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1403.2668
Revealing effective classifiers through network comparison
physics.soc-ph cs.SI physics.data-an
The ability to compare complex systems can provide new insight into the fundamental nature of the processes captured in ways that are otherwise inaccessible to observation. Here, we introduce the $n$-tangle method to directly compare two networks for structural similarity, based on the distribution of edge density in network subgraphs. We demonstrate that this method can efficiently introduce comparative analysis into network science and opens the road for many new applications. For example, we show how the construction of a phylogenetic tree across animal taxa according to their social structure can reveal commonalities in the behavioral ecology of the populations, or how students create similar networks according to the University size. Our method can be expanded to study a multitude of additional properties, such as network classification, changes during time evolution, convergence of growth models, and detection of structural changes during damage.
1403.2702
On the efficiency of transmission strategies for broadcast channels using finite size constellations
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, achievable rates regions are derived for power constrained Gaussian broadcast channel of two users using finite dimension constellations. Various transmission strategies are studied, namely superposition coding (SC) and superposition modulation (SM) and compared to standard schemes such as time sharing (TS). The maximal achievable rates regions for SM and SC strategies are obtained by optimizing over both the joint probability distribution and over the positions of constellation symbols. The improvement in achievable rates for each scheme of increasing complexity is evaluated in terms of SNR savings for a given target achievable rate or/and percentage of gain in achievable rates for one user with reference to a classical scenario.
1403.2708
Beyond network structure: How heterogenous susceptibility modulates the spread of epidemics
physics.soc-ph cs.SI q-bio.PE
The compartmental models used to study epidemic spreading often assume the same susceptibility for all individuals, and are therefore, agnostic about the effects that differences in susceptibility can have on epidemic spreading. Here we show that--for the SIS model--differential susceptibility can make networks more vulnerable to the spread of diseases when the correlation between a node's degree and susceptibility are positive, and less vulnerable when this correlation is negative. Moreover, we show that networks become more likely to contain a pocket of infection when individuals are more likely to connect with others that have similar susceptibility (the network is segregated). These results show that the failure to include differential susceptibility to epidemic models can lead to a systematic over/under estimation of fundamental epidemic parameters when the structure of the networks is not independent from the susceptibility of the nodes or when there are correlations between the susceptibility of connected individuals.
1403.2732
The Bursty Dynamics of the Twitter Information Network
cs.SI physics.soc-ph stat.ML
In online social media systems users are not only posting, consuming, and resharing content, but also creating new and destroying existing connections in the underlying social network. While each of these two types of dynamics has individually been studied in the past, much less is known about the connection between the two. How does user information posting and seeking behavior interact with the evolution of the underlying social network structure? Here, we study ways in which network structure reacts to users posting and sharing content. We examine the complete dynamics of the Twitter information network, where users post and reshare information while they also create and destroy connections. We find that the dynamics of network structure can be characterized by steady rates of change, interrupted by sudden bursts. Information diffusion in the form of cascades of post re-sharing often creates such sudden bursts of new connections, which significantly change users' local network structure. These bursts transform users' networks of followers to become structurally more cohesive as well as more homogenous in terms of follower interests. We also explore the effect of the information content on the dynamics of the network and find evidence that the appearance of new topics and real-world events can lead to significant changes in edge creations and deletions. Lastly, we develop a model that quantifies the dynamics of the network and the occurrence of these bursts as a function of the information spreading through the network. The model can successfully predict which information diffusion events will lead to bursts in network dynamics.
1403.2739
Sufficient statistics for linear control strategies in decentralized systems with partial history sharing
math.OC cs.SY
In decentralized control systems with linear dynamics, quadratic cost, and Gaussian disturbance (also called decentralized LQG systems) linear control strategies are not always optimal. Nonetheless, linear control strategies are appealing due to analytic and implementation simplicity. In this paper, we investigate decentralized LQG systems with partial history sharing information structure and identify finite dimensional sufficient statistics for such systems. Unlike prior work on decentralized LQG systems, we do not assume partially nestedness or quadratic invariance. Our approach is based on the common information approach of Nayyar \emph{et al}, 2013 and exploits the linearity of the system dynamics and control strategies. To illustrate our methodology, we identify sufficient statistics for linear strategies in decentralized systems where controllers communicate over a strongly connected graph with finite delays, and for decentralized systems consisting of coupled subsystems with control sharing or one-sided one step delay sharing information structures.
1403.2740
A consistent model for cardiac deformation estimation under abnormal ventricular muscle conditions
cs.CE cs.NA
Deformation modeling of cardiac muscle is an important issue in the field of cardiac analysis. For this reason, many approaches have been developed to best estimate the cardiac muscle deformation, and to obtain a practical model to use in diagnostic procedures. But there are some conditions, like in case of myocardial infarction, in which the regular modeling approaches are not useful. In this section, using a point-wise approach in deformation estimation, we try to estimate the deformation under some abnormal conditions of cardiac muscle. First, the endocardial and epicardial contour points are ordered with respect to the center of gravity of endocardial contour and boundary point displacement vectors are extracted. Then to solve the governing equation of deformation, which is an elliptic equation, we apply boundary conditions in accordance with the computed displacement vectors and then the Finite Element method (FEM) will be used to solve the governing equation. Using obtained displacement field through the cardiac muscle, strain map is extracted to show the mechanical behavior of cardiac muscle. To validate the proposed algorithm in case of infracted muscle, a non-homogeneous ring is modeled using ANSYS under a uniform time varying internal pressure, which is the case in real cardiac muscle deformation and then the proposed algorithm implemented in MATLAB and the results for such problem are extracted.
1403.2763
Aggregate Estimation Over Dynamic Hidden Web Databases
cs.DB
Many databases on the web are "hidden" behind (i.e., accessible only through) their restrictive, form-like, search interfaces. Recent studies have shown that it is possible to estimate aggregate query answers over such hidden web databases by issuing a small number of carefully designed search queries through the restrictive web interface. A problem with these existing work, however, is that they all assume the underlying database to be static, while most real-world web databases (e.g., Amazon, eBay) are frequently updated. In this paper, we study the novel problem of estimating/tracking aggregates over dynamic hidden web databases while adhering to the stringent query-cost limitation they enforce (e.g., at most 1,000 search queries per day). Theoretical analysis and extensive real-world experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms and their superiority over baseline solutions (e.g., the repeated execution of algorithms designed for static web databases).
1403.2779
Erasure codes with simplex locality
cs.IT math.IT
We focus on erasure codes for distributed storage. The distributed storage setting imposes locality requirements because of easy repair demands on the decoder. We first establish the characterization of various locality properties in terms of the generator matrix of the code. These lead to bounds on locality and notions of optimality. We then examine the locality properties of a family of non-binary codes with simplex structure. We investigate their optimality and design several easy repair decoding methods. In particular, we show that any correctable erasure pattern can be solved by easy repair.
1403.2787
Principles of scientific research team formation and evolution
physics.soc-ph astro-ph.IM cs.DL cs.SI
Research teams are the fundamental social unit of science, and yet there is currently no model that describes their basic property: size. In most fields teams have grown significantly in recent decades. We show that this is partly due to the change in the character of team-size distribution. We explain these changes with a comprehensive yet straightforward model of how teams of different sizes emerge and grow. This model accurately reproduces the evolution of empirical team-size distribution over the period of 50 years. The modeling reveals that there are two modes of knowledge production. The first and more fundamental mode employs relatively small, core teams. Core teams form by a Poisson process and produce a Poisson distribution of team sizes in which larger teams are exceedingly rare. The second mode employs extended teams, which started as core teams, but subsequently accumulated new members proportional to the past productivity of their members. Given time, this mode gives rise to a power-law tail of large teams (10-1000 members), which features in many fields today. Based on this model we construct an analytical functional form that allows the contribution of different modes of authorship to be determined directly from the data and is applicable to any field. The model also offers a solid foundation for studying other social aspects of science, such as productivity and collaboration.
1403.2802
Learning Deep Face Representation
cs.CV cs.LG
Face representation is a crucial step of face recognition systems. An optimal face representation should be discriminative, robust, compact, and very easy-to-implement. While numerous hand-crafted and learning-based representations have been proposed, considerable room for improvement is still present. In this paper, we present a very easy-to-implement deep learning framework for face representation. Our method bases on a new structure of deep network (called Pyramid CNN). The proposed Pyramid CNN adopts a greedy-filter-and-down-sample operation, which enables the training procedure to be very fast and computation-efficient. In addition, the structure of Pyramid CNN can naturally incorporate feature sharing across multi-scale face representations, increasing the discriminative ability of resulting representation. Our basic network is capable of achieving high recognition accuracy ($85.8\%$ on LFW benchmark) with only 8 dimension representation. When extended to feature-sharing Pyramid CNN, our system achieves the state-of-the-art performance ($97.3\%$) on LFW benchmark. We also introduce a new benchmark of realistic face images on social network and validate our proposed representation has a good ability of generalization.
1403.2821
Towards an Agent-Oriented Modeling and Evaluation Approach For Vehicular Systems Security
cs.SE cs.MA
Agent technology is a software paradigm that permits to implement large and complex distributed applications. In order to assist the development of multi-agent systems, agent-oriented methodologies (AOM) have been created in the last years to support modeling more and more complex applications in many different domains. By defining in a non-ambiguous way concepts used in a specific domain, Meta modeling may represent a step towards such interoperability. In the Transport domain, this paper propose an agent-oriented meta-model that provides rigorous concepts for conducting transportation system problem modeling. The aim is to allow analysts to produce a transportation system model that precisely captures the knowledge of an organization so that an agent-oriented requirements specification of the system-to-be and its operational corporate environment can be derived from it. To this end, we extend and adapt an existing meta-model, Extended Gaia, to build a meta-model and an adequate model for transportation problems. Our new agent-oriented meta-model aims to allow the analyst to model and specify any transportation system as a multi-agent system. Based on the proposed meta-model, we proposes an approach for modeling and evaluating the Transportation System based on Stochastic Activity Network (SAN) components. The proposed process is based on seven steps from Recognition phase to Quantitative Analysis phase. These analyzes are based on the Dependability models which are built using the formalism Stochastic Activity Network. A real case study of Urban Public Transportation System has been conducted to show the benefits of the approach.
1403.2835
Compressive Signal Processing with Circulant Sensing Matrices
cs.IT math.IT
Compressive sensing achieves effective dimensionality reduction of signals, under a sparsity constraint, by means of a small number of random measurements acquired through a sensing matrix. In a signal processing system, the problem arises of processing the random projections directly, without first reconstructing the signal. In this paper, we show that circulant sensing matrices allow to perform a variety of classical signal processing tasks such as filtering, interpolation, registration, transforms, and so forth, directly in the compressed domain and in an exact fashion, \emph{i.e.}, without relying on estimators as proposed in the existing literature. The advantage of the techniques presented in this paper is to enable direct measurement-to-measurement transformations, without the need of costly recovery procedures.
1403.2837
HPS: a hierarchical Persian stemming method
cs.CL
In this paper, a novel hierarchical Persian stemming approach based on the Part-Of-Speech of the word in a sentence is presented. The implemented stemmer includes hash tables and several deterministic finite automata in its different levels of hierarchy for removing the prefixes and suffixes of the words. We had two intentions in using hash tables in our method. The first one is that the DFA don't support some special words, so hash table can partly solve the addressed problem. the second goal is to speed up the implemented stemmer with omitting the time that deterministic finite automata need. Because of the hierarchical organization, this method is fast and flexible enough. Our experiments on test sets from Hamshahri collection and security news (istna.ir) show that our method has the average accuracy of 95.37% which is even improved in using the method on a test set with common topics.
1403.2842
Application of Particle Swarm Optimization to Microwave Tapered Microstrip Lines
cs.NE
Application of metaheuristic algorithms has been of continued interest in the field of electrical engineering because of their powerful features. In this work special design is done for a tapered transmission line used for matching an arbitrary real load to a 50{\Omega} line. The problem at hand is to match this arbitrary load to 50 {\Omega} line using three section tapered transmission line with impedances in decreasing order from the load. So the problem becomes optimizing an equation with three unknowns with various conditions. The optimized values are obtained using Particle Swarm Optimization. It can easily be shown that PSO is very strong in solving this kind of multiobjective optimization problems.
1403.2848
Delineation of Techniques to implement on the enhanced proposed model using data mining for protein sequence classification
cs.DB cs.CE
In post genomic era with the advent of new technologies a huge amount of complex molecular data are generated with high throughput. The management of this biological data is definitely a challenging task due to complexity and heterogeneity of data for discovering new knowledge. Issues like managing noisy and incomplete data are needed to be dealt with. Use of data mining in biological domain has made its inventory success. Discovering new knowledge from the biological data is a major challenge in data mining technique. The novelty of the proposed model is its combined use of intelligent techniques to classify the protein sequence faster and efficiently. Use of FFT, fuzzy classifier, String weighted algorithm, gram encoding method, neural network model and rough set classifier in a single model and in an appropriate place can enhance the quality of the classification system.Thus the primary challenge is to identify and classify the large protein sequences in a very fast and easy but intellectual way to decrease the time complexity and space complexity.
1403.2850
Fat-tailed fluctuations in the size of organizations: the role of social influence
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Organizational growth processes have consistently been shown to exhibit a fatter-than-Gaussian growth-rate distribution in a variety of settings. Long periods of relatively small changes are interrupted by sudden changes in all size scales. This kind of extreme events can have important consequences for the development of biological and socio-economic systems. Existing models do not derive this aggregated pattern from agent actions at the micro level. We develop an agent-based simulation model on a social network. We take our departure in a model by a Schwarzkopf et al. on a scale-free network. We reproduce the fat-tailed pattern out of internal dynamics alone, and also find that it is robust with respect to network topology. Thus, the social network and the local interactions are a prerequisite for generating the pattern, but not the network topology itself. We further extend the model with a parameter $\delta$ that weights the relative fraction of an individual's neighbours belonging to a given organization, representing a contextual aspect of social influence. In the lower limit of this parameter, the fraction is irrelevant and choice of organization is random. In the upper limit of the parameter, the largest fraction quickly dominates, leading to a winner-takes-all situation. We recover the real pattern as an intermediate case between these two extremes.
1403.2871
Shape-Based Plagiarism Detection for Flowchart Figures in Texts
cs.CV cs.IR
Plagiarism detection is well known phenomenon in the academic arena. Copying other people is considered as serious offence that needs to be checked. There are many plagiarism detection systems such as turn-it-in that has been developed to provide this checks. Most, if not all, discard the figures and charts before checking for plagiarism. Discarding the figures and charts results in look holes that people can take advantage. That means people can plagiarized figures and charts easily without the current plagiarism systems detecting it. There are very few papers which talks about flowcharts plagiarism detection. Therefore, there is a need to develop a system that will detect plagiarism in figures and charts. This paper presents a method for detecting flow chart figure plagiarism based on shape-based image processing and multimedia retrieval. The method managed to retrieve flowcharts with ranked similarity according to different matching sets.
1403.2877
A survey of dimensionality reduction techniques
stat.ML cs.LG q-bio.QM
Experimental life sciences like biology or chemistry have seen in the recent decades an explosion of the data available from experiments. Laboratory instruments become more and more complex and report hundreds or thousands measurements for a single experiment and therefore the statistical methods face challenging tasks when dealing with such high dimensional data. However, much of the data is highly redundant and can be efficiently brought down to a much smaller number of variables without a significant loss of information. The mathematical procedures making possible this reduction are called dimensionality reduction techniques; they have widely been developed by fields like Statistics or Machine Learning, and are currently a hot research topic. In this review we categorize the plethora of dimension reduction techniques available and give the mathematical insight behind them.
1403.2895
Indoor 3D Video Monitoring Using Multiple Kinect Depth-Cameras
cs.CV
This article describes the design and development of a system for remote indoor 3D monitoring using an undetermined number of Microsoft(R) Kinect sensors. In the proposed client-server system, the Kinect cameras can be connected to different computers, addressing this way the hardware limitation of one sensor per USB controller. The reason behind this limitation is the high bandwidth needed by the sensor, which becomes also an issue for the distributed system TCP/IP communications. Since traffic volume is too high, 3D data has to be compressed before it can be sent over the network. The solution consists in selfcoding the Kinect data into RGB images and then using a standard multimedia codec to compress color maps. Information from different sources is collected into a central client computer, where point clouds are transformed to reconstruct the scene in 3D. An algorithm is proposed to merge the skeletons detected locally by each Kinect conveniently, so that monitoring of people is robust to self and inter-user occlusions. Final skeletons are labeled and trajectories of every joint can be saved for event reconstruction or further analysis.
1403.2902
A Novel Antenna Selection Scheme for Spatially Correlated Massive MIMO Uplinks with Imperfect Channel Estimation
cs.IT math.IT
We propose a new antenna selection scheme for a massive MIMO system with a single user terminal and a base station with a large number of antennas. We consider a practical scenario where there is a realistic correlation among the antennas and imperfect channel estimation at the receiver side. The proposed scheme exploits the sparsity of the channel matrix for the effective selection of a limited number of antennas. To this end, we compute a sparse channel matrix by minimising the mean squared error. This optimisation problem is then solved by the well-known orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm. Widely used models for spatial correlation among the antennas and channel estimation errors are considered in this work. Simulation results demonstrate that when the impacts of spatial correlation and imperfect channel estimation introduced, the proposed scheme in the paper can significantly reduce complexity of the receiver, without degrading the system performance compared to the maximum ratio combining.
1403.2906
Uav Route Planning For Maximum Target Coverage
cs.RO cs.NE
Utilization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in military and civil operations is getting popular. One of the challenges in effectively tasking these expensive vehicles is planning the flight routes to monitor the targets. In this work, we aim to develop an algorithm which produces routing plans for a limited number of UAVs to cover maximum number of targets considering their flight range. The proposed solution for this practical optimization problem is designed by modifying the Max-Min Ant System (MMAS) algorithm. To evaluate the success of the proposed method, an alternative approach, based on the Nearest Neighbour (NN) heuristic, has been developed as well. The results showed the success of the proposed MMAS method by increasing the number of covered targets compared to the solution based on the NN heuristic.
1403.2912
Nonuniform Fuchsian codes for noisy channels
cs.IT math.IT
We develop a new transmission scheme for additive white Gaussian noisy (AWGN) channels based on Fuchsian groups from rational quaternion algebras. The structure of the proposed Fuchsian codes is nonlinear and nonuniform, hence conventional decoding methods based on linearity and symmetry do not apply. Previously, only brute force decoding methods with complexity that is linear in the code size exist for general nonuniform codes. However, the properly discontinuous character of the action of the Fuchsian groups on the complex upper half-plane translates into decoding complexity that is logarithmic in the code size via a recently introduced point reduction algorithm.
1403.2923
Adaptive Representations for Tracking Breaking News on Twitter
cs.IR cs.NE
Twitter is often the most up-to-date source for finding and tracking breaking news stories. Therefore, there is considerable interest in developing filters for tweet streams in order to track and summarize stories. This is a non-trivial text analytics task as tweets are short, and standard retrieval methods often fail as stories evolve over time. In this paper we examine the effectiveness of adaptive mechanisms for tracking and summarizing breaking news stories. We evaluate the effectiveness of these mechanisms on a number of recent news events for which manually curated timelines are available. Assessments based on ROUGE metrics indicate that an adaptive approaches are best suited for tracking evolving stories on Twitter.
1403.2933
Efficiently inferring community structure in bipartite networks
cs.SI physics.data-an physics.soc-ph q-bio.QM stat.ML
Bipartite networks are a common type of network data in which there are two types of vertices, and only vertices of different types can be connected. While bipartite networks exhibit community structure like their unipartite counterparts, existing approaches to bipartite community detection have drawbacks, including implicit parameter choices, loss of information through one-mode projections, and lack of interpretability. Here we solve the community detection problem for bipartite networks by formulating a bipartite stochastic block model, which explicitly includes vertex type information and may be trivially extended to $k$-partite networks. This bipartite stochastic block model yields a projection-free and statistically principled method for community detection that makes clear assumptions and parameter choices and yields interpretable results. We demonstrate this model's ability to efficiently and accurately find community structure in synthetic bipartite networks with known structure and in real-world bipartite networks with unknown structure, and we characterize its performance in practical contexts.
1403.2941
People Like Us: Mining Scholarly Data for Comparable Researchers
cs.DL cs.SI
We present the problem of finding comparable researchers for any given researcher. This problem has many motivations. Firstly, know thyself. The answers of where we stand among research community and who we are most alike may not be easily found by existing evaluations of ones' research mainly based on citation counts. Secondly, there are many situations where one needs to find comparable researchers e.g., for reviewing peers, constructing programming committees or compiling teams for grants. It is often done through an ad hoc and informal basis. Utilizing the large scale scholarly data accessible on the web, we address the problem of automatically finding comparable researchers. We propose a standard to quantify the quality of research output, via the quality of publishing venues. We represent a researcher as a sequence of her publication records, and develop a framework of comparison of researchers by sequence matching. Several variations of comparisons are considered including matching by quality of publication venue and research topics, and performing prefix matching. We evaluate our methods on a large corpus and demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods through examples. In the end, we identify several promising directions for further work.
1403.2950
Cancer Prognosis Prediction Using Balanced Stratified Sampling
cs.LG
High accuracy in cancer prediction is important to improve the quality of the treatment and to improve the rate of survivability of patients. As the data volume is increasing rapidly in the healthcare research, the analytical challenge exists in double. The use of effective sampling technique in classification algorithms always yields good prediction accuracy. The SEER public use cancer database provides various prominent class labels for prognosis prediction. The main objective of this paper is to find the effect of sampling techniques in classifying the prognosis variable and propose an ideal sampling method based on the outcome of the experimentation. In the first phase of this work the traditional random sampling and stratified sampling techniques have been used. At the next level the balanced stratified sampling with variations as per the choice of the prognosis class labels have been tested. Much of the initial time has been focused on performing the pre_processing of the SEER data set. The classification model for experimentation has been built using the breast cancer, respiratory cancer and mixed cancer data sets with three traditional classifiers namely Decision Tree, Naive Bayes and K-Nearest Neighbor. The three prognosis factors survival, stage and metastasis have been used as class labels for experimental comparisons. The results shows a steady increase in the prediction accuracy of balanced stratified model as the sample size increases, but the traditional approach fluctuates before the optimum results.
1403.2958
An Approach for Normalizing Fuzzy Relational Databases Based on Join Dependency
cs.DB
Fuzziness in databases is used to denote uncertain or incomplete data. Relational Databases stress on the nature of the data to be certain. This certainty based data is used as the basis of the normalization approach designed for traditional relational databases. But real world data may not always be certain, thereby making it necessary to design an approach for normalization that deals with fuzzy data. This paper focuses on the approach for designing the fifth normal form (5NF) based on join dependencies for fuzzy data. The basis of join dependency for fuzzy relational databases is derived from the basic relational database concepts. As join dependency implies an multivalued dependency by symmetry the proof of join dependency based normalization is stated from the perspective of multivalued dependency based normalization on fuzzy relational databases.
1403.2980
3D Well-composed Polyhedral Complexes
cs.CV
A binary three-dimensional (3D) image $I$ is well-composed if the boundary surface of its continuous analog is a 2D manifold. Since 3D images are not often well-composed, there are several voxel-based methods ("repairing" algorithms) for turning them into well-composed ones but these methods either do not guarantee the topological equivalence between the original image and its corresponding well-composed one or involve sub-sampling the whole image. In this paper, we present a method to locally "repair" the cubical complex $Q(I)$ (embedded in $\mathbb{R}^3$) associated to $I$ to obtain a polyhedral complex $P(I)$ homotopy equivalent to $Q(I)$ such that the boundary of every connected component of $P(I)$ is a 2D manifold. The reparation is performed via a new codification system for $P(I)$ under the form of a 3D grayscale image that allows an efficient access to cells and their faces.
1403.3005
NetworKit: A Tool Suite for Large-scale Complex Network Analysis
cs.SI cs.DC physics.soc-ph
We introduce NetworKit, an open-source software package for analyzing the structure of large complex networks. Appropriate algorithmic solutions are required to handle increasingly common large graph data sets containing up to billions of connections. We describe the methodology applied to develop scalable solutions to network analysis problems, including techniques like parallelization, heuristics for computationally expensive problems, efficient data structures, and modular software architecture. Our goal for the software is to package results of our algorithm engineering efforts and put them into the hands of domain experts. NetworKit is implemented as a hybrid combining the kernels written in C++ with a Python front end, enabling integration into the Python ecosystem of tested tools for data analysis and scientific computing. The package provides a wide range of functionality (including common and novel analytics algorithms and graph generators) and does so via a convenient interface. In an experimental comparison with related software, NetworKit shows the best performance on a range of typical analysis tasks.
1403.3011
The influence of persuasion in opinion formation and polarization
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
We present a model that explores the influence of persuasion in a population of agents with positive and negative opinion orientations. The opinion of each agent is represented by an integer number $k$ that expresses its level of agreement on a given issue, from totally against $k=-M$ to totally in favor $k=M$. Same-orientation agents persuade each other with probability $p$, becoming more extreme, while opposite-orientation agents become more moderate as they reach a compromise with probability $q$. The population initially evolves to (a) a polarized state for $r=p/q>1$, where opinions' distribution is peaked at the extreme values $k=\pm M$, or (b) a centralized state for $r<1$, with most opinions around $k=\pm 1$. When $r \gg 1$, polarization lasts for a time that diverges as $r^M \ln N$, where $N$ is the population's size. Finally, an extremist consensus ($k=M$ or $-M$) is reached in a time that scales as $r^{-1}$ for $r \ll 1$.
1403.3021
Image reconstruction from limited range projections using orthogonal moments
cs.CV math.NA
A set of orthonormal polynomials is proposed for image reconstruction from projection data. The relationship between the projection moments and image moments is discussed in detail, and some interesting properties are demonstrated. Simulation results are provided to validate the method and to compare its performance with previous works.
1403.3022
Efficient Legendre moment computation for grey level images
cs.CV math.NA
Legendre orthogonal moments have been widely used in the field of image analysis. Because their computation by a direct method is very time expensive, recent efforts have been devoted to the reduction of computational complexity. Nevertheless, the existing algorithms are mainly focused on binary images. We propose here a new fast method for computing the Legendre moments, which is not only suitable for binary images but also for grey levels. We first set up the recurrence formula of one-dimensional (1D) Legendre moments by using the recursive property of Legendre polynomials. As a result, the 1D Legendre moments of order p, Lp = Lp(0), can be expressed as a linear combination of Lp-1(1) and Lp-2(0). Based on this relationship, the 1D Legendre moments Lp(0) is thus obtained from the array of L1(a) and L0(a) where a is an integer number less than p. To further decrease the computation complexity, an algorithm, in which no multiplication is required, is used to compute these quantities. The method is then extended to the calculation of the two-dimensional Legendre moments Lpq. We show that the proposed method is more efficient than the direct method.
1403.3036
Capacity Bounds for a Class of Interference Relay Channels
cs.IT math.IT
The capacity of a class of Interference Relay Channels (IRC) -the Injective Semideterministic IRC where the relay can only observe one of the sources- is investigated. We first derive a novel outer bound and two inner bounds which are based on a careful use of each of the available cooperative strategies together with the adequate interference decoding technique. The outer bound extends Telatar and Tse's work while the inner bounds contain several known results in the literature as special cases. Our main result is the characterization of the capacity region of the Gaussian class of IRCs studied within a fixed number of bits per dimension -constant gap. The proof relies on the use of the different cooperative strategies in specific SNR regimes due to the complexity of the schemes. As a matter of fact, this issue reveals the complex nature of the Gaussian IRC where the combination of a single coding scheme for the Gaussian relay and interference channel may not lead to a good coding scheme for this problem, even when the focus is only on capacity to within a constant gap over all possible fading statistics.
1403.3057
Evaluation of Image Segmentation and Filtering With ANN in the Papaya Leaf
cs.NE cs.CV
Precision agriculture is area with lack of cheap technology. The refinement of the production system brings large advantages to the producer and the use of images makes the monitoring a more cheap methodology. Macronutrients monitoring can to determine the health and vulnerability of the plant in specific stages. In this paper is analyzed the method based on computational intelligence to work with image segmentation in the identification of symptoms of plant nutrient deficiency. Artificial neural networks are evaluated for image segmentation and filtering, several variations of parameters and insertion impulsive noise were evaluated too. Satisfactory results are achieved with artificial neural for segmentation same with high noise levels.
1403.3060
Non linear Prediction of Antitubercular Activity Of Oxazolines and Oxazoles derivatives Making Use of Compact TS-Fuzzy models Through Clustering with orthogonal least sqaure technique and Fuzzy identification system
cs.CE
The prediction of uncertain and predictive nonlinear systems is an important and challenging problem. Fuzzy logic models are often a good choice to describe such systems however in many cases these become complex soon. commonlly, too less effort is put into descriptor selection and in the creation of suitable local rules. Moreover, in common no model reduction is applied, while this may analyze the model by removing redundant data. This paper suggests a combined method that deal with these issues in order to create compact Takagi Sugeno (TS) models that can be effectively used to represent complex predictive systems. A new fuzzy clustering method is come up with for the identification of compact TS-fuzzy models. The best relevant consequent variables of the TS model are choosen by an orthogonal least squares technique based on the obtained clusters.For the selection of the relevant antecedent (scheduling) variables a new method has been developed based on Fisher's interclass separability basis. This complete approach is demonstrated by means of the Oxazolines and Oxazoles derivatives as antituberculosis agent for nonlinear regression benchmark. The results are compared with results obtained by neuro-fuzzy i.e. ANFIS algorithm and advanced fuzzyy clustering techniques i.e FMID toolbox .
1403.3061
A Comparative Study of Audio Compression Based on Compressed Sensing and Sparse Fast Fourier Transform (SFFT): Performance and Challenges
cs.IT math.IT
Audio compression has become one of the basic multimedia technologies. Choosing an efficient compression scheme that is capable of preserving the signal quality while providing a high compression ratio is desirable in the different standards worldwide. In this paper we study the application of two highly acclaimed sparse signal processing algorithms, namely, Compressed Sensing (CS) and Sparse Fart Fourier transform, to audio compression. In addition, we present a Sparse Fast Fourier transform (SFFT)-based framework to compress audio signal. This scheme embeds the K-largest frequencies indices as part of the transmitted signal and thus saves in the bandwidth required for transmission
1403.3077
Set-Membership Adaptive Constant Modulus Algorithm with a Generalized Sidelobe Canceler and Dynamic Bounds for Beamforming
cs.IT math.IT
In this work, we propose an adaptive set-membership constant modulus (SM-CM) algorithm with a generalized sidelobe canceler (GSC) structure for blind beamforming. We develop a stochastic gradient (SG) type algorithm based on the concept of SM filtering for adaptive implementation. The filter weights are updated only if the constraint cannot be satisfied. In addition, we also propose an extension of two schemes of time-varying bounds for beamforming with a GSC structure and incorporate parameter and interference dependence to characterize the environment which improves the tracking performance of the proposed algorithm in dynamic scenarios. A convergence analysis of the proposed adaptive SM filtering techniques is carried out. Simulation results show that the proposed adaptive SM-CM-GSC algorithm with dynamic bounds achieves superior performance to previously reported methods at a reduced update rate.
1403.3080
Statistical Decision Making for Optimal Budget Allocation in Crowd Labeling
cs.LG math.OC stat.ML
In crowd labeling, a large amount of unlabeled data instances are outsourced to a crowd of workers. Workers will be paid for each label they provide, but the labeling requester usually has only a limited amount of the budget. Since data instances have different levels of labeling difficulty and workers have different reliability, it is desirable to have an optimal policy to allocate the budget among all instance-worker pairs such that the overall labeling accuracy is maximized. We consider categorical labeling tasks and formulate the budget allocation problem as a Bayesian Markov decision process (MDP), which simultaneously conducts learning and decision making. Using the dynamic programming (DP) recurrence, one can obtain the optimal allocation policy. However, DP quickly becomes computationally intractable when the size of the problem increases. To solve this challenge, we propose a computationally efficient approximate policy, called optimistic knowledge gradient policy. Our MDP is a quite general framework, which applies to both pull crowdsourcing marketplaces with homogeneous workers and push marketplaces with heterogeneous workers. It can also incorporate the contextual information of instances when they are available. The experiments on both simulated and real data show that the proposed policy achieves a higher labeling accuracy than other existing policies at the same budget level.
1403.3083
A Novel Method to Extract Rocks from Mars Images
cs.CV
In this paper, a novel method is proposed to extract rocks from Martian surface images by using 8 data field. It models the interaction between two pixels of an image in the context of imagery 9 characteristics. First, foreground rocks are differed from background information by binarizing 10 image on roughly partitioned images. Second, foreground rocks are grouped into clusters by 11 locating the centers and edges of clusters in data field via hierarchical grids. Third, the target 12 rocks are discovered for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) to keep healthy paths. The 13 experiment with images taken by MER shows the proposed method is practical and potential.
1403.3084
Emerging archetypes in massive artificial societies for literary purposes using genetic algorithms
cs.AI
The creation of fictional stories is a very complex task that usually implies a creative process where the author has to combine characters, conflicts and plots to create an engaging narrative. This work presents a simulated environment with hundreds of characters that allows the study of coherent and interesting literary archetypes (or behaviours), plots and sub-plots. We will use this environment to perform a study about the number of profiles (parameters that define the personality of a character) needed to create two emergent scenes of archetypes: "natality control" and "revenge". A Genetic Algorithm (GA) will be used to find the fittest number of profiles and parameter configuration that enables the existence of the desired archetypes (played by the characters without their explicit knowledge). The results show that parametrizing this complex system is possible and that these kind of archetypes can emerge in the given environment.
1403.3100
Engaging with Massive Online Courses
cs.SI physics.soc-ph stat.ML
The Web has enabled one of the most visible recent developments in education---the deployment of massive open online courses. With their global reach and often staggering enrollments, MOOCs have the potential to become a major new mechanism for learning. Despite this early promise, however, MOOCs are still relatively unexplored and poorly understood. In a MOOC, each student's complete interaction with the course materials takes place on the Web, thus providing a record of learner activity of unprecedented scale and resolution. In this work, we use such trace data to develop a conceptual framework for understanding how users currently engage with MOOCs. We develop a taxonomy of individual behavior, examine the different behavioral patterns of high- and low-achieving students, and investigate how forum participation relates to other parts of the course. We also report on a large-scale deployment of badges as incentives for engagement in a MOOC, including randomized experiments in which the presentation of badges was varied across sub-populations. We find that making badges more salient produced increases in forum engagement.
1403.3109
Sparse Recovery with Linear and Nonlinear Observations: Dependent and Noisy Data
cs.IT cs.LG math.IT math.ST stat.TH
We formulate sparse support recovery as a salient set identification problem and use information-theoretic analyses to characterize the recovery performance and sample complexity. We consider a very general model where we are not restricted to linear models or specific distributions. We state non-asymptotic bounds on recovery probability and a tight mutual information formula for sample complexity. We evaluate our bounds for applications such as sparse linear regression and explicitly characterize effects of correlation or noisy features on recovery performance. We show improvements upon previous work and identify gaps between the performance of recovery algorithms and fundamental information.
1403.3115
Memory Capacity of Neural Networks using a Circulant Weight Matrix
cs.NE
This paper presents results on the memory capacity of a generalized feedback neural network using a circulant matrix. Children are capable of learning soon after birth which indicates that the neural networks of the brain have prior learnt capacity that is a consequence of the regular structures in the brain's organization. Motivated by this idea, we consider the capacity of circulant matrices as weight matrices in a feedback network.
1403.3117
Distributed Estimation using Bayesian Consensus Filtering
math.OC cs.IT math.IT math.PR
We present the Bayesian consensus filter (BCF) for tracking a moving target using a networked group of sensing agents and achieving consensus on the best estimate of the probability distributions of the target's states. Our BCF framework can incorporate nonlinear target dynamic models, heterogeneous nonlinear measurement models, non-Gaussian uncertainties, and higher-order moments of the locally estimated posterior probability distribution of the target's states obtained using Bayesian filters. If the agents combine their estimated posterior probability distributions using a logarithmic opinion pool, then the sum of Kullback--Leibler divergences between the consensual probability distribution and the local posterior probability distributions is minimized. Rigorous stability and convergence results for the proposed BCF algorithm with single or multiple consensus loops are presented. Communication of probability distributions and computational methods for implementing the BCF algorithm are discussed along with a numerical example.
1403.3118
Parallel WiSARD object tracker: a ram-based tracking system
cs.CV
This paper proposes the Parallel WiSARD Object Tracker (PWOT), a new object tracker based on the WiSARD weightless neural network that is robust against quantization errors. Object tracking in video is an important and challenging task in many applications. Difficulties can arise due to weather conditions, target trajectory and appearance, occlusions, lighting conditions and noise. Tracking is a high-level application and requires the object location frame by frame in real time. This paper proposes a fast hybrid image segmentation (threshold and edge detection) in YcbCr color model and a parallel RAM based discriminator that improves efficiency when quantization errors occur. The original WiSARD training algorithm was changed to allow the tracking.
1403.3126
Signaling in sensor networks for sequential detection
cs.SY
Sequential detection problems in sensor networks are considered. The true state of nature/true hypothesis is modeled as a binary random variable $H$ with known prior distribution. There are $N$ sensors making noisy observations about the hypothesis; $\mathcal{N} =\{1,2,\ldots,N\}$ denotes the set of sensors. Sensor $i$ can receive messages from a subset $\mathcal{P}^i \subset \mathcal{N}$ of sensors and send a message to a subset $\mathcal{C}^i \subset \mathcal{N}$. Each sensor is faced with a stopping problem. At each time $t$, based on the observations it has taken so far and the messages it may have received, sensor $i$ can decide to stop and communicate a binary decision to the sensors in $\mathcal{C}^i$, or it can continue taking observations and receiving messages. After sensor $i$'s binary decision has been sent, it becomes inactive. Sensors incur operational costs (cost of taking observations, communication costs etc.) while they are active. In addition, the system incurs a terminal cost that depends on the true hypothesis $H$, the sensors' binary decisions and their stopping times. The objective is to determine decision strategies for all sensors to minimize the total expected cost.
1403.3142
ARSENAL: Automatic Requirements Specification Extraction from Natural Language
cs.CL cs.SE
Requirements are informal and semi-formal descriptions of the expected behavior of a complex system from the viewpoints of its stakeholders (customers, users, operators, designers, and engineers). However, for the purpose of design, testing, and verification for critical systems, we can transform requirements into formal models that can be analyzed automatically. ARSENAL is a framework and methodology for systematically transforming natural language (NL) requirements into analyzable formal models and logic specifications. These models can be analyzed for consistency and implementability. The ARSENAL methodology is specialized to individual domains, but the approach is general enough to be adapted to new domains.
1403.3148
Heat kernel based community detection
cs.SI cs.DS physics.soc-ph
The heat kernel is a particular type of graph diffusion that, like the much-used personalized PageRank diffusion, is useful in identifying a community nearby a starting seed node. We present the first deterministic, local algorithm to compute this diffusion and use that algorithm to study the communities that it produces. Our algorithm is formally a relaxation method for solving a linear system to estimate the matrix exponential in a degree-weighted norm. We prove that this algorithm stays localized in a large graph and has a worst-case constant runtime that depends only on the parameters of the diffusion, not the size of the graph. Our experiments on real-world networks indicate that the communities produced by this method have better conductance than those produced by PageRank, although they take slightly longer to compute on large graphs. On a real-world community identification task, the heat kernel communities perform better than those from the PageRank diffusion.
1403.3155
Spectral Unmixing via Data-guided Sparsity
cs.CV
Hyperspectral unmixing, the process of estimating a common set of spectral bases and their corresponding composite percentages at each pixel, is an important task for hyperspectral analysis, visualization and understanding. From an unsupervised learning perspective, this problem is very challenging---both the spectral bases and their composite percentages are unknown, making the solution space too large. To reduce the solution space, many approaches have been proposed by exploiting various priors. In practice, these priors would easily lead to some unsuitable solution. This is because they are achieved by applying an identical strength of constraints to all the factors, which does not hold in practice. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel sparsity based method by learning a data-guided map to describe the individual mixed level of each pixel. Through this data-guided map, the $\ell_{p}(0<p<1)$ constraint is applied in an adaptive manner. Such implementation not only meets the practical situation, but also guides the spectral bases toward the pixels under highly sparse constraint. What's more, an elegant optimization scheme as well as its convergence proof have been provided in this paper. Extensive experiments on several datasets also demonstrate that the data-guided map is feasible, and high quality unmixing results could be obtained by our method.
1403.3159
Iterative Detection for Compressive Sensing:Turbo CS
cs.IT math.IT
We consider compressive sensing as a source coding method for signal transmission. We concatenate a convolutional coding system with 1-bit compressive sensing to obtain a serial concatenated system model for sparse signal transmission over an AWGN channel. The proposed source/channel decoder, which we refer to as turbo CS, is robust against channel noise and its signal reconstruction performance at the receiver increases considerably through iterations. We show 12 dB improvement with six turbo CS iterations compared to a non-iterative concatenated source/channel decoder.
1403.3185
Sentiment Analysis by Using Fuzzy Logic
cs.IR cs.CL
How could a product or service is reasonably evaluated by anyone in the shortest time? A million dollar question but it is having a simple answer: Sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis is consumers review on products and services which helps both the producers and consumers (stakeholders) to take effective and efficient decision within a shortest period of time. Producers can have better knowledge of their products and services through the sentiment analysis (ex. positive and negative comments or consumers likes and dislikes) which will help them to know their products status (ex. product limitations or market status). Consumers can have better knowledge of their interested products and services through the sentiment analysis (ex. positive and negative comments or consumers likes and dislikes) which will help them to know their deserving products status (ex. product limitations or market status). For more specification of the sentiment values, fuzzy logic could be introduced. Therefore, sentiment analysis with the help of fuzzy logic (deals with reasoning and gives closer views to the exact sentiment values) will help the producers or consumers or any interested person for taking the effective decision according to their product or service interest.
1403.3196
Secure Beamforming For MIMO Broadcasting With Wireless Information And Power Transfer
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers a basic MIMO information-energy (I-E) broadcast system, where a multi-antenna transmitter transmits information and energy simultaneously to a multi-antenna information receiver and a dual-functional multi-antenna energy receiver which is also capable of decoding information. Due to the open nature of wireless medium and the dual purpose of information and energy transmission, secure information transmission while ensuring efficient energy harvesting is a critical issue for such a broadcast system. Assuming that physical layer security techniques are applied to the system to ensure secure transmission from the transmitter to the information receiver, we study beamforming design to maximize the achievable secrecy rate subject to a total power constraint and an energy harvesting constraint. First, based on semidefinite relaxation, we propose global optimal solutions to the secrecy rate maximization (SRM) problem in the single-stream case and a specific full-stream case where the difference of Gram matrices of the channel matrices is positive semidefinite. Then, we propose a simple iterative algorithm named inexact block coordinate descent (IBCD) algorithm to tackle the SRM problem of general case with arbitrary number of streams. We proves that the IBCD algorithm can monotonically converge to a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) solution to the SRM problem. Furthermore, we extend the IBCD algorithm to the joint beamforming and artificial noise design problem. Finally, simulations are performed to validate the performance of the proposed beamforming algorithms.
1403.3228
Fractal multi-level organisation of human groups in a virtual world
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Humans are fundamentally social. They have progressively dominated their environment by the strength and creativity provided by and within their grouping. It is well recognised that human groups are highly structured, and the anthropological literature has loosely classified them according to their size and function, such as support cliques, sympathy groups, bands, cognitive groups, tribes, linguistic groups and so on. Recently, combining data on human grouping patterns in a comprehensive and systematic study, Zhou et al. identified a quantitative discrete hierarchy of group sizes with a preferred scaling ratio close to $3$, which was later confirmed for hunter-gatherer groups and for other mammalian societies. Using high precision large scale Internet-based social network data, we extend these early findings on a very large data set. We analyse the organisational structure of a complete, multi-relational, large social multiplex network of a human society consisting of about 400,000 odd players of a massive multiplayer online game for which we know all about the group memberships of every player. Remarkably, the online players exhibit the same type of structured hierarchical layers as the societies studied by anthropologists, where each of these layers is three to four times the size of the lower layer. Our findings suggest that the hierarchical organisation of human society is deeply nested in human psychology.
1403.3251
Numerical Investigations on Hatching Process Strategies for Powder Bed Based Additive Manufacturing using an Electron Beam
cs.CE
This paper investigates in hatching process strategies for additive manufacturing using an electron beam by numerical simulations. The underlying physical model and the corresponding three dimensional thermal free surface lattice Boltzmann method of the simulation software are briefly presented. The simulation software has already been validated on the basis of experiments up to 1.2 kW beam power by hatching a cuboid with a basic process strategy, whereby the results are classified into `porous', `good' and `uneven', depending on their relative density and top surface smoothness. In this paper we study the limitations of this basic process strategy in terms of higher beam powers and scan velocities to exploit the future potential of high power electron beam guns up to 10 kW. Subsequently, we introduce modified process strategies, which circumvent these restrictions, to build the part as fast as possible under the restriction of a fully dense part with a smooth top surface. These process strategies are suitable to reduce the build time and costs, maximize the beam power usage and therefore use the potential of high power electron beam guns.
1403.3286
FAUST$^2$: Formal Abstractions of Uncountable-STate STochastic processes
cs.SY
FAUST$^2$ is a software tool that generates formal abstractions of (possibly non-deterministic) discrete-time Markov processes (dtMP) defined over uncountable (continuous) state spaces. A dtMP model is specified in MATLAB and abstracted as a finite-state Markov chain or Markov decision processes. The abstraction procedure runs in MATLAB and employs parallel computations and fast manipulations based on vector calculus. The abstract model is formally put in relationship with the concrete dtMP via a user-defined maximum threshold on the approximation error introduced by the abstraction procedure. FAUST$^2$ allows exporting the abstract model to well-known probabilistic model checkers, such as PRISM or MRMC. Alternatively, it can handle internally the computation of PCTL properties (e.g. safety or reach-avoid) over the abstract model, and refine the outcomes over the concrete dtMP via a quantified error that depends on the abstraction procedure and the given formula. The toolbox is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/faust2/
1403.3297
Channel Capacity Analysis of MIMO System in Correlated Nakagami-m Fading Environment
cs.IT math.IT
We consider Vertical Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time (V-BLAST) systems in correlated multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) Nakagami-m fading channels with equal power allocated to each transmit antenna and also we consider that the channel state information (CSI) is available only at the receiver. Now for practical application, study of the VBLAST MIMO system in correlated environment is necessary. In this paper, we present a detailed study of the channel capacity in correlated and uncorrelated channel condition and also validated the result with appropriate mathematical relation.
1403.3298
The role of network embeddedness on the selection of collaboration partners: An agent-based model with empirical validation
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
We use a data-driven agent-based model to study the core-periphery structure of two collaboration networks, R&D alliances between firms and co-authorship relations between scientists. To characterize the network embeddedness of agents, we introduce a coreness value, obtained from a weighted $k$-core decomposition. We study the change of these coreness values when collaborations with newcomers or established agents are formed. Our agent-based model is able to reproduce the empirical coreness differences of collaboration partners and to explain why we observe a change in partner selection for agents with high network embeddedness.
1403.3300
Limiting Behavior of LQ Deterministic Infinite Horizon Nash Games with Symmetric Players as the Number of Players goes to Infinity
cs.GT cs.SY math.OC
A Linear Quadratic Deterministic Continuous Time Game with many symmetric players is considered and the Linear Feedback Nash strategies are studied as the number of players goes to infinity. We show that under some conditions the limit of the solutions exists and can be used to approximate the case with a finite but large number of players. It is shown that in the limit each player acts as if he were faced with one player only, who represents the average behavior of the others.
1403.3304
A Spatial Data Model for Moving Object Databases
cs.DB
Moving Object Databases will have significant role in Geospatial Information Systems as they allow users to model continuous movements of entities in the databases and perform spatio-temporal analysis. For representing and querying moving objects, and algebra with a comprehensive framework of User Defined Types together with a set of functions on those types is needed. Moreover, concerning real world applications, moving objects move along constrained environments like transportation networks so that an extra algebra for modeling networks is demanded, too. These algebras can be inserted in any data model if their designs are based on available standards such as Open Geospatial Consortium that provides a common model for existing DBMS's. In this paper, we focus on extending a spatial data model for constrained moving objects. Static and moving geometries in our model are based on Open Geospatial Consortium standards. We also extend Structured Query Language for retrieving, querying, and manipulating spatio-temporal data related to moving objects as a simple and expressive query language. Finally as a proof of concept, we implement a generator to generate data for moving objects constrained by a transportation network. Such a generator primarily aims at traffic planning applications.
1403.3305
Noise Facilitation in Associative Memories of Exponential Capacity
cs.NE
Recent advances in associative memory design through structured pattern sets and graph-based inference algorithms have allowed reliable learning and recall of an exponential number of patterns. Although these designs correct external errors in recall, they assume neurons that compute noiselessly, in contrast to the highly variable neurons in brain regions thought to operate associatively such as hippocampus and olfactory cortex. Here we consider associative memories with noisy internal computations and analytically characterize performance. As long as the internal noise level is below a specified threshold, the error probability in the recall phase can be made exceedingly small. More surprisingly, we show that internal noise actually improves the performance of the recall phase while the pattern retrieval capacity remains intact, i.e., the number of stored patterns does not reduce with noise (up to a threshold). Computational experiments lend additional support to our theoretical analysis. This work suggests a functional benefit to noisy neurons in biological neuronal networks.
1403.3312
Optimal number of users in Co-operative spectrum sensing in WRAN using Cyclo-Stationary Detector
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT
Cognitive radio allows unlicensed users to access licensed frequency bands through dynamic spectrum access so as to reduce spectrum scarcity. This requires intelligent spectrum sensing techniques. This paper investigates the use of cyclo-stationary detector and performance evaluation for Digital Video Broadcast-Terrestrial (DVB-T) signals. Generally, DVB-T is specified in IEEE 802.22 standard in VHF and UHF TV broadcasting spectrum. Simulations results show that implementing co-operative spectrum sensing help in better utilization of resources. The paper further proposes to find number of optimal users in a scenario to optimize the detection probability and makes use of the particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique to find an optimum value of threshold.
1403.3320
Numerical Approaches for Linear Left-invariant Diffusions on SE(2), their Comparison to Exact Solutions, and their Applications in Retinal Imaging
math.NA cs.CV
Left-invariant PDE-evolutions on the roto-translation group $SE(2)$ (and their resolvent equations) have been widely studied in the fields of cortical modeling and image analysis. They include hypo-elliptic diffusion (for contour enhancement) proposed by Citti & Sarti, and Petitot, and they include the direction process (for contour completion) proposed by Mumford. This paper presents a thorough study and comparison of the many numerical approaches, which, remarkably, is missing in the literature. Existing numerical approaches can be classified into 3 categories: Finite difference methods, Fourier based methods (equivalent to $SE(2)$-Fourier methods), and stochastic methods (Monte Carlo simulations). There are also 3 types of exact solutions to the PDE-evolutions that were derived explicitly (in the spatial Fourier domain) in previous works by Duits and van Almsick in 2005. Here we provide an overview of these 3 types of exact solutions and explain how they relate to each of the 3 numerical approaches. We compute relative errors of all numerical approaches to the exact solutions, and the Fourier based methods show us the best performance with smallest relative errors. We also provide an improvement of Mathematica algorithms for evaluating Mathieu-functions, crucial in implementations of the exact solutions. Furthermore, we include an asymptotical analysis of the singularities within the kernels and we propose a probabilistic extension of underlying stochastic processes that overcomes the singular behavior in the origin of time-integrated kernels. Finally, we show retinal imaging applications of combining left-invariant PDE-evolutions with invertible orientation scores.
1403.3339
Capacity of a Nonlinear Optical Channel with Finite Memory
cs.IT math.IT physics.optics
The channel capacity of a nonlinear, dispersive fiber-optic link is revisited. To this end, the popular Gaussian noise (GN) model is extended with a parameter to account for the finite memory of realistic fiber channels. This finite-memory model is harder to analyze mathematically but, in contrast to previous models, it is valid also for nonstationary or heavy-tailed input signals. For uncoded transmission and standard modulation formats, the new model gives the same results as the regular GN model when the memory of the channel is about 10 symbols or more. These results confirm previous results that the GN model is accurate for uncoded transmission. However, when coding is considered, the results obtained using the finite-memory model are very different from those obtained by previous models, even when the channel memory is large. In particular, the peaky behavior of the channel capacity, which has been reported for numerous nonlinear channel models, appears to be an artifact of applying models derived for independent input in a coded (i.e., dependent) scenario.
1403.3342
The Potential Benefits of Filtering Versus Hyper-Parameter Optimization
stat.ML cs.LG
The quality of an induced model by a learning algorithm is dependent on the quality of the training data and the hyper-parameters supplied to the learning algorithm. Prior work has shown that improving the quality of the training data (i.e., by removing low quality instances) or tuning the learning algorithm hyper-parameters can significantly improve the quality of an induced model. A comparison of the two methods is lacking though. In this paper, we estimate and compare the potential benefits of filtering and hyper-parameter optimization. Estimating the potential benefit gives an overly optimistic estimate but also empirically demonstrates an approximation of the maximum potential benefit of each method. We find that, while both significantly improve the induced model, improving the quality of the training set has a greater potential effect than hyper-parameter optimization.
1403.3344
Collective attention in the age of (mis)information
cs.SI cs.CY physics.soc-ph
In this work we study, on a sample of 2.3 million individuals, how Facebook users consumed different information at the edge of political discussion and news during the last Italian electoral competition. Pages are categorized, according to their topics and the communities of interests they pertain to, in a) alternative information sources (diffusing topics that are neglected by science and main stream media); b) online political activism; and c) main stream media. We show that attention patterns are similar despite the different qualitative nature of the information, meaning that unsubstantiated claims (mainly conspiracy theories) reverberate for as long as other information. Finally, we categorize users according to their interaction patterns among the different topics and measure how a sample of this social ecosystem (1279 users) responded to the injection of 2788 false information posts. Our analysis reveals that users which are prominently interacting with alternative information sources (i.e. more exposed to unsubstantiated claims) are more prone to interact with false claims.
1403.3351
Semantic Unification A sheaf theoretic approach to natural language
cs.CL
Language is contextual and sheaf theory provides a high level mathematical framework to model contextuality. We show how sheaf theory can model the contextual nature of natural language and how gluing can be used to provide a global semantics for a discourse by putting together the local logical semantics of each sentence within the discourse. We introduce a presheaf structure corresponding to a basic form of Discourse Representation Structures. Within this setting, we formulate a notion of semantic unification --- gluing meanings of parts of a discourse into a coherent whole --- as a form of sheaf-theoretic gluing. We illustrate this idea with a number of examples where it can used to represent resolutions of anaphoric references. We also discuss multivalued gluing, described using a distributions functor, which can be used to represent situations where multiple gluings are possible, and where we may need to rank them using quantitative measures. Dedicated to Jim Lambek on the occasion of his 90th birthday.
1403.3369
Controlling Recurrent Neural Networks by Conceptors
cs.NE
The human brain is a dynamical system whose extremely complex sensor-driven neural processes give rise to conceptual, logical cognition. Understanding the interplay between nonlinear neural dynamics and concept-level cognition remains a major scientific challenge. Here I propose a mechanism of neurodynamical organization, called conceptors, which unites nonlinear dynamics with basic principles of conceptual abstraction and logic. It becomes possible to learn, store, abstract, focus, morph, generalize, de-noise and recognize a large number of dynamical patterns within a single neural system; novel patterns can be added without interfering with previously acquired ones; neural noise is automatically filtered. Conceptors help explaining how conceptual-level information processing emerges naturally and robustly in neural systems, and remove a number of roadblocks in the theory and applications of recurrent neural networks.
1403.3371
Spectral Correlation Hub Screening of Multivariate Time Series
stat.OT cs.LG stat.AP
This chapter discusses correlation analysis of stationary multivariate Gaussian time series in the spectral or Fourier domain. The goal is to identify the hub time series, i.e., those that are highly correlated with a specified number of other time series. We show that Fourier components of the time series at different frequencies are asymptotically statistically independent. This property permits independent correlation analysis at each frequency, alleviating the computational and statistical challenges of high-dimensional time series. To detect correlation hubs at each frequency, an existing correlation screening method is extended to the complex numbers to accommodate complex-valued Fourier components. We characterize the number of hub discoveries at specified correlation and degree thresholds in the regime of increasing dimension and fixed sample size. The theory specifies appropriate thresholds to apply to sample correlation matrices to detect hubs and also allows statistical significance to be attributed to hub discoveries. Numerical results illustrate the accuracy of the theory and the usefulness of the proposed spectral framework.
1403.3376
Massive MIMO performance evaluation based on measured propagation data
cs.IT math.IT
Massive MIMO, also known as very-large MIMO or large-scale antenna systems, is a new technique that potentially can offer large network capacities in multi-user scenarios. With a massive MIMO system, we consider the case where a base station equipped with a large number of antenna elements simultaneously serves multiple single-antenna users in the same time-frequency resource. So far, investigations are mostly based on theoretical channels with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) complex Gaussian coefficients, i.e., i.i.d. Rayleigh channels. Here, we investigate how massive MIMO performs in channels measured in real propagation environments. Channel measurements were performed at 2.6 GHz using a virtual uniform linear array (ULA) which has a physically large aperture, and a practical uniform cylindrical array (UCA) which is more compact in size, both having 128 antenna ports. Based on measurement data, we illustrate channel behavior of massive MIMO in three representative propagation conditions, and evaluate the corresponding performance. The investigation shows that the measured channels, for both array types, allow us to achieve performance close to that in i.i.d. Rayleigh channels. It is concluded that in real propagation environments we have characteristics that can allow for efficient use of massive MIMO, i.e., the theoretical advantages of this new technology can also be harvested in real channels.
1403.3378
Box Drawings for Learning with Imbalanced Data
stat.ML cs.LG
The vast majority of real world classification problems are imbalanced, meaning there are far fewer data from the class of interest (the positive class) than from other classes. We propose two machine learning algorithms to handle highly imbalanced classification problems. The classifiers constructed by both methods are created as unions of parallel axis rectangles around the positive examples, and thus have the benefit of being interpretable. The first algorithm uses mixed integer programming to optimize a weighted balance between positive and negative class accuracies. Regularization is introduced to improve generalization performance. The second method uses an approximation in order to assist with scalability. Specifically, it follows a \textit{characterize then discriminate} approach, where the positive class is characterized first by boxes, and then each box boundary becomes a separate discriminative classifier. This method has the computational advantages that it can be easily parallelized, and considers only the relevant regions of feature space.
1403.3427
Explicit Matrices with the Restricted Isometry Property: Breaking the Square-Root Bottleneck
math.FA cs.IT math.CO math.IT
Matrices with the restricted isometry property (RIP) are of particular interest in compressed sensing. To date, the best known RIP matrices are constructed using random processes, while explicit constructions are notorious for performing at the "square-root bottleneck," i.e., they only accept sparsity levels on the order of the square root of the number of measurements. The only known explicit matrix which surpasses this bottleneck was constructed by Bourgain, Dilworth, Ford, Konyagin and Kutzarova. This chapter provides three contributions to further the groundbreaking work of Bourgain et al.: (i) we develop an intuition for their matrix construction and underlying proof techniques; (ii) we prove a generalized version of their main result; and (iii) we apply this more general result to maximize the extent to which their matrix construction surpasses the square-root bottleneck.
1403.3434
A New Event-Driven Cooperative Receding Horizon Controller for Multi-agent Systems in Uncertain Environments
cs.SY math.OC
In previous work, a Cooperative Receding Horizon (CRH) controller was developed for solving cooperative multi-agent problems in uncertain environments. In this paper, we overcome several limitations of this controller, including potential instabilities in the agent trajectories and poor performance due to inaccurate estimation of a reward-to-go function. We propose an event-driven CRH controller to solve the maximum reward collection problem (MRCP) where multiple agents cooperate to maximize the total reward collected from a set of stationary targets in a given mission space. Rewards are non-increasing functions of time and the environment is uncertain with new targets detected by agents at random time instants. The controller sequentially solves optimization problems over a planning horizon and executes the control for a shorter action horizon, where both are defined by certain events associated with new information becoming available. In contrast to the earlier CRH controller, we reduce the originally infinite-dimensional feasible control set to a finite set at each time step. We prove some properties of this new controller and include simulation results showing its improved performance compared to the original one.
1403.3438
Neighborhood Selection for Thresholding-based Subspace Clustering
stat.ML cs.IT math.IT
Subspace clustering refers to the problem of clustering high-dimensional data points into a union of low-dimensional linear subspaces, where the number of subspaces, their dimensions and orientations are all unknown. In this paper, we propose a variation of the recently introduced thresholding-based subspace clustering (TSC) algorithm, which applies spectral clustering to an adjacency matrix constructed from the nearest neighbors of each data point with respect to the spherical distance measure. The new element resides in an individual and data-driven choice of the number of nearest neighbors. Previous performance results for TSC, as well as for other subspace clustering algorithms based on spectral clustering, come in terms of an intermediate performance measure, which does not address the clustering error directly. Our main analytical contribution is a performance analysis of the modified TSC algorithm (as well as the original TSC algorithm) in terms of the clustering error directly.
1403.3448
Coloring Large Complex Networks
cs.SI cs.DS math.CO physics.soc-ph
Given a large social or information network, how can we partition the vertices into sets (i.e., colors) such that no two vertices linked by an edge are in the same set while minimizing the number of sets used. Despite the obvious practical importance of graph coloring, existing works have not systematically investigated or designed methods for large complex networks. In this work, we develop a unified framework for coloring large complex networks that consists of two main coloring variants that effectively balances the tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency. Using this framework as a fundamental basis, we propose coloring methods designed for the scale and structure of complex networks. In particular, the methods leverage triangles, triangle-cores, and other egonet properties and their combinations. We systematically compare the proposed methods across a wide range of networks (e.g., social, web, biological networks) and find a significant improvement over previous approaches in nearly all cases. Additionally, the solutions obtained are nearly optimal and sometimes provably optimal for certain classes of graphs (e.g., collaboration networks). We also propose a parallel algorithm for the problem of coloring neighborhood subgraphs and make several key observations. Overall, the coloring methods are shown to be (i) accurate with solutions close to optimal, (ii) fast and scalable for large networks, and (iii) flexible for use in a variety of applications.
1403.3460
Scalable and Robust Construction of Topical Hierarchies
cs.LG cs.CL cs.DB cs.IR
Automated generation of high-quality topical hierarchies for a text collection is a dream problem in knowledge engineering with many valuable applications. In this paper a scalable and robust algorithm is proposed for constructing a hierarchy of topics from a text collection. We divide and conquer the problem using a top-down recursive framework, based on a tensor orthogonal decomposition technique. We solve a critical challenge to perform scalable inference for our newly designed hierarchical topic model. Experiments with various real-world datasets illustrate its ability to generate robust, high-quality hierarchies efficiently. Our method reduces the time of construction by several orders of magnitude, and its robust feature renders it possible for users to interactively revise the hierarchy.
1403.3461
Aspects of Favorable Propagation in Massive MIMO
cs.IT math.IT
Favorable propagation, defined as mutual orthogonality among the vector-valued channels to the terminals, is one of the key properties of the radio channel that is exploited in Massive MIMO. However, there has been little work that studies this topic in detail. In this paper, we first show that favorable propagation offers the most desirable scenario in terms of maximizing the sum-capacity. One useful proxy for whether propagation is favorable or not is the channel condition number. However, this proxy is not good for the case where the norms of the channel vectors may not be equal. For this case, to evaluate how favorable the propagation offered by the channel is, we propose a ``distance from favorable propagation'' measure, which is the gap between the sum-capacity and the maximum capacity obtained under favorable propagation. Secondly, we examine how favorable the channels can be for two extreme scenarios: i.i.d. Rayleigh fading and uniform random line-of-sight (UR-LoS). Both environments offer (nearly) favorable propagation. Furthermore, to analyze the UR-LoS model, we propose an urns-and-balls model. This model is simple and explains the singular value spread characteristic of the UR-LoS model well.
1403.3465
A Survey of Algorithms and Analysis for Adaptive Online Learning
cs.LG
We present tools for the analysis of Follow-The-Regularized-Leader (FTRL), Dual Averaging, and Mirror Descent algorithms when the regularizer (equivalently, prox-function or learning rate schedule) is chosen adaptively based on the data. Adaptivity can be used to prove regret bounds that hold on every round, and also allows for data-dependent regret bounds as in AdaGrad-style algorithms (e.g., Online Gradient Descent with adaptive per-coordinate learning rates). We present results from a large number of prior works in a unified manner, using a modular and tight analysis that isolates the key arguments in easily re-usable lemmas. This approach strengthens pre-viously known FTRL analysis techniques to produce bounds as tight as those achieved by potential functions or primal-dual analysis. Further, we prove a general and exact equivalence between an arbitrary adaptive Mirror Descent algorithm and a correspond- ing FTRL update, which allows us to analyze any Mirror Descent algorithm in the same framework. The key to bridging the gap between Dual Averaging and Mirror Descent algorithms lies in an analysis of the FTRL-Proximal algorithm family. Our regret bounds are proved in the most general form, holding for arbitrary norms and non-smooth regularizers with time-varying weight.
1403.3495
Analyzing Large Biological Datasets with an Improved Algorithm for MIC
cs.DB cs.CE
A computational framework utilizes the traditional similarity measures for mining the significant relationships in biological annotations is recently proposed by Tatiana V. Karpinets et al. [2]. In this paper, an improved approximation algorithm for MIC (maximal information coefficient) named IAMIC is suggested to perfect this framework for discovering the hidden regularities between biological annotations. Further, IAMIC is the enhanced algorithm for approximating a novel similarity coefficient MIC with generality and equitability, which makes it more appropriate for data exploration. Here it is shown that IAMIC is also applicable for identify the associations between biological annotations.
1403.3515
Concept Trees: Building Dynamic Concepts from Semi-Structured Data using Nature-Inspired Methods
cs.IR
This paper describes a method for creating structure from heterogeneous sources, as part of an information database, or more specifically, a 'concept base'. Structures called 'concept trees' can grow from the semi-structured sources when consistent sequences of concepts are presented. They might be considered to be dynamic databases, possibly a variation on the distributed Agent-Based or Cellular Automata models, or even related to Markov models. Semantic comparison of text is required, but the trees can be built more, from automatic knowledge and statistical feedback. This reduced model might also be attractive for security or privacy reasons, as not all of the potential data gets saved. The construction process maintains the key requirement of generality, allowing it to be used as part of a generic framework. The nature of the method also means that some level of optimisation or normalisation of the information will occur. This gives comparisons with databases or knowledge-bases, but a database system would firstly model its environment or datasets and then populate the database with instance values. The concept base deals with a more uncertain environment and therefore cannot fully model it beforehand. The model itself therefore evolves over time. Similar to databases, it also needs a good indexing system, where the construction process provides memory and indexing structures. These allow for more complex concepts to be automatically created, stored and retrieved, possibly as part of a more cognitive model. There are also some arguments, or more abstract ideas, for merging physical-world laws into these automatic processes.
1403.3522
An inertial forward-backward algorithm for monotone inclusions
cs.CV cs.NA math.NA math.OC
In this paper, we propose an inertial forward backward splitting algorithm to compute a zero of the sum of two monotone operators, with one of the two operators being co-coercive. The algorithm is inspired by the accelerated gradient method of Nesterov, but can be applied to a much larger class of problems including convex-concave saddle point problems and general monotone inclusions. We prove convergence of the algorithm in a Hilbert space setting and show that several recently proposed first-order methods can be obtained as special cases of the general algorithm. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm converges faster than existing methods, while keeping the computational cost of each iteration basically unchanged.
1403.3533
Quantum linear network coding as one-way quantum computation
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
Network coding is a technique to maximize communication rates within a network, in communication protocols for simultaneous multi-party transmission of information. Linear network codes are examples of such protocols in which the local computations performed at the nodes in the network are limited to linear transformations of their input data (represented as elements of a ring, such as the integers modulo 2). The quantum linear network coding protocols of Kobayashi et al [arXiv:0908.1457 and arXiv:1012.4583] coherently simulate classical linear network codes, using supplemental classical communication. We demonstrate that these protocols correspond in a natural way to measurement-based quantum computations with graph states over over qudits [arXiv:quant-ph/0301052, arXiv:quant-ph/0603226, and arXiv:0704.1263] having a structure directly related to the network.
1403.3568
Modeling Social Dynamics in a Collaborative Environment
physics.soc-ph cs.CY cs.SI physics.data-an
Wikipedia is a prime example of today's value production in a collaborative environment. Using this example, we model the emergence, persistence and resolution of severe conflicts during collaboration by coupling opinion formation with article editing in a bounded confidence dynamics. The complex social behavior involved in editing articles is implemented as a minimal model with two basic elements; (i) individuals interact directly to share information and convince each other, and (ii) they edit a common medium to establish their own opinions. Opinions of the editors and that represented by the article are characterised by a scalar variable. When the pool of editors is fixed, three regimes can be distinguished: (a) a stable mainstream article opinion is continuously contested by editors with extremist views and there is slow convergence towards consensus, (b) the article oscillates between editors with extremist views, reaching consensus relatively fast at one of the extremes, and (c) the extremist editors are converted very fast to the mainstream opinion and the article has an erratic evolution. When editors are renewed with a certain rate, a dynamical transition occurs between different kinds of edit wars, which qualitatively reflect the dynamics of conflicts as observed in real Wikipedia data.
1403.3579
On Projection-Based Model Reduction of Biochemical Networks-- Part I: The Deterministic Case
math.OC cs.SY
This paper addresses the problem of model reduction for dynamical system models that describe biochemical reaction networks. Inherent in such models are properties such as stability, positivity and network structure. Ideally these properties should be preserved by model reduction procedures, although traditional projection based approaches struggle to do this. We propose a projection based model reduction algorithm which uses generalised block diagonal Gramians to preserve structure and positivity. Two algorithms are presented, one provides more accurate reduced order models, the second provides easier to simulate reduced order models. The results are illustrated through numerical examples.
1403.3583
Threshold Analysis of Non-Binary Spatially-Coupled LDPC Codes with Windowed Decoding
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper we study the iterative decoding threshold performance of non-binary spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (NB-SC-LDPC) code ensembles for both the binary erasure channel (BEC) and the binary-input additive white Gaussian noise channel (BIAWGNC), with particular emphasis on windowed decoding (WD). We consider both (2,4)-regular and (3,6)-regular NB-SC-LDPC code ensembles constructed using protographs and compute their thresholds using protograph versions of NB density evolution and NB extrinsic information transfer analysis. For these code ensembles, we show that WD of NB-SC-LDPC codes, which provides a significant decrease in latency and complexity compared to decoding across the entire parity-check matrix, results in a negligible decrease in the near-capacity performance for a sufficiently large window size W on both the BEC and the BIAWGNC. Also, we show that NB-SC-LDPC code ensembles exhibit gains in the WD threshold compared to the corresponding block code ensembles decoded across the entire parity-check matrix, and that the gains increase as the finite field size q increases. Moreover, from the viewpoint of decoding complexity, we see that (3,6)-regular NB-SC-LDPC codes are particularly attractive due to the fact that they achieve near-capacity thresholds even for small q and W.
1403.3594
Sparse Polynomial Interpolation Codes and their decoding beyond half the minimal distance
cs.SC cs.IT math.IT
We present algorithms performing sparse univariate polynomial interpolation with errors in the evaluations of the polynomial. Based on the initial work by Comer, Kaltofen and Pernet [Proc. ISSAC 2012], we define the sparse polynomial interpolation codes and state that their minimal distance is precisely the length divided by twice the sparsity. At ISSAC 2012, we have given a decoding algorithm for as much as half the minimal distance and a list decoding algorithm up to the minimal distance. Our new polynomial-time list decoding algorithm uses sub-sequences of the received evaluations indexed by a linear progression, allowing the decoding for a larger radius, that is, more errors in the evaluations while returning a list of candidate sparse polynomials. We quantify this improvement for all typically small values of number of terms and number of errors, and provide a worst case asymptotic analysis of this improvement. For instance, for sparsity T = 5 with up to 10 errors we can list decode in polynomial-time from 74 values of the polynomial with unknown terms, whereas our earlier algorithm required 2T (E + 1) = 110 evaluations. We then propose two variations of these codes in characteristic zero, where appropriate choices of values for the variable yield a much larger minimal distance: the length minus twice the sparsity.
1403.3602
Spontaneous expression classification in the encrypted domain
cs.CV cs.CR
To date, most facial expression analysis have been based on posed image databases and is carried out without being able to protect the identity of the subjects whose expressions are being recognised. In this paper, we propose and implement a system for classifying facial expressions of images in the encrypted domain based on a Paillier cryptosystem implementation of Fisher Linear Discriminant Analysis and k-nearest neighbour (FLDA + kNN). We present results of experiments carried out on a recently developed natural visible and infrared facial expression (NVIE) database of spontaneous images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system that will allow the recog-nition of encrypted spontaneous facial expressions by a remote server on behalf of a client.
1403.3610
Making Risk Minimization Tolerant to Label Noise
cs.LG
In many applications, the training data, from which one needs to learn a classifier, is corrupted with label noise. Many standard algorithms such as SVM perform poorly in presence of label noise. In this paper we investigate the robustness of risk minimization to label noise. We prove a sufficient condition on a loss function for the risk minimization under that loss to be tolerant to uniform label noise. We show that the $0-1$ loss, sigmoid loss, ramp loss and probit loss satisfy this condition though none of the standard convex loss functions satisfy it. We also prove that, by choosing a sufficiently large value of a parameter in the loss function, the sigmoid loss, ramp loss and probit loss can be made tolerant to non-uniform label noise also if we can assume the classes to be separable under noise-free data distribution. Through extensive empirical studies, we show that risk minimization under the $0-1$ loss, the sigmoid loss and the ramp loss has much better robustness to label noise when compared to the SVM algorithm.
1403.3616
Predictability of extreme events in social media
physics.soc-ph cs.SI physics.data-an
It is part of our daily social-media experience that seemingly ordinary items (videos, news, publications, etc.) unexpectedly gain an enormous amount of attention. Here we investigate how unexpected these events are. We propose a method that, given some information on the items, quantifies the predictability of events, i.e., the potential of identifying in advance the most successful items defined as the upper bound for the quality of any prediction based on the same information. Applying this method to different data, ranging from views in YouTube videos to posts in Usenet discussion groups, we invariantly find that the predictability increases for the most extreme events. This indicates that, despite the inherently stochastic collective dynamics of users, efficient prediction is possible for the most extreme events.
1403.3628
Mixed-norm Regularization for Brain Decoding
cs.LG
This work investigates the use of mixed-norm regularization for sensor selection in Event-Related Potential (ERP) based Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI). The classification problem is cast as a discriminative optimization framework where sensor selection is induced through the use of mixed-norms. This framework is extended to the multi-task learning situation where several similar classification tasks related to different subjects are learned simultaneously. In this case, multi-task learning helps in leveraging data scarcity issue yielding to more robust classifiers. For this purpose, we have introduced a regularizer that induces both sensor selection and classifier similarities. The different regularization approaches are compared on three ERP datasets showing the interest of mixed-norm regularization in terms of sensor selection. The multi-task approaches are evaluated when a small number of learning examples are available yielding to significant performance improvements especially for subjects performing poorly.
1403.3665
A Low-Complexity Algorithm for Throughput Maximization in Wireless Powered Communication Networks
cs.IT math.IT
This paper investigates a wireless powered communication network (WPCN) under the protocol of harvest-then-transmit,where a hybrid access point with constant power supply replenishes the passive user nodes by wireless power transfer in the downlink,then each user node transmit independent information to the hybrid AP in a time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme in the uplink.The sum-throughput maximization and min-throughput maximization problems are considered in this paper.The optimal time allocation for the sum-throughput maximization is proposed based on the Jensen's inequality,which provides more insight into the design of WPCNs.A low-complexity fixed-point iteration algorithm for the min-throughput maximization problem,which promises a much better computation complexity than the state-of-the-art algorithm.Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
1403.3668
Language Heedless of Logic - Philosophy Mindful of What? Failures of Distributive and Absorption Laws
cs.CL
Much of philosophical logic and all of philosophy of language make empirical claims about the vernacular natural language. They presume semantics under which `and' and `or' are related by the dually paired distributive and absorption laws. However, at least one of each pair of laws fails in the vernacular. `Implicature'-based auxiliary theories associated with the programme of H.P. Grice do not prove remedial. Conceivable alternatives that might replace the familiar logics as descriptive instruments are briefly noted: (i) substructural logics and (ii) meaning composition in linear algebras over the reals, occasionally constrained by norms of classical logic. Alternative (ii) locates the problem in violations of one of the idempotent laws. Reasons for a lack of curiosity about elementary and easily testable implications of the received theory are considered. The concept of `reflective equilibrium' is critically examined for its role in reconciling normative desiderata and descriptive commitments.
1403.3678
The Effect of Saturation on Belief Propagation Decoding of LDPC Codes
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the effect of LLR saturation on belief propagation decoding of low-density parity-check codes. Saturation occurs universally in practice and is known to have a significant effect on error floor performance. Our focus is on threshold analysis and stability of density evolution. We analyze the decoder for certain low-density parity-check code ensembles and show that belief propagation decoding generally degrades gracefully with saturation. Stability of density evolution is, on the other hand, rather strongly affected by saturation and the asymptotic qualitative effect of saturation is similar to reduction of variable node degree by one.
1403.3683
Removal and Contraction Operations in $n$D Generalized Maps for Efficient Homology Computation
cs.CV
In this paper, we show that contraction operations preserve the homology of $n$D generalized maps, under some conditions. Removal and contraction operations are used to propose an efficient algorithm that compute homology generators of $n$D generalized maps. Its principle consists in simplifying a generalized map as much as possible by using removal and contraction operations. We obtain a generalized map having the same homology than the initial one, while the number of cells decreased significantly. Keywords: $n$D Generalized Maps; Cellular Homology; Homology Generators; Contraction and Removal Operations.
1403.3707
Learning the Latent State Space of Time-Varying Graphs
cs.SI cs.LG physics.soc-ph stat.ML
From social networks to Internet applications, a wide variety of electronic communication tools are producing streams of graph data; where the nodes represent users and the edges represent the contacts between them over time. This has led to an increased interest in mechanisms to model the dynamic structure of time-varying graphs. In this work, we develop a framework for learning the latent state space of a time-varying email graph. We show how the framework can be used to find subsequences that correspond to global real-time events in the Email graph (e.g. vacations, breaks, ...etc.). These events impact the underlying graph process to make its characteristics non-stationary. Within the framework, we compare two different representations of the temporal relationships; discrete vs. probabilistic. We use the two representations as inputs to a mixture model to learn the latent state transitions that correspond to important changes in the Email graph structure over time.
1403.3710
Saving Energy in Mobile Devices for On-Demand Multimedia Streaming -- A Cross-Layer Approach
cs.MM cs.IT math.IT
This paper proposes a novel energy-efficient multimedia delivery system called EStreamer. First, we study the relationship between buffer size at the client, burst-shaped TCP-based multimedia traffic, and energy consumption of wireless network interfaces in smartphones. Based on the study, we design and implement EStreamer for constant bit rate and rate-adaptive streaming. EStreamer can improve battery lifetime by 3x, 1.5x and 2x while streaming over Wi-Fi, 3G and 4G respectively.
1403.3724
VESICLE: Volumetric Evaluation of Synaptic Interfaces using Computer vision at Large Scale
cs.CV cs.CE q-bio.QM
An open challenge problem at the forefront of modern neuroscience is to obtain a comprehensive mapping of the neural pathways that underlie human brain function; an enhanced understanding of the wiring diagram of the brain promises to lead to new breakthroughs in diagnosing and treating neurological disorders. Inferring brain structure from image data, such as that obtained via electron microscopy (EM), entails solving the problem of identifying biological structures in large data volumes. Synapses, which are a key communication structure in the brain, are particularly difficult to detect due to their small size and limited contrast. Prior work in automated synapse detection has relied upon time-intensive biological preparations (post-staining, isotropic slice thicknesses) in order to simplify the problem. This paper presents VESICLE, the first known approach designed for mammalian synapse detection in anisotropic, non-post-stained data. Our methods explicitly leverage biological context, and the results exceed existing synapse detection methods in terms of accuracy and scalability. We provide two different approaches - one a deep learning classifier (VESICLE-CNN) and one a lightweight Random Forest approach (VESICLE-RF) to offer alternatives in the performance-scalability space. Addressing this synapse detection challenge enables the analysis of high-throughput imaging data soon expected to reach petabytes of data, and provide tools for more rapid estimation of brain-graphs. Finally, to facilitate community efforts, we developed tools for large-scale object detection, and demonstrated this framework to find $\approx$ 50,000 synapses in 60,000 $\mu m ^3$ (220 GB on disk) of electron microscopy data.
1403.3740
Interference Alignment with Partial CSI Feedback in MIMO Cellular Networks
cs.IT math.IT
Interference alignment (IA) is a linear precoding strategy that can achieve optimal capacity scaling at high SNR in interference networks. However, most existing IA designs require full channel state information (CSI) at the transmitters, which would lead to significant CSI signaling overhead. There are two techniques, namely CSI quantization and CSI feedback filtering, to reduce the CSI feedback overhead. In this paper, we consider IA processing with CSI feedback filtering in MIMO cellular networks. We introduce a novel metric, namely the feedback dimension, to quantify the first order CSI feedback cost associated with the CSI feedback filtering. The CSI feedback filtering poses several important challenges in IA processing. First, there is a hidden partial CSI knowledge constraint in IA precoder design which cannot be handled using conventional IA design methodology. Furthermore, existing results on the feasibility conditions of IA cannot be applied due to the partial CSI knowledge. Finally, it is very challenging to find out how much CSI feedback is actually needed to support IA processing. We shall address the above challenges and propose a new IA feasibility condition under partial CSIT knowledge in MIMO cellular networks. Based on this, we consider the CSI feedback profile design subject to the degrees of freedom requirements, and we derive closed-form trade-off results between the CSI feedback cost and IA performance in MIMO cellular networks.
1403.3741
Near-optimal Reinforcement Learning in Factored MDPs
stat.ML cs.LG
Any reinforcement learning algorithm that applies to all Markov decision processes (MDPs) will suffer $\Omega(\sqrt{SAT})$ regret on some MDP, where $T$ is the elapsed time and $S$ and $A$ are the cardinalities of the state and action spaces. This implies $T = \Omega(SA)$ time to guarantee a near-optimal policy. In many settings of practical interest, due to the curse of dimensionality, $S$ and $A$ can be so enormous that this learning time is unacceptable. We establish that, if the system is known to be a \emph{factored} MDP, it is possible to achieve regret that scales polynomially in the number of \emph{parameters} encoding the factored MDP, which may be exponentially smaller than $S$ or $A$. We provide two algorithms that satisfy near-optimal regret bounds in this context: posterior sampling reinforcement learning (PSRL) and an upper confidence bound algorithm (UCRL-Factored).
1403.3758
Big Data Analytics - Retour vers le Futur 3; De Statisticien \`a Data Scientist
math.ST cs.DB stat.TH
The rapid evolution of information systems managing more and more voluminous data has caused profound paradigm shifts in the job of statistician, becoming successively data miner, bioinformatician and now data scientist. Without the sake of completeness and after having illustrated these successive mutations, this article briefly introduced the new research issues that quickly rise in Statistics, and more generally in Mathematics, in order to integrate the characteristics: volume, variety and velocity, of big data.
1403.3759
Parallel Interleaver Design for a High Throughput HSPA+/LTE Multi-Standard Turbo Decoder
cs.IT cs.AR cs.DC math.IT
To meet the evolving data rate requirements of emerging wireless communication technologies, many parallel architectures have been proposed to implement high throughput turbo decoders. However, concurrent memory reading/writing in parallel turbo decoding architectures leads to severe memory conflict problem, which has become a major bottleneck for high throughput turbo decoders. In this paper, we propose a flexible and efficient VLSI architecture to solve the memory conflict problem for highly parallel turbo decoders targeting multi-standard 3G/4G wireless communication systems. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed parallel interleaver architecture, we implemented an HSPA+/LTE/LTE-Advanced multi-standard turbo decoder with a 45nm CMOS technology. The implemented turbo decoder consists of 16 Radix-4 MAP decoder cores, and the chip core area is 2.43 mm^2. When clocked at 600 MHz, this turbo decoder can achieve a maximum decoding throughput of 826 Mbps in the HSPA+ mode and 1.67 Gbps in the LTE/LTE-Advanced mode, exceeding the peak data rate requirements for both standards.