.
1401.4599
Learning and Reasoning with Action-Related Places for Robust Mobile Manipulation
cs.RO cs.AI
We propose the concept of Action-Related Place (ARPlace) as a powerful and flexible representation of task-related place in the context of mobile manipulation. ARPlace represents robot base locations not as a single position, but rather as a collection of positions, each with an associated probability that the manipulation action will succeed when located there. ARPlaces are generated using a predictive model that is acquired through experience-based learning, and take into account the uncertainty the robot has about its own location and the location of the object to be manipulated. When executing the task, rather than choosing one specific goal position based only on the initial knowledge about the task context, the robot instantiates an ARPlace, and bases its decisions on this ARPlace, which is updated as new information about the task becomes available. To show the advantages of this least-commitment approach, we present a transformational planner that reasons about ARPlaces in order to optimize symbolic plans. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that using ARPlaces leads to more robust and efficient mobile manipulation in the face of state estimation uncertainty on our simulated robot.
1401.4600
Exploiting Model Equivalences for Solving Interactive Dynamic Influence Diagrams
cs.AI
We focus on the problem of sequential decision making in partially observable environments shared with other agents of uncertain types having similar or conflicting objectives. This problem has been previously formalized by multiple frameworks one of which is the interactive dynamic influence diagram (I-DID), which generalizes the well-known influence diagram to the multiagent setting. I-DIDs are graphical models and may be used to compute the policy of an agent given its belief over the physical state and others models, which changes as the agent acts and observes in the multiagent setting. As we may expect, solving I-DIDs is computationally hard. This is predominantly due to the large space of candidate models ascribed to the other agents and its exponential growth over time. We present two methods for reducing the size of the model space and stemming its exponential growth. Both these methods involve aggregating individual models into equivalence classes. Our first method groups together behaviorally equivalent models and selects only those models for updating which will result in predictive behaviors that are distinct from others in the updated model space. The second method further compacts the model space by focusing on portions of the behavioral predictions. Specifically, we cluster actionally equivalent models that prescribe identical actions at a single time step. Exactly identifying the equivalences would require us to solve all models in the initial set. We avoid this by selectively solving some of the models, thereby introducing an approximation. We discuss the error introduced by the approximation, and empirically demonstrate the improved efficiency in solving I-DIDs due to the equivalences.
1401.4601
Counting-Based Search: Branching Heuristics for Constraint Satisfaction Problems
cs.AI
Designing a search heuristic for constraint programming that is reliable across problem domains has been an important research topic in recent years. This paper concentrates on one family of candidates: counting-based search. Such heuristics seek to make branching decisions that preserve most of the solutions by determining what proportion of solutions to each individual constraint agree with that decision. Whereas most generic search heuristics in constraint programming rely on local information at the level of the individual variable, our search heuristics are based on more global information at the constraint level. We design several algorithms that are used to count the number of solutions to specific families of constraints and propose some search heuristics exploiting such information. The experimental part of the paper considers eight problem domains ranging from well-established benchmark puzzles to rostering and sport scheduling. An initial empirical analysis identifies heuristic maxSD as a robust candidate among our proposals.eWe then evaluate the latter against the state of the art, including the latest generic search heuristics, restarts, and discrepancy-based tree traversals. Experimental results show that counting-based search generally outperforms other generic heuristics.
1401.4602
Cloning in Elections: Finding the Possible Winners
cs.GT cs.MA
We consider the problem of manipulating elections by cloning candidates. In our model, a manipulator can replace each candidate c by several clones, i.e., new candidates that are so similar to c that each voter simply replaces c in his vote with a block of these new candidates, ranked consecutively. The outcome of the resulting election may then depend on the number of clones as well as on how each voter orders the clones within the block. We formalize what it means for a cloning manipulation to be successful (which turns out to be a surprisingly delicate issue), and, for a number of common voting rules, characterize the preference profiles for which a successful cloning manipulation exists. We also consider the model where there is a cost associated with producing each clone, and study the complexity of finding a minimum-cost cloning manipulation. Finally, we compare cloning with two related problems: the problem of control by adding candidates and the problem of possible (co)winners when new alternatives can join.
1401.4603
Semantic Similarity Measures Applied to an Ontology for Human-Like Interaction
cs.AI cs.CL
The focus of this paper is the calculation of similarity between two concepts from an ontology for a Human-Like Interaction system. In order to facilitate this calculation, a similarity function is proposed based on five dimensions (sort, compositional, essential, restrictive and descriptive) constituting the structure of ontological knowledge. The paper includes a proposal for computing a similarity function for each dimension of knowledge. Later on, the similarity values obtained are weighted and aggregated to obtain a global similarity measure. In order to calculate those weights associated to each dimension, four training methods have been proposed. The training methods differ in the element to fit: the user, concepts or pairs of concepts, and a hybrid approach. For evaluating the proposal, the knowledge base was fed from WordNet and extended by using a knowledge editing toolkit (Cognos). The evaluation of the proposal is carried out through the comparison of system responses with those given by human test subjects, both providing a measure of the soundness of the procedure and revealing ways in which the proposal may be improved.
1401.4604
Completeness Guarantees for Incomplete Ontology Reasoners: Theory and Practice
cs.AI cs.LO
To achieve scalability of query answering, the developers of Semantic Web applications are often forced to use incomplete OWL 2 reasoners, which fail to derive all answers for at least one query, ontology, and data set. The lack of completeness guarantees, however, may be unacceptable for applications in areas such as health care and defence, where missing answers can adversely affect the applications functionality. Furthermore, even if an application can tolerate some level of incompleteness, it is often advantageous to estimate how many and what kind of answers are being lost. In this paper, we present a novel logic-based framework that allows one to check whether a reasoner is complete for a given query Q and ontology T---that is, whether the reasoner is guaranteed to compute all answers to Q w.r.t. T and an arbitrary data set A. Since ontologies and typical queries are often fixed at application design time, our approach allows application developers to check whether a reasoner known to be incomplete in general is actually complete for the kinds of input relevant for the application. We also present a technique that, given a query Q, an ontology T, and reasoners R_1 and R_2 that satisfy certain assumptions, can be used to determine whether, for each data set A, reasoner R_1 computes more answers to Q w.r.t. T and A than reasoner R_2. This allows application developers to select the reasoner that provides the highest degree of completeness for Q and T that is compatible with the applications scalability requirements. Our results thus provide a theoretical and practical foundation for the design of future ontology-based information systems that maximise scalability while minimising or even eliminating incompleteness of query answers.