id
stringlengths
9
16
title
stringlengths
4
278
categories
stringlengths
5
104
abstract
stringlengths
6
4.09k
1402.1726
For-all Sparse Recovery in Near-Optimal Time
cs.DS cs.IT math.IT
An approximate sparse recovery system in $\ell_1$ norm consists of parameters $k$, $\epsilon$, $N$, an $m$-by-$N$ measurement $\Phi$, and a recovery algorithm, $\mathcal{R}$. Given a vector, $\mathbf{x}$, the system approximates $x$ by $\widehat{\mathbf{x}} = \mathcal{R}(\Phi\mathbf{x})$, which must satisfy $\|\widehat{\mathbf{x}}-\mathbf{x}\|_1 \leq (1+\epsilon)\|\mathbf{x}-\mathbf{x}_k\|_1$. We consider the 'for all' model, in which a single matrix $\Phi$, possibly 'constructed' non-explicitly using the probabilistic method, is used for all signals $\mathbf{x}$. The best existing sublinear algorithm by Porat and Strauss (SODA'12) uses $O(\epsilon^{-3} k\log(N/k))$ measurements and runs in time $O(k^{1-\alpha}N^\alpha)$ for any constant $\alpha > 0$. In this paper, we improve the number of measurements to $O(\epsilon^{-2} k \log(N/k))$, matching the best existing upper bound (attained by super-linear algorithms), and the runtime to $O(k^{1+\beta}\textrm{poly}(\log N,1/\epsilon))$, with a modest restriction that $\epsilon \leq (\log k/\log N)^{\gamma}$, for any constants $\beta,\gamma > 0$. When $k\leq \log^c N$ for some $c>0$, the runtime is reduced to $O(k\textrm{poly}(N,1/\epsilon))$. With no restrictions on $\epsilon$, we have an approximation recovery system with $m = O(k/\epsilon \log(N/k)((\log N/\log k)^\gamma + 1/\epsilon))$ measurements.
1402.1736
Flows in Complex Networks: Theory, Algorithms, and Application to Lennard-Jones Cluster Rearrangement
cond-mat.stat-mech cs.CE
A set of analytical and computational tools based on transition path theory (TPT) is proposed to analyze flows in complex networks. Specifically, TPT is used to study the statistical properties of the reactive trajectories by which transitions occur between specific groups of nodes on the network. Sampling tools are built upon the outputs of TPT that allow to generate these reactive trajectories directly, or even transition paths that travel from one group of nodes to the other without making any detour and carry the same probability current as the reactive trajectories. These objects permit to characterize the mechanism of the transitions, for example by quantifying the width of the tubes by which these transitions occur, the location and distribution of their dynamical bottlenecks, etc. These tools are applied to a network modeling the dynamics of the Lennard-Jones cluster with 38 atoms (LJ38) and used to understand the mechanism by which this cluster rearranges itself between its two most likely states at various temperatures.
1402.1754
Two-stage Sampled Learning Theory on Distributions
math.ST cs.LG math.FA stat.ML stat.TH
We focus on the distribution regression problem: regressing to a real-valued response from a probability distribution. Although there exist a large number of similarity measures between distributions, very little is known about their generalization performance in specific learning tasks. Learning problems formulated on distributions have an inherent two-stage sampled difficulty: in practice only samples from sampled distributions are observable, and one has to build an estimate on similarities computed between sets of points. To the best of our knowledge, the only existing method with consistency guarantees for distribution regression requires kernel density estimation as an intermediate step (which suffers from slow convergence issues in high dimensions), and the domain of the distributions to be compact Euclidean. In this paper, we provide theoretical guarantees for a remarkably simple algorithmic alternative to solve the distribution regression problem: embed the distributions to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, and learn a ridge regressor from the embeddings to the outputs. Our main contribution is to prove the consistency of this technique in the two-stage sampled setting under mild conditions (on separable, topological domains endowed with kernels). For a given total number of observations, we derive convergence rates as an explicit function of the problem difficulty. As a special case, we answer a 15-year-old open question: we establish the consistency of the classical set kernel [Haussler, 1999; Gartner et. al, 2002] in regression, and cover more recent kernels on distributions, including those due to [Christmann and Steinwart, 2010].
1402.1757
Frequency-Based Patrolling with Heterogeneous Agents and Limited Communication
cs.MA cs.AI
This paper investigates multi-agent frequencybased patrolling of intersecting, circle graphs under conditions where graph nodes have non-uniform visitation requirements and agents have limited ability to communicate. The task is modeled as a partially observable Markov decision process, and a reinforcement learning solution is developed. Each agent generates its own policy from Markov chains, and policies are exchanged only when agents occupy the same or adjacent nodes. This constraint on policy exchange models sparse communication conditions over large, unstructured environments. Empirical results provide perspectives on convergence properties, agent cooperation, and generalization of learned patrolling policies to new instances of the task. The emergent behavior indicates learned coordination strategies between heterogeneous agents for patrolling large, unstructured regions as well as the ability to generalize to dynamic variation in node visitation requirements.
1402.1759
Performance Improvement of OFDM System Using Iterative Signal Clipping With Various Window Techniques for PAPR Reduction
cs.IT math.IT
OFDM signals demonstrates high fluctuations termed as Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR).The problem of OFDM is the frequent occurrence of high Peaks in the time domain signal which in turn reduces the efficiency of transmit high power amplifier.In this paper we discussed clipping and filtering technique which is easy to implement and reduces the amount of PAPR by clipping the peak of the maximum power signal.This technique clips the OFDM signal to a predefined threshold and uses a filter to eliminate the out-of-band radiation.Moreover, analysis of PAPR is given by varying different filters.The study is focused to reduce PAPR by iterative clipping and filtering method. The symbol error rate performances for different modulation techniques have been countered.Each clipping noise sample is multiplied by a window function(e.g.Hanning,Kaiser, or Hamming) to suppress the out-of-band noise.It is shown that clipping and different filtering techniques for improvement in the SER performance and provides further reduction in PAPR.
1402.1761
On Scalability of Wireless Networks: A Practical Primer for Large Scale Cooperation
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
An intuitive overview of the scalability of a variety of types of wireless networks is presented. Simple heuris- tic arguments are demonstrated here for scaling laws presented in other works, as well as for conditions not previously considered in the literature. Unicast and multicast messages, topology, hierarchy, and effects of reliability protocols are discussed. We show how two key factors, bottlenecks and erasures, can often domi- nate the network scaling behavior. Scaling of through- put or delay with the number of transmitting nodes, the number of receiving nodes, and the file size is described.
1402.1774
From the Information Bottleneck to the Privacy Funnel
cs.IT math.IT
We focus on the privacy-utility trade-off encountered by users who wish to disclose some information to an analyst, that is correlated with their private data, in the hope of receiving some utility. We rely on a general privacy statistical inference framework, under which data is transformed before it is disclosed, according to a probabilistic privacy mapping. We show that when the log-loss is introduced in this framework in both the privacy metric and the distortion metric, the privacy leakage and the utility constraint can be reduced to the mutual information between private data and disclosed data, and between non-private data and disclosed data respectively. We justify the relevance and generality of the privacy metric under the log-loss by proving that the inference threat under any bounded cost function can be upper-bounded by an explicit function of the mutual information between private data and disclosed data. We then show that the privacy-utility tradeoff under the log-loss can be cast as the non-convex Privacy Funnel optimization, and we leverage its connection to the Information Bottleneck, to provide a greedy algorithm that is locally optimal. We evaluate its performance on the US census dataset.
1402.1777
On the Dynamics of Social Media Popularity: A YouTube Case Study
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Understanding the factors that impact the popularity dynamics of social media can drive the design of effective information services, besides providing valuable insights to content generators and online advertisers. Taking YouTube as case study, we analyze how video popularity evolves since upload, extracting popularity trends that characterize groups of videos. We also analyze the referrers that lead users to videos, correlating them, features of the video and early popularity measures with the popularity trend and total observed popularity the video will experience. Our findings provide fundamental knowledge about popularity dynamics and its implications for services such as advertising and search.
1402.1778
Analysis of a heterogeneous social network of humans and cultural objects
cs.SI cs.CY physics.data-an physics.soc-ph
Modern online social platforms enable their members to be involved in a broad range of activities like getting friends, joining groups, posting/commenting resources and so on. In this paper we investigate whether a correlation emerges across the different activities a user can take part in. To perform our analysis we focused on aNobii, a social platform with a world-wide user base of book readers, who like to post their readings, give ratings, review books and discuss them with friends and fellow readers. aNobii presents a heterogeneous structure: i) part social network, with user-to-user interactions, ii) part interest network, with the management of book collections, and iii) part folksonomy, with books that are tagged by the users. We analyzed a complete and anonymized snapshot of aNobii and we focused on three specific activities a user can perform, namely her tagging behavior, her tendency to join groups and her aptitude to compile a wishlist reporting the books she is planning to read. In this way each user is associated with a tag-based, a group-based and a wishlist-based profile. Experimental analysis carried out by means of Information Theory tools like entropy and mutual information suggests that tag-based and group-based profiles are in general more informative than wishlist-based ones. Furthermore, we discover that the degree of correlation between the three profiles associated with the same user tend to be small. Hence, user profiling cannot be reduced to considering just any one type of user activity (although important) but it is crucial to incorporate multiple dimensions to effectively describe users preferences and behavior.
1402.1780
Cascading Failures in Power Grids - Analysis and Algorithms
cs.SY
This paper focuses on cascading line failures in the transmission system of the power grid. Recent large-scale power outages demonstrated the limitations of percolation- and epid- emic-based tools in modeling cascades. Hence, we study cascades by using computational tools and a linearized power flow model. We first obtain results regarding the Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse of the power grid admittance matrix. Based on these results, we study the impact of a single line failure on the flows on other lines. We also illustrate via simulation the impact of the distance and resistance distance on the flow increase following a failure, and discuss the difference from the epidemic models. We then study the cascade properties, considering metrics such as the distance between failures and the fraction of demand (load) satisfied after the cascade (yield). We use the pseudo-inverse of admittance matrix to develop an efficient algorithm to identify the cascading failure evolution, which can be a building block for cascade mitigation. Finally, we show that finding the set of lines whose removal has the most significant impact (under various metrics) is NP-Hard and introduce a simple heuristic for the minimum yield problem. Overall, the results demonstrate that using the resistance distance and the pseudo-inverse of admittance matrix provides important insights and can support the development of efficient algorithms.
1402.1783
Active Clustering with Model-Based Uncertainty Reduction
cs.LG cs.CV stat.ML
Semi-supervised clustering seeks to augment traditional clustering methods by incorporating side information provided via human expertise in order to increase the semantic meaningfulness of the resulting clusters. However, most current methods are \emph{passive} in the sense that the side information is provided beforehand and selected randomly. This may require a large number of constraints, some of which could be redundant, unnecessary, or even detrimental to the clustering results. Thus in order to scale such semi-supervised algorithms to larger problems it is desirable to pursue an \emph{active} clustering method---i.e. an algorithm that maximizes the effectiveness of the available human labor by only requesting human input where it will have the greatest impact. Here, we propose a novel online framework for active semi-supervised spectral clustering that selects pairwise constraints as clustering proceeds, based on the principle of uncertainty reduction. Using a first-order Taylor expansion, we decompose the expected uncertainty reduction problem into a gradient and a step-scale, computed via an application of matrix perturbation theory and cluster-assignment entropy, respectively. The resulting model is used to estimate the uncertainty reduction potential of each sample in the dataset. We then present the human user with pairwise queries with respect to only the best candidate sample. We evaluate our method using three different image datasets (faces, leaves and dogs), a set of common UCI machine learning datasets and a gene dataset. The results validate our decomposition formulation and show that our method is consistently superior to existing state-of-the-art techniques, as well as being robust to noise and to unknown numbers of clusters.
1402.1792
Binary Excess Risk for Smooth Convex Surrogates
cs.LG stat.ML
In statistical learning theory, convex surrogates of the 0-1 loss are highly preferred because of the computational and theoretical virtues that convexity brings in. This is of more importance if we consider smooth surrogates as witnessed by the fact that the smoothness is further beneficial both computationally- by attaining an {\it optimal} convergence rate for optimization, and in a statistical sense- by providing an improved {\it optimistic} rate for generalization bound. In this paper we investigate the smoothness property from the viewpoint of statistical consistency and show how it affects the binary excess risk. We show that in contrast to optimization and generalization errors that favor the choice of smooth surrogate loss, the smoothness of loss function may degrade the binary excess risk. Motivated by this negative result, we provide a unified analysis that integrates optimization error, generalization bound, and the error in translating convex excess risk into a binary excess risk when examining the impact of smoothness on the binary excess risk. We show that under favorable conditions appropriate choice of smooth convex loss will result in a binary excess risk that is better than $O(1/\sqrt{n})$.
1402.1794
In silico Proteome Cleavage Reveals Iterative Digestion Strategy for High Sequence Coverage
q-bio.GN cs.CE
In the post-genome era, biologists have sought to measure the complete complement of proteins, termed proteomics. Currently, the most effective method to measure the proteome is with shotgun, or bottom-up, proteomics, in which the proteome is digested into peptides that are identified followed by protein inference. Despite continuous improvements to all steps of the shotgun proteomics workflow, observed proteome coverage is often low; some proteins are identified by a single peptide sequence. Complete proteome sequence coverage would allow comprehensive characterization of RNA splicing variants and all post translational modifications, which would drastically improve the accuracy of biological models. There are many reasons for the sequence coverage deficit, but ultimately peptide length determines sequence observability. Peptides that are too short are lost because they match many protein sequences and their true origin is ambiguous. The maximum observable peptide length is determined by several analytical challenges. This paper explores computationally how peptide lengths produced from several common proteome digestion methods limit observable proteome coverage. Iterative proteome cleavage strategies are also explored. These simulations reveal that maximized proteome coverage can be achieved by use of an iterative digestion protocol involving multiple proteases and chemical cleavages that theoretically allow 91.1% proteome coverage.
1402.1801
Efficient Low Dose X-ray CT Reconstruction through Sparsity-Based MAP Modeling
stat.AP cs.CV
Ultra low radiation dose in X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) is an important clinical objective in order to minimize the risk of carcinogenesis. Compressed Sensing (CS) enables significant reductions in radiation dose to be achieved by producing diagnostic images from a limited number of CT projections. However, the excessive computation time that conventional CS-based CT reconstruction typically requires has limited clinical implementation. In this paper, we first demonstrate that a thorough analysis of CT reconstruction through a Maximum a Posteriori objective function results in a weighted compressive sensing problem. This analysis enables us to formulate a low dose fan beam and helical cone beam CT reconstruction. Subsequently, we provide an efficient solution to the formulated CS problem based on a Fast Composite Splitting Algorithm-Latent Expected Maximization (FCSA-LEM) algorithm. In the proposed method we use pseudo polar Fourier transform as the measurement matrix in order to decrease the computational complexity; and rebinning of the projections to parallel rays in order to extend its application to fan beam and helical cone beam scans. The weight involved in the proposed weighted CS model, denoted by Error Adaptation Weight (EAW), is calculated based on the statistical characteristics of CT reconstruction and is a function of Poisson measurement noise and rebinning interpolation error. Simulation results show that low computational complexity of the proposed method made the fast recovery of the CT images possible and using EAW reduces the reconstruction error by one order of magnitude. Recovery of a high quality 512$\times$ 512 image was achieved in less than 20 sec on a desktop computer without numerical optimizations.
1402.1814
Foundation for Frequent Pattern Mining Algorithms Implementation
cs.DB
As with the development of the IT technologies, the amount of accumulated data is also increasing. Thus the role of data mining comes into picture. Association rule mining becomes one of the significant responsibilities of descriptive technique which can be defined as discovering meaningful patterns from large collection of data. The frequent pattern mining algorithms determine the frequent patterns from a database. Mining frequent itemset is very fundamental part of association rule mining. Many algorithms have been proposed from last many decades including majors are Apriori, Direct Hashing and Pruning, FP-Growth, ECLAT etc. The aim of this study is to analyze the existing techniques for mining frequent patterns and evaluate the performance of them by comparing Apriori and DHP algorithms in terms of candidate generation, database and transaction pruning. This creates a foundation to develop newer algorithm for frequent pattern mining.
1402.1815
On the Performance of Optimized Dense Device-to-Device Wireless Networks
cs.IT math.IT
We consider a D2D wireless network where $n$ users are densely deployed in a squared planar region and communicate with each other without the help of a wired infrastructure. For this network, we examine the 3-phase hierarchical cooperation (HC) scheme and the 2-phase improved HC scheme based on the concept of {\em network multiple access}. Exploiting recent results on the optimality of treating interference as noise in Gaussian interference channels, we optimize the achievable average per-link rate and not just its scaling law. In addition, we provide further improvements on both the previously proposed hierarchical cooperation schemes by a more efficient use of TDMA and spatial reuse. Thanks to our explicit achievable rate expressions, we can compare HC scheme with multihop routing (MR), where the latter can be regarded as the current practice of D2D wireless networks. Our results show that the improved and optimized HC schemes yield very significant rate gains over MR in realistic conditions of channel propagation exponents, signal to noise ratio, and number of users. This sheds light on the long-standing question about the real advantage of HC scheme over MR beyond the well-known scaling laws analysis. In contrast, we also show that our rate optimization is non-trivial, since when HC is applied with off-the-shelf choice of the system parameters, no significant rate gain with respect to MR is achieved. We also show that for large pathloss exponent the sum rate is a nearly linear function of the number of users $n$ in the range of networks of practical size. This also sheds light on a long-standing dispute on the effective achievability of linear sum rate scaling with HC. Finally, we notice that the achievable sum rate for large $\alpha$ is much larger than for small $\alpha$. This suggests that HC scheme may be a very effective approach for networks operating at mm-waves.
1402.1834
The Generalized Statistical Complexity of PolSAR Data
cs.IT math.IT
This paper presents and discusses the use of a new feature for PolSAR imagery: the Generalized Statistical Complexity. This measure is able to capture the disorder of the data by means of the entropy, as well as its departure from a reference distribution. The latter component is obtained by measuring a stochastic distance between two models: the $\mathcal G^0$ and the Gamma laws. Preliminary results on the intensity components of AIRSAR image of San Francisco are encouraging.
1402.1862
Periodic Behaviors in Constrained Multi-agent Systems
cs.SY cs.MA
In this paper, we provide two discrete-time multi-agent models which generate periodic behaviors. The first one is a multi-agent system of identical double integrators with input saturation constraints, while the other one is a multi-agent system of identical neutrally stable system with input saturation constraints. In each case, we show that if the feedback gain parameters of the local controller satisfy a certain condition, the multi-agent system exhibits a periodic solution.
1402.1864
An Inequality with Applications to Structured Sparsity and Multitask Dictionary Learning
cs.LG stat.ML
From concentration inequalities for the suprema of Gaussian or Rademacher processes an inequality is derived. It is applied to sharpen existing and to derive novel bounds on the empirical Rademacher complexities of unit balls in various norms appearing in the context of structured sparsity and multitask dictionary learning or matrix factorization. A key role is played by the largest eigenvalue of the data covariance matrix.
1402.1869
On the Number of Linear Regions of Deep Neural Networks
stat.ML cs.LG cs.NE
We study the complexity of functions computable by deep feedforward neural networks with piecewise linear activations in terms of the symmetries and the number of linear regions that they have. Deep networks are able to sequentially map portions of each layer's input-space to the same output. In this way, deep models compute functions that react equally to complicated patterns of different inputs. The compositional structure of these functions enables them to re-use pieces of computation exponentially often in terms of the network's depth. This paper investigates the complexity of such compositional maps and contributes new theoretical results regarding the advantage of depth for neural networks with piecewise linear activation functions. In particular, our analysis is not specific to a single family of models, and as an example, we employ it for rectifier and maxout networks. We improve complexity bounds from pre-existing work and investigate the behavior of units in higher layers.
1402.1879
Sparse Illumination Learning and Transfer for Single-Sample Face Recognition with Image Corruption and Misalignment
cs.CV
Single-sample face recognition is one of the most challenging problems in face recognition. We propose a novel algorithm to address this problem based on a sparse representation based classification (SRC) framework. The new algorithm is robust to image misalignment and pixel corruption, and is able to reduce required gallery images to one sample per class. To compensate for the missing illumination information traditionally provided by multiple gallery images, a sparse illumination learning and transfer (SILT) technique is introduced. The illumination in SILT is learned by fitting illumination examples of auxiliary face images from one or more additional subjects with a sparsely-used illumination dictionary. By enforcing a sparse representation of the query image in the illumination dictionary, the SILT can effectively recover and transfer the illumination and pose information from the alignment stage to the recognition stage. Our extensive experiments have demonstrated that the new algorithms significantly outperform the state of the art in the single-sample regime and with less restrictions. In particular, the single-sample face alignment accuracy is comparable to that of the well-known Deformable SRC algorithm using multiple gallery images per class. Furthermore, the face recognition accuracy exceeds those of the SRC and Extended SRC algorithms using hand labeled alignment initialization.
1402.1881
Tactical Fixed Job Scheduling with Spread-Time Constraints
cs.DS cs.CE
We address the tactical fixed job scheduling problem with spread-time constraints. In such a problem, there are a fixed number of classes of machines and a fixed number of groups of jobs. Jobs of the same group can only be processed by machines of a given set of classes. All jobs have their fixed start and end times. Each machine is associated with a cost according to its machine class. Machines have spread-time constraints, with which each machine is only available for $L$ consecutive time units from the start time of the earliest job assigned to it. The objective is to minimize the total cost of the machines used to process all the jobs. For this strongly NP-hard problem, we develop a branch-and-price algorithm, which solves instances with up to $300$ jobs, as compared with CPLEX, which cannot solve instances of $100$ jobs. We further investigate the influence of machine flexibility by computational experiments. Our results show that limited machine flexibility is sufficient in most situations.
1402.1892
Thresholding Classifiers to Maximize F1 Score
stat.ML cs.IR cs.LG
This paper provides new insight into maximizing F1 scores in the context of binary classification and also in the context of multilabel classification. The harmonic mean of precision and recall, F1 score is widely used to measure the success of a binary classifier when one class is rare. Micro average, macro average, and per instance average F1 scores are used in multilabel classification. For any classifier that produces a real-valued output, we derive the relationship between the best achievable F1 score and the decision-making threshold that achieves this optimum. As a special case, if the classifier outputs are well-calibrated conditional probabilities, then the optimal threshold is half the optimal F1 score. As another special case, if the classifier is completely uninformative, then the optimal behavior is to classify all examples as positive. Since the actual prevalence of positive examples typically is low, this behavior can be considered undesirable. As a case study, we discuss the results, which can be surprising, of applying this procedure when predicting 26,853 labels for Medline documents.
1402.1896
Correlated Orienteering Problem and it Application to Persistent Monitoring Tasks
cs.RO
We propose a novel non-linear extension to the Orienteering Problem (OP), called the Correlated Orienteering Problem (COP). We use COP to model the planning of informative tours for the persistent monitoring of a spatiotemporal field with time-invariant spatial correlations, in which the tours are constrained to have limited length. Our focus in this paper is QCOP a quadratic COP formulation that only looks at correlations between neighboring nodes in a node network. The main feature of QCOP is a quadratic utility function capturing the said spatial correlation. QCOP may be solved using mixed integer quadratic programming (MIQP), with the resulting anytime algorithm capable of planning multiple disjoint tours that maximize the quadratic utility. In particular, our algorithm can quickly plan a near-optimal tour over a network with up to $150$ nodes. Besides performing extensive simulation studies to verify the algorithm's correctness and characterize its performance, we also successfully applied it to two realistic persistent monitoring tasks: (i) estimation over a synthetic spatiotemporal field, and (ii) estimating the temperature distribution in the state of Massachusetts.
1402.1899
Analysis of A Nonsmooth Optimization Approach to Robust Estimation
cs.SY math.OC
In this paper, we consider the problem of identifying a linear map from measurements which are subject to intermittent and arbitarily large errors. This is a fundamental problem in many estimation-related applications such as fault detection, state estimation in lossy networks, hybrid system identification, robust estimation, etc. The problem is hard because it exhibits some intrinsic combinatorial features. Therefore, obtaining an effective solution necessitates relaxations that are both solvable at a reasonable cost and effective in the sense that they can return the true parameter vector. The current paper discusses a nonsmooth convex optimization approach and provides a new analysis of its behavior. In particular, it is shown that under appropriate conditions on the data, an exact estimate can be recovered from data corrupted by a large (even infinite) number of gross errors.
1402.1921
A Hybrid Loss for Multiclass and Structured Prediction
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CV
We propose a novel hybrid loss for multiclass and structured prediction problems that is a convex combination of a log loss for Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) and a multiclass hinge loss for Support Vector Machines (SVMs). We provide a sufficient condition for when the hybrid loss is Fisher consistent for classification. This condition depends on a measure of dominance between labels--specifically, the gap between the probabilities of the best label and the second best label. We also prove Fisher consistency is necessary for parametric consistency when learning models such as CRFs. We demonstrate empirically that the hybrid loss typically performs least as well as--and often better than--both of its constituent losses on a variety of tasks, such as human action recognition. In doing so we also provide an empirical comparison of the efficacy of probabilistic and margin based approaches to multiclass and structured prediction.
1402.1931
MCA Learning Algorithm for Incident Signals Estimation: A Review
cs.NE
Recently there has been many works on adaptive subspace filtering in the signal processing literature. Most of them are concerned with tracking the signal subspace spanned by the eigenvectors corresponding to the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix of the signal plus noise data. Minor Component Analysis (MCA) is important tool and has a wide application in telecommunications, antenna array processing, statistical parametric estimation, etc. As an important feature extraction technique, MCA is a statistical method of extracting the eigenvector associated with the smallest eigenvalue of the covariance matrix. In this paper, we will present a MCA learning algorithm to extract minor component from input signals, and the learning rate parameter is also presented, which ensures fast convergence of the algorithm, because it has direct effect on the convergence of the weight vector and the error level is affected by this value. MCA is performed to determine the estimated DOA. Simulation results will be furnished to illustrate the theoretical results achieved.
1402.1936
Integer Set Compression and Statistical Modeling
cs.IT cs.DS math.IT
Compression of integer sets and sequences has been extensively studied for settings where elements follow a uniform probability distribution. In addition, methods exist that exploit clustering of elements in order to achieve higher compression performance. In this work, we address the case where enumeration of elements may be arbitrary or random, but where statistics is kept in order to estimate probabilities of elements. We present a recursive subset-size encoding method that is able to benefit from statistics, explore the effects of permuting the enumeration order based on element probabilities, and discuss general properties and possibilities for this class of compression problem.
1402.1939
Maximum Entropy, Word-Frequency, Chinese Characters, and Multiple Meanings
physics.soc-ph cs.CL
The word-frequency distribution of a text written by an author is well accounted for by a maximum entropy distribution, the RGF (random group formation)-prediction. The RGF-distribution is completely determined by the a priori values of the total number of words in the text (M), the number of distinct words (N) and the number of repetitions of the most common word (k_max). It is here shown that this maximum entropy prediction also describes a text written in Chinese characters. In particular it is shown that although the same Chinese text written in words and Chinese characters have quite differently shaped distributions, they are nevertheless both well predicted by their respective three a priori characteristic values. It is pointed out that this is analogous to the change in the shape of the distribution when translating a given text to another language. Another consequence of the RGF-prediction is that taking a part of a long text will change the input parameters (M, N, k_max) and consequently also the shape of the frequency distribution. This is explicitly confirmed for texts written in Chinese characters. Since the RGF-prediction has no system-specific information beyond the three a priori values (M, N, k_max), any specific language characteristic has to be sought in systematic deviations from the RGF-prediction and the measured frequencies. One such systematic deviation is identified and, through a statistical information theoretical argument and an extended RGF-model, it is proposed that this deviation is caused by multiple meanings of Chinese characters. The effect is stronger for Chinese characters than for Chinese words. The relation between Zipf's law, the Simon-model for texts and the present results are discussed.
1402.1946
Anomaly Detection Based on Access Behavior and Document Rank Algorithm
cs.NI cs.CR cs.IR
Distributed denial of service(DDos) attack is ongoing dangerous threat to the Internet. Commonly, DDos attacks are carried out at the network layer, e.g. SYN flooding, ICMP flooding and UDP flooding, which are called Distributed denial of service attacks. The intention of these DDos attacks is to utilize the network bandwidth and deny service to authorize users of the victim systems. Obtain from the low layers, new application-layer-based DDos attacks utilizing authorize HTTP requests to overload victim resources are more undetectable. When these are taking place during crowd events of any popular website, this is the case is very serious. The state-of-art approaches cannot handle the situation where there is no considerable deviation between the normal and the attackers activity. The page rank and proximity graph representation of online web accesses takes much time in practice. There should be less computational complexity, than of proximity graph search. Hence proposing Web Access Table mechanism to hold the data such as "who accessed what and how many times, and their rank on average" to find the anomalous web access behavior. The system takes less computational complexity and may produce considerable time complexity.
1402.1947
Classification Tree Diagrams in Health Informatics Applications
cs.IR cs.CV cs.LG
Health informatics deal with the methods used to optimize the acquisition, storage and retrieval of medical data, and classify information in healthcare applications. Healthcare analysts are particularly interested in various computer informatics areas such as; knowledge representation from data, anomaly detection, outbreak detection methods and syndromic surveillance applications. Although various parametric and non-parametric approaches are being proposed to classify information from data, classification tree diagrams provide an interactive visualization to analysts as compared to other methods. In this work we discuss application of classification tree diagrams to classify information from medical data in healthcare applications.
1402.1956
Revisiting the Learned Clauses Database Reduction Strategies
cs.AI
In this paper, we revisit an important issue of CDCL-based SAT solvers, namely the learned clauses database management policies. Our motivation takes its source from a simple observation on the remarkable performances of both random and size-bounded reduction strategies. We first derive a simple reduction strategy, called Size-Bounded Randomized strategy (in short SBR), that combines maintaing short clauses (of size bounded by k), while deleting randomly clauses of size greater than k. The resulting strategy outperform the state-of-the-art, namely the LBD based one, on SAT instances taken from the last SAT competition. Reinforced by the interest of keeping short clauses, we propose several new dynamic variants, and we discuss their performances.
1402.1958
Better Optimism By Bayes: Adaptive Planning with Rich Models
cs.AI cs.LG stat.ML
The computational costs of inference and planning have confined Bayesian model-based reinforcement learning to one of two dismal fates: powerful Bayes-adaptive planning but only for simplistic models, or powerful, Bayesian non-parametric models but using simple, myopic planning strategies such as Thompson sampling. We ask whether it is feasible and truly beneficial to combine rich probabilistic models with a closer approximation to fully Bayesian planning. First, we use a collection of counterexamples to show formal problems with the over-optimism inherent in Thompson sampling. Then we leverage state-of-the-art techniques in efficient Bayes-adaptive planning and non-parametric Bayesian methods to perform qualitatively better than both existing conventional algorithms and Thompson sampling on two contextual bandit-like problems.
1402.1971
Direct Processing of Run Length Compressed Document Image for Segmentation and Characterization of a Specified Block
cs.CV
Extracting a block of interest referred to as segmenting a specified block in an image and studying its characteristics is of general research interest, and could be a challenging if such a segmentation task has to be carried out directly in a compressed image. This is the objective of the present research work. The proposal is to evolve a method which would segment and extract a specified block, and carry out its characterization without decompressing a compressed image, for two major reasons that most of the image archives contain images in compressed format and decompressing an image indents additional computing time and space. Specifically in this research work, the proposal is to work on run-length compressed document images.
1402.1973
Dictionary learning for fast classification based on soft-thresholding
cs.CV cs.LG stat.ML
Classifiers based on sparse representations have recently been shown to provide excellent results in many visual recognition and classification tasks. However, the high cost of computing sparse representations at test time is a major obstacle that limits the applicability of these methods in large-scale problems, or in scenarios where computational power is restricted. We consider in this paper a simple yet efficient alternative to sparse coding for feature extraction. We study a classification scheme that applies the soft-thresholding nonlinear mapping in a dictionary, followed by a linear classifier. A novel supervised dictionary learning algorithm tailored for this low complexity classification architecture is proposed. The dictionary learning problem, which jointly learns the dictionary and linear classifier, is cast as a difference of convex (DC) program and solved efficiently with an iterative DC solver. We conduct experiments on several datasets, and show that our learning algorithm that leverages the structure of the classification problem outperforms generic learning procedures. Our simple classifier based on soft-thresholding also competes with the recent sparse coding classifiers, when the dictionary is learned appropriately. The adopted classification scheme further requires less computational time at the testing stage, compared to other classifiers. The proposed scheme shows the potential of the adequately trained soft-thresholding mapping for classification and paves the way towards the development of very efficient classification methods for vision problems.
1402.1986
Recommandation mobile, sensible au contexte de contenus \'evolutifs: Contextuel-E-Greedy
cs.AI
We introduce in this paper an algorithm named Contextuel-E-Greedy that tackles the dynamicity of the user's content. It is based on dynamic exploration/exploitation tradeoff and can adaptively balance the two aspects by deciding which situation is most relevant for exploration or exploitation. The experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms surveyed algorithms.
1402.1987
Quantifying Human Mobility Perturbation and Resilience in Natural Disasters
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Human mobility is influenced by environmental change and natural disasters. Researchers have used trip distance distribution, radius of gyration of movements, and individuals' visited locations to understand and capture human mobility patterns and trajectories. However, our knowledge of human movements during natural disasters is limited owing to both a lack of empirical data and the low precision of available data. Here, we studied human mobility using high-resolution movement data from individuals in New York City during and for several days after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. We found the human movements followed truncated power-law distributions during and after Hurricane Sandy, although the {\beta} value was noticeably larger during the first 24 hours after the storm struck. Also, we examined two parameters: the center of mass and the radius of gyration of each individual's movements. We found that their values during perturbation states and steady states are highly correlated, suggesting human mobility data obtained in steady states can possibly predict the perturbation state. Our results demonstrate that human movement trajectories experienced significant perturbations during hurricanes, but also exhibited high resilience. We expect the study will stimulate future research on the perturbation and inherent resilience of human mobility under the influence of natural disasters. For example, mobility patterns in coastal urban areas could be examined as tropical cyclones approach, gain or dissipate in strength, and as the path of the storm changes. Understanding nuances of human mobility under the influence of disasters will enable more effective evacuation, emergency response planning and development of strategies and policies to reduce fatality, injury, and economic loss.
1402.1992
Euler/X: A Toolkit for Logic-based Taxonomy Integration
cs.LO cs.DB
We introduce Euler/X, a toolkit for logic-based taxonomy integration. Given two taxonomies and a set of alignment constraints between them, Euler/X provides tools for detecting, explaining, and reconciling inconsistencies; finding all possible merges between (consistent) taxonomies; and visualizing merge results. Euler/X employs a number of different underlying reasoning systems, including first-order reasoners (Prover9 and Mace4), answer set programming (DLV and Potassco), and RCC reasoners (PyRCC8). We demonstrate the features of Euler/X and provide experimental results showing its feasibility on various synthetic and real-world examples.
1402.2011
Locality and Availability in Distributed Storage
cs.IT math.IT
This paper studies the problem of code symbol availability: a code symbol is said to have $(r, t)$-availability if it can be reconstructed from $t$ disjoint groups of other symbols, each of size at most $r$. For example, $3$-replication supports $(1, 2)$-availability as each symbol can be read from its $t= 2$ other (disjoint) replicas, i.e., $r=1$. However, the rate of replication must vanish like $\frac{1}{t+1}$ as the availability increases. This paper shows that it is possible to construct codes that can support a scaling number of parallel reads while keeping the rate to be an arbitrarily high constant. It further shows that this is possible with the minimum distance arbitrarily close to the Singleton bound. This paper also presents a bound demonstrating a trade-off between minimum distance, availability and locality. Our codes match the aforementioned bound and their construction relies on combinatorial objects called resolvable designs. From a practical standpoint, our codes seem useful for distributed storage applications involving hot data, i.e., the information which is frequently accessed by multiple processes in parallel.
1402.2013
Foreground segmentation based on multi-resolution and matting
cs.CV
We propose a foreground segmentation algorithm that does foreground extraction under different scales and refines the result by matting. First, the input image is filtered and resampled to 5 different resolutions. Then each of them is segmented by adaptive figure-ground classification and the best segmentation is automatically selected by an evaluation score that maximizes the difference between foreground and background. This segmentation is upsampled to the original size, and a corresponding trimap is built. Closed-form matting is employed to label the boundary region, and the result is refined by a final figure-ground classification. Experiments show the success of our method in treating challenging images with cluttered background and adapting to loose initial bounding-box.
1402.2016
Leveraging Long-Term Predictions and Online-Learning in Agent-based Multiple Person Tracking
cs.CV
We present a multiple-person tracking algorithm, based on combining particle filters and RVO, an agent-based crowd model that infers collision-free velocities so as to predict pedestrian's motion. In addition to position and velocity, our tracking algorithm can estimate the internal goals (desired destination or desired velocity) of the tracked pedestrian in an online manner, thus removing the need to specify this information beforehand. Furthermore, we leverage the longer-term predictions of RVO by deriving a higher-order particle filter, which aggregates multiple predictions from different prior time steps. This yields a tracker that can recover from short-term occlusions and spurious noise in the appearance model. Experimental results show that our tracking algorithm is suitable for predicting pedestrians' behaviors online without needing scene priors or hand-annotated goal information, and improves tracking in real-world crowded scenes under low frame rates.
1402.2020
Binary Stereo Matching
cs.CV
In this paper, we propose a novel binary-based cost computation and aggregation approach for stereo matching problem. The cost volume is constructed through bitwise operations on a series of binary strings. Then this approach is combined with traditional winner-take-all strategy, resulting in a new local stereo matching algorithm called binary stereo matching (BSM). Since core algorithm of BSM is based on binary and integer computations, it has a higher computational efficiency than previous methods. Experimental results on Middlebury benchmark show that BSM has comparable performance with state-of-the-art local stereo methods in terms of both quality and speed. Furthermore, experiments on images with radiometric differences demonstrate that BSM is more robust than previous methods under these changes, which is common under real illumination.
1402.2025
Nonlinear Kalman filter based on duality relations between continuous and discrete-state stochastic processes
cs.SY cond-mat.stat-mech
A new application of duality relations of stochastic processes is demonstrated. Although conventional usages of the duality relations need analytical solutions for the dual processes, we here employ numerical solutions of the dual processes and investigate the usefulness. As a demonstration, estimation problems of hidden variables in stochastic differential equations are discussed. Employing algebraic probability theory, a little complicated birth-death process is derived from the stochastic differential equations, and an estimation method based on the ensemble Kalman filter is proposed. As a result, the possibility for making faster computational algorithms based on the duality concepts is shown.
1402.2031
Deeply Coupled Auto-encoder Networks for Cross-view Classification
cs.CV cs.LG cs.NE
The comparison of heterogeneous samples extensively exists in many applications, especially in the task of image classification. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective coupled neural network, called Deeply Coupled Autoencoder Networks (DCAN), which seeks to build two deep neural networks, coupled with each other in every corresponding layers. In DCAN, each deep structure is developed via stacking multiple discriminative coupled auto-encoders, a denoising auto-encoder trained with maximum margin criterion consisting of intra-class compactness and inter-class penalty. This single layer component makes our model simultaneously preserve the local consistency and enhance its discriminative capability. With increasing number of layers, the coupled networks can gradually narrow the gap between the two views. Extensive experiments on cross-view image classification tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods.
1402.2032
An Achievable Rate-Distortion Region for the Multiple Descriptions Problem
cs.IT math.IT
A multiple-descriptions (MD) coding strategy is proposed and an inner bound to the achievable rate-distortion region is derived. The scheme utilizes linear codes. It is shown in two different MD set-ups that the linear coding scheme achieves a larger rate-distortion region than previously known random coding strategies. Furthermore, it is shown via an example that the best known random coding scheme for the set-up can be improved by including additional randomly generated codebooks.
1402.2042
Ad Hoc Networking With Cost-Effective Infrastructure: Generalized Capacity Scaling
cs.IT math.IT
Capacity scaling of a large hybrid network with unit node density, consisting of $n$ wireless ad hoc nodes, base stations (BSs) equipped with multiple antennas, and one remote central processor (RCP), is analyzed when wired backhaul links between the BSs and the RCP are rate-limited. We deal with a general scenario where the number of BSs, the number of antennas at each BS, and the backhaul link rate can scale at arbitrary rates relative to $n$ (i.e., we introduce three scaling parameters). We first derive the minimum backhaul link rate required to achieve the same capacity scaling law as in the infinite-capacity backhaul link case. Assuming an arbitrary rate scaling of each backhaul link, a generalized achievable throughput scaling law is then analyzed in the network based on using one of pure multihop, hierarchical cooperation, and two infrastructure-supported routing protocols, and moreover, three-dimensional information-theoretic operating regimes are explicitly identified according to the three scaling parameters. In particular, we show the case where our network having a power limitation is also fundamentally in the degrees-of-freedom- or infrastructure-limited regime, or both. In addition, a generalized cut-set upper bound under the network model is derived by cutting not only the wireless connections but also the wired connections. It is shown that our upper bound matches the achievable throughput scaling even under realistic network conditions such that each backhaul link rate scales slower than the aforementioned minimum-required backhaul link rate.
1402.2043
Approachability in unknown games: Online learning meets multi-objective optimization
stat.ML cs.LG math.ST stat.TH
In the standard setting of approachability there are two players and a target set. The players play repeatedly a known vector-valued game where the first player wants to have the average vector-valued payoff converge to the target set which the other player tries to exclude it from this set. We revisit this setting in the spirit of online learning and do not assume that the first player knows the game structure: she receives an arbitrary vector-valued reward vector at every round. She wishes to approach the smallest ("best") possible set given the observed average payoffs in hindsight. This extension of the standard setting has implications even when the original target set is not approachable and when it is not obvious which expansion of it should be approached instead. We show that it is impossible, in general, to approach the best target set in hindsight and propose achievable though ambitious alternative goals. We further propose a concrete strategy to approach these goals. Our method does not require projection onto a target set and amounts to switching between scalar regret minimization algorithms that are performed in episodes. Applications to global cost minimization and to approachability under sample path constraints are considered.
1402.2044
A Second-order Bound with Excess Losses
stat.ML cs.LG math.ST stat.TH
We study online aggregation of the predictions of experts, and first show new second-order regret bounds in the standard setting, which are obtained via a version of the Prod algorithm (and also a version of the polynomially weighted average algorithm) with multiple learning rates. These bounds are in terms of excess losses, the differences between the instantaneous losses suffered by the algorithm and the ones of a given expert. We then demonstrate the interest of these bounds in the context of experts that report their confidences as a number in the interval [0,1] using a generic reduction to the standard setting. We conclude by two other applications in the standard setting, which improve the known bounds in case of small excess losses and show a bounded regret against i.i.d. sequences of losses.
1402.2056
Key parameters generation of the navigation data of GPS Simulator
cs.IT math.IT
The development of the GPS (Global Positioning System) signal simulator involving to a number of key technologies, in which the generation of navigation message has important significance. Based on analysis of the structure of GPS navigation data, the paper researches the production of telemetry word and handover word, parity check code, time parameters and star clock. Using disturbing force equation and Lagrange planetary motion equation extrapolate ephemeris parameters whose feasibility is verified through the Matlab software finally.
1402.2058
Probabilistic Interpretation of Linear Solvers
math.OC cs.LG cs.NA math.NA math.PR stat.ML
This manuscript proposes a probabilistic framework for algorithms that iteratively solve unconstrained linear problems $Bx = b$ with positive definite $B$ for $x$. The goal is to replace the point estimates returned by existing methods with a Gaussian posterior belief over the elements of the inverse of $B$, which can be used to estimate errors. Recent probabilistic interpretations of the secant family of quasi-Newton optimization algorithms are extended. Combined with properties of the conjugate gradient algorithm, this leads to uncertainty-calibrated methods with very limited cost overhead over conjugate gradients, a self-contained novel interpretation of the quasi-Newton and conjugate gradient algorithms, and a foundation for new nonlinear optimization methods.
1402.2071
Attribute Dependencies for Data with Grades
cs.LO cs.DB
This paper examines attribute dependencies in data that involve grades, such as a grade to which an object is red or a grade to which two objects are similar. We thus extend the classical agenda by allowing graded, or fuzzy, attributes instead of Boolean attributes in case of attribute implications, and allowing approximate match based on degrees of similarity instead of exact match in case of functional dependencies. In a sense, we move from bivalence, inherently present in the now-available theories of dependencies, to a more flexible setting that involves grades. Such a shift has far-reaching consequences. We argue that a reasonable theory of dependencies may be developed by making use of mathematical fuzzy logic. Namely, the theory of dependencies is then based on a solid logic calculus the same way the classical dependencies are based on classical logic. For instance, rather than handling degrees of similarity in an ad hoc manner, we consistently treat them as truth values, the same way as true (match) and false (mismatch) are treated in classical theories. In addition, several notions intuitively embraced in the presence of grades, such as a degree of validity of a particular dependence or a degree of entailment, naturally emerge and receive a conceptually clean treatment in the presented approach. In the paper, we discuss motivations, provide basic notions of syntax and semantics, and develop basic results which include entailment of dependencies, associated closure structures, a logic of dependencies with two versions of completeness theorem, results and algorithms regarding complete non-redundant sets of dependencies, relationship to and a possible reductionist interface to classical dependencies, and relationship to functional dependencies over domains with similarity.
1402.2073
Mining Images in Biomedical Publications: Detection and Analysis of Gel Diagrams
cs.IR
Authors of biomedical publications use gel images to report experimental results such as protein-protein interactions or protein expressions under different conditions. Gel images offer a concise way to communicate such findings, not all of which need to be explicitly discussed in the article text. This fact together with the abundance of gel images and their shared common patterns makes them prime candidates for automated image mining and parsing. We introduce an approach for the detection of gel images, and present a workflow to analyze them. We are able to detect gel segments and panels at high accuracy, and present preliminary results for the identification of gene names in these images. While we cannot provide a complete solution at this point, we present evidence that this kind of image mining is feasible.
1402.2086
Guaranteed Non-quadratic Performance for Quantum Systems with Nonlinear Uncertainties
quant-ph cs.SY math.OC
This paper presents a robust performance analysis result for a class of uncertain quantum systems containing sector bounded nonlinearities arising from perturbations to the system Hamiltonian. An LMI condition is given for calculating a guaranteed upper bound on a non-quadratic cost function. This result is illustrated with an example involving a Josephson junction in an electromagnetic cavity.
1402.2088
Signal Reconstruction Framework Based On Projections Onto Epigraph Set Of A Convex Cost Function (PESC)
math.OC cs.CV
A new signal processing framework based on making orthogonal Projections onto the Epigraph Set of a Convex cost function (PESC) is developed. In this way it is possible to solve convex optimization problems using the well-known Projections onto Convex Set (POCS) approach. In this algorithm, the dimension of the minimization problem is lifted by one and a convex set corresponding to the epigraph of the cost function is defined. If the cost function is a convex function in $R^N$, the corresponding epigraph set is also a convex set in R^{N+1}. The PESC method provides globally optimal solutions for total-variation (TV), filtered variation (FV), L_1, L_2, and entropic cost function based convex optimization problems. In this article, the PESC based denoising and compressive sensing algorithms are developed. Simulation examples are presented.
1402.2091
Artificial Noise Revisited
cs.IT math.IT
The artificial noise (AN) scheme, proposed by Goel and Negi, is being considered as one of the key enabling technology for secure communications over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channels. However, the decrease in secrecy rate due to the increase in the number of Eve's antennas is not well understood. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework to characterize the secrecy rate of the AN scheme as a function of Eve's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), Bob's SNR, the number of antennas in each terminal, and the power allocation scheme. We first derive a closed-form expression for the average secrecy rate. We then derive a closed-form expression for the asymptotic instantaneous secrecy rate with large number of antennas at all terminals. Finally, we derive simple lower and upper bounds on the average and instantaneous secrecy rate that provide a tool for the system design.
1402.2092
Near-Optimally Teaching the Crowd to Classify
cs.LG
How should we present training examples to learners to teach them classification rules? This is a natural problem when training workers for crowdsourcing labeling tasks, and is also motivated by challenges in data-driven online education. We propose a natural stochastic model of the learners, modeling them as randomly switching among hypotheses based on observed feedback. We then develop STRICT, an efficient algorithm for selecting examples to teach to workers. Our solution greedily maximizes a submodular surrogate objective function in order to select examples to show to the learners. We prove that our strategy is competitive with the optimal teaching policy. Moreover, for the special case of linear separators, we prove that an exponential reduction in error probability can be achieved. Our experiments on simulated workers as well as three real image annotation tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk show the effectiveness of our teaching algorithm.
1402.2114
Ubiquitous Smart Home System Using Android Application
cs.CY cs.SY
This paper presents a flexible standalone, low-cost smart home system, which is based on the Android app communicating with the micro-web server providing more than the switching functionalities. The Arduino Ethernet is used to eliminate the use of a personal computer (PC) keeping the cost of the overall system to a minimum while voice activation is incorporated for switching functionalities. Devices such as light switches, power plugs, temperature sensors, humidity sensors, current sensors, intrusion detection sensors, smoke/gas sensors and sirens have been integrated in the system to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed smart home system. The smart home app is tested and it is able to successfully perform the smart home operations such as switching functionalities, automatic environmental control and intrusion detection, in the later case where an email is generated and the siren goes on.
1402.2145
Using content features to enhance performance of user-based collaborative filtering performance of user-based collaborative filtering
cs.IR
Content-based and collaborative filtering methods are the most successful solutions in recommender systems. Content based method is based on items attributes. This method checks the features of users favourite items and then proposes the items which have the most similar characteristics with those items. Collaborative filtering method is based on the determination of similar items or similar users, which are called item-based and user-based collaborative filtering, respectively.In this paper we propose a hybrid method that integrates collaborative filtering and content-based methods. The proposed method can be viewed as user-based Collaborative filtering technique. However to find users with similar taste with active user, we used content features of the item under investigation to put more emphasis on users rating for similar items. In other words two users are similar if their ratings are similar on items that have similar context. This is achieved by assigning a weight to each rating when calculating the similarity of two users.We used movielens data set to access the performance of the proposed method in comparison with basic user-based collaborative filtering and other popular methods.
1402.2188
Handwritten Character Recognition In Malayalam Scripts- A Review
cs.CV
Handwritten character recognition is one of the most challenging and ongoing areas of research in the field of pattern recognition. HCR research is matured for foreign languages like Chinese and Japanese but the problem is much more complex for Indian languages. The problem becomes even more complicated for South Indian languages due to its large character set and the presence of vowels modifiers and compound characters. This paper provides an overview of important contributions and advances in offline as well as online handwritten character recognition of Malayalam scripts.
1402.2224
Characterizing the Sample Complexity of Private Learners
cs.CR cs.LG
In 2008, Kasiviswanathan et al. defined private learning as a combination of PAC learning and differential privacy. Informally, a private learner is applied to a collection of labeled individual information and outputs a hypothesis while preserving the privacy of each individual. Kasiviswanathan et al. gave a generic construction of private learners for (finite) concept classes, with sample complexity logarithmic in the size of the concept class. This sample complexity is higher than what is needed for non-private learners, hence leaving open the possibility that the sample complexity of private learning may be sometimes significantly higher than that of non-private learning. We give a combinatorial characterization of the sample size sufficient and necessary to privately learn a class of concepts. This characterization is analogous to the well known characterization of the sample complexity of non-private learning in terms of the VC dimension of the concept class. We introduce the notion of probabilistic representation of a concept class, and our new complexity measure RepDim corresponds to the size of the smallest probabilistic representation of the concept class. We show that any private learning algorithm for a concept class C with sample complexity m implies RepDim(C)=O(m), and that there exists a private learning algorithm with sample complexity m=O(RepDim(C)). We further demonstrate that a similar characterization holds for the database size needed for privately computing a large class of optimization problems and also for the well studied problem of private data release.
1402.2231
Compressive sensing for dynamic spectrum access networks: Techniques and tradeoffs
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT
We explore the practical costs and benefits of CS for dynamic spectrum access (DSA) networks. Firstly, we review several fast and practical techniques for energy detection without full reconstruction and provide theoretical guarantees. We also define practical metrics to measure the performance of these techniques. Secondly, we perform comprehensive experiments comparing the techniques on real signals captured over the air. Our results show that we can significantly compressively acquire the signal while still accurately determining spectral occupancy.
1402.2232
Image Search Reranking
cs.IR cs.CV
The existing methods for image search reranking suffer from the unfaithfulness of the assumptions under which the text-based images search result. The resulting images contain more irrelevant images. Hence the re ranking concept arises to re rank the retrieved images based on the text around the image and data of data of image and visual feature of image. A number of methods are differentiated for this re-ranking. The high ranked images are used as noisy data and a k means algorithm for classification is learned to rectify the ranking further. We are study the affect ability of the cross validation method to this training data. The pre eminent originality of the overall method is in collecting text/metadata of image and visual features in order to achieve an automatic ranking of the images. Supervision is initiated to learn the model weights offline, previous to reranking process. While model learning needs manual labeling of the results for a some limited queries, the resulting model is query autonomous and therefore applicable to any other query .Examples are given for a selection of other classes like vehicles, animals and other classes.
1402.2237
Coordination Avoidance in Database Systems (Extended Version)
cs.DB
Minimizing coordination, or blocking communication between concurrently executing operations, is key to maximizing scalability, availability, and high performance in database systems. However, uninhibited coordination-free execution can compromise application correctness, or consistency. When is coordination necessary for correctness? The classic use of serializable transactions is sufficient to maintain correctness but is not necessary for all applications, sacrificing potential scalability. In this paper, we develop a formal framework, invariant confluence, that determines whether an application requires coordination for correct execution. By operating on application-level invariants over database states (e.g., integrity constraints), invariant confluence analysis provides a necessary and sufficient condition for safe, coordination-free execution. When programmers specify their application invariants, this analysis allows databases to coordinate only when anomalies that might violate invariants are possible. We analyze the invariant confluence of common invariants and operations from real-world database systems (i.e., integrity constraints) and applications and show that many are invariant confluent and therefore achievable without coordination. We apply these results to a proof-of-concept coordination-avoiding database prototype and demonstrate sizable performance gains compared to serializable execution, notably a 25-fold improvement over prior TPC-C New-Order performance on a 200 server cluster.
1402.2238
Information-theoretically Optimal Sparse PCA
cs.IT math.IT math.ST stat.TH
Sparse Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a dimensionality reduction technique wherein one seeks a low-rank representation of a data matrix with additional sparsity constraints on the obtained representation. We consider two probabilistic formulations of sparse PCA: a spiked Wigner and spiked Wishart (or spiked covariance) model. We analyze an Approximate Message Passing (AMP) algorithm to estimate the underlying signal and show, in the high dimensional limit, that the AMP estimates are information-theoretically optimal. As an immediate corollary, our results demonstrate that the posterior expectation of the underlying signal, which is often intractable to compute, can be obtained using a polynomial-time scheme. Our results also effectively provide a single-letter characterization of the sparse PCA problem.
1402.2255
Robust Phase Retrieval and Super-Resolution from One Bit Coded Diffraction Patterns
cs.IT math.IT math.ST stat.AP stat.TH
In this paper we study a realistic setup for phase retrieval, where the signal of interest is modulated or masked and then for each modulation or mask a diffraction pattern is collected, producing a coded diffraction pattern (CDP) [CLM13]. We are interested in the setup where the resolution of the collected CDP is limited by the Fraunhofer diffraction limit of the imaging system. We investigate a novel approach based on a geometric quantization scheme of phase-less linear measurements into (one-bit) coded diffraction patterns, and a corresponding recovery scheme. The key novelty in this approach consists in comparing pairs of coded diffractions patterns across frequencies: the one bit measurements obtained rely on the order statistics of the un-quantized measurements rather than their values . This results in a robust phase recovery, and unlike currently available methods, allows to efficiently perform phase recovery from measurements affected by severe (possibly unknown) non linear, rank preserving perturbations, such as distortions. Another important feature of this approach consists in the fact that it enables also super-resolution and blind-deconvolution, beyond the diffraction limit of a given imaging system.
1402.2297
Connecting Dream Networks Across Cultures
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Many species dream, yet there remain many open research questions in the study of dreams. The symbolism of dreams and their interpretation is present in cultures throughout history. Analysis of online data sources for dream interpretation using network science leads to understanding symbolism in dreams and their associated meaning. In this study, we introduce dream interpretation networks for English, Chinese and Arabic that represent different cultures from various parts of the world. We analyze communities in these networks, finding that symbols within a community are semantically related. The central nodes in communities give insight about cultures and symbols in dreams. The community structure of different networks highlights cultural similarities and differences. Interconnections between different networks are also identified by translating symbols from different languages into English. Structural correlations across networks point out relationships between cultures. Similarities between network communities are also investigated by analysis of sentiment in symbol interpretations. We find that interpretations within a community tend to have similar sentiment. Furthermore, we cluster communities based on their sentiment, yielding three main categories of positive, negative, and neutral dream symbols.
1402.2300
Feature and Variable Selection in Classification
cs.LG cs.AI stat.ML
The amount of information in the form of features and variables avail- able to machine learning algorithms is ever increasing. This can lead to classifiers that are prone to overfitting in high dimensions, high di- mensional models do not lend themselves to interpretable results, and the CPU and memory resources necessary to run on high-dimensional datasets severly limit the applications of the approaches. Variable and feature selection aim to remedy this by finding a subset of features that in some way captures the information provided best. In this paper we present the general methodology and highlight some specific approaches.
1402.2308
Predicting Crowd Behavior with Big Public Data
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
With public information becoming widely accessible and shared on today's web, greater insights are possible into crowd actions by citizens and non-state actors such as large protests and cyber activism. We present efforts to predict the occurrence, specific timeframe, and location of such actions before they occur based on public data collected from over 300,000 open content web sources in 7 languages, from all over the world, ranging from mainstream news to government publications to blogs and social media. Using natural language processing, event information is extracted from content such as type of event, what entities are involved and in what role, sentiment and tone, and the occurrence time range of the event discussed. Statements made on Twitter about a future date from the time of posting prove particularly indicative. We consider in particular the case of the 2013 Egyptian coup d'etat. The study validates and quantifies the common intuition that data on social media (beyond mainstream news sources) are able to predict major events.
1402.2324
Universal Matrix Completion
stat.ML cs.IT cs.LG math.IT
The problem of low-rank matrix completion has recently generated a lot of interest leading to several results that offer exact solutions to the problem. However, in order to do so, these methods make assumptions that can be quite restrictive in practice. More specifically, the methods assume that: a) the observed indices are sampled uniformly at random, and b) for every new matrix, the observed indices are sampled afresh. In this work, we address these issues by providing a universal recovery guarantee for matrix completion that works for a variety of sampling schemes. In particular, we show that if the set of sampled indices come from the edges of a bipartite graph with large spectral gap (i.e. gap between the first and the second singular value), then the nuclear norm minimization based method exactly recovers all low-rank matrices that satisfy certain incoherence properties. Moreover, we also show that under certain stricter incoherence conditions, $O(nr^2)$ uniformly sampled entries are enough to recover any rank-$r$ $n\times n$ matrix, in contrast to the $O(nr\log n)$ sample complexity required by other matrix completion algorithms as well as existing analyses of the nuclear norm method.
1402.2331
Computational Limits for Matrix Completion
cs.CC cs.LG
Matrix Completion is the problem of recovering an unknown real-valued low-rank matrix from a subsample of its entries. Important recent results show that the problem can be solved efficiently under the assumption that the unknown matrix is incoherent and the subsample is drawn uniformly at random. Are these assumptions necessary? It is well known that Matrix Completion in its full generality is NP-hard. However, little is known if make additional assumptions such as incoherence and permit the algorithm to output a matrix of slightly higher rank. In this paper we prove that Matrix Completion remains computationally intractable even if the unknown matrix has rank $4$ but we are allowed to output any constant rank matrix, and even if additionally we assume that the unknown matrix is incoherent and are shown $90%$ of the entries. This result relies on the conjectured hardness of the $4$-Coloring problem. We also consider the positive semidefinite Matrix Completion problem. Here we show a similar hardness result under the standard assumption that $\mathrm{P}\ne \mathrm{NP}.$ Our results greatly narrow the gap between existing feasibility results and computational lower bounds. In particular, we believe that our results give the first complexity-theoretic justification for why distributional assumptions are needed beyond the incoherence assumption in order to obtain positive results. On the technical side, we contribute several new ideas on how to encode hard combinatorial problems in low-rank optimization problems. We hope that these techniques will be helpful in further understanding the computational limits of Matrix Completion and related problems.
1402.2333
Modeling sequential data using higher-order relational features and predictive training
cs.LG cs.CV stat.ML
Bi-linear feature learning models, like the gated autoencoder, were proposed as a way to model relationships between frames in a video. By minimizing reconstruction error of one frame, given the previous frame, these models learn "mapping units" that encode the transformations inherent in a sequence, and thereby learn to encode motion. In this work we extend bi-linear models by introducing "higher-order mapping units" that allow us to encode transformations between frames and transformations between transformations. We show that this makes it possible to encode temporal structure that is more complex and longer-range than the structure captured within standard bi-linear models. We also show that a natural way to train the model is by replacing the commonly used reconstruction objective with a prediction objective which forces the model to correctly predict the evolution of the input multiple steps into the future. Learning can be achieved by back-propagating the multi-step prediction through time. We test the model on various temporal prediction tasks, and show that higher-order mappings and predictive training both yield a significant improvement over bi-linear models in terms of prediction accuracy.
1402.2335
Sparsity averaging for radio-interferometric imaging
astro-ph.IM cs.CV
We propose a novel regularization method for compressive imaging in the context of the compressed sensing (CS) theory with coherent and redundant dictionaries. Natural images are often complicated and several types of structures can be present at once. It is well known that piecewise smooth images exhibit gradient sparsity, and that images with extended structures are better encapsulated in wavelet frames. Therefore, we here conjecture that promoting average sparsity or compressibility over multiple frames rather than single frames is an extremely powerful regularization prior.
1402.2343
New Codes and Inner Bounds for Exact Repair in Distributed Storage Systems
cs.IT math.IT
We study the exact-repair tradeoff between storage and repair bandwidth in distributed storage systems (DSS). We give new inner bounds for the tradeoff region and provide code constructions that achieve these bounds.
1402.2351
TrendLearner: Early Prediction of Popularity Trends of User Generated Content
cs.SI cs.IR
We here focus on the problem of predicting the popularity trend of user generated content (UGC) as early as possible. Taking YouTube videos as case study, we propose a novel two-step learning approach that: (1) extracts popularity trends from previously uploaded objects, and (2) predicts trends for new content. Unlike previous work, our solution explicitly addresses the inherent tradeoff between prediction accuracy and remaining interest in the content after prediction, solving it on a per-object basis. Our experimental results show great improvements of our solution over alternatives, and its applicability to improve the accuracy of state-of-the-art popularity prediction methods.
1402.2359
Machine Learner for Automated Reasoning 0.4 and 0.5
cs.LG cs.AI cs.LO
Machine Learner for Automated Reasoning (MaLARea) is a learning and reasoning system for proving in large formal libraries where thousands of theorems are available when attacking a new conjecture, and a large number of related problems and proofs can be used to learn specific theorem-proving knowledge. The last version of the system has by a large margin won the 2013 CASC LTB competition. This paper describes the motivation behind the methods used in MaLARea, discusses the general approach and the issues arising in evaluation of such system, and describes the Mizar@Turing100 and CASC'24 versions of MaLARea.
1402.2363
Animation of 3D Human Model Using Markerless Motion Capture Applied To Sports
cs.GR cs.CV
Markerless motion capture is an active research in 3D virtualization. In proposed work we presented a system for markerless motion capture for 3D human character animation, paper presents a survey on motion and skeleton tracking techniques which are developed or are under development. The paper proposed a method to transform the motion of a performer to a 3D human character (model), the 3D human character performs similar movements as that of a performer in real time. In the proposed work, human model data will be captured by Kinect camera, processed data will be applied on 3D human model for animation. 3D human model is created using open source software (MakeHuman). Anticipated dataset for sport activity is considered as input which can be applied to any HCI application.
1402.2394
GraphX: Unifying Data-Parallel and Graph-Parallel Analytics
cs.DB
From social networks to language modeling, the growing scale and importance of graph data has driven the development of numerous new graph-parallel systems (e.g., Pregel, GraphLab). By restricting the computation that can be expressed and introducing new techniques to partition and distribute the graph, these systems can efficiently execute iterative graph algorithms orders of magnitude faster than more general data-parallel systems. However, the same restrictions that enable the performance gains also make it difficult to express many of the important stages in a typical graph-analytics pipeline: constructing the graph, modifying its structure, or expressing computation that spans multiple graphs. As a consequence, existing graph analytics pipelines compose graph-parallel and data-parallel systems using external storage systems, leading to extensive data movement and complicated programming model. To address these challenges we introduce GraphX, a distributed graph computation framework that unifies graph-parallel and data-parallel computation. GraphX provides a small, core set of graph-parallel operators expressive enough to implement the Pregel and PowerGraph abstractions, yet simple enough to be cast in relational algebra. GraphX uses a collection of query optimization techniques such as automatic join rewrites to efficiently implement these graph-parallel operators. We evaluate GraphX on real-world graphs and workloads and demonstrate that GraphX achieves comparable performance as specialized graph computation systems, while outperforming them in end-to-end graph pipelines. Moreover, GraphX achieves a balance between expressiveness, performance, and ease of use.
1402.2426
Imaging with Rays: Microscopy, Medical Imaging, and Computer Vision
cs.CV
In this paper we broadly consider techniques which utilize projections on rays for data collection, with particular emphasis on optical techniques. We formulate a variety of imaging techniques as either special cases or extensions of tomographic reconstruction. We then consider how the techniques must be extended to describe objects containing occlusion, as with a self-occluding opaque object. We formulate the reconstruction problem as a regularized nonlinear optimization problem to simultaneously solve for object brightness and attenuation, where the attenuation can become infinite. We demonstrate various simulated examples for imaging opaque objects, including sparse point sources, a conventional multiview reconstruction technique, and a super-resolving technique which exploits occlusion to resolve an image.
1402.2427
An evaluation of keyword extraction from online communication for the characterisation of social relations
cs.SI cs.CL cs.IR
The set of interpersonal relationships on a social network service or a similar online community is usually highly heterogenous. The concept of tie strength captures only one aspect of this heterogeneity. Since the unstructured text content of online communication artefacts is a salient source of information about a social relationship, we investigate the utility of keywords extracted from the message body as a representation of the relationship's characteristics as reflected by the conversation topics. Keyword extraction is performed using standard natural language processing methods. Communication data and human assessments of the extracted keywords are obtained from Facebook users via a custom application. The overall positive quality assessment provides evidence that the keywords indeed convey relevant information about the relationship.
1402.2440
Validation Experiments for LBM Simulations of Electron Beam Melting
cs.CE
This paper validates 3D simulation results of electron beam melting (EBM) processes comparing experimental and numerical data. The physical setup is presented which is discretized by a three dimensional (3D) thermal lattice Boltzmann method (LBM). An experimental process window is used for the validation depending on the line energy injected into the metal powder bed and the scan velocity of the electron beam. In the process window the EBM products are classified into the categories, porous, good and swelling, depending on the quality of the surface. The same parameter sets are used to generate a numerical process window. A comparison of numerical and experimental process windows shows a good agreement. This validates the EBM model and justifies simulations for future improvements of EBM processes. In particular numerical simulations can be used to explain future process window scenarios and find the best parameter set for a good surface quality and dense products.
1402.2447
A comparison of linear and non-linear calibrations for speaker recognition
stat.ML cs.LG
In recent work on both generative and discriminative score to log-likelihood-ratio calibration, it was shown that linear transforms give good accuracy only for a limited range of operating points. Moreover, these methods required tailoring of the calibration training objective functions in order to target the desired region of best accuracy. Here, we generalize the linear recipes to non-linear ones. We experiment with a non-linear, non-parametric, discriminative PAV solution, as well as parametric, generative, maximum-likelihood solutions that use Gaussian, Student's T and normal-inverse-Gaussian score distributions. Experiments on NIST SRE'12 scores suggest that the non-linear methods provide wider ranges of optimal accuracy and can be trained without having to resort to objective function tailoring.
1402.2453
Sliding window and compressive sensing for low-field dynamic magnetic resonance imaging
cs.CE physics.med-ph
We describe an acquisition/processing procedure for image reconstruction in dynamic Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The approach requires sliding window to record a set of trajectories in the k-space, standard regularization to reconstruct an estimate of the object and compressed sensing to recover image residuals. We validated this approach in the case of specific simulated experiments and, in the case of real measurements, we showed that the procedure is reliable even in the case of data acquired by means of a low-field scanner.
1402.2461
Distributions of Upper PAPR and Lower PAPR of OFDM Signals in Visible Light Communications
cs.IT math.IT
Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) in visible light communications (VLC) inherits the disadvantage of high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) from OFDM in radio frequency (RF) communications. The upper peak power and lower peak power of real-valued VLC-OFDM signals are both limited by the dynamic constraints of light emitting diodes (LEDs). The efficiency and transmitted electrical power are directly related with the upper PAPR (UPAPR) and lower PAPR (LPAPR) of VLC-OFDM. In this paper, we will derive the complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF) of UPAPR and LPAPR, and investigate the joint distribution of UPAPR and LPAPR.
1402.2479
Coalitional Games with Overlapping Coalitions for Interference Management in Small Cell Networks
cs.GT cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we study the problem of cooperative interference management in an OFDMA two-tier small cell network. In particular, we propose a novel approach for allowing the small cells to cooperate, so as to optimize their sum-rate, while cooperatively satisfying their maximum transmit power constraints. Unlike existing work which assumes that only disjoint groups of cooperative small cells can emerge, we formulate the small cells' cooperation problem as a coalition formation game with overlapping coalitions. In this game, each small cell base station can choose to participate in one or more cooperative groups (or coalitions) simultaneously, so as to optimize the tradeoff between the benefits and costs associated with cooperation. We study the properties of the proposed overlapping coalition formation game and we show that it exhibits negative externalities due to interference. Then, we propose a novel decentralized algorithm that allows the small cell base stations to interact and self-organize into a stable overlapping coalitional structure. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm results in a notable performance advantage in terms of the total system sum-rate, relative to the noncooperative case and the classical algorithms for coalitional games with non-overlapping coalitions.
1402.2482
Performance of Social Network Sensors During Hurricane Sandy
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Information flow during catastrophic events is a critical aspect of disaster management. Modern communication platforms, in particular online social networks, provide an opportunity to study such flow, and a mean to derive early-warning sensors, improving emergency preparedness and response. Performance of the social networks sensor method, based on topological and behavioural properties derived from the "friendship paradox", is studied here for over 50 million Twitter messages posted before, during, and after Hurricane Sandy. We find that differences in user's network centrality effectively translate into moderate awareness advantage (up to 26 hours); and that geo-location of users within or outside of the hurricane-affected area plays significant role in determining the scale of such advantage. Emotional response appears to be universal regardless of the position in the network topology, and displays characteristic, easily detectable patterns, opening a possibility of implementing a simple "sentiment sensing" technique to detect and locate disasters.
1402.2487
Materialized View Replacement using Markovs Analysis
cs.DB
Materialized view is used in large data centric applications to expedite query processing. The efficiency of materialized view depends on degree of result found against the queries over the existing materialized views. Materialized views are constructed following different methodologies. Thus the efficacy of the materialized views depends on the methodology based on which these are formed. Construction of materialized views are often time consuming and moreover after a certain time the performance of the materialized views degrade when the nature of queries change. In this situation either new materialized views could be constructed from scratch or the existing views could be upgraded. Fresh construction of materialized views has higher time complexity hence the modification of the existing views is a better solution.Modification process of materialized view is classified under materialized view maintenance scheme. Materialized view maintenance is a continuous process and the system could be tuned to ensure a constant rate of performance. If a materialized view construction process is not supported by materialized view maintenance scheme that system would suffer from performance degradation. In this paper a new materialized view maintenance scheme is proposed using markovs analysis to ensure consistent performance. Markovs analysis is chosen here to predict steady state probability over initial probability.
1402.2489
The Fair Distribution of Power to Electric Vehicles: An Alternative to Pricing
cs.NI cs.SY
As the popularity of electric vehicles increases, the demand for more power can increase more rapidly than our ability to install additional generating capacity. In the long term we expect that the supply and demand will become balanced. However, in the interim the rate at which electric vehicles can be deployed will depend on our ability to charge these vehicles without inconveniencing their owners. In this paper, we investigate using fairness mechanisms to distribute power to electric vehicles on a smart grid. We assume that during peak demand there is insufficient power to charge all the vehicles simultaneously. In each five minute interval of time we select a subset of the vehicles to charge, based upon information about the vehicles. We evaluate the selection mechanisms using published data on the current demand for electric power as a function of time of day, current driving habits for commuting, and the current rates at which electric vehicles can be charged on home outlets. We found that conventional selection strategies, such as first-come-first-served or round robin, may delay a significant fraction of the vehicles by more than two hours, even when the total available power over the course of a day is two or three times the power required by the vehicles. However, a selection mechanism that minimizes the maximum delay can reduce the delays to a few minutes, even when the capacity available for charging electric vehicles exceeds their requirements by as little as 5%.
1402.2507
Force-Guiding Particle Chains for Shape-Shifting Displays
cs.RO
We present design and implementation of a chain of particles that can be programmed to fold the chain into a given curve. The particles guide an external force to fold, therefore the particles are simple and amenable for miniaturization. A chain can consist of a large number of such particles. Using multiple of these chains, a shape-shifting display can be constructed that folds its initially flat surface to approximate a given 3D shape that can be touched and modified by users, for example, enabling architects to interactively view, touch, and modify a 3D model of a building.
1402.2509
Achieve Better Ranking Accuracy Using CloudRank Framework for Cloud Services
cs.DC cs.IR
Building high quality cloud applications becomes an urgently required research problem. Nonfunctional performance of cloud services is usually described by quality-of-service (QoS). In cloud applications, cloud services are invoked remotely by internet connections. The QoS Ranking of cloud services for a user cannot be transferred directly to another user, since the locations of the cloud applications are quite different. Personalized QoS Ranking is required to evaluate all candidate services at the user - side but it is impractical in reality. To get QoS values, the service candidates are usually required and it is very expensive. To avoid time consuming and expensive realworld service invocations, this paper proposes a CloudRank framework which predicts the QoS ranking directly without predicting the corresponding QoS values. This framework provides an accurate ranking but the QoS values are same in both algorithms so, an optimal VM allocation policy is used to improve the QoS performance of cloud services and it also provides better ranking accuracy than CloudRank2 algorithm.
1402.2551
Modeling European Options
cs.CE
Option contracts can be valued by using the Black-Scholes equation, a partial differential equation with initial conditions. An exact solution for European style options is known. The computation time and the error need to be minimized simultaneously. In this paper, the authors have solved the Black-Scholes equation by employing a reasonably accurate implicit method. Options with known analytic solutions have been evaluated. Furthermore, an overall second order accurate space and time discretization has been accomplished in this paper.
1402.2561
The CQC Algorithm: Cycling in Graphs to Semantically Enrich and Enhance a Bilingual Dictionary
cs.CL
Bilingual machine-readable dictionaries are knowledge resources useful in many automatic tasks. However, compared to monolingual computational lexicons like WordNet, bilingual dictionaries typically provide a lower amount of structured information, such as lexical and semantic relations, and often do not cover the entire range of possible translations for a word of interest. In this paper we present Cycles and Quasi-Cycles (CQC), a novel algorithm for the automated disambiguation of ambiguous translations in the lexical entries of a bilingual machine-readable dictionary. The dictionary is represented as a graph, and cyclic patterns are sought in the graph to assign an appropriate sense tag to each translation in a lexical entry. Further, we use the algorithms output to improve the quality of the dictionary itself, by suggesting accurate solutions to structural problems such as misalignments, partial alignments and missing entries. Finally, we successfully apply CQC to the task of synonym extraction.
1402.2562
\'Etude cognitive des processus de construction d'une requ\^ete dans un syst\`eme de gestion de connaissances m\'edicales
cs.IR cs.CL
This article presents the Cogni-CISMeF project, which aims at improving medical information search in the CISMeF system (Catalog and Index of French-language health resources) by including a conversational agent to interact with the user in natural language. To study the cognitive processes involved during the information search, a bottom-up methodology was adopted. Experimentation has been set up to obtain human dialogs between a user (playing the role of patient) dealing with medical information search and a CISMeF expert refining the request. The analysis of these dialogs underlined the use of discursive evidence: vocabulary, reformulation, implicit or explicit expression of user intentions, conversational sequences, etc. A model of artificial agent is proposed. It leads the user in its information search by proposing to him examples, assistance and choices. This model was implemented and integrated in the CISMeF system. ---- Cet article d\'ecrit le projet Cogni-CISMeF qui propose un module de dialogue Homme-Machine \`a int\'egrer dans le syst\`eme d'indexation de connaissances m\'edicales CISMeF (Catalogue et Index des Sites M\'edicaux Francophones). Nous avons adopt\'e une d\'emarche de mod\'elisation cognitive en proc\'edant \`a un recueil de corpus de dialogues entre un utilisateur (jouant le r\^ole d'un patient) d\'esirant une information m\'edicale et un expert CISMeF af inant cette demande pour construire la requ\^ete. Nous avons analys\'e la structure des dialogues ainsi obtenus et avons \'etudi\'e un certain nombre d'indices discursifs : vocabulaire employ\'e, marques de reformulation, commentaires m\'eta et \'epilinguistiques, expression implicite ou explicite des intentions de l'utilisateur, encha\^inement conversationnel, etc. De cette analyse, nous avons construit un mod\`ele d'agent artificiel dot\'e de capacit\'es cognitives capables d'aider l'utilisateur dans sa t\^ache de recherche d'information. Ce mod\`ele a \'et\'e impl\'ement\'e et int\'egr\'e dans le syst\`eme CISMeF.
1402.2583
Coordinated Output Regulation of Heterogeneous Linear Systems under Switching Topologies
cs.SY cs.MA math.OC
This paper constructs a framework to describe and study the coordinated output regulation problem for multiple heterogeneous linear systems. Each agent is modeled as a general linear multiple-input multiple-output system with an autonomous exosystem which represents the individual offset from the group reference for the agent. The multi-agent system as a whole has a group exogenous state which represents the tracking reference for the whole group. Under the constraints that the group exogenous output is only locally available to each agent and that the agents have only access to their neighbors' information, we propose observer-based feedback controllers to solve the coordinated output regulation problem using output feedback information. A high-gain approach is used and the information interactions are allowed to be switched over a finite set of fixed networks containing both graphs that have a directed spanning tree and graphs that do not. The fundamental relationship between the information interactions, the dwell time, the non-identical dynamics of different agents, and the high-gain parameters is given. Simulations are shown to validate the theoretical results.
1402.2594
Online Nonparametric Regression
stat.ML cs.LG math.ST stat.TH
We establish optimal rates for online regression for arbitrary classes of regression functions in terms of the sequential entropy introduced in (Rakhlin, Sridharan, Tewari, 2010). The optimal rates are shown to exhibit a phase transition analogous to the i.i.d./statistical learning case, studied in (Rakhlin, Sridharan, Tsybakov 2013). In the frequently encountered situation when sequential entropy and i.i.d. empirical entropy match, our results point to the interesting phenomenon that the rates for statistical learning with squared loss and online nonparametric regression are the same. In addition to a non-algorithmic study of minimax regret, we exhibit a generic forecaster that enjoys the established optimal rates. We also provide a recipe for designing online regression algorithms that can be computationally efficient. We illustrate the techniques by deriving existing and new forecasters for the case of finite experts and for online linear regression.
1402.2601
Near Oracle Performance and Block Analysis of Signal Space Greedy Methods
math.NA cs.IT math.IT
Compressive sampling (CoSa) is a new methodology which demonstrates that sparse signals can be recovered from a small number of linear measurements. Greedy algorithms like CoSaMP have been designed for this recovery, and variants of these methods have been adapted to the case where sparsity is with respect to some arbitrary dictionary rather than an orthonormal basis. In this work we present an analysis of the so-called Signal Space CoSaMP method when the measurements are corrupted with mean-zero white Gaussian noise. We establish near-oracle performance for recovery of signals sparse in some arbitrary dictionary. In addition, we analyze the block variant of the method for signals whose supports obey a block structure, extending the method into the model-based compressed sensing framework. Numerical experiments confirm that the block method significantly outperforms the standard method in these settings.
1402.2603
Small Cell In-Band Wireless Backhaul in Massive MIMO Systems: A Cooperation of Next-Generation Techniques
cs.IT math.IT
Massive multiple-inputmultiple-output (MIMO) systems, dense small-cells (SCs), and full duplex are three candidate techniques for next-generation communication systems. The cooperation of next-generation techniques could offer more benefits, e.g., SC in-band wireless backhaul in massive MIMO systems. In this paper, three strategies of SC in-band wireless backhaul in massive MIMO systems are introduced and compared, i.e., complete time-division duplex (CTDD), zero-division duplex (ZDD), and ZDD with interference rejection (ZDD-IR). Simulation results demonstrate that SC in-band wireless backhaul has the potential to improve the throughput for massive MIMO systems. Specifically, among the three strategies, CTDD is the simplest one and could achieve decent throughput improvement. Depending on conditions, with the self-interference cancellation capability at SCs, ZDD could achieve better throughput than CTDD, even with residual self-interference. Moreover, ZDD-IR requires the additional interference rejection process at the BS compared to ZDD, but it could generally achieve better throughput than CTDD and ZDD.
1402.2606
A Fast Two Pass Multi-Value Segmentation Algorithm based on Connected Component Analysis
cs.CV
Connected component analysis (CCA) has been heavily used to label binary images and classify segments. However, it has not been well-exploited to segment multi-valued natural images. This work proposes a novel multi-value segmentation algorithm that utilizes CCA to segment color images. A user defined distance measure is incorporated in the proposed modified CCA to identify and segment similar image regions. The raw output of the algorithm consists of distinctly labelled segmented regions. The proposed algorithm has a unique design architecture that provides several benefits: 1) it can be used to segment any multi-channel multi-valued image; 2) the distance measure/segmentation criteria can be application-specific and 3) an absolute linear-time implementation allows easy extension for real-time video segmentation. Experimental demonstrations of the aforesaid benefits are presented along with the comparison results on multiple datasets with current benchmark algorithms. A number of possible application areas are also identified and results on real-time video segmentation has been presented to show the promise of the proposed method.
1402.2634
Cooperative Set Aggregation for Multiple Lagrangian Systems
cs.SY math.OC
In this paper, we study the cooperative set tracking problem for a group of Lagrangian systems. Each system observes a convex set as its local target. The intersection of these local sets is the group aggregation target. We first propose a control law based on each system's own target sensing and information exchange with neighbors. With necessary connectivity for both cases of fixed and switching communication graphs, multiple Lagrangian systems are shown to achieve rendezvous on the intersection of all the local target sets while the vectors of generalized coordinate derivatives are driven to zero. Then, we introduce the collision avoidance control term into set aggregation control to ensure group dispersion. By defining an ultimate bound on the final generalized coordinate between each system and the intersection of all the local target sets, we show that multiple Lagrangian systems approach a bounded region near the intersection of all the local target sets while the collision avoidance is guaranteed during the movement. In addition, the vectors of generalized coordinate derivatives of all the mechanical systems are shown to be driven to zero. Simulation results are given to validate the theoretical results.
1402.2637
Identifiability Scaling Laws in Bilinear Inverse Problems
cs.IT math.IT
A number of ill-posed inverse problems in signal processing, like blind deconvolution, matrix factorization, dictionary learning and blind source separation share the common characteristic of being bilinear inverse problems (BIPs), i.e. the observation model is a function of two variables and conditioned on one variable being known, the observation is a linear function of the other variable. A key issue that arises for such inverse problems is that of identifiability, i.e. whether the observation is sufficient to unambiguously determine the pair of inputs that generated the observation. Identifiability is a key concern for applications like blind equalization in wireless communications and data mining in machine learning. Herein, a unifying and flexible approach to identifiability analysis for general conic prior constrained BIPs is presented, exploiting a connection to low-rank matrix recovery via lifting. We develop deterministic identifiability conditions on the input signals and examine their satisfiability in practice for three classes of signal distributions, viz. dependent but uncorrelated, independent Gaussian, and independent Bernoulli. In each case, scaling laws are developed that trade-off probability of robust identifiability with the complexity of the rank two null space. An added appeal of our approach is that the rank two null space can be partly or fully characterized for many bilinear problems of interest (e.g. blind deconvolution). We present numerical experiments involving variations on the blind deconvolution problem that exploit a characterization of the rank two null space and demonstrate that the scaling laws offer good estimates of identifiability.
1402.2642
A comprehensive analysis of the geometry of TDOA maps in localisation problems
math-ph cs.CE cs.SD gr-qc math.AC math.MP
In this manuscript we consider the well-established problem of TDOA-based source localization and propose a comprehensive analysis of its solutions for arbitrary sensor measurements and placements. More specifically, we define the TDOA map from the physical space of source locations to the space of range measurements (TDOAs), in the specific case of three receivers in 2D space. We then study the identifiability of the model, giving a complete analytical characterization of the image of this map and its invertibility. This analysis has been conducted in a completely mathematical fashion, using many different tools which make it valid for every sensor configuration. These results are the first step towards the solution of more general problems involving, for example, a larger number of sensors, uncertainty in their placement, or lack of synchronization.