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1402.6763
Linear Programming for Large-Scale Markov Decision Problems
math.OC cs.AI cs.NA
We consider the problem of controlling a Markov decision process (MDP) with a large state space, so as to minimize average cost. Since it is intractable to compete with the optimal policy for large scale problems, we pursue the more modest goal of competing with a low-dimensional family of policies. We use the dual linear programming formulation of the MDP average cost problem, in which the variable is a stationary distribution over state-action pairs, and we consider a neighborhood of a low-dimensional subset of the set of stationary distributions (defined in terms of state-action features) as the comparison class. We propose two techniques, one based on stochastic convex optimization, and one based on constraint sampling. In both cases, we give bounds that show that the performance of our algorithms approaches the best achievable by any policy in the comparison class. Most importantly, these results depend on the size of the comparison class, but not on the size of the state space. Preliminary experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in a queuing application.
1402.6764
A method to identify potential ambiguous Malay words through Ambiguity Attributes mapping: An exploratory Study
cs.SE cs.CL
We describe here a methodology to identify a list of ambiguous Malay words that are commonly being used in Malay documentations such as Requirement Specification. We compiled several relevant and appropriate requirement quality attributes and sentence rules from previous literatures and adopt it to come out with a set of ambiguity attributes that most suit Malay words. The extracted Malay ambiguous words (potential) are then being mapped onto the constructed ambiguity attributes to confirm their vagueness. The list is then verified by Malay linguist experts. This paper aims to identify a list of potential ambiguous words in Malay as an attempt to assist writers to avoid using the vague words while documenting Malay Requirement Specification as well as to any other related Malay documentation. The result of this study is a list of 120 potential ambiguous Malay words that could act as guidelines in writing Malay sentences
1402.6771
On Linear Codes over $\mathbb{Z}_4+v\mathbb{Z}_4$
cs.IT math.IT
Linear codes are considered over the ring $\mathbb{Z}_4+v\mathbb{Z}_4$, where $v^2=v$. Gray weight, Gray maps for linear codes are defined and MacWilliams identity for the Gray weight enumerator is given. Self-dual codes, construction of Euclidean isodual codes, unimodular complex lattices, MDS codes and MGDS codes over $\mathbb{Z}_4+v\mathbb{Z}_4$ are studied. Cyclic codes and quadratic residue codes are also considered. Finally, some examples for illustrating the main work are given.
1402.6775
Analysis of Barcode sequence features to find anomalies due to amplification Bias
cs.CE q-bio.QM
In this paper we aim at investigating whether barcode sequence features can predict the read count ambiguities caused during PCR based next generation sequencing techniques. The methodologies we used are mutual information based motif discovery and Lasso regression technique using features generated from the barcode sequence. The results indicate that there is a certain degree of correlation between motifs discovered in the sequences and the read counts. Our main contribution in this paper is a thorough investigation of the barcode features that gave us useful information regarding the significance of the sequence features and the sequence containing the discovered motifs in prediction of read counts.
1402.6779
Resourceful Contextual Bandits
cs.LG cs.DS cs.GT
We study contextual bandits with ancillary constraints on resources, which are common in real-world applications such as choosing ads or dynamic pricing of items. We design the first algorithm for solving these problems that handles constrained resources other than time, and improves over a trivial reduction to the non-contextual case. We consider very general settings for both contextual bandits (arbitrary policy sets, e.g. Dudik et al. (UAI'11)) and bandits with resource constraints (bandits with knapsacks, Badanidiyuru et al. (FOCS'13)), and prove a regret guarantee with near-optimal statistical properties.
1402.6785
Synthesis of Parametric Programs using Genetic Programming and Model Checking
cs.SE cs.AI cs.NE
Formal methods apply algorithms based on mathematical principles to enhance the reliability of systems. It would only be natural to try to progress from verification, model checking or testing a system against its formal specification into constructing it automatically. Classical algorithmic synthesis theory provides interesting algorithms but also alarming high complexity and undecidability results. The use of genetic programming, in combination with model checking and testing, provides a powerful heuristic to synthesize programs. The method is not completely automatic, as it is fine tuned by a user that sets up the specification and parameters. It also does not guarantee to always succeed and converge towards a solution that satisfies all the required properties. However, we applied it successfully on quite nontrivial examples and managed to find solutions to hard programming challenges, as well as to improve and to correct code. We describe here several versions of our method for synthesizing sequential and concurrent systems.
1402.6787
Learning multifractal structure in large networks
cs.SI
Generating random graphs to model networks has a rich history. In this paper, we analyze and improve upon the multifractal network generator (MFNG) introduced by Palla et al. We provide a new result on the probability of subgraphs existing in graphs generated with MFNG. From this result it follows that we can quickly compute moments of an important set of graph properties, such as the expected number of edges, stars, and cliques. Specifically, we show how to compute these moments in time complexity independent of the size of the graph and the number of recursive levels in the generative model. We leverage this theory to a new method of moments algorithm for fitting large networks to MFNG. Empirically, this new approach effectively simulates properties of several social and information networks. In terms of matching subgraph counts, our method outperforms similar algorithms used with the Stochastic Kronecker Graph model. Furthermore, we present a fast approximation algorithm to generate graph instances following the multi- fractal structure. The approximation scheme is an improvement over previous methods, which ran in time complexity quadratic in the number of vertices. Combined, our method of moments and fast sampling scheme provide the first scalable framework for effectively modeling large networks with MFNG.
1402.6792
Information Evolution in Social Networks
cs.SI cs.CL physics.soc-ph
Social networks readily transmit information, albeit with less than perfect fidelity. We present a large-scale measurement of this imperfect information copying mechanism by examining the dissemination and evolution of thousands of memes, collectively replicated hundreds of millions of times in the online social network Facebook. The information undergoes an evolutionary process that exhibits several regularities. A meme's mutation rate characterizes the population distribution of its variants, in accordance with the Yule process. Variants further apart in the diffusion cascade have greater edit distance, as would be expected in an iterative, imperfect replication process. Some text sequences can confer a replicative advantage; these sequences are abundant and transfer "laterally" between different memes. Subpopulations of the social network can preferentially transmit a specific variant of a meme if the variant matches their beliefs or culture. Understanding the mechanism driving change in diffusing information has important implications for how we interpret and harness the information that reaches us through our social networks.
1402.6794
Trellis-Extended Codebooks and Successive Phase Adjustment: A Path from LTE-Advanced to FDD Massive MIMO Systems
cs.IT math.IT
It is of great interest to develop efficient ways to acquire accurate channel state information (CSI) for frequency division duplexing (FDD) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems for backward compatibility. It is theoretically well known that the codebook size for CSI quantization should be increased as the number of transmit antennas becomes larger, and 3GPP long term evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced codebooks also follow this trend. Thus, in massive MIMO, it is hard to apply the conventional approach of using pre-defined vector-quantized codebooks for CSI quantization mainly because of codeword search complexity. In this paper, we propose a trellis-extended codebook (TEC) that can be easily harmonized with current wireless standards such as LTE or LTE-Advanced by extending standardized codebooks designed for 2, 4, or 8 antennas with trellis structures. TEC exploits a Viterbi decoder and convolutional encoder in channel coding as the CSI quantizer and the CSI reconstructer, respectively. By quantizing multiple channel entries simultaneously using standardized codebooks in a state transition of trellis search, TEC can achieve fractional bits per channel entry quantization to have a practical feedback overhead. Thus, TEC can solve both the complexity and the feedback overhead issues of CSI quantization in massive MIMO systems. We also develop trellis-extended successive phase adjustment (TE-SPA) which works as a differential codebook of TEC. This is similar to the dual codebook concept of LTE-Advanced. TE-SPA can reduce CSI quantization error even with lower feedback overhead in temporally correlated channels. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed schemes in FDD massive MIMO systems.
1402.6809
Analyzing Cascading Failures in Smart Grids under Random and Targeted Attacks
cs.SI cs.DM cs.NI math.CO physics.soc-ph
We model smart grids as complex interdependent networks, and study targeted attacks on smart grids for the first time. A smart grid consists of two networks: the power network and the communication network, interconnected by edges. Occurrence of failures (attacks) in one network triggers failures in the other network, and propagates in cascades across the networks. Such cascading failures can result in disintegration of either (or both) of the networks. Earlier works considered only random failures. In practical situations, an attacker is more likely to compromise nodes selectively. We study cascading failures in smart grids, where an attacker selectively compromises the nodes with probabilities proportional to their degrees; high degree nodes are compromised with higher probability. We mathematically analyze the sizes of the giant components of the networks under targeted attacks, and compare the results with the corresponding sizes under random attacks. We show that networks disintegrate faster for targeted attacks compared to random attacks. A targeted attack on a small fraction of high degree nodes disintegrates one or both of the networks, whereas both the networks contain giant components for random attack on the same fraction of nodes.
1402.6859
Outlier Detection using Improved Genetic K-means
cs.LG cs.DB
The outlier detection problem in some cases is similar to the classification problem. For example, the main concern of clustering-based outlier detection algorithms is to find clusters and outliers, which are often regarded as noise that should be removed in order to make more reliable clustering. In this article, we present an algorithm that provides outlier detection and data clustering simultaneously. The algorithmimprovesthe estimation of centroids of the generative distribution during the process of clustering and outlier discovery. The proposed algorithm consists of two stages. The first stage consists of improved genetic k-means algorithm (IGK) process, while the second stage iteratively removes the vectors which are far from their cluster centroids.
1402.6862
A Fast, robust algorithm for power line interference cancellation in neural recording
cs.SY physics.med-ph
Power line interference may severely corrupt neural recordings at 50/60 Hz and harmonic frequencies. In this paper, we present a robust and computationally efficient algorithm for removing power line interference from neural recordings. The algorithm includes four steps. First, an adaptive notch filter is used to estimate the fundamental frequency of the interference. Subsequently, based on the estimated frequency, harmonics are generated by using discrete-time oscillators, and then the amplitude and phase of each harmonic are estimated through using a modified recursive least squares algorithm. Finally, the estimated interference is subtracted from the recorded data. The algorithm does not require any reference signal, and can track the frequency, phase, and amplitude of each harmonic. When benchmarked with other popular approaches, our algorithm performs better in terms of noise immunity, convergence speed, and output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). While minimally affecting the signal bands of interest, the algorithm consistently yields fast convergence and substantial interference rejection in different conditions of interference strengths (input SNR from -30 dB to 30 dB), power line frequencies (45-65 Hz), and phase and amplitude drifts. In addition, the algorithm features a straightforward parameter adjustment since the parameters are independent of the input SNR, input signal power, and the sampling rate. The proposed algorithm features a highly robust operation, fast adaptation to interference variations, significant SNR improvement, low computational complexity and memory requirement, and straightforward parameter adjustment. These features render the algorithm suitable for wearable and implantable sensor applications, where reliable and real-time cancellation of the interference is desired.
1402.6865
Applications of Structural Balance in Signed Social Networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We present measures, models and link prediction algorithms based on the structural balance in signed social networks. Certain social networks contain, in addition to the usual 'friend' links, 'enemy' links. These networks are called signed social networks. A classical and major concept for signed social networks is that of structural balance, i.e., the tendency of triangles to be 'balanced' towards including an even number of negative edges, such as friend-friend-friend and friend-enemy-enemy triangles. In this article, we introduce several new signed network analysis methods that exploit structural balance for measuring partial balance, for finding communities of people based on balance, for drawing signed social networks, and for solving the problem of link prediction. Notably, the introduced methods are based on the signed graph Laplacian and on the concept of signed resistance distances. We evaluate our methods on a collection of four signed social network datasets.
1402.6880
It's distributions all the way down!: Second order changes in statistical distributions also occur
cs.CL
The textual, big-data literature misses Bentley, OBrien, & Brocks (Bentley et als) message on distributions; it largely examines the first-order effects of how a single, signature distribution can predict population behaviour, neglecting second-order effects involving distributional shifts, either between signature distributions or within a given signature distribution. Indeed, Bentley et al. themselves under-emphasise the potential richness of the latter, within-distribution effects.
1402.6882
An Optimal Decoding Strategy for Physical-layer Network Coding over Multipath Fading Channels
cs.IT math.IT
We present an optimal decoder for physical-layer network coding (PNC) in a multipath fading channels. Previous studies on PNC have largely focused on the single path case. For PNC, multipath not only introduces inter-symbol interference (ISI), but also cross-symbol interference (Cross-SI) between signals simultaneously transmitted by multiple users. In this paper, we assume the transmitters do not have channel state information (CSI). The relay in the PNC system, however, has CSI. The relay makes use of a belief propagation (BP) algorithm to decode the multipath-distorted signals received from multiple users into a network-coded packet. We refer to our multipath decoding algorithm as MP-PNC. Our simulation results show that, benchmarked against synchronous PNC over a one-path channel, the bit error rate (BER) performance penalty of MP-PNC under a two-tap ITU channel model can be kept within 0.5dB. Moreover, it outperforms a MUD-XOR algorithm by 3dB -- MUD-XOR decodes the individual information from both users explicitly before performing the XOR network-coding mapping. Although the framework of fading-channel PNC presented in this paper is demonstrated based on two-path and three-path channel models, our algorithm can be easily extended to cases with more than three paths.
1402.6888
CriPS: Critical Dynamics in Particle Swarm Optimization
cs.NE
Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) makes use of a dynamical system for solving a search task. Instead of adding search biases in order to improve performance in certain problems, we aim to remove algorithm-induced scales by controlling the swarm with a mechanism that is scale-free except possibly for a suppression of scales beyond the system size. In this way a very promising performance is achieved due to the balance of large-scale exploration and local search. The resulting algorithm shows evidence for self-organised criticality, brought about via the intrinsic dynamics of the swarm as it interacts with the objective function, rather than being explicitly specified. The Critical Particle Swarm (CriPS) can be easily combined with many existing extensions such as chaotic exploration, additional force terms or non-trivial topologies.
1402.6926
Sequential Complexity as a Descriptor for Musical Similarity
cs.IR cs.LG cs.SD
We propose string compressibility as a descriptor of temporal structure in audio, for the purpose of determining musical similarity. Our descriptors are based on computing track-wise compression rates of quantised audio features, using multiple temporal resolutions and quantisation granularities. To verify that our descriptors capture musically relevant information, we incorporate our descriptors into similarity rating prediction and song year prediction tasks. We base our evaluation on a dataset of 15500 track excerpts of Western popular music, for which we obtain 7800 web-sourced pairwise similarity ratings. To assess the agreement among similarity ratings, we perform an evaluation under controlled conditions, obtaining a rank correlation of 0.33 between intersected sets of ratings. Combined with bag-of-features descriptors, we obtain performance gains of 31.1% and 10.9% for similarity rating prediction and song year prediction. For both tasks, analysis of selected descriptors reveals that representing features at multiple time scales benefits prediction accuracy.
1402.6932
Low-Cost Compressive Sensing for Color Video and Depth
cs.CV
A simple and inexpensive (low-power and low-bandwidth) modification is made to a conventional off-the-shelf color video camera, from which we recover {multiple} color frames for each of the original measured frames, and each of the recovered frames can be focused at a different depth. The recovery of multiple frames for each measured frame is made possible via high-speed coding, manifested via translation of a single coded aperture; the inexpensive translation is constituted by mounting the binary code on a piezoelectric device. To simultaneously recover depth information, a {liquid} lens is modulated at high speed, via a variable voltage. Consequently, during the aforementioned coding process, the liquid lens allows the camera to sweep the focus through multiple depths. In addition to designing and implementing the camera, fast recovery is achieved by an anytime algorithm exploiting the group-sparsity of wavelet/DCT coefficients.
1402.6942
A Parallel Memetic Algorithm to Solve the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows
cs.DC cs.NE
This paper presents a parallel memetic algorithm for solving the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). The VRPTW is a well-known NP-hard discrete optimization problem with two objectives. The main objective is to minimize the number of vehicles serving customers scattered on the map, and the second one is to minimize the total distance traveled by the vehicles. Here, the fleet size is minimized in the first phase of the proposed method using the parallel heuristic algorithm (PHA), and the traveled distance is minimized in the second phase by the parallel memetic algorithm (PMA). In both parallel algorithms, the parallel components co-operate periodically in order to exchange the best solutions found so far. An extensive experimental study performed on the Gehring and Homberger's benchmark proves the high convergence capabilities and robustness of both PHA and PMA. Also, we present the speedup analysis of the PMA.
1402.6964
Scalable methods for nonnegative matrix factorizations of near-separable tall-and-skinny matrices
cs.LG cs.DC cs.NA stat.ML
Numerous algorithms are used for nonnegative matrix factorization under the assumption that the matrix is nearly separable. In this paper, we show how to make these algorithms efficient for data matrices that have many more rows than columns, so-called "tall-and-skinny matrices". One key component to these improved methods is an orthogonal matrix transformation that preserves the separability of the NMF problem. Our final methods need a single pass over the data matrix and are suitable for streaming, multi-core, and MapReduce architectures. We demonstrate the efficacy of these algorithms on terabyte-sized synthetic matrices and real-world matrices from scientific computing and bioinformatics.
1402.6978
Fundamental Limits of Video Coding: A Closed-form Characterization of Rate Distortion Region from First Principles
cs.IT cs.MM math.IT
Classical motion-compensated video coding methods have been standardized by MPEG over the years and video codecs have become integral parts of media entertainment applications. Despite the ubiquitous use of video coding techniques, it is interesting to note that a closed form rate-distortion characterization for video coding is not available in the literature. In this paper, we develop a simple, yet, fundamental characterization of rate-distortion region in video coding based on information-theoretic first principles. The concept of conditional motion estimation is used to derive the closedform expression for rate-distortion region without losing its generality. Conditional motion estimation offers an elegant means to analyze the rate-distortion trade-offs and demonstrates the viability of achieving the bounds derived. The concept involves classifying image regions into active and inactive based on the amount of motion activity. By appropriately modeling the residuals corresponding to active and inactive regions, a closed form expression for rate-distortion function is derived in terms of motion activity and spatio-temporal correlation that commonly exist in video content. Experiments on real video clips using H.264 codec are presented to demonstrate the practicality and validity of the proposed rate-distortion analysis.
1402.7001
Marginalizing Corrupted Features
cs.LG
The goal of machine learning is to develop predictors that generalize well to test data. Ideally, this is achieved by training on an almost infinitely large training data set that captures all variations in the data distribution. In practical learning settings, however, we do not have infinite data and our predictors may overfit. Overfitting may be combatted, for example, by adding a regularizer to the training objective or by defining a prior over the model parameters and performing Bayesian inference. In this paper, we propose a third, alternative approach to combat overfitting: we extend the training set with infinitely many artificial training examples that are obtained by corrupting the original training data. We show that this approach is practical and efficient for a range of predictors and corruption models. Our approach, called marginalized corrupted features (MCF), trains robust predictors by minimizing the expected value of the loss function under the corruption model. We show empirically on a variety of data sets that MCF classifiers can be trained efficiently, may generalize substantially better to test data, and are also more robust to feature deletion at test time.
1402.7005
Bayesian Multi-Scale Optimistic Optimization
stat.ML cs.LG
Bayesian optimization is a powerful global optimization technique for expensive black-box functions. One of its shortcomings is that it requires auxiliary optimization of an acquisition function at each iteration. This auxiliary optimization can be costly and very hard to carry out in practice. Moreover, it creates serious theoretical concerns, as most of the convergence results assume that the exact optimum of the acquisition function can be found. In this paper, we introduce a new technique for efficient global optimization that combines Gaussian process confidence bounds and treed simultaneous optimistic optimization to eliminate the need for auxiliary optimization of acquisition functions. The experiments with global optimization benchmarks and a novel application to automatic information extraction demonstrate that the resulting technique is more efficient than the two approaches from which it draws inspiration. Unlike most theoretical analyses of Bayesian optimization with Gaussian processes, our finite-time convergence rate proofs do not require exact optimization of an acquisition function. That is, our approach eliminates the unsatisfactory assumption that a difficult, potentially NP-hard, problem has to be solved in order to obtain vanishing regret rates.
1402.7011
Saving Human Lives: What Complexity Science and Information Systems can Contribute
physics.soc-ph cs.SI nlin.AO
We discuss models and data of crowd disasters, crime, terrorism, war and disease spreading to show that conventional recipes, such as deterrence strategies, are often not effective and sufficient to contain them. Many common approaches do not provide a good picture of the actual system behavior, because they neglect feedback loops, instabilities and cascade effects. The complex and often counter-intuitive behavior of social systems and their macro-level collective dynamics can be better understood by means of complexity science. We highlight that a suitable system design and management can help to stop undesirable cascade effects and to enable favorable kinds of self-organization in the system. In such a way, complexity science can help to save human lives.
1402.7015
Data-driven HRF estimation for encoding and decoding models
cs.CE cs.LG
Despite the common usage of a canonical, data-independent, hemodynamic response function (HRF), it is known that the shape of the HRF varies across brain regions and subjects. This suggests that a data-driven estimation of this function could lead to more statistical power when modeling BOLD fMRI data. However, unconstrained estimation of the HRF can yield highly unstable results when the number of free parameters is large. We develop a method for the joint estimation of activation and HRF using a rank constraint causing the estimated HRF to be equal across events/conditions, yet permitting it to be different across voxels. Model estimation leads to an optimization problem that we propose to solve with an efficient quasi-Newton method exploiting fast gradient computations. This model, called GLM with Rank-1 constraint (R1-GLM), can be extended to the setting of GLM with separate designs which has been shown to improve decoding accuracy in brain activity decoding experiments. We compare 10 different HRF modeling methods in terms of encoding and decoding score in two different datasets. Our results show that the R1-GLM model significantly outperforms competing methods in both encoding and decoding settings, positioning it as an attractive method both from the points of view of accuracy and computational efficiency.
1402.7025
Exploiting the Statistics of Learning and Inference
cs.LG
When dealing with datasets containing a billion instances or with simulations that require a supercomputer to execute, computational resources become part of the equation. We can improve the efficiency of learning and inference by exploiting their inherent statistical nature. We propose algorithms that exploit the redundancy of data relative to a model by subsampling data-cases for every update and reasoning about the uncertainty created in this process. In the context of learning we propose to test for the probability that a stochastically estimated gradient points more than 180 degrees in the wrong direction. In the context of MCMC sampling we use stochastic gradients to improve the efficiency of MCMC updates, and hypothesis tests based on adaptive mini-batches to decide whether to accept or reject a proposed parameter update. Finally, we argue that in the context of likelihood free MCMC one needs to store all the information revealed by all simulations, for instance in a Gaussian process. We conclude that Bayesian methods will remain to play a crucial role in the era of big data and big simulations, but only if we overcome a number of computational challenges.
1402.7032
Parameter security characterization of knapsack public-key crypto under quantum computing
cs.CR cs.IT math.IT
In order to research the security of the knapsack problem under quantum algorithm attack, we study the quantum algorithm for knapsack problem over Z_r based on the relation between the dimension of the knapsack vector and r. First, the oracle function is designed based on the knapsack vector B and S, and the quantum algorithm for the knapsack problem over Z_r is presented. The observation probability of target state is not improved by designing unitary transform, but oracle function. Its complexity is polynomial. And its success probability depends on the relation between n and r. From the above discussion, we give the essential condition for the knapsack problem over Z_r against the existing quantum algorithm attacks, i.e. r<O(2^n). Then we analyze the security of the Chor-Rivest public-key crypto.
1402.7035
'Beating the news' with EMBERS: Forecasting Civil Unrest using Open Source Indicators
cs.SI cs.CY physics.soc-ph
We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of EMBERS, an automated, 24x7 continuous system for forecasting civil unrest across 10 countries of Latin America using open source indicators such as tweets, news sources, blogs, economic indicators, and other data sources. Unlike retrospective studies, EMBERS has been making forecasts into the future since Nov 2012 which have been (and continue to be) evaluated by an independent T&E team (MITRE). Of note, EMBERS has successfully forecast the uptick and downtick of incidents during the June 2013 protests in Brazil. We outline the system architecture of EMBERS, individual models that leverage specific data sources, and a fusion and suppression engine that supports trading off specific evaluation criteria. EMBERS also provides an audit trail interface that enables the investigation of why specific predictions were made along with the data utilized for forecasting. Through numerous evaluations, we demonstrate the superiority of EMBERS over baserate methods and its capability to forecast significant societal happenings.
1402.7050
Tools for dynamics simulation of robots: a survey based on user feedback
cs.RO
The number of tools for dynamics simulation has grown in the last years. It is necessary for the robotics community to have elements to ponder which of the available tools is the best for their research. As a complement to an objective and quantitative comparison, difficult to obtain since not all the tools are open-source, an element of evaluation is user feedback. With this goal in mind, we created an online survey about the use of dynamical simulation in robotics. This paper reports the analysis of the participants' answers and a descriptive information fiche for the most relevant tools. We believe this report will be helpful for roboticists to choose the best simulation tool for their researches.
1402.7063
Rapid AkNN Query Processing for Fast Classification of Multidimensional Data in the Cloud
cs.DB
A $k$-nearest neighbor ($k$NN) query determines the $k$ nearest points, using distance metrics, from a specific location. An all $k$-nearest neighbor (A$k$NN) query constitutes a variation of a $k$NN query and retrieves the $k$ nearest points for each point inside a database. Their main usage resonates in spatial databases and they consist the backbone of many location-based applications and not only (i.e. $k$NN joins in databases, classification in data mining). So, it is very crucial to develop methods that answer them efficiently. In this work, we propose a novel method for classifying multidimensional data using an A$k$NN algorithm in the MapReduce framework. Our approach exploits space decomposition techniques for processing the classification procedure in a parallel and distributed manner. To our knowledge, we are the first to study the classification of multidimensional objects under this perspective. Through an extensive experimental evaluation we prove that our solution is efficient and scalable in processing the given queries. We investigate many different perspectives that can affect the total computational cost, such as different dataset distributions, number of dimensions, growth of $k$ value and granularity of space decomposition and prove that our system is efficient, robust and scalable.
1402.7122
Nested Regular Path Queries in Description Logics
cs.LO cs.AI cs.DB
Two-way regular path queries (2RPQs) have received increased attention recently due to their ability to relate pairs of objects by flexibly navigating graph-structured data. They are present in property paths in SPARQL 1.1, the new standard RDF query language, and in the XML query language XPath. In line with XPath, we consider the extension of 2RPQs with nesting, which allows one to require that objects along a path satisfy complex conditions, in turn expressed through (nested) 2RPQs. We study the computational complexity of answering nested 2RPQs and conjunctions thereof (CN2RPQs) in the presence of domain knowledge expressed in description logics (DLs). We establish tight complexity bounds in data and combined complexity for a variety of DLs, ranging from lightweight DLs (DL-Lite, EL) up to highly expressive ones. Interestingly, we are able to show that adding nesting to (C)2RPQs does not affect worst-case data complexity of query answering for any of the considered DLs. However, in the case of lightweight DLs, adding nesting to 2RPQs leads to a surprising jump in combined complexity, from P-complete to Exp-complete.
1402.7136
Neural Network Approach to Railway Stand Lateral Skew Control
cs.SY cs.NE
The paper presents a study of an adaptive approach to lateral skew control for an experimental railway stand. The preliminary experiments with the real experimental railway stand and simulations with its 3-D mechanical model, indicates difficulties of model-based control of the device. Thus, use of neural networks for identification and control of lateral skew shall be investigated. This paper focuses on real-data based modeling of the railway stand by various neural network models, i.e; linear neural unit and quadratic neural unit architectures. Furthermore, training methods of these neural architectures as such, real-time-recurrent-learning and a variation of back-propagation-through-time are examined, accompanied by a discussion of the produced experimental results.
1402.7143
Identifying Users with Opposing Opinions in Twitter Debates
cs.SI cs.CY physics.soc-ph
In recent times, social media sites such as Twitter have been extensively used for debating politics and public policies. These debates span millions of tweets and numerous topics of public importance. Thus, it is imperative that this vast trove of data is tapped in order to gain insights into public opinion especially on hotly contested issues such as abortion, gun reforms etc. Thus, in our work, we aim to gauge users' stance on such topics in Twitter. We propose ReLP, a semi-supervised framework using a retweet-based label propagation algorithm coupled with a supervised classifier to identify users with differing opinions. In particular, our framework is designed such that it can be easily adopted to different domains with little human supervision while still producing excellent accuracy
1402.7162
Visual Saliency Model using SIFT and Comparison of Learning Approaches
cs.CV
Humans' ability to detect and locate salient objects on images is remarkably fast and successful. Performing this process by using eye tracking equipment is expensive and cannot be easily applied, and computer modeling of this human behavior is still a problem to be solved. In our study, one of the largest public eye-tracking databases which has fixation points of 15 observers on 1003 images is used. In addition to low, medium and high-level features which have been used in previous studies, SIFT features extracted from the images are used to improve the classification accuracy of the models. A second contribution of this paper is the comparison and statistical analysis of different machine learning methods that can be used to train our model. As a result, a best feature set and learning model to predict where humans look at images, is determined.
1402.7170
Improving the Finite-Length Performance of Spatially Coupled LDPC Codes by Connecting Multiple Code Chains
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we analyze the finite-length performance of codes on graphs constructed by connecting spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) code chains. Successive (peeling) decoding is considered for the binary erasure channel (BEC). The evolution of the undecoded portion of the bipartite graph remaining after each iteration is analyzed as a dynamical system. When connecting short SC-LDPC chains, we show that, in addition to superior iterative decoding thresholds, connected chain ensembles have better finite-length performance than single chain ensembles of the same rate and length. In addition, we present a novel encoding/transmission scheme to improve the performance of a system using long SC-LDPC chains, where, instead of transmitting codewords corresponding to a single SC-LDPC chain independently, we connect consecutive chains in a multi-layer format to form a connected chain ensemble. We refer to such a transmission scheme to as continuous chain (CC) transmission of SC-LDPC codes. We show that CC transmission can be implemented with no significant increase in encoding/decoding complexity or decoding delay with respect a system using a single SC-LDPC code chain for encoding.
1402.7184
The Hegselmann-Krause dynamics for continuous agents and a regular opinion function do not always lead to consensus
math.DS cs.SI cs.SY
We present an example of a regular opinion function which, as it evolves in accordance with the discrete-time Hegselmann-Krause bounded confidence dynamics, always retains opinions which are separated by more than two. This confirms a conjecture of Blondel, Hendrickx and Tsitsiklis.
1402.7190
Two Stage Prediction Process with Gradient Descent Methods Aligning with the Data Privacy Preservation
cs.DB
Privacy preservation emphasize on authorization of data, which signifies that data should be accessed only by authorized users. Ensuring the privacy of data is considered as one of the challenging task in data management. The generalization of data with varying concept hierarchies seems to be interesting solution. This paper proposes two stage prediction processes on privacy preserved data. The privacy is preserved using generalization and betraying other communicating parties by disguising generalized data which adds another level of privacy. The generalization with betraying is performed in first stage to define the knowledge or hypothesis and which is further optimized using gradient descent method in second stage prediction for accurate prediction of data. The experiment carried with both batch and stochastic gradient methods and it is shown that bulk operation performed by batch takes long time and more iterations than stochastic to give more accurate solution.
1402.7200
Mathematical Model of Semantic Look - An Efficient Context Driven Search Engine
cs.IR
The WorldWideWeb (WWW) is a huge conservatory of web pages. Search Engines are key applications that fetch web pages for the user query. In the current generation web architecture, search engines treat keywords provided by the user as isolated keywords without considering the context of the user query. This results in a lot of unrelated pages or links being displayed to the user. Semantic Web is based on the current web with a revised framework to display a more precise result set as response to a user query. The current web pages need to be annotated by finding relevant meta data to be added to each of them, so that they become useful to Semantic Web search engines. Semantic Look explores the context of user query by processing the Semantic information recorded in the web pages. It is compared with an existing algorithm called OntoLook and it is shown that Semantic Look is a better optimized search engine by being more than twice as fast as OntoLook.
1402.7216
Large-Scale Molecular Dynamics Simulations for Highly Parallel Infrastructures
cs.DC cs.CE physics.comp-ph
Computational chemistry allows researchers to experiment in sillico: by running a computer simulations of a biological or chemical processes of interest. Molecular dynamics with molecular mechanics model of interactions simulates N-body problem of atoms$-$it computes movements of atoms according to Newtonian physics and empirical descriptions of atomic electrostatic interactions. These simulations require high performance computing resources, as evaluations within each step are computationally demanding and billions of steps are needed to reach interesting timescales. Current methods decompose the spatial domain of the problem and calculate on parallel/distributed infrastructures. Even the methods with the highest strong scaling hit the limit at half a million cores: they are not able to cut the time to result if provided with more processors. At the dawn of exascale computing with massively parallel computational resources, we want to increase the level of parallelism by incorporating parallel-in-time computation to molecular dynamics simulations. Calculation of results in several successive time points simultaneously without a priori knowledge has been examined with no major success. We will study and implement a novel combinations of methods that according to our theoretical analyses should achieve promising speed-up compared to sequential-in-time calculation.
1402.7223
SPARQL for Networks of Embedded Systems
cs.DB cs.DC
The Semantic Web (or Web of Data) represents the successful efforts towards linking and sharing data over the Web. The cornerstones of the Web of Data are RDF as data format and SPARQL as de-facto standard query language. Recent trends show the evolution of the Web of Data towards the Web of Things, integrating embedded devices and smart objects. Data stemming from such devices do not share a common format, making the integration and querying impossible. To overcome this problem, we present our approach to make embedded systems first-class citizens of the Web of Things. Our framework abstracts from individual deployments to represent them as common data sources in line with the ideas behind the Semantic Web. This includes the execution of arbitrary SPARQL queries over the data from a pool of embedded devices and/or external data sources. Handling verbose RDF data and executing SPARQL queries in an embedded network poses major challenges to minimize the involved processing and communication cost. We therefore present an in-network query processor aiming to push processing steps onto devices. We demonstrate the practical application and the potential benefits of our framework in a comprehensive evaluation using a real-world deployment and a range of SPARQL queries stemming from a common use case of the Web of Things.
1402.7228
The Wiselib TupleStore: A Modular RDF Database for the Internet of Things
cs.DB cs.DC
The Internet of Things movement provides self-configuring and universally interoperable devices. While such devices are often built with a specific application in mind, they often turn out to be useful in other contexts as well. We claim that by describing the devices' knowledge in a universal way, IoT devices can become first-class citizens in the Internet. They can then exchange data between heterogeneous hardware, different applications and large data sources on the Web. Our key idea --- in contrast to most existing approaches --- is to not restrict the domain of knowledge that can be expressed on the device in any way and, at the same time, allow this knowledge to be machine-understandable and linkable across different locations. We propose an architecture that allows to connect embedded devices to the Semantic Web by expressing their knowledge in the Resource Description Framework (RDF). We present the Wiselib TupleStore, a modular embedded database tailored specifically for the storage of RDF. The Wiselib TupleStore is portable to many platforms including Contiki and TinyOS and allows a variety of trade-offs, making it able to scale to a large variety of hardware scenarios. We discuss the applicability of RDF to heterogeneous resource-constrained devices and compare our system to the existing embedded tuple stores Antelope and TeenyLIME.
1402.7247
Optimal Discrete Power Control in Poisson-Clustered Ad Hoc Networks
cs.IT math.IT
Power control in a digital handset is practically implemented in a discrete fashion and usually such a discrete power control (DPC) scheme is suboptimal. In this paper, we first show that in a Poison-distributed ad hoc network, if DPC is properly designed with a certain condition satisfied, it can strictly work better than constant power control (i.e. no power control) in terms of average signal-to-interference ratio, outage probability and spatial reuse. This motivates us to propose an $N$-layer DPC scheme in a wireless clustered ad hoc network, where transmitters and their intended receivers in circular clusters are characterized by a Poisson cluster process (PCP) on the plane $\mathbb{R}^2$. The cluster of each transmitter is tessellated into $N$-layer annuli with transmit power $P_i$ adopted if the intended receiver is located at the $i$-th layer. Two performance metrics of transmission capacity (TC) and outage-free spatial reuse factor are redefined based on the $N$-layer DPC. The outage probability of each layer in a cluster is characterized and used to derive the optimal power scaling law $P_i=\Theta\left(\eta_i^{-\frac{\alpha}{2}}\right)$, with $\eta_i$ the probability of selecting power $P_i$ and $\alpha$ the path loss exponent. Moreover, the specific design approaches to optimize $P_i$ and $N$ based on $\eta_i$ are also discussed. Simulation results indicate that the proposed optimal $N$-layer DPC significantly outperforms other existing power control schemes in terms of TC and spatial reuse.
1402.7258
An Information Theoretic Charachterization of Channel Shortening Receivers
cs.IT math.IT
Optimal data detection of data transmitted over a linear channel can always be implemented through the Viterbi algorithm (VA). However, in many cases of interest the memory of the channel prohibits application of the VA. A popular and conceptually simple method in this case, studied since the early 70s, is to first filter the received signal in order to shorten the memory of the channel, and then to apply a VA that operates with the shorter memory. We shall refer to this as a channel shortening (CS) receiver. Although studied for almost four decades, an information theoretic understanding of what such a simple receiver solution is actually doing is not available. In this paper we will show that an optimized CS receiver is implementing the chain rule of mutual information, but only up to the shortened memory that the receiver is operating with. Further, we will show that the tools for analyzing the ensuing achievable rates from an optimized CS receiver are precisely the same as those used for analyzing the achievable rates of a minimum mean square error (MMSE) receiver.
1402.7265
Semantics, Modelling, and the Problem of Representation of Meaning -- a Brief Survey of Recent Literature
cs.CL
Over the past 50 years many have debated what representation should be used to capture the meaning of natural language utterances. Recently new needs of such representations have been raised in research. Here I survey some of the interesting representations suggested to answer for these new needs.
1402.7268
Predicting Scientific Success Based on Coauthorship Networks
physics.soc-ph cs.DL cs.SI
We address the question to what extent the success of scientific articles is due to social influence. Analyzing a data set of over 100000 publications from the field of Computer Science, we study how centrality in the coauthorship network differs between authors who have highly cited papers and those who do not. We further show that a machine learning classifier, based only on coauthorship network centrality measures at time of publication, is able to predict with high precision whether an article will be highly cited five years after publication. By this we provide quantitative insight into the social dimension of scientific publishing - challenging the perception of citations as an objective, socially unbiased measure of scientific success.
1402.7276
Robot Location Estimation in the Situation Calculus
cs.AI cs.LO
Location estimation is a fundamental sensing task in robotic applications, where the world is uncertain, and sensors and effectors are noisy. Most systems make various assumptions about the dependencies between state variables, and especially about how these dependencies change as a result of actions. Building on a general framework by Bacchus, Halpern and Levesque for reasoning about degrees of belief in the situation calculus, and a recent extension to it for continuous domains, in this paper we illustrate location estimation in the presence of a rich theory of actions using an example. We also show that while actions might affect prior distributions in nonstandard ways, suitable posterior beliefs are nonetheless entailed as a side-effect of the overall specification.
1402.7305
Similarity Decomposition Approach to Oscillatory Synchronization for Multiple Mechanical Systems With a Virtual Leader
cs.SY math.OC
This paper addresses the oscillatory synchronization problem for multiple uncertain mechanical systems with a virtual leader, and the interaction topology among them is assumed to contain a directed spanning tree. We propose an adaptive control scheme to achieve the goal of oscillatory synchronization. Using the similarity decomposition approach, we show that the position and velocity synchronization errors between each mechanical system (or follower) and the virtual leader converge to zero. The performance of the proposed adaptive scheme is shown by numerical simulation results.
1402.7324
Geometrical approach to modeling of nonlinear systems from experimental data
cs.CE
This monograph presents a geometric modeling method nonlinear dynamical systems from experimental data . basis method is a qualitative approach to the analysis of linear models and construction of the symmetry groups of attractors of dynamical systems with controls . A theoretical study including the central theorem manifold defining conditions of existence of the class in question models in the local area , taking into account the group properties , estimation algorithms invariant characteristics , methods of constructing models and identifiable description of the results obtained using the method for simulation -driven engineering processes . included two application is the development of the proposed approach : identification of groups symmetries on the phase portraits of dynamical systems and the method of constructing neural network predictive models
1402.7340
Hierarchical community structure in complex (social) networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
The investigation of community structure in networks is a task of great importance in many disciplines, namely physics, sociology, biology and computer science where systems are often represented as graphs. One of the challenges is to find local communities from a local viewpoint in a graph without global information in order to reproduce the subjective hierarchical vision for each vertex. In this paper we present the improvement of an information dynamics algorithm in which the label propagation of nodes is based on the Markovian flow of information in the network under cognitive-inspired constraints \cite{Massaro2012}. In this framework we have introduced two more complex heuristics that allow the algorithm to detect the multi-resolution hierarchical community structure of networks from a source vertex or communities adopting fixed values of model's parameters. Experimental results show that the proposed methods are efficient and well-behaved in both real-world and synthetic networks.
1402.7341
A Novel approach as Multi-place Watermarking for Security in Database
cs.DB cs.CR cs.MM
Digital multimedia watermarking technology had suggested in the last decade to embed copyright information in digital objects such as images, audio and video. However, the increasing use of relational database systems in many real-life applications created an ever-increasing need for watermarking database systems. As a result, watermarking relational database system is now emerging as a research area that deals with the legal issue of copyright protection of database systems. The main goal of database watermarking is to generate robust and impersistent watermark for database. In this paper we propose a method, based on image as watermark and this watermark is embedded over the database at two different attribute of tuple, one in the numeric attribute of tuple and another in the date attribute's time (seconds) field. Our approach can be applied for numerical and categorical database.
1402.7344
An Incidence Geometry approach to Dictionary Learning
cs.LG stat.ML
We study the Dictionary Learning (aka Sparse Coding) problem of obtaining a sparse representation of data points, by learning \emph{dictionary vectors} upon which the data points can be written as sparse linear combinations. We view this problem from a geometry perspective as the spanning set of a subspace arrangement, and focus on understanding the case when the underlying hypergraph of the subspace arrangement is specified. For this Fitted Dictionary Learning problem, we completely characterize the combinatorics of the associated subspace arrangements (i.e.\ their underlying hypergraphs). Specifically, a combinatorial rigidity-type theorem is proven for a type of geometric incidence system. The theorem characterizes the hypergraphs of subspace arrangements that generically yield (a) at least one dictionary (b) a locally unique dictionary (i.e.\ at most a finite number of isolated dictionaries) of the specified size. We are unaware of prior application of combinatorial rigidity techniques in the setting of Dictionary Learning, or even in machine learning. We also provide a systematic classification of problems related to Dictionary Learning together with various algorithms, their assumptions and performance.
1402.7350
Phase Retrieval with Application to Optical Imaging
cs.IT math.IT
This review article provides a contemporary overview of phase retrieval in optical imaging, linking the relevant optical physics to the information processing methods and algorithms. Its purpose is to describe the current state of the art in this area, identify challenges, and suggest vision and areas where signal processing methods can have a large impact on optical imaging and on the world of imaging at large, with applications in a variety of fields ranging from biology and chemistry to physics and engineering.
1402.7351
A Machine Learning Model for Stock Market Prediction
cs.CE cs.NE
Stock market prediction is the act of trying to determine the future value of a company stock or other financial instrument traded on a financial exchange.
1402.7352
Second-Order Consensus of Networked Mechanical Systems With Communication Delays
cs.SY math.OC
In this paper, we consider the second-order consensus problem for networked mechanical systems subjected to nonuniform communication delays, and the mechanical systems are assumed to interact on a general directed topology. We propose an adaptive controller plus a distributed velocity observer to realize the objective of second-order consensus. It is shown that both the positions and velocities of the mechanical agents synchronize, and furthermore, the velocities of the mechanical agents converge to the scaled weighted average value of their initial ones. We further demonstrate that the proposed second-order consensus scheme can be used to solve the leader-follower synchronization problem with a constant-velocity leader and under constant communication delays. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed adaptive controllers.
1403.0012
A Stochastic Geometry Analysis of Inter-cell Interference Coordination and Intra-cell Diversity
cs.IT math.IT
Inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) and intra-cell diversity (ICD) play important roles in improving cellular downlink coverage. Modeling cellular base stations (BSs) as a homogeneous Poisson point process (PPP), this paper provides explicit finite-integral expressions for the coverage probability with ICIC and ICD, taking into account the temporal/spectral correlation of the signal and interference. In addition, we show that in the high-reliability regime, where the user outage probability goes to zero, ICIC and ICD affect the network coverage in drastically different ways: ICD can provide order gain while ICIC only offers linear gain. In the high-spectral efficiency regime where the SIR threshold goes to infinity, the order difference in the coverage probability does not exist, however the linear difference makes ICIC a better scheme than ICD for realistic path loss exponents. Consequently, depending on the SIR requirements, different combinations of ICIC and ICD optimize the coverage probability.
1403.0017
Intensional RDB Manifesto: a Unifying NewSQL Model for Flexible Big Data
cs.DB
In this paper we present a new family of Intensional RDBs (IRDBs) which extends the traditional RDBs with the Big Data and flexible and 'Open schema' features, able to preserve the user-defined relational database schemas and all preexisting user's applications containing the SQL statements for a deployment of such a relational data. The standard RDB data is parsed into an internal vector key/value relation, so that we obtain a column representation of data used in Big Data applications, covering the key/value and column-based Big Data applications as well, into a unifying RDB framework. We define a query rewriting algorithm, based on the GAV Data Integration methods, so that each user-defined SQL query is rewritten into a SQL query over this vector relation, and hence the user-defined standard RDB schema is maintained as an empty global schema for the RDB schema modeling of data and as the SQL interface to stored vector relation. Such an IRDB architecture is adequate for the massive migrations from the existing slow RDBMSs into this new family of fast IRDBMSs by offering a Big Data and new flexible schema features as well.
1403.0034
Tractable Epistemic Reasoning with Functional Fluents, Static Causal Laws and Postdiction
cs.AI
We present an epistemic action theory for tractable epistemic reasoning as an extension to the h-approximation (HPX) theory. In contrast to existing tractable approaches, the theory supports functional fluents and postdictive reasoning with static causal laws. We argue that this combination is particularly synergistic because it allows one not only to perform direct postdiction about the conditions of actions, but also indirect postdiction about the conditions of static causal laws. We show that despite the richer expressiveness, the temporal projection problem remains tractable (polynomial), and therefore the planning problem remains in NP. We present the operational semantics of our theory as well as its formulation as Answer Set Programming.
1403.0036
Dynamic Decision Process Modeling and Relation-line Handling in Distributed Cooperative Modeling System
cs.AI
The Distributed Cooperative Modeling System (DCMS) solves complex decision problems involving a lot of participants with different viewpoints by network based distributed modeling and multi-template aggregation. This thesis aims at extending the system with support for dynamic decision making process. First, the thesis presents a discussion of characteristics and optimal policy finding Markov Decision Process as well as a brief introduction to dynamic Bayesian decision network, which is inherently equal to MDP. After that, discussion and implementation of prediction in Markov process for both discrete and continuous random variable are given, as well as several different kinds of correlation analysis among multiple indices which could help decision-makers to realize the interaction of indices and design appropriate policy. Appending history data of Macau industry, as the foundation of extending DCMS, is introduced. Additional works include rearrangement of graphical class hierarchy in DCMS, which in turn allows convenient implementation of curve relation-line, which makes template modeling clearer and friendlier.
1403.0041
Individual dynamics induces symmetry in network controllability
math.OC cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Controlling complex networked systems to a desired state is a key research goal in contemporary science. Despite recent advances in studying the impact of network topology on controllability, a comprehensive understanding of the synergistic effect of network topology and individual dynamics on controllability is still lacking. Here we offer a theoretical study with particular interest in the diversity of dynamic units characterized by different types of individual dynamics. Interestingly, we find a global symmetry accounting for the invariance of controllability with respect to exchanging the densities of any two different types of dynamic units, irrespective of the network topology. The highest controllability arises at the global symmetry point, at which different types of dynamic units are of the same density. The lowest controllability occurs when all self-loops are either completely absent or present with identical weights. These findings further improve our understanding of network controllability and have implications for devising the optimal control of complex networked systems in a wide range of fields.
1403.0052
TBX goes TEI -- Implementing a TBX basic extension for the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines
cs.CL
This paper presents an attempt to customise the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) guidelines in order to offer the possibility to incorporate TBX (TermBase eXchange) based terminological entries within any kind of TEI documents. After presenting the general historical, conceptual and technical contexts, we describe the various design choices we had to take while creating this customisation, which in turn have led to make various changes in the actual TBX serialisation. Keeping in mind the objective to provide the TEI guidelines with, again, an onomasiological model, we try to identify the best comprise in maintaining both the isomorphism with the existing TBX Basic standard and the characteristics of the TEI framework.
1403.0054
Multi-Objective Resource Allocation for Secure Communication in Cognitive Radio Networks with Wireless Information and Power Transfer
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we study resource allocation for multiuser multiple-input single-output secondary communication systems with multiple system design objectives. We consider cognitive radio networks where the secondary receivers are able to harvest energy from the radio frequency when they are idle. The secondary system provides simultaneous wireless power and secure information transfer to the secondary receivers. We propose a multi-objective optimization framework for the design of a Pareto optimal resource allocation algorithm based on the weighted Tchebycheff approach. In particular, the algorithm design incorporates three important system objectives: total transmit power minimization, energy harvesting efficiency maximization, and interference power leakage-to-transmit power ratio minimization. The proposed framework takes into account a quality of service requirement regarding communication secrecy in the secondary system and the imperfection of the channel state information of potential eavesdroppers (idle secondary receivers and primary receivers) at the secondary transmitter. The adopted multi-objective optimization problem is non-convex and is recast as a convex optimization problem via semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation. It is shown that the global optimal solution of the original problem can be constructed by exploiting both the primal and the dual optimal solutions of the SDP relaxed problem. Besides, two suboptimal resource allocation schemes for the case when the solution of the dual problem is unavailable for constructing the optimal solution are proposed. Numerical results not only demonstrate the close-to-optimal performance of the proposed suboptimal schemes, but also unveil an interesting trade-off between the considered conflicting system design objectives.
1403.0057
Real-time Topic-aware Influence Maximization Using Preprocessing
cs.SI cs.LG
Influence maximization is the task of finding a set of seed nodes in a social network such that the influence spread of these seed nodes based on certain influence diffusion model is maximized. Topic-aware influence diffusion models have been recently proposed to address the issue that influence between a pair of users are often topic-dependent and information, ideas, innovations etc. being propagated in networks (referred collectively as items in this paper) are typically mixtures of topics. In this paper, we focus on the topic-aware influence maximization task. In particular, we study preprocessing methods for these topics to avoid redoing influence maximization for each item from scratch. We explore two preprocessing algorithms with theoretical justifications. Our empirical results on data obtained in a couple of existing studies demonstrate that one of our algorithms stands out as a strong candidate providing microsecond online response time and competitive influence spread, with reasonable preprocessing effort.
1403.0068
Semantic Annotation and Search for Educational Resources Supporting Distance Learning
cs.IR cs.CY cs.DL
Multimedia educational resources play an important role in education, particularly for distance learning environments. With the rapid growth of the multimedia web, large numbers of education articles video resources are increasingly being created by several different organizations. It is crucial to explore, share, reuse, and link these educational resources for better e-learning experiences. Most of the video resources are currently annotated in an isolated way, which means that they lack semantic connections. Thus, providing the facilities for annotating these video resources is highly demanded. These facilities create the semantic connections among video resources and allow their metadata to be understood globally. Adopting Linked Data technology, this paper introduces a video annotation and browser platform with two online tools: Notitia and Sansu-Wolke. Notitia enables users to semantically annotate video resources using vocabularies defined in the Linked Data cloud. Sansu-Wolke allows users to browse semantically linked educational video resources with enhanced web information from different online resources. In the prototype development, the platform uses existing video resources for education articles. The result of the initial development demonstrates the benefits of applying Linked Data technology in the aspects of reusability, scalability, and extensibility
1403.0087
Temporal Image Fusion
cs.CV cs.GR
This paper introduces temporal image fusion. The proposed technique builds upon previous research in exposure fusion and expands it to deal with the limited Temporal Dynamic Range of existing sensors and camera technologies. In particular, temporal image fusion enables the rendering of long-exposure effects on full frame-rate video, as well as the generation of arbitrarily long exposures from a sequence of images of the same scene taken over time. We explore the problem of temporal under-exposure, and show how it can be addressed by selectively enhancing dynamic structure. Finally, we show that the use of temporal image fusion together with content-selective image filters can produce a range of striking visual effects on a given input sequence.
1403.0093
Robust Nonlinear L2 Filtering of Uncertain Lipschitz Systems via Pareto Optimization
cs.SY math.OC
A new approach for robust Hinfty filtering for a class of Lipschitz nonlinear systems with time-varying uncertainties both in the linear and nonlinear parts of the system is proposed in an LMI framework. The admissible Lipschitz constant of the system and the disturbance attenuation level are maximized simultaneously through convex multiobjective optimization. The resulting Hinfty filter guarantees asymptotic stability of the estimation error dynamics with exponential convergence and is robust against nonlinear additive uncertainty and time-varying parametric uncertainties. Explicit bounds on the nonlinear uncertainty are derived based on norm-wise and element-wise robustness analysis.
1403.0135
A survey on tidal analysis and forecasting methods for Tsunami detection
cs.CE math.OC physics.ao-ph
Accurate analysis and forecasting of tidal level are very important tasks for human activities in oceanic and coastal areas. They can be crucial in catastrophic situations like occurrences of Tsunamis in order to provide a rapid alerting to the human population involved and to save lives. Conventional tidal forecasting methods are based on harmonic analysis using the least squares method to determine harmonic parameters. However, a large number of parameters and long-term measured data are required for precise tidal level predictions with harmonic analysis. Furthermore, traditional harmonic methods rely on models based on the analysis of astronomical components and they can be inadequate when the contribution of non-astronomical components, such as the weather, is significant. Other alternative approaches have been developed in the literature in order to deal with these situations and provide predictions with the desired accuracy, with respect also to the length of the available tidal record. These methods include standard high or band pass filtering techniques, although the relatively deterministic character and large amplitude of tidal signals make special techniques, like artificial neural networks and wavelets transform analysis methods, more effective. This paper is intended to provide the communities of both researchers and practitioners with a broadly applicable, up to date coverage of tidal analysis and forecasting methodologies that have proven to be successful in a variety of circumstances, and that hold particular promise for success in the future. Classical and novel methods are reviewed in a systematic and consistent way, outlining their main concepts and components, similarities and differences, advantages and disadvantages.
1403.0153
Size Adaptive Region Based Huffman Compression Technique
cs.IT math.IT
A loss-less compression technique is proposed which uses a variable length Region formation technique to divide the input file into a number of variable length regions. Huffman codes are obtained for entire file after formation of regions. Symbols of each region are compressed one by one. Comparisons are made among proposed technique, Region Based Huffman compression technique and classical Huffman technique. The proposed technique offers better compression ratio for some files than other two.
1403.0156
Sleep Analytics and Online Selective Anomaly Detection
cs.LG
We introduce a new problem, the Online Selective Anomaly Detection (OSAD), to model a specific scenario emerging from research in sleep science. Scientists have segmented sleep into several stages and stage two is characterized by two patterns (or anomalies) in the EEG time series recorded on sleep subjects. These two patterns are sleep spindle (SS) and K-complex. The OSAD problem was introduced to design a residual system, where all anomalies (known and unknown) are detected but the system only triggers an alarm when non-SS anomalies appear. The solution of the OSAD problem required us to combine techniques from both machine learning and control theory. Experiments on data from real subjects attest to the effectiveness of our approach.
1403.0157
Network Traffic Decomposition for Anomaly Detection
cs.LG cs.NI
In this paper we focus on the detection of network anomalies like Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and port scans in a unified manner. While there has been an extensive amount of research in network anomaly detection, current state of the art methods are only able to detect one class of anomalies at the cost of others. The key tool we will use is based on the spectral decomposition of a trajectory/hankel matrix which is able to detect deviations from both between and within correlation present in the observed network traffic data. Detailed experiments on synthetic and real network traces shows a significant improvement in detection capability over competing approaches. In the process we also address the issue of robustness of anomaly detection systems in a principled fashion.
1403.0173
Coordinated Direct and Relay Schemes for Two-Hop Communication in VANETS
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT
In order to accommodate increasing need and offer communication with high performance, both vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications are exploited. The advantages of static nodes and vehicular nodes are combined to achieve an optimal routing scheme. In this paper, we consider the communications between a static node and the vehicular nodes moving in an adjacent area of it. The adjacent area is defined as the zone where a vehicular can communicate with the static node within maximum two hops. We only consider single-hop and two-hop transmissions because these transmissions can be considered as building blocks to construct transmissions with a higher number of hops. Different cases in which an uplink or a downlink for the two-hop user combined with an uplink or a downlink for the single-hop user correspond to different CDR schemes. Using side information to intentionally cancel the interference, Network Coding (NC), CDR, overhearing and multi-way schemes aggregate communications flows in order to increase the performance of the network. We apply the mentioned schemes to a V2I network and propose novel schemes to optimally arrange and combine the transmissions.
1403.0190
RZA-NLMF algorithm based adaptive sparse sensing for realizing compressive sensing problems
cs.IT math.IT
Nonlinear sparse sensing (NSS) techniques have been adopted for realizing compressive sensing in many applications such as Radar imaging. Unlike the NSS, in this paper, we propose an adaptive sparse sensing (ASS) approach using reweighted zero-attracting normalized least mean fourth (RZA-NLMF) algorithm which depends on several given parameters, i.e., reweighted factor, regularization parameter and initial step-size. First, based on the independent assumption, Cramer Rao lower bound (CRLB) is derived as for the trademark of performance comparisons. In addition, reweighted factor selection method is proposed for achieving robust estimation performance. Finally, to verify the algorithm, Monte Carlo based computer simulations are given to show that the ASS achieves much better mean square error (MSE) performance than the NSS.
1403.0192
Compressive sensing based Bayesian sparse channel estimation for OFDM communication systems: high performance and low complexity
cs.IT math.IT
In orthogonal frequency division modulation (OFDM) communication systems, channel state information (CSI) is required at receiver due to the fact that frequency-selective fading channel leads to disgusting inter-symbol interference (ISI) over data transmission. Broadband channel model is often described by very few dominant channel taps and they can be probed by compressive sensing based sparse channel estimation (SCE) methods, e.g., orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm, which can take the advantage of sparse structure effectively in the channel as for prior information. However, these developed methods are vulnerable to both noise interference and column coherence of training signal matrix. In other words, the primary objective of these conventional methods is to catch the dominant channel taps without a report of posterior channel uncertainty. To improve the estimation performance, we proposed a compressive sensing based Bayesian sparse channel estimation (BSCE) method which can not only exploit the channel sparsity but also mitigate the unexpected channel uncertainty without scarifying any computational complexity. The propose method can reveal potential ambiguity among multiple channel estimators that are ambiguous due to observation noise or correlation interference among columns in the training matrix. Computer simulations show that propose method can improve the estimation performance when comparing with conventional SCE methods.
1403.0214
Variable-Rate Linear Network Error Correction MDS Codes
cs.IT math.IT
In network communication, the source often transmits messages at several different information rates within a session. How to deal with information transmission and network error correction simultaneously under different rates is introduced in this paper as a variable-rate network error correction problem. Apparently, linear network error correction MDS codes are expected to be used for these different rates. For this purpose, designing a linear network error correction MDS code based on the existing results for each information rate is an efficient solution. In order to solve the problem more efficiently, we present the concept of variable-rate linear network error correction MDS codes, that is, these linear network error correction MDS codes of different rates have the same local encoding kernel at each internal node. Further, we propose an approach to construct such a family of variable-rate network MDS codes and give an algorithm for efficient implementation. This approach saves the storage space for each internal node, and resources and time for the transmission on networks. Moreover, the performance of our proposed algorithm is analyzed, including the field size, the time complexity, the encoding complexity at the source node, and the decoding methods. Finally, a random method is introduced for constructing variable-rate network MDS codes and we obtain a lower bound on the success probability of this random method, which shows that this probability will approach to one as the base field size goes to infinity.
1403.0222
Beyond Q-Resolution and Prenex Form: A Proof System for Quantified Constraint Satisfaction
cs.LO cs.AI cs.CC
We consider the quantified constraint satisfaction problem (QCSP) which is to decide, given a structure and a first-order sentence (not assumed here to be in prenex form) built from conjunction and quantification, whether or not the sentence is true on the structure. We present a proof system for certifying the falsity of QCSP instances and develop its basic theory; for instance, we provide an algorithmic interpretation of its behavior. Our proof system places the established Q-resolution proof system in a broader context, and also allows us to derive QCSP tractability results.
1403.0230
Research Traceability using Provenance Services for Biomedical Analysis
cs.DB
We outline the approach being developed in the neuGRID project to use provenance management techniques for the purposes of capturing and preserving the provenance data that emerges in the specification and execution of workflows in biomedical analyses. In the neuGRID project a provenance service has been designed and implemented that is intended to capture, store, retrieve and reconstruct the workflow information needed to facilitate users in conducting user analyses. We describe the architecture of the neuGRID provenance service and discuss how the CRISTAL system from CERN is being adapted to address the requirements of the project and then consider how a generalised approach for provenance management could emerge for more generic application to the (Health)Grid community.
1403.0240
Particle methods enable fast and simple approximation of Sobolev gradients in image segmentation
cs.CV cs.CE cs.NA q-bio.QM
Bio-image analysis is challenging due to inhomogeneous intensity distributions and high levels of noise in the images. Bayesian inference provides a principled way for regularizing the problem using prior knowledge. A fundamental choice is how one measures "distances" between shapes in an image. It has been shown that the straightforward geometric L2 distance is degenerate and leads to pathological situations. This is avoided when using Sobolev gradients, rendering the segmentation problem less ill-posed. The high computational cost and implementation overhead of Sobolev gradients, however, have hampered practical applications. We show how particle methods as applied to image segmentation allow for a simple and computationally efficient implementation of Sobolev gradients. We show that the evaluation of Sobolev gradients amounts to particle-particle interactions along the contour in an image. We extend an existing particle-based segmentation algorithm to using Sobolev gradients. Using synthetic and real-world images, we benchmark the results for both 2D and 3D images using piecewise smooth and piecewise constant region models. The present particle approximation of Sobolev gradients is 2.8 to 10 times faster than the previous reference implementation, but retains the known favorable properties of Sobolev gradients. This speedup is achieved by using local particle-particle interactions instead of solving a global Poisson equation at each iteration. The computational time per iteration is higher for Sobolev gradients than for L2 gradients. Since Sobolev gradients precondition the optimization problem, however, a smaller number of overall iterations may be necessary for the algorithm to converge, which can in some cases amortize the higher per-iteration cost.
1403.0258
Decentralized Hybrid Formation Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
cs.SY
This paper presents a decentralized hybrid supervisory control approach for a team of unmanned helicopters that are involved in a leader-follower formation mission. Using a polar partitioning technique, the motion dynamics of the follower helicopters are abstracted to finite state machines. Then, a discrete supervisor is designed in a modular way for different components of the formation mission including reaching the formation, keeping the formation, and collision avoidance. Furthermore, a formal technique is developed to design the local supervisors decentralizedly, so that the team of helicopters as whole, can cooperatively accomplish a collision-free formation task.
1403.0259
The Effect of Block-wise Feedback on the Throughput-Delay Trade-off in Streaming
cs.IT cs.MM math.IT
Unlike traditional file transfer where only total delay matters, streaming applications impose delay constraints on each packet and require them to be in order. To achieve fast in-order packet decoding, we have to compromise on the throughput. We study this trade-off between throughput and in-order decoding delay, and in particular how it is affected by the frequency of block-wise feedback to the source. When there is immediate feedback, we can achieve the optimal throughput and delay simultaneously. But as the feedback delay increases, we have to compromise on at least one of these metrics. We present a spectrum of coding schemes that span different points on the throughput-delay trade-off. Depending upon the delay-sensitivity and bandwidth limitations of the application, one can choose an appropriate operating point on this trade-off.
1403.0268
Tropical optimization problems with application to project scheduling with minimum makespan
math.OC cs.SY
We consider multidimensional optimization problems in the framework of tropical mathematics. The problems are formulated to minimize a nonlinear objective function that is defined on vectors over an idempotent semifield and calculated by means of multiplicative conjugate transposition. We start with an unconstrained problem and offer two complete direct solutions to demonstrate different practicable argumentation schemes. The first solution consists of the derivation of a sharp lower bound for the objective function and the solving of an equation to find all vectors that yield the bound. The second is based on extremal properties of the spectral radius of matrices and involves the evaluation of this radius for a certain matrix. This solution is then extended to problems with boundary constraints that specify the feasible solution set by a double inequality, and with a linear inequality constraint given by a matrix. To illustrate one application of the results obtained, we solve problems in project scheduling under the minimum makespan criterion subject to various precedence constraints on the time of initiation and completion of activities in the project. Simple numerical examples are given to show the computational technique used for solutions.
1403.0270
Quantum Random State Generation with Predefined Entanglement Constraint
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
Entanglement plays an important role in quantum communication, algorithms, and error correction. Schmidt coefficients are correlated to the eigenvalues of the reduced density matrix. These eigenvalues are used in Von Neumann entropy to quantify the amount of the bipartite entanglement. In this paper, we map the Schmidt basis and the associated coefficients to quantum circuits to generate random quantum states. We also show that it is possible to adjust the entanglement between subsystems by changing the quantum gates corresponding to the Schmidt coefficients. In this manner, random quantum states with predefined bipartite entanglement amounts can be generated using random Schmidt basis. This provides a technique for generating equivalent quantum states for given weighted graph states, which are very useful in the study of entanglement, quantum computing, and quantum error correction.
1403.0284
Bayes Merging of Multiple Vocabularies for Scalable Image Retrieval
cs.CV
The Bag-of-Words (BoW) representation is well applied to recent state-of-the-art image retrieval works. Typically, multiple vocabularies are generated to correct quantization artifacts and improve recall. However, this routine is corrupted by vocabulary correlation, i.e., overlapping among different vocabularies. Vocabulary correlation leads to an over-counting of the indexed features in the overlapped area, or the intersection set, thus compromising the retrieval accuracy. In order to address the correlation problem while preserve the benefit of high recall, this paper proposes a Bayes merging approach to down-weight the indexed features in the intersection set. Through explicitly modeling the correlation problem in a probabilistic view, a joint similarity on both image- and feature-level is estimated for the indexed features in the intersection set. We evaluate our method through extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets. Albeit simple, Bayes merging can be well applied in various merging tasks, and consistently improves the baselines on multi-vocabulary merging. Moreover, Bayes merging is efficient in terms of both time and memory cost, and yields competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
1403.0300
A Proposed Improvement Equalizer for Telephone and Mobile Circuit Channels
cs.IT math.IT
In the transmission of digital data at a relatively high rate over a particular band limited channel, it is normally necessary to employ an equalizer at the receiver in order to correct the signal distortion introduced by the channel .ISI (inter symbol interference) leads to large error probability if it is not suppressed .The possible solutions for coping with ISI such as equalization technique. Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation (MLSE) implemented with Viterbi algorithm is the optimal equalizer for this ISI problem sense it minimizes the sequence of error rate. This estimator involves a very considerable amount of equipment complexity especially when detecting a multilevel digital signal having large alphabet, and/or operating under a channel with long impulse response, this arises a need to develop detection algorithms with reduced complexity without losing the performance. The aim of this work is to study the various ways to remove the ISI, concentrating on the decision-based algorithms (DFE, MLSE, and near MLSE), analyzing the difference between them from both performance and complexity point of view. An Improved non linear equalizer with Perturbation algorithm has been suggested which trying to enhance the performance and reduce the computational complexity by comparing it with the other existing detection algorithms.
1403.0306
An extended isogeometric analysis for vibration of cracked FGM plates using higher-order shear deformation theory
cs.CE math.NA
A novel and effective formulation that combines the eXtended IsoGeometric Approach (XIGA) and Higher-order Shear Deformation Theory (HSDT) is proposed to study the free vibration of cracked Functionally Graded Material (FGM) plates. Herein, the general HSDT model with five unknown variables per node is applied for calculating the stiffness matrix without needing Shear Correction Factor (SCF). In order to model the discontinuous and singular phenomena in the cracked plates, IsoGeometric Analysis (IGA) utilizing the Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) functions is incorporated with enrichment functions through the partition of unity method. NURBS basis functions with their inherent arbitrary high order smoothness permit the C1 requirement of the HSDT model. The material properties of the FGM plates vary continuously through the plate thickness according to an exponent function. The effects of gradient index, crack length, crack location, length to thickness on the natural frequencies and mode shapes of simply supported and clamped FGM plate are studied. Numerical examples are provided to show excellent performance of the proposed method compared with other published solutions in the literature.
1403.0307
Isogeometric finite element analysis of laminated composite plates based on a four variable refined plate theory
cs.CE math.NA
In this paper, a novel and effective formulation based on isogeometric approach (IGA) and Refined Plate Theory (RPT) is proposed to study the behavior of laminated composite plates. Using many kinds of higher-order distributed functions, RPT model naturally satisfies the traction-free boundary conditions at plate surfaces and describes the non-linear distribution of shear stresses without requiring shear correction factor (SCF). IGA utilizes the basis functions, namely B-splines or non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS), which achieve easily the smoothness of any arbitrary order. It hence satisfies the C1 requirement of the RPT model. The static, dynamic and buckling analysis of rectangular plates is investigated for different boundary conditions. Numerical results show high effectiveness of the present formulation.
1403.0309
Object Tracking via Non-Euclidean Geometry: A Grassmann Approach
cs.CV math.MG stat.ML
A robust visual tracking system requires an object appearance model that is able to handle occlusion, pose, and illumination variations in the video stream. This can be difficult to accomplish when the model is trained using only a single image. In this paper, we first propose a tracking approach based on affine subspaces (constructed from several images) which are able to accommodate the abovementioned variations. We use affine subspaces not only to represent the object, but also the candidate areas that the object may occupy. We furthermore propose a novel approach to measure affine subspace-to-subspace distance via the use of non-Euclidean geometry of Grassmann manifolds. The tracking problem is then considered as an inference task in a Markov Chain Monte Carlo framework via particle filtering. Quantitative evaluation on challenging video sequences indicates that the proposed approach obtains considerably better performance than several recent state-of-the-art methods such as Tracking-Learning-Detection and MILtrack.
1403.0315
Summarisation of Short-Term and Long-Term Videos using Texture and Colour
cs.CV stat.AP
We present a novel approach to video summarisation that makes use of a Bag-of-visual-Textures (BoT) approach. Two systems are proposed, one based solely on the BoT approach and another which exploits both colour information and BoT features. On 50 short-term videos from the Open Video Project we show that our BoT and fusion systems both achieve state-of-the-art performance, obtaining an average F-measure of 0.83 and 0.86 respectively, a relative improvement of 9% and 13% when compared to the previous state-of-the-art. When applied to a new underwater surveillance dataset containing 33 long-term videos, the proposed system reduces the amount of footage by a factor of 27, with only minor degradation in the information content. This order of magnitude reduction in video data represents significant savings in terms of time and potential labour cost when manually reviewing such footage.
1403.0316
Cross-Scale Cost Aggregation for Stereo Matching
cs.CV
Human beings process stereoscopic correspondence across multiple scales. However, this bio-inspiration is ignored by state-of-the-art cost aggregation methods for dense stereo correspondence. In this paper, a generic cross-scale cost aggregation framework is proposed to allow multi-scale interaction in cost aggregation. We firstly reformulate cost aggregation from a unified optimization perspective and show that different cost aggregation methods essentially differ in the choices of similarity kernels. Then, an inter-scale regularizer is introduced into optimization and solving this new optimization problem leads to the proposed framework. Since the regularization term is independent of the similarity kernel, various cost aggregation methods can be integrated into the proposed general framework. We show that the cross-scale framework is important as it effectively and efficiently expands state-of-the-art cost aggregation methods and leads to significant improvements, when evaluated on Middlebury, KITTI and New Tsukuba datasets.
1403.0320
Matching Image Sets via Adaptive Multi Convex Hull
cs.CV stat.ML
Traditional nearest points methods use all the samples in an image set to construct a single convex or affine hull model for classification. However, strong artificial features and noisy data may be generated from combinations of training samples when significant intra-class variations and/or noise occur in the image set. Existing multi-model approaches extract local models by clustering each image set individually only once, with fixed clusters used for matching with various image sets. This may not be optimal for discrimination, as undesirable environmental conditions (eg. illumination and pose variations) may result in the two closest clusters representing different characteristics of an object (eg. frontal face being compared to non-frontal face). To address the above problem, we propose a novel approach to enhance nearest points based methods by integrating affine/convex hull classification with an adapted multi-model approach. We first extract multiple local convex hulls from a query image set via maximum margin clustering to diminish the artificial variations and constrain the noise in local convex hulls. We then propose adaptive reference clustering (ARC) to constrain the clustering of each gallery image set by forcing the clusters to have resemblance to the clusters in the query image set. By applying ARC, noisy clusters in the query set can be discarded. Experiments on Honda, MoBo and ETH-80 datasets show that the proposed method outperforms single model approaches and other recent techniques, such as Sparse Approximated Nearest Points, Mutual Subspace Method and Manifold Discriminant Analysis.
1403.0353
Personalized recommendation against crowd's popular selection
cs.IR cs.SI physics.soc-ph
The problem of personalized recommendation in an ocean of data attracts more and more attention recently. Most traditional researches ignore the popularity of the recommended object, which resulting in low personality and accuracy. In this Letter, we proposed a personalized recommendation method based on weighted object network, punishing the recommended object that is the crowd's popular selection, namely, Anti-popularity index(AP), which can give enhanced personality, accuracy and diversity in contrast to mainstream baselines with a low computational complexity.
1403.0354
Energy Harvesting Cooperative Networks: Is the Max-Min Criterion Still Diversity-Optimal?
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers a general energy harvesting cooperative network with M source-destination (SD) pairs and one relay, where the relay schedules only m user pairs for transmissions. For the special case of m = 1, the addressed scheduling problem is equivalent to relay selection for the scenario with one SD pair and M relays. In conventional cooperative networks, the max-min selection criterion has been recognized as a diversity-optimal strategy for relay selection and user scheduling. The main contribution of this paper is to show that the use of the max-min criterion will result in loss of diversity gains in energy harvesting cooperative networks. Particularly when only a single user is scheduled, analytical results are developed to demonstrate that the diversity gain achieved by the max-min criterion is only (M+1)/2, much less than the maximal diversity gain M. The max-min criterion suffers this diversity loss because it does not reflect the fact that the source-relay channels are more important than the relay-destination channels in energy harvesting networks. Motivated by this fact, a few user scheduling approaches tailored to energy harvesting networks are developed and their performance is analyzed. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the accuracy of the developed analytical results and facilitate the performance comparison.
1403.0355
Ergodic Sum-Rate Maximization for Fading Cognitive Multiple Access Channels without Successive Interference Cancellation
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, the ergodic sum-rate of a fading cognitive multiple access channel (C-MAC) is studied, where a secondary network (SN) with multiple secondary users (SUs) transmitting to a secondary base station (SBS) shares the spectrum band with a primary user (PU). An interference power constraint (IPC) is imposed on the SN to protect the PU. Under such a constraint and the individual transmit power constraint (TPC) imposed on each SU, we investigate the power allocation strategies to maximize the ergodic sum-rate of a fading C-MAC without successive interference cancellation (SIC). In particular, this paper considers two types of constraints: (1) average TPC and average IPC, (2) peak TPC and peak IPC. For the first case, it is proved that the optimal power allocation is dynamic time-division multiple-access (D-TDMA), which is exactly the same as the optimal power allocation to maximize the ergodic sum-rate of the fading C-MAC with SIC under the same constraints. For the second case, it is proved that the optimal solution must be at the extreme points of the feasible region. It is shown that D-TDMA is optimal with high probability when the number of SUs is large. Besides, we show that, when the SUs can be sorted in a certain order, an algorithm with linear complexity can be used to find the optimal power allocation.
1403.0388
Cascading Randomized Weighted Majority: A New Online Ensemble Learning Algorithm
stat.ML cs.LG
With the increasing volume of data in the world, the best approach for learning from this data is to exploit an online learning algorithm. Online ensemble methods are online algorithms which take advantage of an ensemble of classifiers to predict labels of data. Prediction with expert advice is a well-studied problem in the online ensemble learning literature. The Weighted Majority algorithm and the randomized weighted majority (RWM) are the most well-known solutions to this problem, aiming to converge to the best expert. Since among some expert, the best one does not necessarily have the minimum error in all regions of data space, defining specific regions and converging to the best expert in each of these regions will lead to a better result. In this paper, we aim to resolve this defect of RWM algorithms by proposing a novel online ensemble algorithm to the problem of prediction with expert advice. We propose a cascading version of RWM to achieve not only better experimental results but also a better error bound for sufficiently large datasets.
1403.0429
Extending Agents by Transmitting Protocols in Open Systems
cs.MA
Agents in an open system communicate using interaction protocols. Suppose that we have a system of agents and that we want to add a new protocol that all (or some) agents should be able to understand. Clearly, modifying the source code for each agent implementation is not practical. A solution to this problem of upgrading an open system is to have a mechanism that allows agents to receive a description of an interaction protocol and use it. In this paper we propose a representation for protocols based on extending Petri nets. However, this is not enough: in an open system the source of a protocol may not be trusted and a protocol that is received may contain steps that are erroneous or that make confidential information public. We therefore also describe an analysis method that infers whether a protocol is safe. Finally, we give an execution model for extended Petri nets.
1403.0448
Hybrid evolving clique-networks and their communicability
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Aiming to understand real-world hierarchical networks whose degree distributions are neither power law nor exponential, we construct a hybrid clique network that includes both homogeneous and inhomogeneous parts, and introduce an inhomogeneity parameter to tune the ratio between the homogeneous part and the inhomogeneous one. We perform Monte-Carlo simulations to study various properties of such a network, including the degree distribution, the average shortest-path-length, the clustering coefficient, the clustering spectrum, and the communicability.
1403.0461
Timed Soft Concurrent Constraint Programs: An Interleaved and a Parallel Approach
cs.PL cs.AI
We propose a timed and soft extension of Concurrent Constraint Programming. The time extension is based on the hypothesis of bounded asynchrony: the computation takes a bounded period of time and is measured by a discrete global clock. Action prefixing is then considered as the syntactic marker which distinguishes a time instant from the next one. Supported by soft constraints instead of crisp ones, tell and ask agents are now equipped with a preference (or consistency) threshold which is used to determine their success or suspension. In the paper we provide a language to describe the agents behavior, together with its operational and denotational semantics, for which we also prove the compositionality and correctness properties. After presenting a semantics using maximal parallelism of actions, we also describe a version for their interleaving on a single processor (with maximal parallelism for time elapsing). Coordinating agents that need to take decisions both on preference values and time events may benefit from this language. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).
1403.0466
Automatic exploration of structural regularities in networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Complex networks provide a powerful mathematical representation of complex systems in nature and society. To understand complex networks, it is crucial to explore their internal structures, also called structural regularities. The task of network structure exploration is to determine how many groups in a complex network and how to group the nodes of the network. Most existing structure exploration methods need to specify either a group number or a certain type of structure when they are applied to a network. In the real world, however, not only the group number but also the certain type of structure that a network has are usually unknown in advance. To automatically explore structural regularities in complex networks, without any prior knowledge about the group number or the certain type of structure, we extend a probabilistic mixture model that can handle networks with any type of structure but needs to specify a group number using Bayesian nonparametric theory and propose a novel Bayesian nonparametric model, called the Bayesian nonparametric mixture (BNPM) model. Experiments conducted on a large number of networks with different structures show that the BNPM model is able to automatically explore structural regularities in networks with a stable and state-of-the-art performance.
1403.0468
Identification of Structural Model for Chaotic Systems
math.DS cs.CE cs.SY nlin.CD
This article is talking about the study constructive method of structural identification systems with chaotic dynamics. It is shown that the reconstructed attractors are a source of information not only about the dynamics but also on the basis of the attractors which can be identified and the mere sight of models. It is known that the knowledge of the symmetry group allows you to specify the form of a minimal system. Forming a group transformation can be found in the recon-structed attractor. The affine system as the basic model is selected. Type of a nonlinear system is the subject of calcula-tions. A theoretical analysis is performed and proof of the possibility of constructing models in the central invariant manifold reduced. This developed algorithm for determining the observed symmetry in the attractor. The results of identification used in real systems are an application.
1403.0481
Support Vector Machine Model for Currency Crisis Discrimination
cs.LG stat.ML
Support Vector Machine (SVM) is powerful classification technique based on the idea of structural risk minimization. Use of kernel function enables curse of dimensionality to be addressed. However, proper kernel function for certain problem is dependent on specific dataset and as such there is no good method on choice of kernel function. In this paper, SVM is used to build empirical models of currency crisis in Argentina. An estimation technique is developed by training model on real life data set which provides reasonably accurate model outputs and helps policy makers to identify situations in which currency crisis may happen. The third and fourth order polynomial kernel is generally best choice to achieve high generalization of classifier performance. SVM has high level of maturity with algorithms that are simple, easy to implement, tolerates curse of dimensionality and good empirical performance. The satisfactory results show that currency crisis situation is properly emulated using only small fraction of database and could be used as an evaluation tool as well as an early warning system. To the best of knowledge this is the first work on SVM approach for currency crisis evaluation of Argentina.
1403.0485
Face Recognition Methods & Applications
cs.CV
Face recognition presents a challenging problem in the field of image analysis and computer vision. The security of information is becoming very significant and difficult. Security cameras are presently common in airports, Offices, University, ATM, Bank and in any locations with a security system. Face recognition is a biometric system used to identify or verify a person from a digital image. Face Recognition system is used in security. Face recognition system should be able to automatically detect a face in an image. This involves extracts its features and then recognize it, regardless of lighting, expression, illumination, ageing, transformations (translate, rotate and scale image) and pose, which is a difficult task. This paper contains three sections. The first section describes the common methods like holistic matching method, feature extraction method and hybrid methods. The second section describes applications with examples and finally third section describes the future research directions of face recognition.
1403.0500
Automating Fault Tolerance in High-Performance Computational Biological Jobs Using Multi-Agent Approaches
cs.DC cs.CE cs.MA
Background: Large-scale biological jobs on high-performance computing systems require manual intervention if one or more computing cores on which they execute fail. This places not only a cost on the maintenance of the job, but also a cost on the time taken for reinstating the job and the risk of losing data and execution accomplished by the job before it failed. Approaches which can proactively detect computing core failures and take action to relocate the computing core's job onto reliable cores can make a significant step towards automating fault tolerance. Method: This paper describes an experimental investigation into the use of multi-agent approaches for fault tolerance. Two approaches are studied, the first at the job level and the second at the core level. The approaches are investigated for single core failure scenarios that can occur in the execution of parallel reduction algorithms on computer clusters. A third approach is proposed that incorporates multi-agent technology both at the job and core level. Experiments are pursued in the context of genome searching, a popular computational biology application. Result: The key conclusion is that the approaches proposed are feasible for automating fault tolerance in high-performance computing systems with minimal human intervention. In a typical experiment in which the fault tolerance is studied, centralised and decentralised checkpointing approaches on an average add 90% to the actual time for executing the job. On the other hand, in the same experiment the multi-agent approaches add only 10% to the overall execution time.