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1403.3780
Automatic Classification of Human Epithelial Type 2 Cell Indirect Immunofluorescence Images using Cell Pyramid Matching
q-bio.CB cs.CV q-bio.QM
This paper describes a novel system for automatic classification of images obtained from Anti-Nuclear Antibody (ANA) pathology tests on Human Epithelial type 2 (HEp-2) cells using the Indirect Immunofluorescence (IIF) protocol. The IIF protocol on HEp-2 cells has been the hallmark method to identify the presence of ANAs, due to its high sensitivity and the large range of antigens that can be detected. However, it suffers from numerous shortcomings, such as being subjective as well as time and labour intensive. Computer Aided Diagnostic (CAD) systems have been developed to address these problems, which automatically classify a HEp-2 cell image into one of its known patterns (eg. speckled, homogeneous). Most of the existing CAD systems use handpicked features to represent a HEp-2 cell image, which may only work in limited scenarios. We propose a novel automatic cell image classification method termed Cell Pyramid Matching (CPM), which is comprised of regional histograms of visual words coupled with the Multiple Kernel Learning framework. We present a study of several variations of generating histograms and show the efficacy of the system on two publicly available datasets: the ICPR HEp-2 cell classification contest dataset and the SNPHEp-2 dataset.
1403.3785
Statistically validated mobile communication networks: Evolution of motifs in European and Chinese data
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Big data open up unprecedented opportunities to investigate complex systems including the society. In particular, communication data serve as major sources for computational social sciences but they have to be cleaned and filtered as they may contain spurious information due to recording errors as well as interactions, like commercial and marketing activities, not directly related to the social network. The network constructed from communication data can only be considered as a proxy for the network of social relationships. Here we apply a systematic method, based on multiple hypothesis testing, to statistically validate the links and then construct the corresponding Bonferroni network, generalized to the directed case. We study two large datasets of mobile phone records, one from Europe and the other from China. For both datasets we compare the raw data networks with the corresponding Bonferroni networks and point out significant differences in the structures and in the basic network measures. We show evidence that the Bonferroni network provides a better proxy for the network of social interactions than the original one. By using the filtered networks we investigated the statistics and temporal evolution of small directed 3-motifs and conclude that closed communication triads have a formation time-scale, which is quite fast and typically intraday. We also find that open communication triads preferentially evolve to other open triads with a higher fraction of reciprocated calls. These stylized facts were observed for both datasets.
1403.3786
Universal Decoding for Gaussian Intersymbol Interference Channels
cs.IT math.IT
A universal decoding procedure is proposed for the intersymbol interference (ISI) Gaussian channels. The universality of the proposed decoder is in the sense of being independent of the various channel parameters, and at the same time, attaining the same random coding error exponent as the optimal maximum-likelihood (ML) decoder, which utilizes full knowledge of these unknown parameters. The proposed decoding rule can be regarded as a frequency domain version of the universal maximum mutual information (MMI) decoder. Contrary to previously suggested universal decoders for ISI channels, our proposed decoding metric can easily be evaluated.
1403.3788
MIMO Zero-Forcing Performance Evaluation Using the Holonomic Gradient Method
cs.IT math.IT
For multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) spatial-multiplexing transmission, zero-forcing detection (ZF) is appealing because of its low complexity. Our recent MIMO ZF performance analysis for Rician--Rayleigh fading, which is relevant in heterogeneous networks, has yielded for the ZF outage probability and ergodic capacity infinite-series expressions. Because they arose from expanding the confluent hypergeometric function $ {_1\! F_1} (\cdot, \cdot, \sigma) $ around 0, they do not converge numerically at realistically-high Rician $ K $-factor values. Therefore, herein, we seek to take advantage of the fact that $ {_1\! F_1} (\cdot, \cdot, \sigma) $ satisfies a differential equation, i.e., it is a \textit{holonomic} function. Holonomic functions can be computed by the \textit{holonomic gradient method} (HGM), i.e., by numerically solving the satisfied differential equation. Thus, we first reveal that the moment generating function (m.g.f.) and probability density function (p.d.f.) of the ZF signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are holonomic. Then, from the differential equation for $ {_1\! F_1} (\cdot, \cdot, \sigma) $, we deduce those satisfied by the SNR m.g.f. and p.d.f., and demonstrate that the HGM helps compute the p.d.f. accurately at practically-relevant values of $ K $. Finally, numerical integration of the SNR p.d.f. produced by HGM yields accurate ZF outage probability and ergodic capacity results.
1403.3795
Think Locally, Act Locally: The Detection of Small, Medium-Sized, and Large Communities in Large Networks
cs.SI cond-mat.dis-nn math.CO nlin.AO physics.soc-ph
It is common in the study of networks to investigate meso-scale features to try to gain an understanding of network structure and function. For example, numerous algorithms have been developed to try to identify "communities," which are typically construed as sets of nodes with denser connections internally than with the remainder of a network. In this paper, we adopt a complementary perspective that "communities" are associated with bottlenecks of locally-biased dynamical processes that begin at seed sets of nodes, and we employ several different community-identification procedures (using diffusion-based and geodesic-based dynamics) to investigate community quality as a function of community size. Using several empirical and synthetic networks, we identify several distinct scenarios for ``size-resolved community structure'' that can arise in real (and realistic) networks. Depending on which scenario holds, one may or may not be able to successfully identify ``good'' communities in a given network, the manner in which different small communities fit together to form meso-scale network structures can be very different, and processes such as viral propagation and information diffusion can exhibit very different dynamics.In addition, our results suggest that, for many large realistic networks, the output of locally-biased methods that focus on communities that are centered around a given seed node might have better conceptual grounding and greater practical utility than the output of global community-detection methods. They also illustrate subtler structural properties that are important to consider in the development of better benchmark networks to test methods for community detection. [Note: Because of space limitations in the arXiv's abstract field, this is an abridged version of the paper's abstract.]
1403.3807
Sensing Subjective Well-being from Social Media
cs.AI cs.CY
Subjective Well-being(SWB), which refers to how people experience the quality of their lives, is of great use to public policy-makers as well as economic, sociological research, etc. Traditionally, the measurement of SWB relies on time-consuming and costly self-report questionnaires. Nowadays, people are motivated to share their experiences and feelings on social media, so we propose to sense SWB from the vast user generated data on social media. By utilizing 1785 users' social media data with SWB labels, we train machine learning models that are able to "sense" individual SWB from users' social media. Our model, which attains the state-by-art prediction accuracy, can then be used to identify SWB of large population of social media users in time with very low cost.
1403.3829
Geometric VLAD for Large Scale Image Search
cs.CV
We present a novel compact image descriptor for large scale image search. Our proposed descriptor - Geometric VLAD (gVLAD) is an extension of VLAD (Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors) that incorporates weak geometry information into the VLAD framework. The proposed geometry cues are derived as a membership function over keypoint angles which contain evident and informative information but yet often discarded. A principled technique for learning the membership function by clustering angles is also presented. Further, to address the overhead of iterative codebook training over real-time datasets, a novel codebook adaptation strategy is outlined. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of proposed gVLAD based retrieval framework where we achieve more than 15% improvement in mAP over existing benchmarks.
1403.3864
Information Anatomy of Stochastic Equilibria
cond-mat.stat-mech cs.IT math.DS math.IT nlin.CD
A stochastic nonlinear dynamical system generates information, as measured by its entropy rate. Some---the ephemeral information---is dissipated and some---the bound information---is actively stored and so affects future behavior. We derive analytic expressions for the ephemeral and bound informations in the limit of small-time discretization for two classical systems that exhibit dynamical equilibria: first-order Langevin equations (i) where the drift is the gradient of a potential function and the diffusion matrix is invertible and (ii) with a linear drift term (Ornstein-Uhlenbeck) but a noninvertible diffusion matrix. In both cases, the bound information is sensitive only to the drift, while the ephemeral information is sensitive only to the diffusion matrix and not to the drift. Notably, this information anatomy changes discontinuously as any of the diffusion coefficients vanishes, indicating that it is very sensitive to the noise structure. We then calculate the information anatomy of the stochastic cusp catastrophe and of particles diffusing in a heat bath in the overdamped limit, both examples of stochastic gradient descent on a potential landscape. Finally, we use our methods to calculate and compare approximations for the so-called time-local predictive information for adaptive agents.
1403.3881
Complexity of Equilibrium in Diffusion Games on Social Networks
cs.GT cs.CC cs.DC cs.DM cs.MA
In this paper, we consider the competitive diffusion game, and study the existence of its pure-strategy Nash equilibrium when defined over general undirected networks. We first determine the set of pure-strategy Nash equilibria for two special but well-known classes of networks, namely the lattice and the hypercube. Characterizing the utility of the players in terms of graphical distances of their initial seed placements to other nodes in the network, we show that in general networks the decision process on the existence of pure-strategy Nash equilibrium is an NP-hard problem. Following this, we provide some necessary conditions for a given profile to be a Nash equilibrium. Furthermore, we study players' utilities in the competitive diffusion game over Erdos-Renyi random graphs and show that as the size of the network grows, the utilities of the players are highly concentrated around their expectation, and are bounded below by some threshold based on the parameters of the network. Finally, we obtain a lower bound for the maximum social welfare of the game with two players, and study sub-modularity of the players' utilities.
1403.3891
Exploiting Regional Differences: A Spatially Adaptive Random Access
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
In this paper, we discuss the potential for improvement of the simple random access scheme by utilizing local information such as the received signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR). We propose a spatially adaptive random access (SARA) scheme in which the transmitters in the network utilize different transmit probabilities depending on the local situation. In our proposed scheme, the transmit probability is adaptively updated by the ratio of the received SINR and the target SINR. We investigate the performance of the spatially adaptive random access scheme. For the comparison, we derive an optimal transmit probability of ALOHA random access scheme in which all transmitters use the same transmit probability. We illustrate the performance of the spatially adaptive random access scheme through simulations. We show that the performance of the proposed scheme surpasses that of the optimal ALOHA random access scheme and is comparable with the CSMA/CA scheme.
1403.3909
Graph Sample and Hold: A Framework for Big-Graph Analytics
cs.SI cs.DB physics.soc-ph stat.AP
Sampling is a standard approach in big-graph analytics; the goal is to efficiently estimate the graph properties by consulting a sample of the whole population. A perfect sample is assumed to mirror every property of the whole population. Unfortunately, such a perfect sample is hard to collect in complex populations such as graphs (e.g. web graphs, social networks etc), where an underlying network connects the units of the population. Therefore, a good sample will be representative in the sense that graph properties of interest can be estimated with a known degree of accuracy. While previous work focused particularly on sampling schemes used to estimate certain graph properties (e.g. triangle count), much less is known for the case when we need to estimate various graph properties with the same sampling scheme. In this paper, we propose a generic stream sampling framework for big-graph analytics, called Graph Sample and Hold (gSH). To begin, the proposed framework samples from massive graphs sequentially in a single pass, one edge at a time, while maintaining a small state. We then show how to produce unbiased estimators for various graph properties from the sample. Given that the graph analysis algorithms will run on a sample instead of the whole population, the runtime complexity of these algorithm is kept under control. Moreover, given that the estimators of graph properties are unbiased, the approximation error is kept under control. Finally, we show the performance of the proposed framework (gSH) on various types of graphs, such as social graphs, among others.
1403.3931
Quickest detection in coupled systems
math.OC cs.IT math.IT math.ST stat.TH
This work considers the problem of quickest detection of signals in a coupled system of $N$ sensors, which receive continuous sequential observations from the environment. It is assumed that the signals, which are modeled by general It\^{o} processes, are coupled across sensors, but that their onset times may differ from sensor to sensor. Two main cases are considered; in the first one signal strengths are the same across sensors while in the second one they differ by a constant. The objective is the optimal detection of the first time at which any sensor in the system receives a signal. The problem is formulated as a stochastic optimization problem in which an extended minimal Kullback-Leibler divergence criterion is used as a measure of detection delay, with a constraint on the mean time to the first false alarm. The case in which the sensors employ cumulative sum (CUSUM) strategies is considered, and it is proved that the minimum of $N$ CUSUMs is asymptotically optimal as the mean time to the first false alarm increases without bound. In particular, in the case of equal signal strengths across sensors, it is seen that the difference in detection delay of the $N$-CUSUM stopping rule and the unknown optimal stopping scheme tends to a constant related to the number of sensors as the mean time to the first false alarm increases without bound. Alternatively, in the case of unequal signal strengths, it is seen that this difference tends to zero.
1403.3948
An Improved Apriori Algorithm for Association Rules
cs.DB
There are several mining algorithms of association rules. One of the most popular algorithms is Apriori that is used to extract frequent itemsets from large database and getting the association rule for discovering the knowledge. Based on this algorithm, this paper indicates the limitation of the original Apriori algorithm of wasting time for scanning the whole database searching on the frequent itemsets, and presents an improvement on Apriori by reducing that wasted time depending on scanning only some transactions. The paper shows by experimental results with several groups of transactions, and with several values of minimum support that applied on the original Apriori and our implemented improved Apriori that our improved Apriori reduces the time consumed by 67.38% in comparison with the original Apriori, and makes the Apriori algorithm more efficient and less time consuming.
1403.3964
Image processing using miniKanren
cs.CV cs.PL
An integral image is one of the most efficient optimization technique for image processing. However an integral image is only a special case of delayed stream or memoization. This research discusses generalizing concept of integral image optimization technique, and how to generate an integral image optimized program code automatically from abstracted image processing algorithm. In oder to abstruct algorithms, we forces to miniKanren.
1403.3978
A Novel Scheme for Downlink Opportunistic Interference Alignment
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper we propose a downlink codebook-based opportunistic interference alignment (OIA) in a three-cell MIMO system. A codebook composed of multiple transmit vector sets is utilized to improve the multiuser selection diversity. The sum rate increases as the size of the codebook grows. In addition, during the user selection, effective channel gain and alignment metric are combined to generate a novel criterion, which improves the system performance, especially at low SNR. Furthermore, a threshold-based feedback approach is introduced to reduce the feedback load in the proposed scheme. Both the analytical results and simulations show that the proposed scheme provides significant improvement in terms of sum rates with no feedback load growth and slight increase of complexity.
1403.3991
Throughput Optimization for Massive MIMO Systems Powered by Wireless Energy Transfer
cs.IT math.IT
This paper studies a wireless-energy-transfer (WET) enabled massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system (MM) consisting of a hybrid data-and-energy access point (H-AP) and multiple single-antenna users. In the WET-MM system, the H-AP is equipped with a large number $M$ of antennas and functions like a conventional AP in receiving data from users, but additionally supplies wireless power to the users. We consider frame-based transmissions. Each frame is divided into three phases: the uplink channel estimation (CE) phase, the downlink WET phase, as well as the uplink wireless information transmission (WIT) phase. Firstly, users use a fraction of the previously harvested energy to send pilots, while the H-AP estimates the uplink channels and obtains the downlink channels by exploiting channel reciprocity. Next, the H-AP utilizes the channel estimates just obtained to transfer wireless energy to all users in the downlink via energy beamforming. Finally, the users use a portion of the harvested energy to send data to the H-AP simultaneously in the uplink (reserving some harvested energy for sending pilots in the next frame). To optimize the throughput and ensure rate fairness, we consider the problem of maximizing the minimum rate among all users. In the large-$M$ regime, we obtain the asymptotically optimal solutions and some interesting insights for the optimal design of WET-MM system. We define a metric, namely, the massive MIMO degree-of-rate-gain (MM-DoRG), as the asymptotic UL rate normalized by $\log(M)$. We show that the proposed WET-MM system is optimal in terms of MM-DoRG, i.e., it achieves the same MM-DoRG as the case with ideal CE.
1403.4011
Whose Opinion to follow in Multihypothesis Social Learning? A Large Deviations Perspective
cs.IT math.IT
We consider a multihypothesis social learning problem in which an agent has access to a set of private observations and chooses an opinion from a set of experts to incorporate into its final decision. To model individual biases, we allow the agent and experts to have general loss functions and possibly different decision spaces. We characterize the loss exponents of both the agent and experts, and provide an asymptotically optimal method for the agent to choose the best expert to follow. We show that up to asymptotic equivalence, the worst loss exponent for the agent is achieved when it adopts the 0-1 loss function, which assigns a loss of 0 if the true hypothesis is declared and a loss of 1 otherwise. We introduce the concept of hypothesis-loss neutrality, and show that if the agent adopts a particular policy that is hypothesis-loss neutral, then it ignores all experts whose decision spaces are smaller than its own. On the other hand, if experts have the same decision space as the agent, then choosing an expert with the same loss function as itself is not necessarily optimal for the agent, which is somewhat counter-intuitive. We derive sufficient conditions for when it is optimal for the agent with 0-1 loss function to choose an expert with the same loss function.
1403.4015
Exceptional planar polynomials
math.NT cs.IT math.CO math.IT
Planar functions are special functions from a finite field to itself that give rise to finite projective planes and other combinatorial objects. We consider polynomials over a finite field $K$ that induce planar functions on infinitely many extensions of $K$; we call such polynomials exceptional planar. Exceptional planar monomials have been recently classified. In this paper we establish a partial classification of exceptional planar polynomials. This includes results for the classical planar functions on finite fields of odd characteristic and for the recently proposed planar functions on finite fields of characteristic two.
1403.4017
Multi-task Feature Selection based Anomaly Detection
stat.ML cs.LG
Network anomaly detection is still a vibrant research area. As the fast growth of network bandwidth and the tremendous traffic on the network, there arises an extremely challengeable question: How to efficiently and accurately detect the anomaly on multiple traffic? In multi-task learning, the traffic consisting of flows at different time periods is considered as a task. Multiple tasks at different time periods performed simultaneously to detect anomalies. In this paper, we apply the multi-task feature selection in network anomaly detection area which provides a powerful method to gather information from multiple traffic and detect anomalies on it simultaneously. In particular, the multi-task feature selection includes the well-known l1-norm based feature selection as a special case given only one task. Moreover, we show that the multi-task feature selection is more accurate by utilizing more information simultaneously than the l1-norm based method. At the evaluation stage, we preprocess the raw data trace from trans-Pacific backbone link between Japan and the United States, label with anomaly communities, and generate a 248-feature dataset. We show empirically that the multi-task feature selection outperforms independent l1-norm based feature selection on real traffic dataset.
1403.4023
Simulation leagues: Analysis of competition formats
cs.MA cs.AI cs.RO
The selection of an appropriate competition format is critical for both the success and credibility of any competition, both real and simulated. In this paper, the automated parallelism offered by the RoboCupSoccer 2D simulation league is leveraged to conduct a 28,000 game round-robin between the top 8 teams from RoboCup 2012 and 2013. A proposed new competition format is found to reduce variation from the resultant statistically significant team performance rankings by 75% and 67%, when compared to the actual competition results from RoboCup 2012 and 2013 respectively. These results are statistically validated by generating 10,000 random tournaments for each of the three considered formats and comparing the respective distributions of ranking discrepancy.
1403.4024
Measuring Global Similarity between Texts
cs.CL
We propose a new similarity measure between texts which, contrary to the current state-of-the-art approaches, takes a global view of the texts to be compared. We have implemented a tool to compute our textual distance and conducted experiments on several corpuses of texts. The experiments show that our methods can reliably identify different global types of texts.
1403.4047
A Queueing Characterization of Information Transmission over Block Fading Rayleigh Channels in the Low SNR
cs.IT math.IT
Unlike the AWGN (additive white gaussian noise) channel, fading channels suffer from random channel gains besides the additive Gaussian noise. As a result, the instantaneous channel capacity varies randomly along time, which makes it insufficient to characterize the transmission capability of a fading channel using data rate only. In this paper, the transmission capability of a buffer-aided block Rayleigh fading channel is examined by a constant rate input data stream, and reflected by several parameters such as the average queue length, stationary queue length distribution, packet delay and overflow probability. Both infinite-buffer model and finite-buffer model are considered. Taking advantage of the memoryless property of the service provided by the channel in each block in the the low SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) regime, the information transmission over the channel is formulated as a \textit{discrete time discrete state} $D/G/1$ queueing problem. The obtained results show that block fading channels are unable to support a data rate close to their ergodic capacity, no matter how long the buffer is, even seen from the application layer. For the finite-buffer model, the overflow probability is derived with explicit expression, and is shown to decrease exponentially when buffer size is increased, even when the buffer size is very small.
1403.4060
Quantum codes from affine variety codes and their subfield-subcodes
cs.IT math.IT
We use affine variety codes and their subfield-subcodes for obtaining quantum stabilizer codes via the CSS code construction. With this procedure, we get codes with good parameters and a code whose parameters exceed the CSS quantum Gilbert-Varshamov bound given by Feng and Ma.
1403.4099
High-speed detection of emergent market clustering via an unsupervised parallel genetic algorithm
q-fin.CP cs.DC cs.NE
We implement a master-slave parallel genetic algorithm (PGA) with a bespoke log-likelihood fitness function to identify emergent clusters within price evolutions. We use graphics processing units (GPUs) to implement a PGA and visualise the results using disjoint minimal spanning trees (MSTs). We demonstrate that our GPU PGA, implemented on a commercially available general purpose GPU, is able to recover stock clusters in sub-second speed, based on a subset of stocks in the South African market. This represents a pragmatic choice for low-cost, scalable parallel computing and is significantly faster than a prototype serial implementation in an optimised C-based fourth-generation programming language, although the results are not directly comparable due to compiler differences. Combined with fast online intraday correlation matrix estimation from high frequency data for cluster identification, the proposed implementation offers cost-effective, near-real-time risk assessment for financial practitioners.
1403.4106
The role of endogenous and exogenous mechanisms in the formation of R&D networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI physics.data-an
We develop an agent-based model of strategic link formation in Research and Development (R&D) networks. Empirical evidence has shown that the growth of these networks is driven by mechanisms which are both endogenous to the system (that is, depending on existing alliances patterns) and exogenous (that is, driven by an exploratory search for newcomer firms). Extant research to date has not investigated both mechanisms simultaneously in a comparative manner. To overcome this limitation, we develop a general modeling framework to shed light on the relative importance of these two mechanisms. We test our model against a comprehensive dataset, listing cross-country and cross-sectoral R&D alliances from 1984 to 2009. Our results show that by fitting only three macroscopic properties of the network topology, this framework is able to reproduce a number of micro-level measures, including the distributions of degree, local clustering, path length and component size, and the emergence of network clusters. Furthermore, by estimating the link probabilities towards newcomers and established firms from the data, we find that endogenous mechanisms are predominant over the exogenous ones in the network formation, thus quantifying the importance of existing structures in selecting partner firms.
1403.4109
Convergence Time for Unbiased Quantized Consensus Over Static and Dynamic Networks
cs.SY cs.SI
In this paper, the question of expected time to convergence is addressed for unbiased quantized consensus on undirected connected graphs, and some strong results are obtained. The paper first provides a tight expression for the expected convergence time of the unbiased quantized consensus over general but fixed networks. It is shown that the maximum expected convergence time lies within a constant factor of the maximum hitting time of an appropriate lazy random walk, using the theory of harmonic functions for reversible Markov chains. Following this, and using electric resistance analogy of the reversible Markov chains, the paper provides a tight upper bound for the expected convergence time to consensus based on the parameters of the network. Moreover, the paper identifies a precise order of the maximum expected convergence time for some simple graphs such as line graph and cycle. Finally, the results are extended to bound the expected convergence time of the underlying dynamics in time-varying networks. Modeling such dynamics as the evolution of a time inhomogeneous Markov chain, the paper derives a tight upper bound for expected convergence time of the dynamics using the spectral representation of the networks. This upper bound is significantly better than earlier results for the quantized consensus problem over time-varying graphs.
1403.4118
Efficient Maximum-Likelihood Decoding of Linear Block Codes on Binary Memoryless Channels
cs.IT math.IT
In this work, we consider efficient maximum-likelihood decoding of linear block codes for small-to-moderate block lengths. The presented approach is a branch-and-bound algorithm using the cutting-plane approach of Zhang and Siegel (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, 2012) for obtaining lower bounds. We have compared our proposed algorithm to the state-of-the-art commercial integer program solver CPLEX, and for all considered codes our approach is faster for both low and high signal-to-noise ratios. For instance, for the benchmark (155,64) Tanner code our algorithm is more than 11 times as fast as CPLEX for an SNR of 1.0 dB on the additive white Gaussian noise channel. By a small modification, our algorithm can be used to calculate the minimum distance, which we have again verified to be much faster than using the CPLEX solver.
1403.4155
Bayesian Design of Tandem Networks for Distributed Detection With Multi-bit Sensor Decisions
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the problem of decentralized hypothesis testing under communication constraints in a topology where several peripheral nodes are arranged in tandem. Each node receives an observation and transmits a message to its successor, and the last node then decides which hypothesis is true. We assume that the observations at different nodes are, conditioned on the true hypothesis, independent and the channel between any two successive nodes is considered error-free but rate-constrained. We propose a cyclic numerical design algorithm for the design of nodes using a person-by-person methodology with the minimum expected error probability as a design criterion, where the number of communicated messages is not necessarily equal to the number of hypotheses. The number of peripheral nodes in the proposed method is in principle arbitrary and the information rate constraints are satisfied by quantizing the input of each node. The performance of the proposed method for different information rate constraints, in a binary hypothesis test, is compared to the optimum rate-one solution due to Swaszek and a method proposed by Cover, and it is shown numerically that increasing the channel rate can significantly enhance the performance of the tandem network. Simulation results for $M$-ary hypothesis tests also show that by increasing the channel rates the performance of the tandem network significantly improves.
1403.4174
A Receding Horizon Approach to Multi-Agent Planning from Local LTL Specifications
cs.RO
We study the problem of control synthesis for multi-agent systems, to achieve complex, high-level, long-term goals that are assigned to each agent individually. As the agents might not be capable of satisfying their respective goals by themselves, requests for other agents' collaborations are a part of the task descriptions. Particularly, we consider that the task specification takes a form of a linear temporal logic formula, which may contain requirements and constraints on the other agent's behavior. A traditional automata-based approach to multi-agent strategy synthesis from such specifications builds on centralized planning for the whole team and thus suffers from extreme computational demands. In this work, we aim at reducing the computational complexity by decomposing the strategy synthesis problem into short horizon planning problems that are solved iteratively, upon the run of the agents. We discuss the correctness of the solution and find assumptions, under which the proposed iterative algorithm leads to provable eventual satisfaction of the desired specifications.
1403.4175
Approximate Dynamic Programming based on Projection onto the (min,+) subsemimodule
cs.SY math.OC
We develop a new Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) method for infinite horizon discounted reward Markov Decision Processes (MDP) based on projection onto a subsemimodule. We approximate the value function in terms of a $(\min,+)$ linear combination of a set of basis functions whose $(\min,+)$ linear span constitutes a subsemimodule. The projection operator is closely related to the Fenchel transform. Our approximate solution obeys the $(\min,+)$ Projected Bellman Equation (MPPBE) which is different from the conventional Projected Bellman Equation (PBE). We show that the approximation error is bounded in its $L_\infty$-norm. We develop a Min-Plus Approximate Dynamic Programming (MPADP) algorithm to compute the solution to the MPPBE. We also present the proof of convergence of the MPADP algorithm and apply it to two problems, a grid-world problem in the discrete domain and mountain car in the continuous domain.
1403.4179
Approximate dynamic programming with $(\min,+)$ linear function approximation for Markov decision processes
cs.SY math.OC
Markov Decision Processes (MDP) is an useful framework to cast optimal sequential decision making problems. Given any MDP the aim is to find the optimal action selection mechanism i.e., the optimal policy. Typically, the optimal policy ($u^*$) is obtained by substituting the optimal value-function ($J^*$) in the Bellman equation. Alternately $u^*$ is also obtained by learning the optimal state-action value function $Q^*$ known as the $Q$ value-function. However, it is difficult to compute the exact values of $J^*$ or $Q^*$ for MDPs with large number of states. Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) methods address this difficulty by computing lower dimensional approximations of $J^*$/$Q^*$. Most ADP methods employ linear function approximation (LFA), i.e., the approximate solution lies in a subspace spanned by a family of pre-selected basis functions. The approximation is obtain via a linear least squares projection of higher dimensional quantities and the $L_2$ norm plays an important role in convergence and error analysis. In this paper, we discuss ADP methods for MDPs based on LFAs in $(\min,+)$ algebra. Here the approximate solution is a $(\min,+)$ linear combination of a set of basis functions whose span constitutes a subsemimodule. Approximation is obtained via a projection operator onto the subsemimodule which is different from linear least squares projection used in ADP methods based on conventional LFAs. MDPs are not $(\min,+)$ linear systems, nevertheless, we show that the monotonicity property of the projection operator helps us to establish the convergence of our ADP schemes. We also discuss future directions in ADP methods for MDPs based on the $(\min,+)$ LFAs.
1403.4182
Effects of Spatial Randomness on Locating a Point Source with Distributed Sensors
cs.IT math.IT
Most studies that consider the problem of estimating the location of a point source in wireless sensor networks assume that the source location is estimated by a set of spatially distributed sensors, whose locations are fixed. Motivated by the fact that the observation quality and performance of the localization algorithm depend on the location of the sensors, which could be randomly distributed, this paper investigates the performance of a recently proposed energy-based source-localization algorithm under the assumption that the sensors are positioned according to a uniform clustering process. Practical considerations such as the existence and size of the exclusion zones around each sensor and the source will be studied. By introducing a novel performance measure called the estimation outage, it will be shown how parameters related to the network geometry such as the distance between the source and the closest sensor to it as well as the number of sensors within a region surrounding the source affect the localization performance.
1403.4224
Learning Negative Mixture Models by Tensor Decompositions
cs.LG
This work considers the problem of estimating the parameters of negative mixture models, i.e. mixture models that possibly involve negative weights. The contributions of this paper are as follows. (i) We show that every rational probability distributions on strings, a representation which occurs naturally in spectral learning, can be computed by a negative mixture of at most two probabilistic automata (or HMMs). (ii) We propose a method to estimate the parameters of negative mixture models having a specific tensor structure in their low order observable moments. Building upon a recent paper on tensor decompositions for learning latent variable models, we extend this work to the broader setting of tensors having a symmetric decomposition with positive and negative weights. We introduce a generalization of the tensor power method for complex valued tensors, and establish theoretical convergence guarantees. (iii) We show how our approach applies to negative Gaussian mixture models, for which we provide some experiments.
1403.4232
Automatic Image Registration in Infrared-Visible Videos using Polygon Vertices
cs.CV
In this paper, an automatic method is proposed to perform image registration in visible and infrared pair of video sequences for multiple targets. In multimodal image analysis like image fusion systems, color and IR sensors are placed close to each other and capture a same scene simultaneously, but the videos are not properly aligned by default because of different fields of view, image capturing information, working principle and other camera specifications. Because the scenes are usually not planar, alignment needs to be performed continuously by extracting relevant common information. In this paper, we approximate the shape of the targets by polygons and use affine transformation for aligning the two video sequences. After background subtraction, keypoints on the contour of the foreground blobs are detected using DCE (Discrete Curve Evolution)technique. These keypoints are then described by the local shape at each point of the obtained polygon. The keypoints are matched based on the convexity of polygon's vertices and Euclidean distance between them. Only good matches for each local shape polygon in a frame, are kept. To achieve a global affine transformation that maximises the overlapping of infrared and visible foreground pixels, the matched keypoints of each local shape polygon are stored temporally in a buffer for a few number of frames. The matrix is evaluated at each frame using the temporal buffer and the best matrix is selected, based on an overlapping ratio criterion. Our experimental results demonstrate that this method can provide highly accurate registered images and that we outperform a previous related method.
1403.4238
Computer Vision Accelerators for Mobile Systems based on OpenCL GPGPU Co-Processing
cs.DC cs.CV cs.MS
In this paper, we present an OpenCL-based heterogeneous implementation of a computer vision algorithm -- image inpainting-based object removal algorithm -- on mobile devices. To take advantage of the computation power of the mobile processor, the algorithm workflow is partitioned between the CPU and the GPU based on the profiling results on mobile devices, so that the computationally-intensive kernels are accelerated by the mobile GPGPU (general-purpose computing using graphics processing units). By exploring the implementation trade-offs and utilizing the proposed optimization strategies at different levels including algorithm optimization, parallelism optimization, and memory access optimization, we significantly speed up the algorithm with the CPU-GPU heterogeneous implementation, while preserving the quality of the output images. Experimental results show that heterogeneous computing based on GPGPU co-processing can significantly speed up the computer vision algorithms and makes them practical on real-world mobile devices.
1403.4267
Balancing Sparsity and Rank Constraints in Quadratic Basis Pursuit
cs.NA cs.LG
We investigate the methods that simultaneously enforce sparsity and low-rank structure in a matrix as often employed for sparse phase retrieval problems or phase calibration problems in compressive sensing. We propose a new approach for analyzing the trade off between the sparsity and low rank constraints in these approaches which not only helps to provide guidelines to adjust the weights between the aforementioned constraints, but also enables new simulation strategies for evaluating performance. We then provide simulation results for phase retrieval and phase calibration cases both to demonstrate the consistency of the proposed method with other approaches and to evaluate the change of performance with different weights for the sparsity and low rank structure constraints.
1403.4289
Telling Breaking News Stories from Wikipedia with Social Multimedia: A Case Study of the 2014 Winter Olympics
cs.SI cs.CY cs.IR
With the ability to watch Wikipedia and Wikidata edits in realtime, the online encyclopedia and the knowledge base have become increasingly used targets of research for the detection of breaking news events. In this paper, we present a case study of the 2014 Winter Olympics, where we tell the story of breaking news events in the context of the Olympics with the help of social multimedia stemming from multiple social network sites. Therefore, we have extended the application Wikipedia Live Monitor-a tool for the detection of breaking news events-with the capability of automatically creating media galleries that illustrate events. Athletes winning an Olympic competition, a new country leading the medal table, or simply the Olympics themselves are all events newsworthy enough for people to concurrently edit Wikipedia and Wikidata-around the world in many languages. The Olympics being an event of common interest, an even bigger majority of people share the event in a multitude of languages on global social network sites, which makes the event an ideal subject of study. With this work, we connect the world of Wikipedia and Wikidata with the world of social network sites, in order to convey the spirit of the 2014 Winter Olympics, to tell the story of victory and defeat, and always following the Olympic motto Citius, Altius, Fortius. The proposed system-generalized for all sort of breaking news stories-has been put in production in form of the Twitter bot @mediagalleries, available and archived at https://twitter.com/mediagalleries.
1403.4303
A new network node similarity measure method and its applications
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Network node similarity measure has been paid particular attention in the field of statistical physics. In this paper, we utilize the concept of information and information loss to measure the node similarity. The whole model is based on this idea that if two nodes are more similar than the others, then the information loss of seeing them as the same is less. The present new method has low algorithm complexity so that it can save much time and energy to deal with the large scale real-world network. We illustrate the availability of this approach based on two artificial examples and computer-generated networks by comparing its accuracy with the other selected approaches. The above tests demonstrate that the new method can provide more reasonable results consistent with our human common judgment. The new similarity measure method is also applied to predict the network evolution and predict unknown nodes' attributions in the two application examples.
1403.4311
The lower bound of the PCM quantization error in high dimension
math.NA cs.IT math.IT
In this note, we investigate the performance of the PCM scheme with linear quantization rule for quantizing unit-norm tight frame expansions for ${\mathbb R}^d$ without the White Noise Hypothesis. In \cite{WX}, Wang and Xu showed that for asymptotically equidistributed unit-norm tight frame the PCM quantization error has an upper bound ${\mathcal O}(\delta^{(d+1)/2})$ and they conjecture the upper bound is sharp. In this note, we confirm the conjecture with employing the asymptotic estimate of the Bessel functions.
1403.4333
Increasing Flash Memory Lifetime by Dynamic Voltage Allocation for Constant Mutual Information
cs.IT math.IT
The read channel in Flash memory systems degrades over time because the Fowler-Nordheim tunneling used to apply charge to the floating gate eventually compromises the integrity of the cell because of tunnel oxide degradation. While degradation is commonly measured in the number of program/erase cycles experienced by a cell, the degradation is proportional to the number of electrons forced into the floating gate and later released by the erasing process. By managing the amount of charge written to the floating gate to maintain a constant read-channel mutual information, Flash lifetime can be extended. This paper proposes an overall system approach based on information theory to extend the lifetime of a flash memory device. Using the instantaneous storage capacity of a noisy flash memory channel, our approach allocates the read voltage of flash cell dynamically as it wears out gradually over time. A practical estimation of the instantaneous capacity is also proposed based on soft information via multiple reads of the memory cells.
1403.4334
Bregman Divergences for Infinite Dimensional Covariance Matrices
cs.CV
We introduce an approach to computing and comparing Covariance Descriptors (CovDs) in infinite-dimensional spaces. CovDs have become increasingly popular to address classification problems in computer vision. While CovDs offer some robustness to measurement variations, they also throw away part of the information contained in the original data by only retaining the second-order statistics over the measurements. Here, we propose to overcome this limitation by first mapping the original data to a high-dimensional Hilbert space, and only then compute the CovDs. We show that several Bregman divergences can be computed between the resulting CovDs in Hilbert space via the use of kernels. We then exploit these divergences for classification purposes. Our experiments demonstrate the benefits of our approach on several tasks, such as material and texture recognition, person re-identification, and action recognition from motion capture data.
1403.4342
Spatial Performance Analysis and Design Principles for Wireless Peer Discovery
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
In wireless peer-to-peer networks that serve various proximity-based applications, peer discovery is the key to identifying other peers with which a peer can communicate and an understanding of its performance is fundamental to the design of an efficient discovery operation. This paper analyzes the performance of wireless peer discovery through comprehensively considering the wireless channel, spatial distribution of peers, and discovery operation parameters. The average numbers of successfully discovered peers are expressed in closed forms for two widely used channel models, i.e., the interference limited Nakagami-m fading model and the Rayleigh fading model with nonzero noise, when peers are spatially distributed according to a homogeneous Poisson point process. These insightful expressions lead to the design principles for the key operation parameters including the transmission probability, required amount of wireless resources, level of modulation and coding scheme (MCS), and transmit power. Furthermore, the impact of shadowing on the spatial performance and suggested design principles is evaluated using mathematical analysis and simulations.
1403.4346
Spatial Topology Adjustment for Minimizing Multicell Network Power Consumption
cs.IT math.IT
While the deployment of base stations (BSs) becomes increasingly dense in order to accommodate the growth in traffic demand, these BSs may be under-utilized during most hours except peak hours. Accordingly, the deactivation of these under-utilized BSs is regarded as the key to reducing network power consumption; however, the remaining active BSs should increase their transmit power in order to fill network coverage holes that result from BS switching off. This paper investigates the optimal balance between such beneficial and harmful effects of BS switching off in terms of minimizing the network power consumption, through comprehensively considering the spatial BS distribution, BS transmit power, BS power consumption behaviors, radio propagation environments, and frequency reuse. When BSs are deployed according to a homogeneous Poisson point process, the suboptimal and approximated design problems are formulated as geometric programming and the solutions lead to insightful design principles for the key design parameters including the spatial density, transmit power, and frequency reuse of remaining active BSs. The numerical results demonstrate that these solutions are very close to the optimal balances.
1403.4357
High Speed Railway Wireless Communications: Efficiency v.s. Fairness
cs.IT math.IT
High speed railways (HSRs) have been deployed widely all over the world in recent years. Different from traditional cellular communication, its high mobility makes it essential to implement power allocation along the time. In the HSR case, the transmission rate depends greatly on the distance between the base station (BS) and the train. As a result, the train receives a time varying data rate service when passing by a BS. It is clear that the most efficient power allocation will spend all the power when the train is nearest from the BS, which will cause great unfairness along the time. On the other hand, the channel inversion allocation achieves the best fairness in terms of constant rate transmission. However, its power efficiency is much lower. Therefore, the power efficiency and the fairness along time are two incompatible objects. For the HSR cellular system considered in this paper, a trade-off between the two is achieved by proposing a temporal proportional fair power allocation scheme. Besides, near optimal closed form solution and one algorithm finding the $\epsilon$-optimal allocation are presented.
1403.4362
Concept Based vs. Pseudo Relevance Feedback Performance Evaluation for Information Retrieval System
cs.IR cs.CL
This article evaluates the performance of two techniques for query reformulation in a system for information retrieval, namely, the concept based and the pseudo relevance feedback reformulation. The experiments performed on a corpus of Arabic text have allowed us to compare the contribution of these two reformulation techniques in improving the performance of an information retrieval system for Arabic texts.
1403.4374
Low-Complexity Transmission Mode Selection in MU-MIMO Systems
cs.IT math.IT
We propose a low-complexity transmission strategy in multi-user multiple-input multiple-output downlink systems. The adaptive strategy adjusts the precoding methods, denoted as the transmission mode, to improve the system sum rates while maintaining the number of simultaneously served users. Three linear precoding transmission modes are discussed, i.e., the block diagonalization zero-forcing, the cooperative zero-forcing (CZF), and the cooperative matched-filter (CMF). Considering both the number of data streams and the multiple-antenna configuration of users, we modify the common CZF and CMF modes by allocating data streams. Then, the transmission mode is selected between the modified ones according to the asymptotic sum rate analyses. As instantaneous channel state information is not needed for the mode selection, the computational complexity is significantly reduced. Numerical simulations confirm our analyses and demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves substantial performance gains with very low computational complexity.
1403.4378
Spectral Clustering with Jensen-type kernels and their multi-point extensions
cs.LG
Motivated by multi-distribution divergences, which originate in information theory, we propose a notion of `multi-point' kernels, and study their applications. We study a class of kernels based on Jensen type divergences and show that these can be extended to measure similarity among multiple points. We study tensor flattening methods and develop a multi-point (kernel) spectral clustering (MSC) method. We further emphasize on a special case of the proposed kernels, which is a multi-point extension of the linear (dot-product) kernel and show the existence of cubic time tensor flattening algorithm in this case. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of our contributions using standard data sets and image segmentation tasks.
1403.4405
Absorbing Set Analysis and Design of LDPC Codes from Transversal Designs over the AWGN Channel
cs.IT math.CO math.IT
In this paper we construct low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes from transversal designs with low error-floors over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. The constructed codes are based on transversal designs that arise from sets of mutually orthogonal Latin squares (MOLS) with cyclic structure. For lowering the error-floors, our approach is twofold: First, we give an exhaustive classification of so-called absorbing sets that may occur in the factor graphs of the given codes. These purely combinatorial substructures are known to be the main cause of decoding errors in the error-floor region over the AWGN channel by decoding with the standard sum-product algorithm (SPA). Second, based on this classification, we exploit the specific structure of the presented codes to eliminate the most harmful absorbing sets and derive powerful constraints for the proper choice of code parameters in order to obtain codes with an optimized error-floor performance.
1403.4415
DecLiNe -- Models for Decay of Links in Networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
The prediction of graph evolution is an important and challenging problem in the analysis of networks and of the Web in particular. But while the appearance of new links is part of virtually every model of Web growth, the disappearance of links has received much less attention in the literature. To fill this gap, our approach DecLiNe (an acronym for DECay of LInks in NEtworks) aims to predict link decay in networks, based on structural analysis of corresponding graph models. In analogy to the link prediction problem, we show that analysis of graph structures can help to identify indicators for superfluous links under consideration of common network models. In doing so, we introduce novel metrics that denote the likelihood of certain links in social graphs to remain in the network, and combine them with state-of-the-art machine learning methods for predicting link decay. Our methods are independent of the underlying network type, and can be applied to such diverse networks as the Web, social networks and any other structure representable as a network, and can be easily combined with case-specific content analysis and adopted for a variety of social network mining, filtering and recommendation applications. In systematic evaluations with large-scale datasets of Wikipedia we show the practical feasibility of the proposed structure-based link decay prediction algorithms.
1403.4452
The Homogeneous Weight Partition and its Character-Theoretic Dual
cs.IT math.IT math.RA
The values of the normalized homogeneous weight are determined for arbitrary finite Frobenius rings and expressed in a form that is independent from a generating character and the M\"obius function on the ring. The weight naturally induces a partition of the ring, which is invariant under left or right multiplication by units. It is shown that the character-theoretic left-sided dual of this partition coincides with the right-sided dual, and even more, the left- and right-sided Krawtchouk coefficients coincide. An example is provided showing that this is not the case for general invariant partitions if the ring is not semisimple.
1403.4467
A hybrid formalism to parse Sign Languages
cs.CL
Sign Language (SL) linguistic is dependent on the expensive task of annotating. Some automation is already available for low-level information (eg. body part tracking) and the lexical level has shown significant progresses. The syntactic level lacks annotated corpora as well as complete and consistent models. This article presents a solution for the automatic annotation of SL syntactic elements. It exposes a formalism able to represent both constituency-based and dependency-based models. The first enable the representation the structures one may want to annotate, the second aims at fulfilling the holes of the first. A parser is presented and used to conduct two experiments on the solution. One experiment is on a real corpus, the other is on a synthetic corpus.
1403.4473
Sign Language Gibberish for syntactic parsing evaluation
cs.CL
Sign Language (SL) automatic processing slowly progresses bottom-up. The field has seen proposition to handle the video signal, to recognize and synthesize sublexical and lexical units. It starts to see the development of supra-lexical processing. But the recognition, at this level, lacks data. The syntax of SL appears very specific as it uses massively the multiplicity of articulators and its access to the spatial dimensions. Therefore new parsing techniques are developed. However these need to be evaluated. The shortage on real data restrains the corpus-based models to small sizes. We propose here a solution to produce data-sets for the evaluation of parsers on the specific properties of SL. The article first describes the general model used to generates dependency grammars and the phrase generation from these lasts. It then discusses the limits of approach. The solution shows to be of particular interest to evaluate the scalability of the techniques on big models.
1403.4482
SNSAPI: A Cross-Platform Middleware for Rapid Deployment of Decentralized Social Networks
cs.SI cs.NI
In this paper, we present the design, implementation and our year-long maintenance experience of SNSAPI, a Python-based middleware which unifies the interfaces and data structures of heterogeneous Social Networking Services (SNS). Unlike most prior works, our middleware is user-oriented and requires zero infrastructure support. It enables a user to readily conduct online social activities in a programmable, cross-platform fashion while gradually reducing the dependence on centralized Online Social Networks (OSN). More importantly, as the SNSAPI middleware can be used to support decentralized social networking services via conventional communication channels such as RSS or Email, it enables the deployment of Decentralized Social Networks (DSN) in an incremental, ad hoc manner. To demonstrate the viability of such type of DSNs, we have deployed an experimental 6000-node SNSAPI-based DSN on PlanetLab and evaluate its performance by replaying traces of online social activities collected from a mainstream OSN. Our results show that, with only mild resource consumption, the SNSAPI-based DSN can achieve acceptable forwarding latency comparable to that of a centralized OSN. We also develop an analytical model to characterize the trade-offs between resource consumption and message forwarding delay in our DSN. Via 20 parameterized experiments on PlanetLab, we have found that the empirical measurement results match reasonably with the performance predicted by our analytical model.
1403.4492
Joint Beamforming Design and Time Allocation for Wireless Powered Communication Networks
cs.IT math.IT
This paper investigates a multi-input single-output (MISO) wireless powered communication network (WPCN) under the protocol of harvest-then-transmit. The power station (PS) with reliable power supply can replenish the passive user nodes by wireless power transfer (WPT) in the downlink (DL), then each user node transmits independent information to the sink by a time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme in the uplink (UL). We consider the joint time allocation and beamforming design to maximize the system sum-throughput. The semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique is applied to solve the nonconvex design problem. The tightness of SDR approximation, thus the global optimality, is proved. This implies that only one single energy beamformer is required at the PS. Then a fast semiclosed form solution is proposed by exploiting the inherent structure. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms from the perspectives of time complexity and information throughput.
1403.4508
Research on Study Mechanical Vibrations with Data Acquisition Systems
cs.CE
The paper presents a new study method of mechanic vibrations with the help of the data acquisition systems. The study of vibrations with the help of data acquisition systems allows the solving of some engineering problems connected to the measurement of some parameters which are difficult to measure having in view the improvement of the technical performances of the industrial equipment or devices
1403.4514
Simultaneous Perturbation Algorithms for Batch Off-Policy Search
math.OC cs.LG
We propose novel policy search algorithms in the context of off-policy, batch mode reinforcement learning (RL) with continuous state and action spaces. Given a batch collection of trajectories, we perform off-line policy evaluation using an algorithm similar to that by [Fonteneau et al., 2010]. Using this Monte-Carlo like policy evaluator, we perform policy search in a class of parameterized policies. We propose both first order policy gradient and second order policy Newton algorithms. All our algorithms incorporate simultaneous perturbation estimates for the gradient as well as the Hessian of the cost-to-go vector, since the latter is unknown and only biased estimates are available. We demonstrate their practicality on a simple 1-dimensional continuous state space problem.
1403.4521
Efficient Network Generation Under General Preferential Attachment
cs.SI cs.DS physics.soc-ph
Preferential attachment (PA) models of network structure are widely used due to their explanatory power and conceptual simplicity. PA models are able to account for the scale-free degree distributions observed in many real-world large networks through the remarkably simple mechanism of sequentially introducing nodes that attach preferentially to high-degree nodes. The ability to efficiently generate instances from PA models is a key asset in understanding both the models themselves and the real networks that they represent. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to the problem of efficient instance generation. In this paper, we show that the complexity of generating network instances from a PA model depends on the preference function of the model, provide efficient data structures that work under any preference function, and present empirical results from an implementation based on these data structures. We demonstrate that, by indexing growing networks with a simple augmented heap, we can implement a network generator which scales many orders of magnitude beyond existing capabilities ($10^6$ -- $10^8$ nodes). We show the utility of an efficient and general PA network generator by investigating the consequences of varying the preference functions of an existing model. We also provide "quicknet", a freely-available open-source implementation of the methods described in this work.
1403.4540
Similarity networks for classification: a case study in the Horse Colic problem
cs.LG cs.NE
This paper develops a two-layer neural network in which the neuron model computes a user-defined similarity function between inputs and weights. The neuron transfer function is formed by composition of an adapted logistic function with the mean of the partial input-weight similarities. The resulting neuron model is capable of dealing directly with variables of potentially different nature (continuous, fuzzy, ordinal, categorical). There is also provision for missing values. The network is trained using a two-stage procedure very similar to that used to train a radial basis function (RBF) neural network. The network is compared to two types of RBF networks in a non-trivial dataset: the Horse Colic problem, taken as a case study and analyzed in detail.
1403.4583
An Achievable rate region for the $3-$user interference channel based on coset codes
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the problem of communication over a three user discrete memoryless interference channel ($3-$IC). The current known coding techniques for communicating over an arbitrary $3-$IC are based on message splitting, superposition coding and binning using independent and identically distributed (iid) random codebooks. In this work, we propose a new ensemble of codes - partitioned coset codes (PCC) - that possess an appropriate mix of empirical and algebraic closure properties. We develop coding techniques that exploit algebraic closure property of PCC to enable efficient communication over $3-$IC. We analyze the performance of the proposed coding technique to derive an achievable rate region for the general discrete $3-$IC. Additive and non-additive examples are identified for which the derived achievable rate region is the capacity, and moreover, strictly larger than current known largest achievable rate regions based on iid random codebooks.
1403.4597
Energy-Efficient Transmission Schedule for Delay-Limited Bursty Data Arrivals under Non-Ideal Circuit Power Consumption
cs.IT math.IT
This paper develops a novel approach to obtaining energy-efficient transmission schedules for delay-limited bursty data arrivals under non-ideal circuit power consumption. Assuming a-prior knowledge of packet arrivals, deadlines and channel realizations, we show that the problem can be formulated as a convex program. For both time-invariant and time-varying fading channels, it is revealed that the optimal transmission between any two consecutive channel or data state changing instants, termed epoch, can only take one of the three strategies: (i) no transmission, (ii) transmission with an energy-efficiency (EE) maximizing rate over part of the epoch, or (iii) transmission with a rate greater than the EE-maximizing rate over the whole epoch. Based on this specific structure, efficient algorithms are then developed to find the optimal policies that minimize the total energy consumption with a low computational complexity. The proposed approach can provide the optimal benchmarks for practical schemes designed for transmissions of delay-limited data arrivals, and can be employed to develop efficient online scheduling schemes which require only causal knowledge of data arrivals and deadline requirements.
1403.4608
Can Cascades be Predicted?
cs.SI physics.soc-ph stat.ML
On many social networking web sites such as Facebook and Twitter, resharing or reposting functionality allows users to share others' content with their own friends or followers. As content is reshared from user to user, large cascades of reshares can form. While a growing body of research has focused on analyzing and characterizing such cascades, a recent, parallel line of work has argued that the future trajectory of a cascade may be inherently unpredictable. In this work, we develop a framework for addressing cascade prediction problems. On a large sample of photo reshare cascades on Facebook, we find strong performance in predicting whether a cascade will continue to grow in the future. We find that the relative growth of a cascade becomes more predictable as we observe more of its reshares, that temporal and structural features are key predictors of cascade size, and that initially, breadth, rather than depth in a cascade is a better indicator of larger cascades. This prediction performance is robust in the sense that multiple distinct classes of features all achieve similar performance. We also discover that temporal features are predictive of a cascade's eventual shape. Observing independent cascades of the same content, we find that while these cascades differ greatly in size, we are still able to predict which ends up the largest.
1403.4640
Communication Communities in MOOCs
cs.CY cs.SI stat.ML
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) bring together thousands of people from different geographies and demographic backgrounds -- but to date, little is known about how they learn or communicate. We introduce a new content-analysed MOOC dataset and use Bayesian Non-negative Matrix Factorization (BNMF) to extract communities of learners based on the nature of their online forum posts. We see that BNMF yields a superior probabilistic generative model for online discussions when compared to other models, and that the communities it learns are differentiated by their composite students' demographic and course performance indicators. These findings suggest that computationally efficient probabilistic generative modelling of MOOCs can reveal important insights for educational researchers and practitioners and help to develop more intelligent and responsive online learning environments.
1403.4643
Information Content of Systems as a Physical Principle
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
To explain conceptual gap between classical/quantum and other, hypothetical descriptions of world, several principles has been proposed. So far, all these principles have not explicitly included the uncertainty relation. Here we introduce an information content principle (ICP) which represents the new - constrained uncertainty principle. The principle, by taking into account the encoding/decoding properties of single physical system, is capable of separation both classicality and quanta from a number of potential physical theories including hidden variable theories. The ICP, which is satisfied by both classical and quantum theory, states that the amount of non-redundant information which may be extracted from a given system is bounded by a perfectly decodable information content of the system. We show that ICP allows to discriminate theories which do not allow for correlations stronger than Tsirelson's bound. We show also how to apply the principle to composite systems, ruling out some theories despite their elementary constituents behave quantumly.
1403.4655
Quadrature-Based Vector Fitting: Implications For H2 System Approximation
math.NA cs.SY
Vector Fitting is a popular method of constructing rational approximants designed to fit given frequency response measurements. The original method, which we refer to as VF, is based on a least-squares fit to the measurements by a rational function, using an iterative reallocation of the poles of the approximant. We show that one can improve the performance of VF significantly, by using a particular choice of frequency sampling points and properly weighting their contribution based on quadrature rules that connect the least squares objective with an H2 error measure. Our modified approach, designated here as QuadVF, helps recover the original transfer function with better global fidelity (as measured with respect to the H2 norm), than the localized least squares approximation implicit in VF. We extend the new framework also to incorporate derivative information, leading to rational approximants that minimize system error with respect to a discrete Sobolev norm. We consider the convergence behavior of both VF and QuadVF as well, and evaluate potential numerical ill-conditioning of the underlying least-squares problems. We investigate briefly VF in the case of noisy measurements and propose a new formulation for the resulting approximation problem. Several numerical examples are provided to support the theoretical discussion.
1403.4661
An Optimal-Dimensionality Sampling Scheme on the Sphere with Fast Spherical Harmonic Transforms
cs.IT math.IT
We develop a sampling scheme on the sphere that permits accurate computation of the spherical harmonic transform and its inverse for signals band-limited at $L$ using only $L^2$ samples. We obtain the optimal number of samples given by the degrees of freedom of the signal in harmonic space. The number of samples required in our scheme is a factor of two or four fewer than existing techniques, which require either $2L^2$ or $4L^2$ samples. We note, however, that we do not recover a sampling theorem on the sphere, where spherical harmonic transforms are theoretically exact. Nevertheless, we achieve high accuracy even for very large band-limits. For our optimal-dimensionality sampling scheme, we develop a fast and accurate algorithm to compute the spherical harmonic transform (and inverse), with computational complexity comparable with existing schemes in practice. We conduct numerical experiments to study in detail the stability, accuracy and computational complexity of the proposed transforms. We also highlight the advantages of the proposed sampling scheme and associated transforms in the context of potential applications.
1403.4662
Model Predictive HVAC Control with Online Occupancy Model
cs.SY
This paper presents an occupancy-predicting control algorithm for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in buildings. It incorporates the building's thermal properties, local weather predictions, and a self-tuning stochastic occupancy model to reduce energy consumption while maintaining occupant comfort. Contrasting with existing approaches, the occupancy model requires no manual training and adapts to changes in occupancy patterns during operation. A prediction-weighted cost function provides conditioning of thermal zones before occupancy begins and reduces system output before occupancy ends. Simulation results with real-world occupancy data demonstrate the algorithm's effectiveness.
1403.4669
Performance Analysis of Arbitrarily-Shaped Underlay Cognitive Networks: Effects of Secondary User Activity Protocols
cs.IT math.IT
This paper analyzes the performance of the primary and secondary users (SUs) in an arbitrarily-shaped underlay cognitive network. In order to meet the interference threshold requirement for a primary receiver (PU-Rx) at an arbitrary location, we consider different SU activity protocols which limit the number of active SUs. We propose a framework, based on the moment generating function (MGF) of the interference due to a random SU, to analytically compute the outage probability in the primary network, as well as the average number of active SUs in the secondary network. We also propose a cooperation-based SU activity protocol in the underlay cognitive network which includes the existing threshold-based protocol as a special case. We study the average number of active SUs for the different SU activity protocols, subject to a given outage probability constraint at the PU and we employ it as an analytical approach to compare the effect of different SU activity protocols on the performance of the primary and secondary networks.
1403.4670
Quantized Output Feedback Stabilization of Switched Linear Systems
cs.SY math.OC
This paper studies the problem of stabilizing a continuous-time switched linear system by quantized output feedback. We assume that the quantized outputs and the switching signal are available to the controller at all time. We develop an encoding strategy by using multiple Lyapunov functions and an average dwell time property. The encoding strategy is based on the results in the case of a single mode, and it requires an additional adjustment of the "zoom" parameter at every switching time.
1403.4679
Justification of Logarithmic Loss via the Benefit of Side Information
cs.IT math.IT
We consider a natural measure of relevance: the reduction in optimal prediction risk in the presence of side information. For any given loss function, this relevance measure captures the benefit of side information for performing inference on a random variable under this loss function. When such a measure satisfies a natural data processing property, and the random variable of interest has alphabet size greater than two, we show that it is uniquely characterized by the mutual information, and the corresponding loss function coincides with logarithmic loss. In doing so, our work provides a new characterization of mutual information, and justifies its use as a measure of relevance. When the alphabet is binary, we characterize the only admissible forms the measure of relevance can assume while obeying the specified data processing property. Our results naturally extend to measuring causal influence between stochastic processes, where we unify different causal-inference measures in the literature as instantiations of directed information.
1403.4682
Structured Sparse Method for Hyperspectral Unmixing
cs.CV cs.AI
Hyperspectral Unmixing (HU) has received increasing attention in the past decades due to its ability of unveiling information latent in hyperspectral data. Unfortunately, most existing methods fail to take advantage of the spatial information in data. To overcome this limitation, we propose a Structured Sparse regularized Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (SS-NMF) method from the following two aspects. First, we incorporate a graph Laplacian to encode the manifold structures embedded in the hyperspectral data space. In this way, the highly similar neighboring pixels can be grouped together. Second, the lasso penalty is employed in SS-NMF for the fact that pixels in the same manifold structure are sparsely mixed by a common set of relevant bases. These two factors act as a new structured sparse constraint. With this constraint, our method can learn a compact space, where highly similar pixels are grouped to share correlated sparse representations. Experiments on real hyperspectral data sets with different noise levels demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly.
1403.4691
Quantized Feedback Stabilization of Sampled-Data Switched Linear Systems
cs.SY
We propose a stability analysis method for sampled-data switched linear systems with quantization. The available information to the controller is limited: the quantized state and switching signal at each sampling time. Switching between sampling times can produce the mismatch of the modes between the plant and the controller. Moreover, the coarseness of quantization makes the trajectory wander around, not approach, the origin. Hence the trajectory may leave the desired neighborhood if the mismatch leads to instability of the closed-loop system. For the stability of the switched systems, we develop a sufficient condition characterized by the total mismatch time. The relationship between the mismatch time and the dwell time of the switching signal is also discussed.
1403.4711
Multiagent Conflict Resolution for a Specification Network of Discrete-Event Coordinating Agents
cs.MA
This paper presents a novel compositional approach to distributed coordination module (CM) synthesis for multiple discrete-event agents in the formal languages and automata framework. The approach is supported by two original ideas. The first is a new formalism called the Distributed Constraint Specification Network (DCSN) that can comprehensibly describe the networking constraint relationships among distributed agents. The second is multiagent conflict resolution planning, which entails generating and using AND/OR graphs to compactly represent conflict resolution (synthesis-process) plans for a DCSN. Together with the framework of local CM design developed in the authors' earlier work, the systematic approach supports separately designing local and deconflicting CM's for individual agents in accordance to a selected conflict resolution plan. Composing the agent models and the CM's designed furnishes an overall nonblocking coordination solution that meets the set of inter-agent constraints specified in a given DCSN.
1403.4714
Enhancing Dictionary Based Preprocessing For Better Text Compression
cs.IT math.IT
With the rapid growing of data and number of applications, there is a crucial need of dictionary based reversible transformation techniques to increase the efficiency of the compression algorithms and hence contribute towards the enhancement in compression ratio. Performance analysis of compression methods in combination with the various transformation techniques is obtained for different text files of varying sizes. The popular block sorting lossless Burrows Wheeler Compression Algorithm (BWCA) is implemented along with one proposed method. For efficient compression a dictionary based transformation algorithm is also developed. It is observed that much increase in terms of compression ratio is attained when a source file is preprocessed with dictionary and then applied to BWCA and the proposed method.
1403.4735
On the Automorphisms of Order 15 for a Binary Self-Dual [96, 48, 20] Code
cs.IT math.IT
The structure of binary self-dual codes invariant under the action of a cyclic group of order $pq$ for odd primes $p\neq q$ is considered. As an application we prove the nonexistence of an extremal self-dual $[96, 48, 20]$ code with an automorphism of order $15$ which closes a gap in `"On extremal self-dual codes of length 96", IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 57, pp. 6820-6823, 2011'.
1403.4751
The Deterministic Time-Linearity of Service Provided by Fading Channels
cs.IT math.IT
In the paper, we study the service process $S(t)$ of an independent and identically distributed (\textit{i.i.d.}) Nakagami-$m$ fading channel, which is defined as the amount of service provided, i.e., the integral of the instantaneous channel capacity over time $t$. By using the Characteristic Function (CF) approach and the infinitely divisible law, it is proved that, other than certain generally recognized curve form {or a stochastic process}, the channel service process $S(t)$ is a deterministic linear function of time $t$, namely, $S(t)=c_m^\ast\cdot t$ where $c_m^\ast$ is a constant determined by the fading parameter $m$. Furthermore, we extend it to general \textit{i.i.d.} fading channels and present an explicit form of the constant service rate $c_p^\ast$. The obtained work provides such a new insight on the system design of joint source/channel coding that there exists a coding scheme such that a receiver can decode with zero error probability and zero high layer queuing delay, if the transmitter maintains a constant data rate no more than $c_p^\ast$. Finally, we verify our analysis through Monte Carlo simulations.
1403.4759
Spelling Error Trends and Patterns in Sindhi
cs.CL
Statistical error Correction technique is the most accurate and widely used approach today, but for a language like Sindhi which is a low resourced language the trained corpora's are not available, so the statistical techniques are not possible at all. Instead a useful alternative would be to exploit various spelling error trends in Sindhi by using a Rule based approach. For designing such technique an essential prerequisite would be to study the various error patterns in a language. This pa per presents various studies of spelling error trends and their types in Sindhi Language. The research shows that the error trends common to all languages are also encountered in Sindhi but their do exist some error patters that are catered specifically to a Sindhi language.
1403.4762
Maximally Permissive Coordination Supervisory Control -- Towards Necessary and Sufficient Conditions
math.OC cs.FL cs.SY
In this paper, we further develop the coordination control framework for discrete-event systems with both complete and partial observation. A new weaker sufficient condition for the computation of the supremal conditionally controllable sublanguage is presented. This result is then used for the computation of the supremal conditionally controllable and conditionally normal sublanguage. The paper further generalizes the previous study by considering general, non-prefix-closed languages.
1403.4777
MFCC based Enlargement of the Training Set for Emotion Recognition in Speech
cs.CV
Emotional state recognition through speech is being a very interesting research topic nowadays. Using subliminal information of speech, denominated as prosody, it is possible to recognize the emotional state of the person. One of the main problems in the design of automatic emotion recognition systems is the small number of available patterns. This fact makes the learning process more difficult, due to the generalization problems that arise under these conditions. In this work we propose a solution to this problem consisting in enlarging the training set through the creation the new virtual patterns. In the case of emotional speech, most of the emotional information is included in speed and pitch variations. So, a change in the average pitch that does not modify neither the speed nor the pitch variations does not affect the expressed emotion. Thus, we use this prior information in order to create new patterns applying a gender dependent pitch shift modification in the feature extraction process of the classification system. For this purpose, we propose a frequency scaling modification of the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, used to classify the emotion. For this purpose, we propose a gender dependent frequency scaling modification. This proposed process allows us to synthetically increase the number of available patterns in the training set, thus increasing the generalization capability of the system and reducing the test error. Results carried out with two different classifiers with different degree of generalization capability demonstrate the suitability of the proposal.
1403.4781
A Split-and-Merge Dictionary Learning Algorithm for Sparse Representation
cs.LG stat.ML
In big data image/video analytics, we encounter the problem of learning an overcomplete dictionary for sparse representation from a large training dataset, which can not be processed at once because of storage and computational constraints. To tackle the problem of dictionary learning in such scenarios, we propose an algorithm for parallel dictionary learning. The fundamental idea behind the algorithm is to learn a sparse representation in two phases. In the first phase, the whole training dataset is partitioned into small non-overlapping subsets, and a dictionary is trained independently on each small database. In the second phase, the dictionaries are merged to form a global dictionary. We show that the proposed algorithm is efficient in its usage of memory and computational complexity, and performs on par with the standard learning strategy operating on the entire data at a time. As an application, we consider the problem of image denoising. We present a comparative analysis of our algorithm with the standard learning techniques, that use the entire database at a time, in terms of training and denoising performance. We observe that the split-and-merge algorithm results in a remarkable reduction of training time, without significantly affecting the denoising performance.
1403.4789
Structure-preserving model reduction of physical network systems by clustering
cs.SY
In this paper, we establish a method for model order reduction of a certain class of physical network systems. The proposed method is based on clustering of the vertices of the underlying graph, and yields a reduced order model within the same class. To capture the physical properties of the network, we allow for weights associated to both the edges as well as the vertices of the graph. We extend the notion of almost equitable partitions to this class of graphs. Consequently, an explicit model reduction error expression in the sense of H2-norm is provided for clustering arising from almost equitable partitions. Finally the method is extended to second-order systems.
1403.4804
Distributed System Identification with ADMM
cs.SY
This paper presents identification of both network connected systems as well as distributed systems governed by PDEs in the framework of distributed optimization via the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers. This approach opens first the possibility to identify distributed models in a global manner using all available data sequences and second the possibility for a distributed implementation. The latter will make the application to large scale complex systems possible. In addition to outlining a new large scale identification method, illustrations are shown for identifying both network connected systems and discretized PDEs.
1403.4828
Optimal Provision of Regulation Service Reserves Under Dynamic Energy Service Preferences
cs.SY
We propose and solve a stochastic dynamic programming (DP) problem addressing the optimal provision of regulation service reserves (RSR) by controlling dynamic demand preferences in smart buildings. A major contribution over past dynamic pricing work is that we pioneer the relaxation of static, uniformly distributed utility of demand. In this paper we model explicitly the dynamics of energy service preferences leading to a non-uniform and time varying probability distribution of demand utility. More explicitly, we model active and idle duty cycle appliances in a smart building as a closed queuing system with price-controlled arrival rates into the active appliance queue. Focusing on cooling appliances, we model the utility associated with the transition from idle to active as a non-uniform time varying function. We (i) derive an analytic characterization of the optimal policy and the differential cost function, and (ii) prove optimal policy monotonicity and value function convexity. These properties enable us to propose and implement a smart assisted value iteration (AVI) algorithm and an approximate DP (ADP) that exploits related functional approximations. Numerical results demonstrate the validity of the solution techniques and the computational advantage of the proposed ADP on realistic, large-state-space problems.
1403.4847
Massive MIMO Systems with Hardware-Constrained Base Stations
cs.IT math.IT
Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are cellular networks where the base stations (BSs) are equipped with unconventionally many antennas. Such large antenna arrays offer huge spatial degrees-of-freedom for transmission optimization; in particular, great signal gains, resilience to imperfect channel knowledge, and small inter-user interference are all achievable without extensive inter-cell coordination. The key to cost-efficient deployment of large arrays is the use of hardware-constrained base stations with low-cost antenna elements, as compared to today's expensive and power-hungry BSs. Low-cost transceivers are prone to hardware imperfections, but it has been conjectured that the excessive degrees-of-freedom of massive MIMO would bring robustness to such imperfections. We herein prove this claim for an uplink channel with multiplicative phase-drift, additive distortion noise, and noise amplification. Specifically, we derive a closed-form scaling law that shows how fast the imperfections increase with the number of antennas.
1403.4851
Circuit-Aware Design of Energy-Efficient Massive MIMO Systems
cs.IT math.IT
Densification is a key to greater throughput in cellular networks. The full potential of coordinated multipoint (CoMP) can be realized by massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where each base station (BS) has very many antennas. However, the improved throughput comes at the price of more infrastructure; hardware cost and circuit power consumption scale linearly/affinely with the number of antennas. In this paper, we show that one can make the circuit power increase with only the square root of the number of antennas by circuit-aware system design. To this end, we derive achievable user rates for a system model with hardware imperfections and show how the level of imperfections can be gradually increased while maintaining high throughput. The connection between this scaling law and the circuit power consumption is established for different circuits at the BS.
1403.4868
Zero forcing sets and controllability of dynamical systems defined on graphs
cs.SY
In this paper, controllability of systems defined on graphs is discussed. We consider the problem of controllability of the network for a family of matrices carrying the structure of an underlying directed graph. A one-to-one correspondence between the set of leaders rendering the network controllable and zero forcing sets is established. To illustrate the proposed results, special cases including path, cycle, and complete graphs are discussed. Moreover, as shown for graphs with a tree structure, the proposed results of the present paper together with the existing results on the zero forcing sets lead to a minimal leader selection scheme in particular cases.
1403.4871
Evolutionary Algorithm for Drug Discovery Interim Design Report
cs.NE cs.CE
A software program which aims to provide an exploration capability over the Search Space of potential drug molecules. The program explores the search space by generating random molecules, determining their fitness and then breeding a new generation from the fittest individuals. The search space, in theory any combination of any elements in any order, is constrained by the use of a subset of elements and a list of fragments, molecular parts that are known to be useful in drug development. The resultant molecules from each generation are stored in a searchable database, so that the user can browse through previous generations looking for interesting molecules.
1403.4879
A Compressive Sensing Based Approach to Sparse Wideband Array Design
cs.IT math.IT math.OC
Sparse wideband sensor array design for sensor location optimisation is highly nonlinear and it is traditionally solved by genetic algorithms, simulated annealing or other similar optimization methods. However, this is an extremely time-consuming process and more efficient solutions are needed. In this work, this problem is studied from the viewpoint of compressive sensing and a formulation based on a modified $l_1$ norm is derived. As there are multiple coefficients associated with each sensor, the key is to make sure that these coefficients are simultaneously minimized in order to discard the corresponding sensor locations. Design examples are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
1403.4881
Comparing Numerical Integration Schemes for Time-Continuous Car-Following Models
cs.CE physics.soc-ph
When simulating trajectories by integrating time-continuous car-following models, standard integration schemes such as the forth-order Runge-Kutta method (RK4) are rarely used while the simple Euler's method is popular among researchers. We compare four explicit methods: Euler's method, ballistic update, Heun's method (trapezoidal rule), and the standard forth-order RK4. As performance metrics, we plot the global discretization error as a function of the numerical complexity. We tested the methods on several time-continuous car-following models in several multi-vehicle simulation scenarios with and without discontinuities such as stops or a discontinuous behavior of an external leader. We find that the theoretical advantage of RK4 (consistency order~4) only plays a role if both the acceleration function of the model and the external data of the simulation scenario are sufficiently often differentiable. Otherwise, we obtain lower (and often fractional) consistency orders. Although, to our knowledge, Heun's method has never been used for integrating car-following models, it turns out to be the best scheme for many practical situations. The ballistic update always prevails Euler's method although both are of first order.
1403.4887
Using Entropy Estimates for DAG-Based Ontologies
cs.CL
Motivation: Entropy measurements on hierarchical structures have been used in methods for information retrieval and natural language modeling. Here we explore its application to semantic similarity. By finding shared ontology terms, semantic similarity can be established between annotated genes. A common procedure for establishing semantic similarity is to calculate the descriptiveness (information content) of ontology terms and use these values to determine the similarity of annotations. Most often information content is calculated for an ontology term by analyzing its frequency in an annotation corpus. The inherent problems in using these values to model functional similarity motivates our work. Summary: We present a novel calculation for establishing the entropy of a DAG-based ontology, which can be used in an alternative method for establishing the information content of its terms. We also compare our IC metric to two others using semantic and sequence similarity.
1403.4891
Dynamics of social balance under temporal interaction
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Real social contacts are often intermittent such that a link between a pair of nodes in a social network is only temporarily used. Effects of such temporal networks on social dynamics have been investigated for several phenomenological models such as epidemic spreading, linear diffusion processes, and nonlinear oscillations. Here, we numerically investigate nonlinear social balance dynamics in such a situation. Social balance is a classical psychological theory, which dictates that a triad is balanced if the three agents are mutual friends or if the two of them are the friends of each other and hostile to the other agent. We show that the social balance dynamics is slowed down on the temporal complete graph as compared to the corresponding static complete graph.
1403.4928
Clinical TempEval
cs.CL
We describe the Clinical TempEval task which is currently in preparation for the SemEval-2015 evaluation exercise. This task involves identifying and describing events, times and the relations between them in clinical text. Six discrete subtasks are included, focusing on recognising mentions of times and events, describing those mentions for both entity types, identifying the relation between an event and the document creation time, and identifying narrative container relations.
1403.4997
Universal and Distinct Properties of Communication Dynamics: How to Generate Realistic Inter-event Times
cs.SI cs.LG physics.soc-ph
With the advancement of information systems, means of communications are becoming cheaper, faster and more available. Today, millions of people carrying smart-phones or tablets are able to communicate at practically any time and anywhere they want. Among others, they can access their e-mails, comment on weblogs, watch and post comments on videos, make phone calls or text messages almost ubiquitously. Given this scenario, in this paper we tackle a fundamental aspect of this new era of communication: how the time intervals between communication events behave for different technologies and means of communications? Are there universal patterns for the inter-event time distribution (IED)? In which ways inter-event times behave differently among particular technologies? To answer these questions, we analyze eight different datasets from real and modern communication data and we found four well defined patterns that are seen in all the eight datasets. Moreover, we propose the use of the Self-Feeding Process (SFP) to generate inter-event times between communications. The SFP is extremely parsimonious point process that requires at most two parameters and is able to generate inter-event times with all the universal properties we observed in the data. We show the potential application of SFP by proposing a framework to generate a synthetic dataset containing realistic communication events of any one of the analyzed means of communications (e.g. phone calls, e-mails, comments on blogs) and an algorithm to detect anomalies.
1403.5006
Generating Preview Tables for Entity Graphs
cs.DB cs.IR
Users are tapping into massive, heterogeneous entity graphs for many applications. It is challenging to select entity graphs for a particular need, given abundant datasets from many sources and the oftentimes scarce information for them. We propose methods to produce preview tables for compact presentation of important entity types and relationships in entity graphs. The preview tables assist users in attaining a quick and rough preview of the data. They can be shown in a limited display space for a user to browse and explore, before she decides to spend time and resources to fetch and investigate the complete dataset. We formulate several optimization problems that look for previews with the highest scores according to intuitive goodness measures, under various constraints on preview size and distance between preview tables. The optimization problem under distance constraint is NP-hard. We design a dynamic-programming algorithm and an Apriori-style algorithm for finding optimal previews. Results from experiments, comparison with related work and user studies demonstrated the scoring measures' accuracy and the discovery algorithms' efficiency.
1403.5020
State-space solution to a minimum-entropy $\mathcal{H}_\infty$-optimal control problem with a nested information constraint
cs.SY math.OC
State-space formulas are derived for the minimum-entropy $\mathcal{H}_\infty$ controller when the plant and controller are constrained to be block-lower-triangular. Such a controller exists if and only if: the corresponding unstructured problem has a solution, a certain pair of coupled algebraic Riccati equations admits a mutually stabilizing fixed point, and a pair of spectral radius conditions is met. The controller's observer-based structure is also discussed, and a simple numerical approach for solving the coupled Riccati equations is presented.
1403.5022
An efficient, variational approximation of the best fitting multi-Bernoulli filter
cs.SY
The joint probabilistic data association (JPDA) filter is a popular tracking methodology for problems involving well-spaced targets, but it is rarely applied in problems with closely-spaced targets due to its complexity in these cases, and due to the well-known phenomenon of coalescence. This paper addresses these difficulties using random finite sets (RFSs) and variational inference, deriving a highly tractable, approximate method for obtaining the multi-Bernoulli distribution that minimises the set Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence from the true posterior, working within the RFS framework to incorporate uncertainty in target existence. The derivation is interpreted as an application of expectation-maximisation (EM), where the missing data is the correspondence of Bernoulli components (i.e., tracks) under each data association hypothesis. The missing data is shown to play an identical role to the selection of an ordered distribution in the same ordered family in the set JPDA algorithm. Subsequently, a special case of the proposed method is utilised to provide an efficient approximation of the minimum mean optimal sub-pattern assignment estimator. The performance of the proposed methods is demonstrated in challenging scenarios in which up to twenty targets come into close proximity.
1403.5029
Network-based Isoform Quantification with RNA-Seq Data for Cancer Transcriptome Analysis
cs.CE cs.AI cs.LG
High-throughput mRNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) is widely used for transcript quantification of gene isoforms. Since RNA-Seq data alone is often not sufficient to accurately identify the read origins from the isoforms for quantification, we propose to explore protein domain-domain interactions as prior knowledge for integrative analysis with RNA-seq data. We introduce a Network-based method for RNA-Seq-based Transcript Quantification (Net-RSTQ) to integrate protein domain-domain interaction network with short read alignments for transcript abundance estimation. Based on our observation that the abundances of the neighboring isoforms by domain-domain interactions in the network are positively correlated, Net-RSTQ models the expression of the neighboring transcripts as Dirichlet priors on the likelihood of the observed read alignments against the transcripts in one gene. The transcript abundances of all the genes are then jointly estimated with alternating optimization of multiple EM problems. In simulation Net-RSTQ effectively improved isoform transcript quantifications when isoform co-expressions correlate with their interactions. qRT-PCR results on 25 multi-isoform genes in a stem cell line, an ovarian cancer cell line, and a breast cancer cell line also showed that Net-RSTQ estimated more consistent isoform proportions with RNA-Seq data. In the experiments on the RNA-Seq data in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), the transcript abundances estimated by Net-RSTQ are more informative for patient sample classification of ovarian cancer, breast cancer and lung cancer. All experimental results collectively support that Net-RSTQ is a promising approach for isoform quantification.
1403.5045
Matroid Bandits: Fast Combinatorial Optimization with Learning
cs.LG cs.AI cs.SY stat.ML
A matroid is a notion of independence in combinatorial optimization which is closely related to computational efficiency. In particular, it is well known that the maximum of a constrained modular function can be found greedily if and only if the constraints are associated with a matroid. In this paper, we bring together the ideas of bandits and matroids, and propose a new class of combinatorial bandits, matroid bandits. The objective in these problems is to learn how to maximize a modular function on a matroid. This function is stochastic and initially unknown. We propose a practical algorithm for solving our problem, Optimistic Matroid Maximization (OMM); and prove two upper bounds, gap-dependent and gap-free, on its regret. Both bounds are sublinear in time and at most linear in all other quantities of interest. The gap-dependent upper bound is tight and we prove a matching lower bound on a partition matroid bandit. Finally, we evaluate our method on three real-world problems and show that it is practical.
1403.5071
Organised crime infiltration in the legitimate private economy - An empirical network analysis approach
cs.CY cs.SI physics.soc-ph
It is estimated that Italian Mafias registered 135 billion euros in profits only in 2010. Part of this huge amount of money, coming mostly from the drugs, prostitution and arms illicit markets, is often used to invest into legitimate private economies. As a consequence, the affected economies destabilise, become entrenched with violent forms of competition and are bound to stagnation. Nonetheless, few are the attempts to uncover the patterns followed by criminal organisations in their business ventures. The reason lays mostly in the poor availability of data on criminal activity, or in the highly risky task of gather it. This paper partially fills this gap thanks to access to information about the Sicilian Mafia in a city. More specifically, it tries to analyse the nature and extent of criminal infiltration into the legitimate private economy of the case-study using network techniques. The research demonstrates that sectors with a high degree of centrality and comprising fewer firms are the most vulnerable to this kind of security threat. It also shows that centrality is also the key criterion that makes a firm sensitive to infiltration, provided it belongs to a susceptible economic sector.
1403.5089
On the Gaussian Many-to-One X Channel
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, the Gaussian many-to-one X channel, which is a special case of general multiuser X channel, is studied. In the Gaussian many-to-one X channel, communication links exist between all transmitters and one of the receivers, along with a communication link between each transmitter and its corresponding receiver. As per the X channel assumption, transmission of messages is allowed on all the links of the channel. This communication model is different from the corresponding many-to-one interference channel (IC). Transmission strategies which involve using Gaussian codebooks and treating interference from a subset of transmitters as noise are formulated for the above channel. Sum-rate is used as the criterion of optimality for evaluating the strategies. Initially, a $3 \times 3$ many-to-one X channel is considered and three transmission strategies are analyzed. The first two strategies are shown to achieve sum-rate capacity under certain channel conditions. For the third strategy, a sum-rate outer bound is derived and the gap between the outer bound and the achieved rate is characterized. These results are later extended to the $K \times K$ case. Next, a region in which the many-to-one X channel can be operated as a many-to-one IC without loss of sum-rate is identified. Further, in the above region, it is shown that using Gaussian codebooks and treating interference as noise achieves a rate point that is within $K/2 -1$ bits from the sum-rate capacity. Subsequently, some implications of the above results to the Gaussian many-to-one IC are discussed. Transmission strategies for the many-to-one IC are formulated and channel conditions under which the strategies achieve sum-rate capacity are obtained. A region where the sum-rate capacity can be characterized to within $K/2-1$ bits is also identified.
1403.5115
Unconfused Ultraconservative Multiclass Algorithms
cs.LG
We tackle the problem of learning linear classifiers from noisy datasets in a multiclass setting. The two-class version of this problem was studied a few years ago by, e.g. Bylander (1994) and Blum et al. (1996): in these contributions, the proposed approaches to fight the noise revolve around a Perceptron learning scheme fed with peculiar examples computed through a weighted average of points from the noisy training set. We propose to build upon these approaches and we introduce a new algorithm called UMA (for Unconfused Multiclass additive Algorithm) which may be seen as a generalization to the multiclass setting of the previous approaches. In order to characterize the noise we use the confusion matrix as a multiclass extension of the classification noise studied in the aforementioned literature. Theoretically well-founded, UMA furthermore displays very good empirical noise robustness, as evidenced by numerical simulations conducted on both synthetic and real data. Keywords: Multiclass classification, Perceptron, Noisy labels, Confusion Matrix