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1401.5444
Exploiting Spectral Leakage for Spectrogram Frequency Super-resolution
cs.IT math.IT
The spectrogram is a classical DSP tool used to view signals in both time and frequency. Unfortunately, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal limits our ability to use them for detecting and measuring narrowband signal modulation in wideband environments. On a spectrogram, instantaneous frequency can only be measured to the nearest bin without additional interpolation. This work presents a novel technique for extracting higher accuracy frequency estimates. Whereas most practitioners seek to suppress spectral leakage, we use mismatched windows to exploit such artifacts in order to produce super-resolved spectral displays. We present a derivation of our methodology and exhibit several interesting examples.
1401.5465
BDGS: A Scalable Big Data Generator Suite in Big Data Benchmarking
cs.DB
Data generation is a key issue in big data benchmarking that aims to generate application-specific data sets to meet the 4V requirements of big data. Specifically, big data generators need to generate scalable data (Volume) of different types (Variety) under controllable generation rates (Velocity) while keeping the important characteristics of raw data (Veracity). This gives rise to various new challenges about how we design generators efficiently and successfully. To date, most existing techniques can only generate limited types of data and support specific big data systems such as Hadoop. Hence we develop a tool, called Big Data Generator Suite (BDGS), to efficiently generate scalable big data while employing data models derived from real data to preserve data veracity. The effectiveness of BDGS is demonstrated by developing six data generators covering three representative data types (structured, semi-structured and unstructured) and three data sources (text, graph, and table data).
1401.5528
Distributed and Centralized Hybrid CSMA/CA-TDMA Schemes for Single-Hop Wireless Networks
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT
The strength of carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) can be combined with that of time-division multiple access (TDMA) to enhance the channel access performance in wireless networks such as the IEEE 802.15.4-based wireless personal area networks (WPANs). In particular, the performance of legacy CSMA/CA-based medium access control (MAC) scheme in congested networks can be enhanced through a hybrid CSMA/CA-TDMA scheme while preserving the scalability property. In this paper, we present distributed and centralized channel access models which follow the transmission strategies based on Markov decision process (MDP) to access both contention period and contention-free period in an intelligent way. The models consider the buffer status as an indication of congestion provided that the offered traffic does not exceed the channel capacity. We extend the models to consider the hidden node collision problem encountered due to the signal attenuation caused by channel fading. The simulation results show that the MDP-based distributed channel access scheme outperforms the legacy slotted CSMA/CA scheme. This scheme also works efficiently in a network consisting of heterogeneous nodes. The centralized model outperforms the distributed model but requires the global information of the network.
1401.5535
Learning Mid-Level Features and Modeling Neuron Selectivity for Image Classification
cs.CV cs.LG cs.NE cs.RO
We now know that mid-level features can greatly enhance the performance of image learning, but how to automatically learn the image features efficiently and in an unsupervised manner is still an open question. In this paper, we present a very efficient mid-level feature learning approach (MidFea), which only involves simple operations such as $k$-means clustering, convolution, pooling, vector quantization and random projection. We explain why this simple method generates the desired features, and argue that there is no need to spend much time in learning low-level feature extractors. Furthermore, to boost the performance, we propose to model the neuron selectivity (NS) principle by building an additional layer over the mid-level features before feeding the features into the classifier. We show that the NS-layer learns category-specific neurons with both bottom-up inference and top-down analysis, and thus supports fast inference for a query image. We run extensive experiments on several public databases to demonstrate that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art performances for face recognition, gender classification, age estimation and object categorization. In particular, we demonstrate that our approach is more than an order of magnitude faster than some recently proposed sparse coding based methods.
1401.5536
On Discrete Alphabets for the Two-user Gaussian Interference Channel with One Receiver Lacking Knowledge of the Interfering Codebook
cs.IT math.IT
In multi-user information theory it is often assumed that every node in the network possesses all codebooks used in the network. This assumption is however impractical in distributed ad-hoc and cognitive networks. This work considers the two- user Gaussian Interference Channel with one Oblivious Receiver (G-IC-OR), i.e., one receiver lacks knowledge of the interfering cookbook while the other receiver knows both codebooks. We ask whether, and if so how much, the channel capacity of the G-IC- OR is reduced compared to that of the classical G-IC where both receivers know all codebooks. Intuitively, the oblivious receiver should not be able to jointly decode its intended message along with the unintended interfering message whose codebook is unavailable. We demonstrate that in strong and very strong interference, where joint decoding is capacity achieving for the classical G-IC, lack of codebook knowledge does not reduce performance in terms of generalized degrees of freedom (gDoF). Moreover, we show that the sum-capacity of the symmetric G-IC- OR is to within O(log(log(SNR))) of that of the classical G-IC. The key novelty of the proposed achievable scheme is the use of a discrete input alphabet for the non-oblivious transmitter, whose cardinality is appropriately chosen as a function of SNR.
1401.5543
Lower Bounds on the Probability of a Finite Union of Events
math.PR cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, lower bounds on the probability of a finite union of events are considered, i.e. $P\left(\bigcup_{i=1}^N A_i\right)$, in terms of the individual event probabilities $\{P(A_i), i=1,\ldots,N\}$ and the sums of the pairwise event probabilities, i.e., $\{\sum_{j:j\neq i} P(A_i\cap A_j), i=1,\ldots,N\}$. The contribution of this paper includes the following: (i) in the class of all lower bounds that are established in terms of only the $P(A_i)$'s and $\sum_{j:j\neq i} P(A_i\cap A_j)$'s, the optimal lower bound is given numerically by solving a linear programming (LP) problem with $N^2-N+1$ variables; (ii) a new analytical lower bound is proposed based on a relaxed LP problem, which is at least as good as the bound due to Kuai, et al.; (iii) numerical examples are provided to illustrate the performance of the bounds.
1401.5551
Algebraic Methods of Classifying Directed Graphical Models
cs.IT math.IT math.ST stat.TH
Directed acyclic graphical models (DAGs) are often used to describe common structural properties in a family of probability distributions. This paper addresses the question of classifying DAGs up to an isomorphism. By considering Gaussian densities, the question reduces to verifying equality of certain algebraic varieties. A question of computing equations for these varieties has been previously raised in the literature. Here it is shown that the most natural method adds spurious components with singular principal minors, proving a conjecture of Sullivant. This characterization is used to establish an algebraic criterion for isomorphism, and to provide a randomized algorithm for checking that criterion. Results are applied to produce a list of the isomorphism classes of tree models on 4,5, and 6 nodes. Finally, some evidence is provided to show that projectivized DAG varieties contain useful information in the sense that their relative embedding is closely related to efficient inference.
1401.5553
Peer Ratings in Massive Online Social Networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Instant quality feedback in the form of online peer ratings is a prominent feature of modern massive online social networks (MOSNs). It allows network members to indicate their appreciation of a post, comment, photograph, etc. Some MOSNs support both positive and negative (signed) ratings. In this study, we rated 11 thousand MOSN member profiles and collected user responses to the ratings. MOSN users are very sensitive to peer ratings: 33% of the subjects visited the researcher's profile in response to rating, 21% also rated the researcher's profile picture, and 5% left a text comment. The grades left by the subjects are highly polarized: out of the six available grades, the most negative and the most positive are also the most popular. The grades fall into three almost equally sized categories: reciprocal, generous, and stingy. We proposed quantitative measures for generosity, reciprocity, and benevolence, and analyzed them with respect to the subjects' demographics.
1401.5555
Interference Statistics and Capacity Analysis for Uplink Transmission in Two-Tier Small Cell Networks: A Geometric Probability Approach
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT math.ST stat.TH
Small cell networks are evolving as an economically viable solution to ameliorate the capacity and coverage of state-of-the-art wireless cellular systems. Nonetheless, the dense and unplanned deployment of the small cells (e.g., femtocells, picocells) with restricted user access significantly increases the impact of interference on the overall network performance. To this end, this paper presents a novel framework to derive the statistics of the interference considering dedicated and shared spectrum access for uplink transmissions in two-tier small cell networks such as the macrocell-femtocell networks. The derived expressions are validated by the Monte-Carlo simulations. Numerical results are generated to assess the feasibility of shared and dedicated spectrum access in femtocells under varying traffic load and spectral reuse scenarios.
1401.5559
License Plate Recognition (LPR): A Review with Experiments for Malaysia Case Study
cs.CV
Most vehicle license plate recognition use neural network techniques to enhance its computing capability. The image of the vehicle license plate is captured and processed to produce a textual output for further processing. This paper reviews image processing and neural network techniques applied at different stages which are preprocessing, filtering, feature extraction, segmentation and recognition in such way to remove the noise of the image, to enhance the image quality and to expedite the computing process by converting the characters in the image into respective text. An exemplar experiment has been done in MATLAB to show the basic process of the image processing especially for license plate in Malaysia case study. An algorithm is adapted into the solution for parking management system. The solution then is implemented as proof of concept to the algorithm.
1401.5567
On Controllability and Near-controllability of Multi-input Discrete-time Bilinear Systems in Dimension Two
cs.SY
This paper completely solves the controllability problems of two-dimensional multi-input discrete-time bilinear systems with and without drift. Necessary and sufficient conditions for controllability, which cover the existing results, are obtained by using an algebraic method. Furthermore, for the uncontrollable systems, near-controllability is studied and necessary and sufficient conditions for the systems to be nearly controllable are also presented. Examples are provided to demonstrate the conceptions and results of the paper.
1401.5580
Polynomial Transformation Method for Non-Gaussian Noise Environment
math.ST cs.CE stat.TH
Signal processing in non-Gaussian noise environment is addressed in this paper. For many real-life situations, the additive noise process present in the system is found to be dominantly non-Gaussian. The problem of detection and estimation of signals corrupted with non-Gaussian noise is difficult to track mathematically. In this paper, we present a novel approach for optimal detection and estimation of signals in non-Gaussian noise. It is demonstrated that preprocessing of data by the orthogonal polynomial approximation together with the minimum error-variance criterion converts an additive non-Gaussian noise process into an approximation-error process which is close to Gaussian. The Monte Carlo simulations are presented to test the Gaussian hypothesis based on the bicoherence of a sequence. The histogram test and the kurtosis test are carried out to verify the Gaussian hypothesis.
1401.5582
Beyond One-Way Communication: Degrees of Freedom of Multi-Way Relay MIMO Interference Networks
cs.IT math.IT
We characterize the degrees of freedom (DoF) of multi-way relay MIMO interference networks. In particular, we consider a wireless network consisting of 4 user nodes, each with M antennas, and one N-antenna relay node. In this network, each user node sends one independent message to each of the other user nodes, and there are no direct links between any two user nodes, i.e., all communication must pass through the relay node. For this network, we show that the symmetric DoF value per message is given by max(min(M/3,N/7),min(2M/7,N/6)) normalized by space dimensions, i.e., piecewise linear depending on M and N alternatively. While the information theoretic DoF upper bound is established for every M and N, the achievability relying on linear signal subspace alignment is established in the spatially-normalized sense in general. In addition, by deactivating 4 messages to form a two-way relay MIMO X channel, we also present the DoF result in the similar piecewise linear type. The central new insight to emerge from this work is the notion of inter-user signal subspace alignment incorporating the idea of network coding, which is the key to achieve the optimal DoF for multi-way relay interference networks. Moreover, this work also settles the feasibility of linear interference alignment that extends the feasibility framework from one-way to multi-way relay interference networks.
1401.5589
The Gabor-Einstein Wavelet: A Model for the Receptive Fields of V1 to MT Neurons
q-bio.NC cs.CV physics.bio-ph
Our visual system is astonishingly efficient at detecting moving objects. This process is mediated by the neurons which connect the primary visual cortex (V1) to the middle temporal (MT) area. Interestingly, since Kuffler's pioneering experiments on retinal ganglion cells, mathematical models have been vital for advancing our understanding of the receptive fields of visual neurons. However, existing models were not designed to describe the most salient attributes of the highly specialized neurons in the V1 to MT motion processing stream; and they have not been able to do so. Here, we introduce the Gabor-Einstein wavelet, a new family of functions for representing the receptive fields of V1 to MT neurons. We show that the way space and time are mixed in the visual cortex is analogous to the way they are mixed in the special theory of relativity (STR). Hence we constrained the Gabor-Einstein model by requiring: (i) relativistic-invariance of the wave carrier, and (ii) the minimum possible number of parameters. From these two constraints, the sinc function emerged as a natural descriptor of the wave carrier. The particular distribution of lowpass to bandpass temporal frequency filtering properties of V1 to MT neurons (Foster et al 1985; DeAngelis et al 1993b; Hawken et al 1996) is clearly explained by the Gabor-Einstein basis. Furthermore, it does so in a manner innately representative of the motion-processing stream's neuronal hierarchy. Our analysis and computer simulations show that the distribution of temporal frequency filtering properties along the motion processing stream is a direct effect of the way the brain jointly encodes space and time. We uncovered this fundamental link by demonstrating that analogous mathematical structures underlie STR and joint cortical spacetime encoding. This link will provide new physiological insights into how the brain represents visual information.
1401.5632
Enhancing Template Security of Face Biometrics by Using Edge Detection and Hashing
cs.CV
In this paper we address the issues of using edge detection techniques on facial images to produce cancellable biometric templates and a novel method for template verification against tampering. With increasing use of biometrics, there is a real threat for the conventional systems using face databases, which store images of users in raw and unaltered form. If compromised not only it is irrevocable, but can be misused for cross-matching across different databases. So it is desirable to generate and store revocable templates for the same user in different applications to prevent cross-matching and to enhance security, while maintaining privacy and ethics. By comparing different edge detection methods it has been observed that the edge detection based on the Roberts Cross operator performs consistently well across multiple face datasets, in which the face images have been taken under a variety of conditions. We have proposed a novel scheme using hashing, for extra verification, in order to harden the security of the stored biometric templates.
1401.5636
Causal Discovery in a Binary Exclusive-or Skew Acyclic Model: BExSAM
stat.ML cs.LG
Discovering causal relations among observed variables in a given data set is a major objective in studies of statistics and artificial intelligence. Recently, some techniques to discover a unique causal model have been explored based on non-Gaussianity of the observed data distribution. However, most of these are limited to continuous data. In this paper, we present a novel causal model for binary data and propose an efficient new approach to deriving the unique causal model governing a given binary data set under skew distributions of external binary noises. Experimental evaluation shows excellent performance for both artificial and real world data sets.
1401.5644
A new keyphrases extraction method based on suffix tree data structure for arabic documents clustering
cs.CL cs.IR
Document Clustering is a branch of a larger area of scientific study known as data mining .which is an unsupervised classification using to find a structure in a collection of unlabeled data. The useful information in the documents can be accompanied by a large amount of noise words when using Full Text Representation, and therefore will affect negatively the result of the clustering process. So it is with great need to eliminate the noise words and keeping just the useful information in order to enhance the quality of the clustering results. This problem occurs with different degree for any language such as English, European, Hindi, Chinese, and Arabic Language. To overcome this problem, in this paper, we propose a new and efficient Keyphrases extraction method based on the Suffix Tree data structure (KpST), the extracted Keyphrases are then used in the clustering process instead of Full Text Representation. The proposed method for Keyphrases extraction is language independent and therefore it may be applied to any language. In this investigation, we are interested to deal with the Arabic language which is one of the most complex languages. To evaluate our method, we conduct an experimental study on Arabic Documents using the most popular Clustering approach of Hierarchical algorithms: Agglomerative Hierarchical algorithm with seven linkage techniques and a variety of distance functions and similarity measures to perform Arabic Document Clustering task. The obtained results show that our method for extracting Keyphrases increases the quality of the clustering results. We propose also to study the effect of using the stemming for the testing dataset to cluster it with the same documents clustering techniques and similarity/distance measures.
1401.5648
Random walk centrality for temporal networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Nodes can be ranked according to their relative importance within the network. Ranking algorithms based on random walks are particularly useful because they connect topological and diffusive properties of the network. Previous methods based on random walks, as for example the PageRank, have focused on static structures. However, several realistic networks are indeed dynamic, meaning that their structure changes in time. In this paper, we propose a centrality measure for temporal networks based on random walks which we call TempoRank. While in a static network, the stationary density of the random walk is proportional to the degree or the strength of a node, we find that in temporal networks, the stationary density is proportional to the in-strength of the so-called effective network. The stationary density also depends on the sojourn probability q which regulates the tendency of the walker to stay in the node. We apply our method to human interaction networks and show that although it is important for a node to be connected to another node with many random walkers at the right moment (one of the principles of the PageRank), this effect is negligible in practice when the time order of link activation is included.
1401.5657
Enhancing Mobile Object Classification Using Geo-referenced Maps and Evidential Grids
cs.RO
Evidential grids have recently shown interesting properties for mobile object perception. Evidential grids are a generalisation of Bayesian occupancy grids using Dempster- Shafer theory. In particular, these grids can handle efficiently partial information. The novelty of this article is to propose a perception scheme enhanced by geo-referenced maps used as an additional source of information, which is fused with a sensor grid. The paper presents the key stages of such a data fusion process. An adaptation of conjunctive combination rule is presented to refine the analysis of the conflicting information. The method uses temporal accumulation to make the distinction between stationary and mobile objects, and applies contextual discounting for modelling information obsolescence. As a result, the method is able to better characterise the occupied cells by differentiating, for instance, moving objects, parked cars, urban infrastructure and buildings. Experiments carried out on real- world data illustrate the benefits of such an approach.
1401.5674
Generalized Biwords for Bitext Compression and Translation Spotting
cs.CL
Large bilingual parallel texts (also known as bitexts) are usually stored in a compressed form, and previous work has shown that they can be more efficiently compressed if the fact that the two texts are mutual translations is exploited. For example, a bitext can be seen as a sequence of biwords ---pairs of parallel words with a high probability of co-occurrence--- that can be used as an intermediate representation in the compression process. However, the simple biword approach described in the literature can only exploit one-to-one word alignments and cannot tackle the reordering of words. We therefore introduce a generalization of biwords which can describe multi-word expressions and reorderings. We also describe some methods for the binary compression of generalized biword sequences, and compare their performance when different schemes are applied to the extraction of the biword sequence. In addition, we show that this generalization of biwords allows for the implementation of an efficient algorithm to look on the compressed bitext for words or text segments in one of the texts and retrieve their counterpart translations in the other text ---an application usually referred to as translation spotting--- with only some minor modifications in the compression algorithm.
1401.5675
How science maps reveal knowledge transfer: new measurement for a historical case
cs.DL cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Modelling actors of science via science (overlay) maps has recently become a popular practice in Interdisciplinarity Research (IDR). The benefits of this toolkit have also been recognized for other areas of scientometrics, such as the study of science dynamics. In this paper we propose novel methods of measuring knowledge diffusion/integration based on previous applications of the overlay methodology. New indices called Mean Overlay Distance and Overlay Diversity Ratio, respectively, are being drawn from previous uses of the Stirling index as the main proxy for knowledge diversification. We demonstrate the added value of this proposal via a case study addressing the development of a rather complex discourse in biology, usually referred to as the Species Problem. The selected topic is known for a history connecting various research fields and traditions, being, therefore, both an ideal and challenging case for the study of knowledge diffusion.
1401.5676
A Novel Proof for the DoF Region of the MIMO Broadcast Channel with No CSIT
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, a new proof for the degrees of freedom (DoF) region of the K-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast channel (BC) with no channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) and perfect channel state information at the receivers (CSIR) is provided. Based on this proof, the capacity region of a certain class of MIMO BC with channel distribution information at the transmitter (CDIT) and perfect CSIR is derived. Finally, an outer bound for the DoF region of the MIMO interference channel (IC) with no CSIT is provided.
1401.5686
Increasing Server Availability for Overall System Security: A Preventive Maintenance Approach Based on Failure Prediction
cs.DC cs.NE
Server Availability (SA) is an important measure of overall systems security. Important security systems rely on the availability of their hosting servers to deliver critical security services. Many of these servers offer management interface through web mainly using an Apache server. This paper investigates the increase of Server Availability by the use of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) to predict software aging phenomenon. Several resource usage data is collected and analyzed on a typical long-running software system (a web server). A Multi-Layer Perceptron feed forward Artificial Neural Network was trained on an Apache web server data-set to predict future server resource exhaustion through uni-variate time series forecasting. The results were benchmarked against those obtained from non-parametric statistical techniques, parametric time series models and empirical modeling techniques reported in the literature.
1401.5688
Capacities and Capacity-Achieving Decoders for Various Fingerprinting Games
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
Combining an information-theoretic approach to fingerprinting with a more constructive, statistical approach, we derive new results on the fingerprinting capacities for various informed settings, as well as new log-likelihood decoders with provable code lengths that asymptotically match these capacities. The simple decoder built against the interleaving attack is further shown to achieve the simple capacity for unknown attacks, and is argued to be an improved version of the recently proposed decoder of Oosterwijk et al. With this new universal decoder, cut-offs on the bias distribution function can finally be dismissed. Besides the application of these results to fingerprinting, a direct consequence of our results to group testing is that (i) a simple decoder asymptotically requires a factor 1.44 more tests to find defectives than a joint decoder, and (ii) the simple decoder presented in this paper provably achieves this bound.
1401.5693
Sentence Compression as Tree Transduction
cs.CL
This paper presents a tree-to-tree transduction method for sentence compression. Our model is based on synchronous tree substitution grammar, a formalism that allows local distortion of the tree topology and can thus naturally capture structural mismatches. We describe an algorithm for decoding in this framework and show how the model can be trained discriminatively within a large margin framework. Experimental results on sentence compression bring significant improvements over a state-of-the-art model.
1401.5694
Cross-lingual Annotation Projection for Semantic Roles
cs.CL
This article considers the task of automatically inducing role-semantic annotations in the FrameNet paradigm for new languages. We propose a general framework that is based on annotation projection, phrased as a graph optimization problem. It is relatively inexpensive and has the potential to reduce the human effort involved in creating role-semantic resources. Within this framework, we present projection models that exploit lexical and syntactic information. We provide an experimental evaluation on an English-German parallel corpus which demonstrates the feasibility of inducing high-precision German semantic role annotation both for manually and automatically annotated English data.
1401.5695
Multilingual Part-of-Speech Tagging: Two Unsupervised Approaches
cs.CL
We demonstrate the effectiveness of multilingual learning for unsupervised part-of-speech tagging. The central assumption of our work is that by combining cues from multiple languages, the structure of each becomes more apparent. We consider two ways of applying this intuition to the problem of unsupervised part-of-speech tagging: a model that directly merges tag structures for a pair of languages into a single sequence and a second model which instead incorporates multilingual context using latent variables. Both approaches are formulated as hierarchical Bayesian models, using Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling techniques for inference. Our results demonstrate that by incorporating multilingual evidence we can achieve impressive performance gains across a range of scenarios. We also found that performance improves steadily as the number of available languages increases.
1401.5696
Unsupervised Methods for Determining Object and Relation Synonyms on the Web
cs.CL
The task of identifying synonymous relations and objects, or synonym resolution, is critical for high-quality information extraction. This paper investigates synonym resolution in the context of unsupervised information extraction, where neither hand-tagged training examples nor domain knowledge is available. The paper presents a scalable, fully-implemented system that runs in O(KN log N) time in the number of extractions, N, and the maximum number of synonyms per word, K. The system, called Resolver, introduces a probabilistic relational model for predicting whether two strings are co-referential based on the similarity of the assertions containing them. On a set of two million assertions extracted from the Web, Resolver resolves objects with 78% precision and 68% recall, and resolves relations with 90% precision and 35% recall. Several variations of resolvers probabilistic model are explored, and experiments demonstrate that under appropriate conditions these variations can improve F1 by 5%. An extension to the basic Resolver system allows it to handle polysemous names with 97% precision and 95% recall on a data set from the TREC corpus.
1401.5697
Wikipedia-based Semantic Interpretation for Natural Language Processing
cs.CL
Adequate representation of natural language semantics requires access to vast amounts of common sense and domain-specific world knowledge. Prior work in the field was based on purely statistical techniques that did not make use of background knowledge, on limited lexicographic knowledge bases such as WordNet, or on huge manual efforts such as the CYC project. Here we propose a novel method, called Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA), for fine-grained semantic interpretation of unrestricted natural language texts. Our method represents meaning in a high-dimensional space of concepts derived from Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in existence. We explicitly represent the meaning of any text in terms of Wikipedia-based concepts. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on text categorization and on computing the degree of semantic relatedness between fragments of natural language text. Using ESA results in significant improvements over the previous state of the art in both tasks. Importantly, due to the use of natural concepts, the ESA model is easy to explain to human users.
1401.5698
Identification of Pleonastic It Using the Web
cs.CL
In a significant minority of cases, certain pronouns, especially the pronoun it, can be used without referring to any specific entity. This phenomenon of pleonastic pronoun usage poses serious problems for systems aiming at even a shallow understanding of natural language texts. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to identify such uses of it: the extrapositional cases are identified using a series of queries against the web, and the cleft cases are identified using a simple set of syntactic rules. The system is evaluated with four sets of news articles containing 679 extrapositional cases as well as 78 cleft constructs. The identification results are comparable to those obtained by human efforts.
1401.5699
Text Relatedness Based on a Word Thesaurus
cs.CL
The computation of relatedness between two fragments of text in an automated manner requires taking into account a wide range of factors pertaining to the meaning the two fragments convey, and the pairwise relations between their words. Without doubt, a measure of relatedness between text segments must take into account both the lexical and the semantic relatedness between words. Such a measure that captures well both aspects of text relatedness may help in many tasks, such as text retrieval, classification and clustering. In this paper we present a new approach for measuring the semantic relatedness between words based on their implicit semantic links. The approach exploits only a word thesaurus in order to devise implicit semantic links between words. Based on this approach, we introduce Omiotis, a new measure of semantic relatedness between texts which capitalizes on the word-to-word semantic relatedness measure (SR) and extends it to measure the relatedness between texts. We gradually validate our method: we first evaluate the performance of the semantic relatedness measure between individual words, covering word-to-word similarity and relatedness, synonym identification and word analogy; then, we proceed with evaluating the performance of our method in measuring text-to-text semantic relatedness in two tasks, namely sentence-to-sentence similarity and paraphrase recognition. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed method outperforms every lexicon-based method of semantic relatedness in the selected tasks and the used data sets, and competes well against corpus-based and hybrid approaches.
1401.5700
Inferring Shallow-Transfer Machine Translation Rules from Small Parallel Corpora
cs.CL
This paper describes a method for the automatic inference of structural transfer rules to be used in a shallow-transfer machine translation (MT) system from small parallel corpora. The structural transfer rules are based on alignment templates, like those used in statistical MT. Alignment templates are extracted from sentence-aligned parallel corpora and extended with a set of restrictions which are derived from the bilingual dictionary of the MT system and control their application as transfer rules. The experiments conducted using three different language pairs in the free/open-source MT platform Apertium show that translation quality is improved as compared to word-for-word translation (when no transfer rules are used), and that the resulting translation quality is close to that obtained using hand-coded transfer rules. The method we present is entirely unsupervised and benefits from information in the rest of modules of the MT system in which the inferred rules are applied.
1401.5703
Low-Complexity Polynomial Channel Estimation in Large-Scale MIMO with Arbitrary Statistics
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers pilot-based channel estimation in large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems, also known as massive MIMO, where there are hundreds of antennas at one side of the link. Motivated by the fact that computational complexity is one of the main challenges in such systems, a set of low-complexity Bayesian channel estimators, coined Polynomial ExpAnsion CHannel (PEACH) estimators, are introduced for arbitrary channel and interference statistics. While the conventional minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimator has cubic complexity in the dimension of the covariance matrices, due to an inversion operation, our proposed estimators significantly reduce this to square complexity by approximating the inverse by a L-degree matrix polynomial. The coefficients of the polynomial are optimized to minimize the mean square error (MSE) of the estimate. We show numerically that near-optimal MSEs are achieved with low polynomial degrees. We also derive the exact computational complexity of the proposed estimators, in terms of the floating-point operations (FLOPs), by which we prove that the proposed estimators outperform the conventional estimators in large-scale MIMO systems of practical dimensions while providing a reasonable MSEs. Moreover, we show that L needs not scale with the system dimensions to maintain a certain normalized MSE. By analyzing different interference scenarios, we observe that the relative MSE loss of using the low-complexity PEACH estimators is smaller in realistic scenarios with pilot contamination. On the other hand, PEACH estimators are not well suited for noise-limited scenarios with high pilot power; therefore, we also introduce the low-complexity diagonalized estimator that performs well in this regime. Finally, we ...
1401.5710
Who is Dating Whom: Characterizing User Behaviors of a Large Online Dating Site
cs.SI cs.SY physics.soc-ph
Online dating sites have become popular platforms for people to look for potential romantic partners. It is important to understand users' dating preferences in order to make better recommendations on potential dates. The message sending and replying actions of a user are strong indicators for what he/she is looking for in a potential date and reflect the user's actual dating preferences. We study how users' online dating behaviors correlate with various user attributes using a large real-world dateset from a major online dating site in China. Many of our results on user messaging behavior align with notions in social and evolutionary psychology: males tend to look for younger females while females put more emphasis on the socioeconomic status (e.g., income, education level) of a potential date. In addition, we observe that the geographic distance between two users and the photo count of users play an important role in their dating behaviors. Our results show that it is important to differentiate between users' true preferences and random selection. Some user behaviors in choosing attributes in a potential date may largely be a result of random selection. We also find that both males and females are more likely to reply to users whose attributes come closest to the stated preferences of the receivers, and there is significant discrepancy between a user's stated dating preference and his/her actual online dating behavior. These results can provide valuable guidelines to the design of a recommendation engine for potential dates.
1401.5726
Data Mining Cultural Aspects of Social Media Marketing
cs.SI cs.SY physics.soc-ph
For marketing to function in a globalized world it must respect a diverse set of local cultures. With marketing efforts extending to social media platforms, the crossing of cultural boundaries can happen in an instant. In this paper we examine how culture influences the popularity of marketing messages in social media platforms. Text mining, automated translation and sentiment analysis contribute largely to our research. From our analysis of 400 posts on the localized Google+ pages of German car brands in Germany and the US, we conclude that posting time and emotions are important predictors for reshare counts.
1401.5731
Smart Deferral of Messages for Privacy Protection in Online Social Networks
cs.SI
Despite the several advantages commonly attributed to social networks such as easiness and immediacy to communicate with acquaintances and friends, significant privacy threats provoked by unexperienced or even irresponsible users recklessly publishing sensitive material are also noticeable. Yet, a different, but equally hazardous privacy risk might arise from social networks profiling the online activity of their users based on the timestamp of the interactions between the former and the latter. In order to thwart this last type of commonly neglected attacks, this paper presents a novel, smart deferral mechanism for messages in online social networks. Such solution suggests intelligently delaying certain messages posted by end users in social networks in a way that the observed online-activity profile generated by the attacker does not reveal any time-based sensitive information. Conducted experiments as well as a proposed architecture implementing this approach demonstrate the suitability and feasibility of our mechanism.
1401.5741
Extracting tag hierarchies
cs.IR cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Tagging items with descriptive annotations or keywords is a very natural way to compress and highlight information about the properties of the given entity. Over the years several methods have been proposed for extracting a hierarchy between the tags for systems with a "flat", egalitarian organization of the tags, which is very common when the tags correspond to free words given by numerous independent people. Here we present a complete framework for automated tag hierarchy extraction based on tag occurrence statistics. Along with proposing new algorithms, we are also introducing different quality measures enabling the detailed comparison of competing approaches from different aspects. Furthermore, we set up a synthetic, computer generated benchmark providing a versatile tool for testing, with a couple of tunable parameters capable of generating a wide range of test beds. Beside the computer generated input we also use real data in our studies, including a biological example with a pre-defined hierarchy between the tags. The encouraging similarity between the pre-defined and reconstructed hierarchy, as well as the seemingly meaningful hierarchies obtained for other real systems indicate that tag hierarchy extraction is a very promising direction for further research with a great potential for practical applications.
1401.5742
Diffusion-Based Adaptive Distributed Detection: Steady-State Performance in the Slow Adaptation Regime
cs.IT math.IT
This work examines the close interplay between cooperation and adaptation for distributed detection schemes over fully decentralized networks. The combined attributes of cooperation and adaptation are necessary to enable networks of detectors to continually learn from streaming data and to continually track drifts in the state of nature when deciding in favor of one hypothesis or another. The results in the paper establish a fundamental scaling law for the steady-state probabilities of miss-detection and false-alarm in the slow adaptation regime, when the agents interact with each other according to distributed strategies that employ small constant step-sizes. The latter are critical to enable continuous adaptation and learning. The work establishes three key results. First, it is shown that the output of the collaborative process at each agent has a steady-state distribution. Second, it is shown that this distribution is asymptotically Gaussian in the slow adaptation regime of small step-sizes. And third, by carrying out a detailed large deviations analysis, closed-form expressions are derived for the decaying rates of the false-alarm and miss-detection probabilities. Interesting insights are gained. In particular, it is verified that as the step-size $\mu$ decreases, the error probabilities are driven to zero exponentially fast as functions of $1/\mu$, and that the error exponents increase linearly in the number of agents. It is also verified that the scaling laws governing errors of detection and errors of estimation over networks behave very differently, with the former having an exponential decay proportional to $1/\mu$, while the latter scales linearly with decay proportional to $\mu$. It is shown that the cooperative strategy allows each agent to reach the same detection performance, in terms of detection error exponents, of a centralized stochastic-gradient solution.
1401.5743
The Impact of Social Segregation on Human Mobility in Developing and Urbanized Regions
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
This study leverages mobile phone data to analyze human mobility patterns in developing countries, especially in comparison to more industrialized countries. Developing regions, such as the Ivory Coast, are marked by a number of factors that may influence mobility, such as less infrastructural coverage and maturity, less economic resources and stability, and in some cases, more cultural and language-based diversity. By comparing mobile phone data collected from the Ivory Coast to similar data collected in Portugal, we are able to highlight both qualitative and quantitative differences in mobility patterns - such as differences in likelihood to travel, as well as in the time required to travel - that are relevant to consideration on policy, infrastructure, and economic development. Our study illustrates how cultural and linguistic diversity in developing regions (such as Ivory Coast) can present challenges to mobility models that perform well and were conceptualized in less culturally diverse regions. Finally, we address these challenges by proposing novel techniques to assess the strength of borders in a regional partitioning scheme and to quantify the impact of border strength on mobility model accuracy.
1401.5753
Worst-Case Scenarios for Greedy, Centrality-Based Network Protection Strategies
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
The task of allocating preventative resources to a computer network in order to protect against the spread of viruses is addressed. Virus spreading dynamics are described by a linearized SIS model and protection is framed by an optimization problem which maximizes the rate at which a virus in the network is contained given finite resources. One approach to problems of this type involve greedy heuristics which allocate all resources to the nodes with large centrality measures. We address the worst case performance of such greedy algorithms be constructing networks for which these greedy allocations are arbitrarily inefficient. An example application is presented in which such a worst case network might arise naturally and our results are verified numerically by leveraging recent results which allow the exact optimal solution to be computed via geometric programming.
1401.5767
A refined analysis of the Poisson channel in the high-photon-efficiency regime
cs.IT math.IT
We study the discrete-time Poisson channel under the constraint that its average input power (in photons per channel use) must not exceed some constant E. We consider the wideband, high-photon-efficiency extreme where E approaches zero, and where the channel's "dark current" approaches zero proportionally with E. Improving over a previously obtained first-order capacity approximation, we derive a refined approximation, which includes the exact characterization of the second-order term, as well as an asymptotic characterization of the third-order term with respect to the dark current. We also show that pulse-position modulation is nearly optimal in this regime.
1401.5789
Reaserchnig the Development of the Electrical Power System Using Systemically Evolutionary Algorithm
cs.NE cs.SY
The paper contains the concept and the results of research concerning the evolutionary algorithm, identified based on the systems control theory, which was called the Systemically of Evolutionary Algorithm (SAE). Special attention was paid to two elements of evolutionary algorithms, which have not been fully solved yet, i.e. to the methods used to create the initial population and the method of creating the robustness (fitness) function. Other elements of the SEA algorithm, i.a. cross-over, mutation, selection, etc. were also defined from a systemic point of view. Computational experiments were conducted using a selected subsystem of the Polish Electrical Power System and three programming languages: Java, C++ and Matlab. Selected comparative results for the SAE algorithm in different implementations were also presented.
1401.5791
Advanced Signal Processing Techniqes to Study Normal and Epileptic EEG
cs.CE
EEG monitoring has an important milestone provide valuable information of those candidates who suffer from epilepsy.In this paper human normal and epileptic Electroencephalogram signals are analyzed with popular and efficient signal processing techniques like Fourier and Wavelet transform. The delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma sub bands of EEG are obtained and studied for detection of seizure and epilepsy. The extracted feature is then applied to ANN for classification of the EEG signals.
1401.5808
Reducing the Computational Cost in Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithms by Filtering Worthless Individuals
cs.NE
The large number of exact fitness function evaluations makes evolutionary algorithms to have computational cost. In some real-world problems, reducing number of these evaluations is much more valuable even by increasing computational complexity and spending more time. To fulfill this target, we introduce an effective factor, in spite of applied factor in Adaptive Fuzzy Fitness Granulation with Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II, to filter out worthless individuals more precisely. Our proposed approach is compared with respect to Adaptive Fuzzy Fitness Granulation with Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II, using the Hyper volume and the Inverted Generational Distance performance measures. The proposed method is applied to 1 traditional and 1 state-of-the-art benchmarks with considering 3 different dimensions. From an average performance view, the results indicate that although decreasing the number of fitness evaluations leads to have performance reduction but it is not tangible compared to what we gain.
1401.5813
GGP with Advanced Reasoning and Board Knowledge Discovery
cs.AI
Quality of General Game Playing (GGP) matches suffers from slow state-switching and weak knowledge modules. Instantiation and Propositional Networks offer great performance gains over Prolog-based reasoning, but do not scale well. In this publication mGDL, a variant of GDL stripped of function constants, has been defined as a basis for simple reasoning machines. mGDL allows to easily map rules to C++ functions. 253 out of 270 tested GDL rule sheets conformed to mGDL without any modifications; the rest required minor changes. A revised (m)GDL to C++ translation scheme has been reevaluated; it brought gains ranging from 28% to 7300% over YAP Prolog, managing to compile even demanding rule sheets under few seconds. For strengthening game knowledge, spatial features inspired by similar successful techniques from computer Go have been proposed. For they required an Euclidean metric, a small board extension to GDL has been defined through a set of ground atomic sentences. An SGA-based genetic algorithm has been designed for tweaking game parameters and conducting self-plays, so the features could be mined from meaningful game records. The approach has been tested on a small cluster, giving performance gains up to 20% more wins against the baseline UCT player. Implementations of proposed ideas constitutes the core of GGP Spatium - a small C++/Python GGP framework, created for developing compact GGP Players and problem solvers.
1401.5814
On Randomly Projected Hierarchical Clustering with Guarantees
cs.IR cs.DS
Hierarchical clustering (HC) algorithms are generally limited to small data instances due to their runtime costs. Here we mitigate this shortcoming and explore fast HC algorithms based on random projections for single (SLC) and average (ALC) linkage clustering as well as for the minimum spanning tree problem (MST). We present a thorough adaptive analysis of our algorithms that improve prior work from $O(N^2)$ by up to a factor of $N/(\log N)^2$ for a dataset of $N$ points in Euclidean space. The algorithms maintain, with arbitrary high probability, the outcome of hierarchical clustering as well as the worst-case running-time guarantees. We also present parameter-free instances of our algorithms.
1401.5828
Applications of Information Nonanticipative Rate Distortion Function
cs.IT math.IT math.OC math.PR
The objective of this paper is to further investigate various applications of information Nonanticipative Rate Distortion Function (NRDF) by discussing two working examples, the Binary Symmetric Markov Source with parameter $p$ (BSMS($p$)) with Hamming distance distortion, and the multidimensional partially observed Gaussian-Markov source. For the BSMS($p$), we give the solution to the NRDF, and we use it to compute the Rate Loss (RL) of causal codes with respect to noncausal codes. For the multidimensional Gaussian-Markov source, we give the solution to the NRDF, we show its operational meaning via joint source-channel matching over a vector of parallel Gaussian channels, and we compute the RL of causal and zero-delay codes with respect to noncausal codes.
1401.5836
The Strength of Friendship Ties in Proximity Sensor Data
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Understanding how people interact and socialize is important in many contexts from disease control to urban planning. Datasets that capture this specific aspect of human life have increased in size and availability over the last few years. We have yet to understand, however, to what extent such electronic datasets may serve as a valid proxy for real life social interactions. For an observational dataset, gathered using mobile phones, we analyze the problem of identifying transient and non-important links, as well as how to highlight important social interactions. Applying the Bluetooth signal strength parameter to distinguish between observations, we demonstrate that weak links, compared to strong links, have a lower probability of being observed at later times, while such links--on average--also have lower link-weights and probability of sharing an online friendship. Further, the role of link-strength is investigated in relation to social network properties.
1401.5848
Algorithms and Limits for Compact Plan Representations
cs.AI
Compact representations of objects is a common concept in computer science. Automated planning can be viewed as a case of this concept: a planning instance is a compact implicit representation of a graph and the problem is to find a path (a plan) in this graph. While the graphs themselves are represented compactly as planning instances, the paths are usually represented explicitly as sequences of actions. Some cases are known where the plans always have compact representations, for example, using macros. We show that these results do not extend to the general case, by proving a number of bounds for compact representations of plans under various criteria, like efficient sequential or random access of actions. In addition to this, we show that our results have consequences for what can be gained from reformulating planning into some other problem. As a contrast to this we also prove a number of positive results, demonstrating restricted cases where plans do have useful compact representations, as well as proving that macro plans have favourable access properties. Our results are finally discussed in relation to other relevant contexts.
1401.5849
Interactions between Knowledge and Time in a First-Order Logic for Multi-Agent Systems: Completeness Results
cs.MA cs.AI cs.LO
We investigate a class of first-order temporal-epistemic logics for reasoning about multi-agent systems. We encode typical properties of systems including perfect recall, synchronicity, no learning, and having a unique initial state in terms of variants of quantified interpreted systems, a first-order extension of interpreted systems. We identify several monodic fragments of first-order temporal-epistemic logic and show their completeness with respect to their corresponding classes of quantified interpreted systems.
1401.5850
The Logical Difference for the Lightweight Description Logic EL
cs.LO cs.AI
We study a logic-based approach to versioning of ontologies. Under this view, ontologies provide answers to queries about some vocabulary of interest. The difference between two versions of an ontology is given by the set of queries that receive different answers. We investigate this approach for terminologies given in the description logic EL extended with role inclusions and domain and range restrictions for three distinct types of queries: subsumption, instance, and conjunctive queries. In all three cases, we present polynomial-time algorithms that decide whether two terminologies give the same answers to queries over a given vocabulary and compute a succinct representation of the difference if it is non- empty. We present an implementation, CEX2, of the developed algorithms for subsumption and instance queries and apply it to distinct versions of Snomed CT and the NCI ontology.
1401.5851
A Market-Inspired Approach for Intersection Management in Urban Road Traffic Networks
cs.GT cs.MA
Traffic congestion in urban road networks is a costly problem that affects all major cities in developed countries. To tackle this problem, it is possible (i) to act on the supply side, increasing the number of roads or lanes in a network, (ii) to reduce the demand, restricting the access to urban areas at specific hours or to specific vehicles, or (iii) to improve the efficiency of the existing network, by means of a widespread use of so-called Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). In line with the recent advances in smart transportation management infrastructures, ITS has turned out to be a promising field of application for artificial intelligence techniques. In particular, multiagent systems seem to be the ideal candidates for the design and implementation of ITS. In fact, drivers can be naturally modelled as autonomous agents that interact with the transportation management infrastructure, thereby generating a large-scale, open, agent-based system. To regulate such a system and maintain a smooth and efficient flow of traffic, decentralised mechanisms for the management of the transportation infrastructure are needed. In this article we propose a distributed, market-inspired, mechanism for the management of a future urban road network, where intelligent autonomous vehicles, operated by software agents on behalf of their human owners, interact with the infrastructure in order to travel safely and efficiently through the road network. Building on the reservation-based intersection control model proposed by Dresner and Stone, we consider two different scenarios: one with a single intersection and one with a network of intersections. In the former, we analyse the performance of a novel policy based on combinatorial auctions for the allocation of reservations. In the latter, we analyse the impact that a traffic assignment strategy inspired by competitive markets has on the drivers route choices. Finally we propose an adaptive management mechanism that integrates the auction-based traffic control policy with the competitive traffic assignment strategy.
1401.5852
Algorithms for Generating Ordered Solutions for Explicit AND/OR Structures
cs.AI cs.DS
We present algorithms for generating alternative solutions for explicit acyclic AND/OR structures in non-decreasing order of cost. The proposed algorithms use a best first search technique and report the solutions using an implicit representation ordered by cost. In this paper, we present two versions of the search algorithm -- (a) an initial version of the best first search algorithm, ASG, which may present one solution more than once while generating the ordered solutions, and (b) another version, LASG, which avoids the construction of the duplicate solutions. The actual solutions can be reconstructed quickly from the implicit compact representation used. We have applied the methods on a few test domains, some of them are synthetic while the others are based on well known problems including the search space of the 5-peg Tower of Hanoi problem, the matrix-chain multiplication problem and the problem of finding secondary structure of RNA. Experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed algorithms over the existing approach. Our proposed algorithms have potential use in various domains ranging from knowledge based frameworks to service composition, where the AND/OR structure is widely used for representing problems.
1401.5853
Reasoning over Ontologies with Hidden Content: The Import-by-Query Approach
cs.AI cs.LO
There is currently a growing interest in techniques for hiding parts of the signature of an ontology Kh that is being reused by another ontology Kv. Towards this goal, in this paper we propose the import-by-query framework, which makes the content of Kh accessible through a limited query interface. If Kv reuses the symbols from Kh in a certain restricted way, one can reason over Kv U Kh by accessing only Kv and the query interface. We map out the landscape of the import-by-query problem. In particular, we outline the limitations of our framework and prove that certain restrictions on the expressivity of Kh and the way in which Kv reuses symbols from Kh are strictly necessary to enable reasoning in our setting. We also identify cases in which reasoning is possible and we present suitable import-by-query reasoning algorithms.
1401.5854
Avoiding and Escaping Depressions in Real-Time Heuristic Search
cs.AI
Heuristics used for solving hard real-time search problems have regions with depressions. Such regions are bounded areas of the search space in which the heuristic function is inaccurate compared to the actual cost to reach a solution. Early real-time search algorithms, like LRTA*, easily become trapped in those regions since the heuristic values of their states may need to be updated multiple times, which results in costly solutions. State-of-the-art real-time search algorithms, like LSS-LRTA* or LRTA*(k), improve LRTA*s mechanism to update the heuristic, resulting in improved performance. Those algorithms, however, do not guide search towards avoiding depressed regions. This paper presents depression avoidance, a simple real-time search principle to guide search towards avoiding states that have been marked as part of a heuristic depression. We propose two ways in which depression avoidance can be implemented: mark-and-avoid and move-to-border. We implement these strategies on top of LSS-LRTA* and RTAA*, producing 4 new real-time heuristic search algorithms: aLSS-LRTA*, daLSS-LRTA*, aRTAA*, and daRTAA*. When the objective is to find a single solution by running the real-time search algorithm once, we show that daLSS-LRTA* and daRTAA* outperform their predecessors sometimes by one order of magnitude. Of the four new algorithms, daRTAA* produces the best solutions given a fixed deadline on the average time allowed per planning episode. We prove all our algorithms have good theoretical properties: in finite search spaces, they find a solution if one exists, and converge to an optimal after a number of trials.
1401.5855
Tractable Triangles and Cross-Free Convexity in Discrete Optimisation
cs.CC cs.AI
The minimisation problem of a sum of unary and pairwise functions of discrete variables is a general NP-hard problem with wide applications such as computing MAP configurations in Markov Random Fields (MRF), minimising Gibbs energy, or solving binary Valued Constraint Satisfaction Problems (VCSPs). We study the computational complexity of classes of discrete optimisation problems given by allowing only certain types of costs in every triangle of variable-value assignments to three distinct variables. We show that for several computational problems, the only non- trivial tractable classes are the well known maximum matching problem and the recently discovered joint-winner property. Our results, apart from giving complete classifications in the studied cases, provide guidance in the search for hybrid tractable classes; that is, classes of problems that are not captured by restrictions on the functions (such as submodularity) or the structure of the problem graph (such as bounded treewidth). Furthermore, we introduce a class of problems with convex cardinality functions on cross-free sets of assignments. We prove that while imposing only one of the two conditions renders the problem NP-hard, the conjunction of the two gives rise to a novel tractable class satisfying the cross-free convexity property, which generalises the joint-winner property to problems of unbounded arity.
1401.5856
Narrative Planning: Compilations to Classical Planning
cs.AI
A model of story generation recently proposed by Riedl and Young casts it as planning, with the additional condition that story characters behave intentionally. This means that characters have perceivable motivation for the actions they take. I show that this condition can be compiled away (in more ways than one) to produce a classical planning problem that can be solved by an off-the-shelf classical planner, more efficiently than by Riedl and Youngs specialised planner.
1401.5857
COLIN: Planning with Continuous Linear Numeric Change
cs.AI
In this paper we describe COLIN, a forward-chaining heuristic search planner, capable of reasoning with COntinuous LINear numeric change, in addition to the full temporal semantics of PDDL. Through this work we make two advances to the state-of-the-art in terms of expressive reasoning capabilities of planners: the handling of continuous linear change, and the handling of duration-dependent effects in combination with duration inequalities, both of which require tightly coupled temporal and numeric reasoning during planning. COLIN combines FF-style forward chaining search, with the use of a Linear Program (LP) to check the consistency of the interacting temporal and numeric constraints at each state. The LP is used to compute bounds on the values of variables in each state, reducing the range of actions that need to be considered for application. In addition, we develop an extension of the Temporal Relaxed Planning Graph heuristic of CRIKEY3, to support reasoning directly with continuous change. We extend the range of task variables considered to be suitable candidates for specifying the gradient of the continuous numeric change effected by an action. Finally, we explore the potential for employing mixed integer programming as a tool for optimising the timestamps of the actions in the plan, once a solution has been found. To support this, we further contribute a selection of extended benchmark domains that include continuous numeric effects. We present results for COLIN that demonstrate its scalability on a range of benchmarks, and compare to existing state-of-the-art planners.
1401.5858
SAP Speaks PDDL: Exploiting a Software-Engineering Model for Planning in Business Process Management
cs.AI cs.SE
Planning is concerned with the automated solution of action sequencing problems described in declarative languages giving the action preconditions and effects. One important application area for such technology is the creation of new processes in Business Process Management (BPM), which is essential in an ever more dynamic business environment. A major obstacle for the application of Planning in this area lies in the modeling. Obtaining a suitable model to plan with -- ideally a description in PDDL, the most commonly used planning language -- is often prohibitively complicated and/or costly. Our core observation in this work is that this problem can be ameliorated by leveraging synergies with model-based software development. Our application at SAP, one of the leading vendors of enterprise software, demonstrates that even one-to-one model re-use is possible. The model in question is called Status and Action Management (SAM). It describes the behavior of Business Objects (BO), i.e., large-scale data structures, at a level of abstraction corresponding to the language of business experts. SAM covers more than 400 kinds of BOs, each of which is described in terms of a set of status variables and how their values are required for, and affected by, processing steps (actions) that are atomic from a business perspective. SAM was developed by SAP as part of a major model-based software engineering effort. We show herein that one can use this same model for planning, thus obtaining a BPM planning application that incurs no modeling overhead at all. We compile SAM into a variant of PDDL, and adapt an off-the-shelf planner to solve this kind of problem. Thanks to the resulting technology, business experts may create new processes simply by specifying the desired behavior in terms of status variable value changes: effectively, by describing the process in their own language.
1401.5859
Plan-based Policies for Efficient Multiple Battery Load Management
cs.AI
Efficient use of multiple batteries is a practical problem with wide and growing application. The problem can be cast as a planning problem under uncertainty. We describe the approach we have adopted to modelling and solving this problem, seen as a Markov Decision Problem, building effective policies for battery switching in the face of stochastic load profiles. Our solution exploits and adapts several existing techniques: planning for deterministic mixed discrete-continuous problems and Monte Carlo sampling for policy learning. The paper describes the development of planning techniques to allow solution of the non-linear continuous dynamic models capturing the battery behaviours. This approach depends on carefully handled discretisation of the temporal dimension. The construction of policies is performed using a classification approach and this idea offers opportunities for wider exploitation in other problems. The approach and its generality are described in the paper. Application of the approach leads to construction of policies that, in simulation, significantly outperform those that are currently in use and the best published solutions to the battery management problem. We achieve solutions that achieve more than 99% efficiency in simulation compared with the theoretical limit and do so with far fewer battery switches than existing policies. Behaviour of physical batteries does not exactly match the simulated models for many reasons, so to confirm that our theoretical results can lead to real measured improvements in performance we also conduct and report experiments using a physical test system. These results demonstrate that we can obtain 5%-15% improvement in lifetimes in the case of a two battery system.
1401.5860
A New Look at BDDs for Pseudo-Boolean Constraints
cs.AI
Pseudo-Boolean constraints are omnipresent in practical applications, and thus a significant effort has been devoted to the development of good SAT encoding techniques for them. Some of these encodings first construct a Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) for the constraint, and then encode the BDD into a propositional formula. These BDD-based approaches have some important advantages, such as not being dependent on the size of the coefficients, or being able to share the same BDD for representing many constraints. We first focus on the size of the resulting BDDs, which was considered to be an open problem in our research community. We report on previous work where it was proved that there are Pseudo-Boolean constraints for which no polynomial BDD exists. We also give an alternative and simpler proof assuming that NP is different from Co-NP. More interestingly, here we also show how to overcome the possible exponential blowup of BDDs by phcoefficient decomposition. This allows us to give the first polynomial generalized arc-consistent ROBDD-based encoding for Pseudo-Boolean constraints. Finally, we focus on practical issues: we show how to efficiently construct such ROBDDs, how to encode them into SAT with only 2 clauses per node, and present experimental results that confirm that our approach is competitive with other encodings and state-of-the-art Pseudo-Boolean solvers.
1401.5861
Online Speedup Learning for Optimal Planning
cs.AI
Domain-independent planning is one of the foundational areas in the field of Artificial Intelligence. A description of a planning task consists of an initial world state, a goal, and a set of actions for modifying the world state. The objective is to find a sequence of actions, that is, a plan, that transforms the initial world state into a goal state. In optimal planning, we are interested in finding not just a plan, but one of the cheapest plans. A prominent approach to optimal planning these days is heuristic state-space search, guided by admissible heuristic functions. Numerous admissible heuristics have been developed, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, and it is well known that there is no single "best heuristic for optimal planning in general. Thus, which heuristic to choose for a given planning task is a difficult question. This difficulty can be avoided by combining several heuristics, but that requires computing numerous heuristic estimates at each state, and the tradeoff between the time spent doing so and the time saved by the combined advantages of the different heuristics might be high. We present a novel method that reduces the cost of combining admissible heuristics for optimal planning, while maintaining its benefits. Using an idealized search space model, we formulate a decision rule for choosing the best heuristic to compute at each state. We then present an active online learning approach for learning a classifier with that decision rule as the target concept, and employ the learned classifier to decide which heuristic to compute at each state. We evaluate this technique empirically, and show that it substantially outperforms the standard method for combining several heuristics via their pointwise maximum.
1401.5863
Complexity of Judgment Aggregation
cs.MA
We analyse the computational complexity of three problems in judgment aggregation: (1) computing a collective judgment from a profile of individual judgments (the winner determination problem); (2) deciding whether a given agent can influence the outcome of a judgment aggregation procedure in her favour by reporting insincere judgments (the strategic manipulation problem); and (3) deciding whether a given judgment aggregation scenario is guaranteed to result in a logically consistent outcome, independently from what the judgments supplied by the individuals are (the problem of the safety of the agenda). We provide results both for specific aggregation procedures (the quota rules, the premise-based procedure, and a distance-based procedure) and for classes of aggregation procedures characterised in terms of fundamental axioms.
1401.5869
An Enhanced Branch-and-bound Algorithm for the Talent Scheduling Problem
cs.AI
The talent scheduling problem is a simplified version of the real-world film shooting problem, which aims to determine a shooting sequence so as to minimize the total cost of the actors involved. In this article, we first formulate the problem as an integer linear programming model. Next, we devise a branch-and-bound algorithm to solve the problem. The branch-and-bound algorithm is enhanced by several accelerating techniques, including preprocessing, dominance rules and caching search states. Extensive experiments over two sets of benchmark instances suggest that our algorithm is superior to the current best exact algorithm. Finally, the impacts of different parameter settings are disclosed by some additional experiments.
1401.5871
Serefind: A Social Networking Website for Classifieds
cs.SI cs.CY
This paper presents the design and implementation of a social networking website for classifieds, called Serefind. We designed search interfaces with focus on security, privacy, usability, design, ranking, and communications. We deployed this site at the Johns Hopkins University, and the results show it can be used as a self-sustaining classifieds site for public or private communities.
1401.5874
Distribution properties of compressing sequences derived from primitive sequences modulo odd prime powers
cs.IT math.IT
Let $\underline{a}$ and $\underline{b}$ be primitive sequences over $\mathbb{Z}/(p^e)$ with odd prime $p$ and $e\ge 2$. For certain compressing maps, we consider the distribution properties of compressing sequences of $\underline{a}$ and $\underline{b}$, and prove that $\underline{a}=\underline{b}$ if the compressing sequences are equal at the times $t$ such that $\alpha(t)=k$, where $\underline{\alpha}$ is a sequence related to $\underline{a}$. We also discuss the $s$-uniform distribution property of compressing sequences. For some compressing maps, we have that there exist different primitive sequences such that the compressing sequences are $s$-uniform. We also discuss that compressing sequences can be $s$-uniform for how many elements $s$.
1401.5888
Efficiently Detecting Overlapping Communities through Seeding and Semi-Supervised Learning
cs.SI cs.LG physics.soc-ph
Seeding then expanding is a commonly used scheme to discover overlapping communities in a network. Most seeding methods are either too complex to scale to large networks or too simple to select high-quality seeds, and the non-principled functions used by most expanding methods lead to poor performance when applied to diverse networks. This paper proposes a new method that transforms a network into a corpus where each edge is treated as a document, and all nodes of the network are treated as terms of the corpus. An effective seeding method is also proposed that selects seeds as a training set, then a principled expanding method based on semi-supervised learning is applied to classify edges. We compare our new algorithm with four other community detection algorithms on a wide range of synthetic and empirical networks. Experimental results show that the new algorithm can significantly improve clustering performance in most cases. Furthermore, the time complexity of the new algorithm is linear to the number of edges, and this low complexity makes the new algorithm scalable to large networks.
1401.5891
Hierarchical pixel clustering for image segmentation
cs.CV
In the paper a piecewise constant image approximations of sequential number of pixel clusters or segments are treated. A majorizing of optimal approximation sequence by hierarchical sequence of image approximations is studied. Transition from pixel clustering to image segmentation by reducing of segment numbers in clusters is provided. Algorithms are proved by elementary formulas.
1401.5896
Secret Sharing Schemes Based on Min-Entropies
cs.CR cs.IT math.IT
Fundamental results on secret sharing schemes (SSSs) are discussed in the setting where security and share size are measured by (conditional) min-entropies. We first formalize a unified framework of SSSs based on (conditional) R\'enyi entropies, which includes SSSs based on Shannon and min entropies etc. as special cases. By deriving the lower bound of share sizes in terms of R\'enyi entropies based on the technique introduced by Iwamoto-Shikata, we obtain the lower bounds of share sizes measured by min entropies as well as by Shannon entropies in a unified manner. As the main contributions of this paper, we show two existential results of non-perfect SSSs based on min-entropies under several important settings. We first show that there exists a non-perfect SSS for arbitrary binary secret information and arbitrary monotone access structure. In addition, for every integers $k$ and $n$ ($k \le n$), we prove that the ideal non-perfect $(k,n)$-threshold scheme exists even if the distribution of the secret is not uniformly distributed.
1401.5897
A Generalization of Threshold Saturation: Application to Spatially Coupled BICM-ID
cs.IT math.IT
Spatial coupling was proved to improve the belief-propagation (BP) performance up to the maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) performance. This paper addresses an extended class of spatially coupled (SC) systems. A potential function is derived for characterizing a lower bound on the BP performance of the extended SC systems, and shown to be different from the potential for the conventional SC systems. This may imply that the BP performance for the extended SC systems does not coincide with the MAP performance for the corresponding uncoupled system. SC bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) is also investigated as an application of the extended SC systems.
1401.5899
Kernel Least Mean Square with Adaptive Kernel Size
stat.ML cs.LG
Kernel adaptive filters (KAF) are a class of powerful nonlinear filters developed in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). The Gaussian kernel is usually the default kernel in KAF algorithms, but selecting the proper kernel size (bandwidth) is still an open important issue especially for learning with small sample sizes. In previous research, the kernel size was set manually or estimated in advance by Silvermans rule based on the sample distribution. This study aims to develop an online technique for optimizing the kernel size of the kernel least mean square (KLMS) algorithm. A sequential optimization strategy is proposed, and a new algorithm is developed, in which the filter weights and the kernel size are both sequentially updated by stochastic gradient algorithms that minimize the mean square error (MSE). Theoretical results on convergence are also presented. The excellent performance of the new algorithm is confirmed by simulations on static function estimation and short term chaotic time series prediction.
1401.5900
Gaussian-binary Restricted Boltzmann Machines on Modeling Natural Image Statistics
cs.NE cs.LG stat.ML
We present a theoretical analysis of Gaussian-binary restricted Boltzmann machines (GRBMs) from the perspective of density models. The key aspect of this analysis is to show that GRBMs can be formulated as a constrained mixture of Gaussians, which gives a much better insight into the model's capabilities and limitations. We show that GRBMs are capable of learning meaningful features both in a two-dimensional blind source separation task and in modeling natural images. Further, we show that reported difficulties in training GRBMs are due to the failure of the training algorithm rather than the model itself. Based on our analysis we are able to propose several training recipes, which allowed successful and fast training in our experiments. Finally, we discuss the relationship of GRBMs to several modifications that have been proposed to improve the model.
1401.5919
Hamming's Original Paper Rewritten in Symbolic Form: A Preamble to Coding Theory
cs.IT math.IT
In this note we try to bring out the ideas of Hamming's classic paper on coding theory in a form understandable by undergraduate students of mathematics.
1401.5934
Accelerated Assistant to SubOptimum Receiver for Multi Carrier Code Division Multiple Access System
cs.IT math.IT
The Multiple Input Multiple output system are considered to be the strongest candidate for the maximum utilization of available bandwidth. In this paper, the MIMO system with the combination of Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiple Access and Space Time Coding using the Alamoutis scheme is considered. A Genetic Algorithm based receiver with an exceptional relationship between filter weights while detecting symbols is proposed. This scheme has better Convergence Rate and Bit Error Rate than the Fast-LMS Adaptive receiver.
1401.5966
Image Block Loss Restoration Using Sparsity Pattern as Side Information
cs.MM cs.CV
In this paper, we propose a method for image block loss restoration based on the notion of sparse representation. We use the sparsity pattern as side information to efficiently restore block losses by iteratively imposing the constraints of spatial and transform domains on the corrupted image. Two novel features, including a pre-interpolation and a criterion for stopping the iterations, are proposed to improve the performance. Also, to deal with practical applications, we develop a technique to transmit the side information along with the image. In this technique, we first compress the side information and then embed its LDPC coded version in the least significant bits of the image pixels. This technique ensures the error-free transmission of the side information, while causing only a small perturbation on the transmitted image. Mathematical analysis and extensive simulations are performed to validate the method and investigate the efficiency of the proposed techniques. The results verify that the proposed method outperforms its counterparts for image block loss restoration.
1401.5980
Reasoning about Meaning in Natural Language with Compact Closed Categories and Frobenius Algebras
cs.CL cs.AI math.CT
Compact closed categories have found applications in modeling quantum information protocols by Abramsky-Coecke. They also provide semantics for Lambek's pregroup algebras, applied to formalizing the grammatical structure of natural language, and are implicit in a distributional model of word meaning based on vector spaces. Specifically, in previous work Coecke-Clark-Sadrzadeh used the product category of pregroups with vector spaces and provided a distributional model of meaning for sentences. We recast this theory in terms of strongly monoidal functors and advance it via Frobenius algebras over vector spaces. The former are used to formalize topological quantum field theories by Atiyah and Baez-Dolan, and the latter are used to model classical data in quantum protocols by Coecke-Pavlovic-Vicary. The Frobenius algebras enable us to work in a single space in which meanings of words, phrases, and sentences of any structure live. Hence we can compare meanings of different language constructs and enhance the applicability of the theory. We report on experimental results on a number of language tasks and verify the theoretical predictions.
1401.5996
Collaboration in the open-source arena: The WebKit case
cs.CY cs.SI
In an era of software crisis, the move of firms towards distributed software development teams is being challenged by emerging collaboration issues. On this matter, the open-source phenomenon may shed some light, as successful cases on distributed collaboration in the open-source community have been recurrently reported. In this paper, we explore the collaboration networks in the WebKit open-source project, by mining WebKit's source-code version-control-system data with Social Network Analysis (SNA). Our approach allows us to observe how key events in the mobile-device industry have affected the WebKit collaboration network over time. With our findings, we show the explanation power from network visualizations capturing the collaborative dynamics of a high-networked software project over time; and highlight the power of the open-source fork concept as a nexus enabling both features of competition and collaboration. We also reveal the WebKit project as a valuable research site manifesting the novel notion of open-coopetition, where rival firms collaborate with competitors in the open-source community.
1401.6002
Numerical weather prediction or stochastic modeling: an objective criterion of choice for the global radiation forecasting
stat.AP cs.LG
Numerous methods exist and were developed for global radiation forecasting. The two most popular types are the numerical weather predictions (NWP) and the predictions using stochastic approaches. We propose to compute a parameter noted constructed in part from the mutual information which is a quantity that measures the mutual dependence of two variables. Both of these are calculated with the objective to establish the more relevant method between NWP and stochastic models concerning the current problem.
1401.6013
Efficient Background Modeling Based on Sparse Representation and Outlier Iterative Removal
cs.CV
Background modeling is a critical component for various vision-based applications. Most traditional methods tend to be inefficient when solving large-scale problems. In this paper, we introduce sparse representation into the task of large scale stable background modeling, and reduce the video size by exploring its 'discriminative' frames. A cyclic iteration process is then proposed to extract the background from the discriminative frame set. The two parts combine to form our Sparse Outlier Iterative Removal (SOIR) algorithm. The algorithm operates in tensor space to obey the natural data structure of videos. Experimental results show that a few discriminative frames determine the performance of the background extraction. Further, SOIR can achieve high accuracy and high speed simultaneously when dealing with real video sequences. Thus, SOIR has an advantage in solving large-scale tasks.
1401.6023
A Unified Approach for Network Information Theory
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we take a unified approach for network information theory and prove a coding theorem, which can recover most of the achievability results in network information theory that are based on random coding. The final single-letter expression has a very simple form, which was made possible by many novel elements such as a unified framework that represents various network problems in a simple and unified way, a unified coding strategy that consists of a few basic ingredients but can emulate many known coding techniques if needed, and new proof techniques beyond the use of standard covering and packing lemmas. For example, in our framework, sources, channels, states and side information are treated in a unified way and various constraints such as cost and distortion constraints are unified as a single joint-typicality constraint. Our theorem can be useful in proving many new achievability results easily and in some cases gives simpler rate expressions than those obtained using conventional approaches. Furthermore, our unified coding can strictly outperform existing schemes. For example, we obtain a generalized decode-compress-amplify-and-forward bound as a simple corollary of our main theorem and show it strictly outperforms previously known coding schemes. Using our unified framework, we formally define and characterize three types of network duality based on channel input-output reversal and network flow reversal combined with packing-covering duality.
1401.6024
Matrix factorization with Binary Components
stat.ML cs.LG
Motivated by an application in computational biology, we consider low-rank matrix factorization with $\{0,1\}$-constraints on one of the factors and optionally convex constraints on the second one. In addition to the non-convexity shared with other matrix factorization schemes, our problem is further complicated by a combinatorial constraint set of size $2^{m \cdot r}$, where $m$ is the dimension of the data points and $r$ the rank of the factorization. Despite apparent intractability, we provide - in the line of recent work on non-negative matrix factorization by Arora et al. (2012) - an algorithm that provably recovers the underlying factorization in the exact case with $O(m r 2^r + mnr + r^2 n)$ operations for $n$ datapoints. To obtain this result, we use theory around the Littlewood-Offord lemma from combinatorics.
1401.6025
Cryptanalysis of McEliece Cryptosystem Based on Algebraic Geometry Codes and their subcodes
cs.IT math.AG math.IT
We give polynomial time attacks on the McEliece public key cryptosystem based either on algebraic geometry (AG) codes or on small codimensional subcodes of AG codes. These attacks consist in the blind reconstruction either of an Error Correcting Pair (ECP), or an Error Correcting Array (ECA) from the single data of an arbitrary generator matrix of a code. An ECP provides a decoding algorithm that corrects up to $\frac{d^*-1-g}{2}$ errors, where $d^*$ denotes the designed distance and $g$ denotes the genus of the corresponding curve, while with an ECA the decoding algorithm corrects up to $\frac{d^*-1}{2}$ errors. Roughly speaking, for a public code of length $n$ over $\mathbb F_q$, these attacks run in $O(n^4\log (n))$ operations in $\mathbb F_q$ for the reconstruction of an ECP and $O(n^5)$ operations for the reconstruction of an ECA. A probabilistic shortcut allows to reduce the complexities respectively to $O(n^{3+\varepsilon} \log (n))$ and $O(n^{4+\varepsilon})$. Compared to the previous known attack due to Faure and Minder, our attack is efficient on codes from curves of arbitrary genus. Furthermore, we investigate how far these methods apply to subcodes of AG codes.
1401.6036
On involutions in extremal self-dual codes and the dual distance of semi self-dual codes
math.CO cs.IT math.IT
A classical result of Conway and Pless is that a natural projection of the fixed code of an automorphism of odd prime order of a self-dual binary linear code is self-dual. In this paper we prove that the same holds for involutions under some (quite strong) conditions on the codes. In order to prove it, we introduce a new family of binary codes: the semi self-dual codes. A binary self-orthogonal code is called semi self-dual if it contains the all-ones vector and is of codimension 2 in its dual code. We prove upper bounds on the dual distance of semi self-dual codes. As an application we get the following: let C be an extremal self-dual binary linear code of length 24m and s in Aut(C) be a fixed point free automorphism of order 2. If m is odd or if m=2k with binom{5k-1}{k-1} odd then C is a free F_2<s>-module. This result has quite strong consequences on the structure of the automorphism group of such codes.
1401.6039
Constant Compositions in the Sphere Packing Bound for Classical-Quantum Channels
cs.IT math.IT quant-ph
The sphere packing bound, in the form given by Shannon, Gallager and Berlekamp, was recently extended to classical-quantum channels, and it was shown that this creates a natural setting for combining probabilistic approaches with some combinatorial ones such as the Lov\'asz theta function. In this paper, we extend the study to the case of constant composition codes. We first extend the sphere packing bound for classical-quantum channels to this case, and we then show that the obtained result is related to a variation of the Lov\'asz theta function studied by Marton. We then propose a further extension to the case of varying channels and codewords with a constant conditional composition given a particular sequence. This extension is then applied to auxiliary channels to deduce a bound which can be interpreted as an extension of the Elias bound.
1401.6048
Replanning in Domains with Partial Information and Sensing Actions
cs.AI
Replanning via determinization is a recent, popular approach for online planning in MDPs. In this paper we adapt this idea to classical, non-stochastic domains with partial information and sensing actions, presenting a new planner: SDR (Sample, Determinize, Replan). At each step we generate a solution plan to a classical planning problem induced by the original problem. We execute this plan as long as it is safe to do so. When this is no longer the case, we replan. The classical planning problem we generate is based on the translation-based approach for conformant planning introduced by Palacios and Geffner. The state of the classical planning problem generated in this approach captures the belief state of the agent in the original problem. Unfortunately, when this method is applied to planning problems with sensing, it yields a non-deterministic planning problem that is typically very large. Our main contribution is the introduction of state sampling techniques for overcoming these two problems. In addition, we introduce a novel, lazy, regression-based method for querying the agents belief state during run-time. We provide a comprehensive experimental evaluation of the planner, showing that it scales better than the state-of-the-art CLG planner on existing benchmark problems, but also highlighting its weaknesses with new domains. We also discuss its theoretical guarantees.
1401.6049
Generating Approximate Solutions to the TTP using a Linear Distance Relaxation
cs.AI
In some domestic professional sports leagues, the home stadiums are located in cities connected by a common train line running in one direction. For these instances, we can incorporate this geographical information to determine optimal or nearly-optimal solutions to the n-team Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP), an NP-hard sports scheduling problem whose solution is a double round-robin tournament schedule that minimizes the sum total of distances traveled by all n teams. We introduce the Linear Distance Traveling Tournament Problem (LD-TTP), and solve it for n=4 and n=6, generating the complete set of possible solutions through elementary combinatorial techniques. For larger n, we propose a novel "expander construction" that generates an approximate solution to the LD-TTP. For n congruent to 4 modulo 6, we show that our expander construction produces a feasible double round-robin tournament schedule whose total distance is guaranteed to be no worse than 4/3 times the optimal solution, regardless of where the n teams are located. This 4/3-approximation for the LD-TTP is stronger than the currently best-known ratio of 5/3 + epsilon for the general TTP. We conclude the paper by applying this linear distance relaxation to general (non-linear) n-team TTP instances, where we develop fast approximate solutions by simply "assuming" the n teams lie on a straight line and solving the modified problem. We show that this technique surprisingly generates the distance-optimal tournament on all benchmark sets on 6 teams, as well as close-to-optimal schedules for larger n, even when the teams are located around a circle or positioned in three-dimensional space.
1401.6050
Integrative Semantic Dependency Parsing via Efficient Large-scale Feature Selection
cs.CL
Semantic parsing, i.e., the automatic derivation of meaning representation such as an instantiated predicate-argument structure for a sentence, plays a critical role in deep processing of natural language. Unlike all other top systems of semantic dependency parsing that have to rely on a pipeline framework to chain up a series of submodels each specialized for a specific subtask, the one presented in this article integrates everything into one model, in hopes of achieving desirable integrity and practicality for real applications while maintaining a competitive performance. This integrative approach tackles semantic parsing as a word pair classification problem using a maximum entropy classifier. We leverage adaptive pruning of argument candidates and large-scale feature selection engineering to allow the largest feature space ever in use so far in this field, it achieves a state-of-the-art performance on the evaluation data set for CoNLL-2008 shared task, on top of all but one top pipeline system, confirming its feasibility and effectiveness.
1401.6053
Flows over time in time-varying networks
cs.SY
There has been much research on network flows over time due to their important role in real world applications. This has led to many results, but the more challenging continuous time model still lacks some of the key concepts and techniques that are the cornerstones of static network flows. The aim of this paper is to advance the state of the art for dynamic network flows by developing the continuous time analogues of the theory for static network flows. Specifically, we make use of ideas from the static case to establish a reduced cost optimality condition, a negative cycle optimality condition, and a strong duality result for a very general class of network flows over time.
1401.6058
The Readability of Tweets and their Geographic Correlation with Education
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Twitter has rapidly emerged as one of the largest worldwide venues for written communication. Thanks to the ease with which vast quantities of tweets can be mined, Twitter has also become a source for studying modern linguistic style. The readability of text has long provided a simple method to characterize the complexity of language and ease that documents may be understood by readers. In this note we use a modified version of the Flesch Reading Ease formula, applied to a corpus of 17.4 million tweets. We find tweets have characteristically more difficult readability scores compared to other short format communication, such as SMS or chat. This linguistic difference is insensitive to the presence of "hashtags" within tweets. By utilizing geographic data provided by 2% of users, joined with "ZIP Code Tabulation Area" (ZCTA) level education data from the U.S. Census, we find an intriguing correlation between the average readability and the college graduation rate within a ZCTA. This points towards a difference in either the underlying language, or a change in the type of content being tweeted in these areas
1401.6060
Achieving Marton's Region for Broadcast Channels Using Polar Codes
cs.IT math.IT
This paper presents polar coding schemes for the 2-user discrete memoryless broadcast channel (DM-BC) which achieve Marton's region with both common and private messages. This is the best achievable rate region known to date, and it is tight for all classes of 2-user DM-BCs whose capacity regions are known. To accomplish this task, we first construct polar codes for both the superposition as well as the binning strategy. By combining these two schemes, we obtain Marton's region with private messages only. Finally, we show how to handle the case of common information. The proposed coding schemes possess the usual advantages of polar codes, i.e., they have low encoding and decoding complexity and a super-polynomial decay rate of the error probability. We follow the lead of Goela, Abbe, and Gastpar, who recently introduced polar codes emulating the superposition and binning schemes. In order to align the polar indices, for both schemes, their solution involves some degradedness constraints that are assumed to hold between the auxiliary random variables and the channel outputs. To remove these constraints, we consider the transmission of $k$ blocks and employ a chaining construction that guarantees the proper alignment of the polarized indices. The techniques described in this work are quite general, and they can be adopted to many other multi-terminal scenarios whenever there polar indices need to be aligned.
1401.6063
Resource cost results for one-way entanglement distillation and state merging of compound and arbitrarily varying quantum sources
quant-ph cs.IT math-ph math.IT math.MP
We consider one-way quantum state merging and entanglement distillation under compound and arbitrarily varying source models. Regarding quantum compound sources, where the source is memoryless, but the source state an unknown member of a certain set of density matrices, we continue investigations begun in the work of Bjelakovi\'c et. al. [Universal quantum state merging, J. Math. Phys. 54, 032204 (2013)] and determine the classical as well as entanglement cost of state merging. We further investigate quantum state merging and entanglement distillation protocols for arbitrarily varying quantum sources (AVQS). In the AVQS model, the source state is assumed to vary in an arbitrary manner for each source output due to environmental fluctuations or adversarial manipulation. We determine the one-way entanglement distillation capacity for AVQS, where we invoke the famous robustification and elimination techniques introduced by R. Ahlswede. Regarding quantum state merging for AVQS we show by example, that the robustification and elimination based approach generally leads to suboptimal entanglement as well as classical communication rates.
1401.6069
On Continuous-Time White Phase Noise Channels
cs.IT math.IT
A continuous-time model for the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel in the presence of white (memoryless) phase noise is proposed and discussed. It is shown that for linear modulation the output of the baud-sampled filter matched to the shaping waveform represents a sufficient statistic. The analysis shows that the phase noise channel has the same information rate as an AWGN channel but with a penalty on the average signal-to-noise ratio, the amount of penalty depending on the phase noise statistic.
1401.6082
Performance Evaluation of Two-Hop Wireless Link under Nakagami-m Fading
cs.IT math.IT
Now-a-days, intense research is going on two-hop wireless link under different fading conditions with its remedial measures. In this paper work, a two-hop link under three different conditions is considered: (i) MIMO on both hops, (ii) MISO in first hop and SIMO in second hop and finally (iii) SIMO in first hop and MISO in second hop. The three models used here give the flexibility of using STBC (Space Time Block Coding) and combining scheme on any of the source to relay (S- R) and relay to destination (R-D) link. Even incorporation of Transmitting Antenna Selection (TAS) is possible on any link. Here, the variation of SER (Symbol Error Rate) is determined against mean SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) of R-D link for three different modulation schemes: BPSK, 8-PSK and 16-PSK, taking the number of antennas and SNR of S-R link as parameters under Nakagami -m fading condition.
1401.6083
Maximizing Energy-Efficiency in Multi-Relay OFDMA Cellular Networks
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
This contribution presents a method of obtaining the optimal power and subcarrier allocations that maximize the energy-efficiency (EE) of a multi-user, multi-relay, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) cellular network. Initially, the objective function (OF) is formulated as the ratio of the spectral-efficiency (SE) over the power consumption of the network. This OF is shown to be quasi-concave, thus Dinkelbach's method can be employed for solving it as a series of parameterized concave problems. We characterize the performance of the aforementioned method by comparing the optimal solutions obtained to those found using an exhaustive search. Additionally, we explore the relationship between the achievable SE and EE in the cellular network upon increasing the number of active users. In general, increasing the number of users supported by the system benefits both the SE and EE, and higher SE values may be obtained at the cost of EE, when an increased power may be allocated.
1401.6087
Efficient Image Encryption and Decryption Using Discrete Wavelet Transform and Fractional Fourier Transform
cs.CR cs.IT cs.MM math.IT
Fractional Fourier transform and chaos functions play a key role in many of encryption-decryption algorithms. In this work performance of image encryption-decryption algorithms is quantified and compared using the computation time i.e. the time consumption of encryption-decryption process and resemblance of input image to the restored image, quantified by MSE. This work proposes an improvement in computation-time of image encryptiondecryption algorithms by utilizing image compression properties of the 2-dimensional Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT2). Initially, computation complexity of the algorithms is evaluated and compared with that of existing algorithms. This analysis claims the proposed algorithms to be nearly 8 times faster than the existing algorithms. Further, simulations are performed using MATLAB7.7 to quantify performance of existing algorithms and the proposed algorithms using MSE and computation time. The results obtained in these simulations prove that for the proposed algorithms MSE between restored and original images is lesser than that of existing algorithms thereby maintaining the robustness of the existing algorithms. These algorithms are found sensitive to a variation of 1x10-1 in the fractional orders used in encryption-decryption process.
1401.6092
PageRank for evolving link structures
cs.IR math.PR
In this article we will look at the PageRank algorithm used as part of the ranking process of different Internet pages in search engines by for example Google. This article has its main focus in the understanding of the behavior of PageRank as the system dynamically changes either by contracting or expanding such as when adding or subtracting nodes or links or groups of nodes or links. In particular we will take a look at link structures consisting of a line of nodes or a complete graph where every node links to all others. We will look at PageRank as the solution of a linear system of equations and do our examination in both the ordinary normalized version of PageRank as well as the non-normalized version found by solving the linear system. We will see that it is possible to find explicit formulas for the PageRank in some simple link structures and using these formulas take a more in-depth look at the behavior of the ranking as the system changes.
1401.6097
Polarization as a novel architecture to boost the classical mismatched capacity of B-DMCs
cs.IT math.IT
We show that the mismatched capacity of binary discrete memoryless channels can be improved by channel combining and splitting via Ar{\i}kan's polar transformations. We also show that the improvement is possible even if the transformed channels are decoded with a mismatched polar decoder.
1401.6098
An adaptive Simulated Annealing-based satellite observation scheduling method combined with a dynamic task clustering strategy
cs.AI cs.CE
Efficient scheduling is of great significance to rationally make use of scarce satellite resources. Task clustering has been demonstrated to realize an effective strategy to improve the efficiency of satellite scheduling. However, the previous task clustering strategy is static. That is, it is integrated into the scheduling in a two-phase manner rather than in a dynamic fashion, without expressing its full potential in improving the satellite scheduling performance. In this study, we present an adaptive Simulated Annealing based scheduling algorithm aggregated with a dynamic task clustering strategy (or ASA-DTC for short) for satellite observation scheduling problems (SOSPs). First, we develop a formal model for the scheduling of Earth observing satellites. Second, we analyze the related constraints involved in the observation task clustering process. Thirdly, we detail an implementation of the dynamic task clustering strategy and the adaptive Simulated Annealing algorithm. The adaptive Simulated Annealing algorithm is efficient, with the endowment of some sophisticated mechanisms, i.e. adaptive temperature control, tabu-list based revisiting avoidance mechanism, and intelligent combination of neighborhood structures. Finally, we report on experimental simulation studies to demonstrate the competitive performance of ASA-DTC. Moreover, we show that ASA-DTC is especially effective when SOSPs contain a large number of targets or these targets are densely distributed in a certain area.
1401.6108
Face Verification Using Kernel Principle Component Analysis
cs.CV
In the beginning stage, face verification is done using easy method of geometric algorithm models, but the verification route has now developed into a scientific progress of complicated geometric representation and matching process. In modern time the skill have enhanced face detection system into the vigorous focal point. Researchers currently undergoing strong research on finding face recognition system for wider area information taken under hysterical elucidation dissimilarity. The proposed face recognition system consists of a narrative exposition indiscreet preprocessing method, a hybrid Fourier-based facial feature extraction and a score fusion scheme. We take in conventional the face detection in unlike cheer up circumstances and at unusual setting. Image processing, Image detection, Feature removal and Face detection are the methods used for Face Verification System . This paper focuses mainly on the issue of toughness to lighting variations. The proposed system has obtained an average of verification rate on Two-Dimensional images under different lightening conditions.
1401.6112
Face Verification System based on Integral Normalized Gradient Image(INGI)
cs.CV
Character identification plays a vital role in the contemporary world of Image processing. It can solve many composite problems and makes humans work easier. An instance is Handwritten Character detection. Handwritten recognition is not a novel expertise, but it has not gained community notice until Now. The eventual aim of designing Handwritten Character recognition structure with an accurateness rate of 100% is pretty illusionary. Tamil Handwritten Character recognition system uses the Neural Networks to distinguish them. Neural Network and structural characteristics are used to instruct and recognize written characters. After training and testing the exactness rate reached 99%. This correctness rate is extremely high. In this paper we are exploring image processing through the Hilditch algorithm foundation and structural characteristics of a character in the image. And we recognized some character of the Tamil language, and we are trying to identify all the character of Tamil In our future works.