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1404.2300
Better Performance ACF Operation for PAPR Reduction of OFDM Signal
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a promising modulation radio access scheme for next generation wireless communication systems because of its inherent immunity to multipath interference due to a low symbol rate, the use of a cyclic prefix, and its affinity to different transmission bandwidth arrangements. OFDM has already been adopted as a radio access scheme for several of the latest cellular system specifications such as the long-term evolution (LTE) system in the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project). Nevertheless, peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of OFDM signal is a significant drawback since it restricts the efficiency of the transmitter. A number of promising approaches have been proposed & implemented to reduce PAPR with the expense of increase transmit signal power, bit error rate (BER) & computational complexity and data rate loss, etc. In this paper, a relatively better scheme of amplitude clipping & filtering operation (ACF) is proposed and implemented which shows the significant improvement in case of PAPR reduction while increasing slight BER compare to an present method.
1404.2302
Performance Analysis on The Basis of a Comparative Study Between Multipath Rayleigh Fading And AWGN Channel in The Presence of Various Interference
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
Interference is the most important issue for present wireless communication. There are various kinds of channel used in wireless communication. Here I want to show a performance analysis on the basis of two different channels - AWGN and Multipath Rayleigh fading channel. This is the comparative analysis with different kinds of modulation techniques. Here I have also measured the Bit Error Rate with respect to different modulation techniques and compare the rate in different channels. My objective is to compare the different characteristics of the transmitter and receiver for different types of channels and modulators.
1404.2313
Outer-Product Hidden Markov Model and Polyphonic MIDI Score Following
cs.AI cs.SD
We present a polyphonic MIDI score-following algorithm capable of following performances with arbitrary repeats and skips, based on a probabilistic model of musical performances. It is attractive in practical applications of score following to handle repeats and skips which may be made arbitrarily during performances, but the algorithms previously described in the literature cannot be applied to scores of practical length due to problems with large computational complexity. We propose a new type of hidden Markov model (HMM) as a performance model which can describe arbitrary repeats and skips including performer tendencies on distributed score positions before and after them, and derive an efficient score-following algorithm that reduces computational complexity without pruning. A theoretical discussion on how much such information on performer tendencies improves the score-following results is given. The proposed score-following algorithm also admits performance mistakes and is demonstrated to be effective in practical situations by carrying out evaluations with human performances. The proposed HMM is potentially valuable for other topics in information processing and we also provide a detailed description of inference algorithms.
1404.2314
A Stochastic Temporal Model of Polyphonic MIDI Performance with Ornaments
cs.AI cs.SD
We study indeterminacies in realization of ornaments and how they can be incorporated in a stochastic performance model applicable for music information processing such as score-performance matching. We point out the importance of temporal information, and propose a hidden Markov model which describes it explicitly and represents ornaments with several state types. Following a review of the indeterminacies, they are carefully incorporated into the model through its topology and parameters, and the state construction for quite general polyphonic scores is explained in detail. By analyzing piano performance data, we find significant overlaps in inter-onset-interval distributions of chordal notes, ornaments, and inter-chord events, and the data is used to determine details of the model. The model is applied for score following and offline score-performance matching, yielding highly accurate matching for performances with many ornaments and relatively frequent errors, repeats, and skips.
1404.2334
Informed RRT*: Optimal Sampling-based Path Planning Focused via Direct Sampling of an Admissible Ellipsoidal Heuristic
cs.RO
Rapidly-exploring random trees (RRTs) are popular in motion planning because they find solutions efficiently to single-query problems. Optimal RRTs (RRT*s) extend RRTs to the problem of finding the optimal solution, but in doing so asymptotically find the optimal path from the initial state to every state in the planning domain. This behaviour is not only inefficient but also inconsistent with their single-query nature. For problems seeking to minimize path length, the subset of states that can improve a solution can be described by a prolate hyperspheroid. We show that unless this subset is sampled directly, the probability of improving a solution becomes arbitrarily small in large worlds or high state dimensions. In this paper, we present an exact method to focus the search by directly sampling this subset. The advantages of the presented sampling technique are demonstrated with a new algorithm, Informed RRT*. This method retains the same probabilistic guarantees on completeness and optimality as RRT* while improving the convergence rate and final solution quality. We present the algorithm as a simple modification to RRT* that could be further extended by more advanced path-planning algorithms. We show experimentally that it outperforms RRT* in rate of convergence, final solution cost, and ability to find difficult passages while demonstrating less dependence on the state dimension and range of the planning problem.
1404.2342
Social Collaborative Retrieval
cs.IR
Socially-based recommendation systems have recently attracted significant interest, and a number of studies have shown that social information can dramatically improve a system's predictions of user interests. Meanwhile, there are now many potential applications that involve aspects of both recommendation and information retrieval, and the task of collaborative retrieval---a combination of these two traditional problems---has recently been introduced. Successful collaborative retrieval requires overcoming severe data sparsity, making additional sources of information, such as social graphs, particularly valuable. In this paper we propose a new model for collaborative retrieval, and show that our algorithm outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches by incorporating information from social networks. We also provide empirical analyses of the ways in which cultural interests propagate along a social graph using a real-world music dataset.
1404.2343
Wireless Transmission of Video for Biomechanical Analysis
cs.CE cs.MM cs.NI
When there is a possibility to wirelessly stream video over a network, a sophisticated computer analysis of the transmitted video is possible. Such process is used in biomechanics when it is important to analyze athletes performance via streaming digital uncompressed video to a computer and then analyzing it using specific software such as Arial Performance Analysis Systems or Dartfish. This manuscript presents some approaches and challenges in streaming video as well as some applications of Information Technology in biomechanics. An example of how scientists from Indiana State University approached the wireless transmission of video is also introduced.
1404.2352
Low-complexity Decoding is Asymptotically Optimal in the SIMO MAC
cs.IT math.IT
A single input multiple output (SIMO) multiple access channel, with a large number of transmitters sending symbols from a constellation to the receiver of a multi-antenna base station, is considered. The fundamental limits of joint decoding of the signals from all the users using a low complexity convex relaxation of the maximum likelihood decoder (ML, constellation search) is investigated. It has been shown that in a rich scattering environment, and in the asymptotic limit of a large number of transmitters, reliable communication is possible even without employing coding at the transmitters. This holds even when the number of receiver antennas per transmitter is arbitrarily small, with scaling behaviour arbitrarily close to what is achievable with coding. Thus, the diversity of a large system not only makes the scaling law for coded systems similar to that of uncoded systems, but, as we show, also allows efficient decoders to realize close to the optimal performance of maximum-likelihood decoding. However, while there is no performance loss relative to the scaling laws of the optimal decoder, our proposed low-complexity decoder exhibits a loss of the exponential or near-exponential rates of decay of error probability relative to the optimal ML decoder.
1404.2353
Power System Parameters Forecasting Using Hilbert-Huang Transform and Machine Learning
cs.LG stat.ML
A novel hybrid data-driven approach is developed for forecasting power system parameters with the goal of increasing the efficiency of short-term forecasting studies for non-stationary time-series. The proposed approach is based on mode decomposition and a feature analysis of initial retrospective data using the Hilbert-Huang transform and machine learning algorithms. The random forests and gradient boosting trees learning techniques were examined. The decision tree techniques were used to rank the importance of variables employed in the forecasting models. The Mean Decrease Gini index is employed as an impurity function. The resulting hybrid forecasting models employ the radial basis function neural network and support vector regression. Apart from introduction and references the paper is organized as follows. The section 2 presents the background and the review of several approaches for short-term forecasting of power system parameters. In the third section a hybrid machine learning-based algorithm using Hilbert-Huang transform is developed for short-term forecasting of power system parameters. Fourth section describes the decision tree learning algorithms used for the issue of variables importance. Finally in section six the experimental results in the following electric power problems are presented: active power flow forecasting, electricity price forecasting and for the wind speed and direction forecasting.
1404.2357
Multiple Access Analog Fountain Codes
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we propose a novel rateless multiple access scheme based on the recently proposed capacity-approaching analog fountain code (AFC). We show that the multiple access process will create an equivalent analog fountain code, referred to as the multiple access analog fountain code (MA-AFC), at the destination. Thus, the standard belief propagation (BP) decoder can be effectively used to jointly decode all the users. We further analyse the asymptotic performance of the BP decoder by using a density evolution approach and show that the average log-likelihood ratio (LLR) of each user's information symbol is proportional to its transmit signal to noise ratio (SNR), when all the users utilize the same AFC code. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can approach the sum-rate capacity of the Gaussian multiple access channel in a wide range of signal to noise ratios.
1404.2367
Detecting Possible Manipulators in Elections
cs.MA cs.GT
Manipulation is a problem of fundamental importance in the context of voting in which the voters exercise their votes strategically instead of voting honestly to prevent selection of an alternative that is less preferred. The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem shows that there is no strategy-proof voting rule that simultaneously satisfies certain combinations of desirable properties. Researchers have attempted to get around the impossibility results in several ways such as domain restriction and computational hardness of manipulation. However these approaches have been shown to have limitations. Since prevention of manipulation seems to be elusive, an interesting research direction therefore is detection of manipulation. Motivated by this, we initiate the study of detection of possible manipulators in an election. We formulate two pertinent computational problems - Coalitional Possible Manipulators (CPM) and Coalitional Possible Manipulators given Winner (CPMW), where a suspect group of voters is provided as input to compute whether they can be a potential coalition of possible manipulators. In the absence of any suspect group, we formulate two more computational problems namely Coalitional Possible Manipulators Search (CPMS), and Coalitional Possible Manipulators Search given Winner (CPMSW). We provide polynomial time algorithms for these problems, for several popular voting rules. For a few other voting rules, we show that these problems are in NP-complete. We observe that detecting manipulation maybe easy even when manipulation is hard, as seen for example, in the case of the Borda voting rule.
1404.2374
A signature of power law network dynamics
q-bio.QM cs.SI physics.soc-ph q-bio.MN
Can one hear the 'sound' of a growing network? We address the problem of recognizing the topology of evolving biological or social networks. Starting from percolation theory, we analytically prove a linear inverse relationship between two simple graph parameters--the logarithm of the average cluster size and logarithm of the ratio of the edges of the graph to the theoretically maximum number of edges for that graph--that holds for all growing power law graphs. The result establishes a novel property of evolving power-law networks in the asymptotic limit of network size. Numerical simulations as well as fitting to real-world citation co-authorship networks demonstrate that the result holds for networks of finite sizes, and provides a convenient measure of the extent to which an evolving family of networks belongs to the same power-law class.
1404.2380
A Direct Approach to Computing Spatially Averaged Outage Probability
cs.IT math.IT
This letter describes a direct method for computing the spatially averaged outage probability of a network with interferers located according to a point process and signals subject to fading. Unlike most common approaches, it does not require transforms such as a Laplace transform. Examples show how to directly obtain the outage probability in the presence of Rayleigh fading in networks whose interferers are drawn from binomial and Poisson point processes defined over arbitrary regions. We furthermore show that, by extending the arbitrary region to the entire plane, the result for Poisson point processes converges to the same expression found by Baccelli et al..
1404.2393
Spatially Coupled Turbo Codes
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we introduce the concept of spatially coupled turbo codes (SC-TCs), as the turbo codes counterpart of spatially coupled low-density parity-check codes. We describe spatial coupling for both Berrou et al. and Benedetto et al. parallel and serially concatenated codes. For the binary erasure channel, we derive the exact density evolution (DE) equations of SC-TCs by using the method proposed by Kurkoski et al. to compute the decoding erasure probability of convolutional encoders. Using DE, we then analyze the asymptotic behavior of SC-TCs. We observe that the belief propagation (BP) threshold of SC-TCs improves with respect to that of the uncoupled ensemble and approaches its maximum a posteriori threshold. This phenomenon is especially significant for serially concatenated codes, whose uncoupled ensemble suffers from a poor BP threshold.
1404.2403
Robustness surfaces of complex networks
cs.SI
Despite the robustness of complex networks has been extensively studied in the last decade, there still lacks a unifying framework able to embrace all the proposed metrics. In the literature there are two open issues related to this gap: (a) how to dimension several metrics to allow their summation and (b) how to weight each of the metrics. In this work we propose a solution for the two aforementioned problems by defining the $R^*$-value and introducing the concept of \emph{robustness surface} ($\Omega$). The rationale of our proposal is to make use of Principal Component Analysis (PCA). We firstly adjust to 1 the initial robustness of a network. Secondly, we find the most informative robustness metric under a specific failure scenario. Then, we repeat the process for several percentage of failures and different realizations of the failure process. Lastly, we join these values to form the robustness surface, which allows the visual assessment of network robustness variability. Results show that a network presents different robustness surfaces (i.e., dissimilar shapes) depending on the failure scenario and the set of metrics. In addition, the robustness surface allows the robustness of different networks to be compared.
1404.2458
r-Extreme Signalling for Congestion Control
math.OC cs.AI cs.MA
In many "smart city" applications, congestion arises in part due to the nature of signals received by individuals from a central authority. In the model of Marecek et al. [arXiv:1406.7639, Int. J. Control 88(10), 2015], each agent uses one out of multiple resources at each time instant. The per-use cost of a resource depends on the number of concurrent users. A central authority has up-to-date knowledge of the congestion across all resources and uses randomisation to provide a scalar or an interval for each resource at each time. In this paper, the interval to broadcast per resource is obtained by taking the minima and maxima of costs observed within a time window of length r, rather than by randomisation. We show that the resulting distribution of agents across resources also converges in distribution, under plausible assumptions about the evolution of the population over time.
1404.2464
How Credible is the Prediction of a Party-Based Election?
cs.MA cs.GT
In a party-based election system, the voters are grouped into parties and all voters of a party are assumed to vote according to the party preferences over the candidates. Hence, once the party preferences are declared the outcome of the election can be determined. However, in the actual election, the members of some "instable" parties often leave their own party to join other parties. We introduce two parameters to measure the credibility of the prediction based on party preferences: Min is the minimum number of voters leaving the instable parties such that the prediction is no longer true, while Max is the maximum number of voters leaving the instable parties such that the prediction remains valid. Concerning the complexity of computing Min and Max, we consider both positional scoring rules (Plurality, Veto, r-Approval and Borda) and Condorcet-consistent rules (Copeland and Maximin). We show that for all considered scoring rules, Min is polynomial-time computable, while it is NP-hard to compute Min for Copeland and Maximin. With the only exception of Borda, Max can be computed in polynomial time for other scoring rules. We have NP-hardness results for the computation of Max under Borda, Maximin and Copeland.
1404.2471
Yet another algorithm to compute the nonlinearity of a Boolean function
cs.IT math.IT
We associate to each Boolean function a polynomial whose evaluations represents the distances from all possible Boolean affine functions. Both determining the coefficients of this polynomial from the truth table of the Boolean function and computing its evaluation vector requires a worst-case complexity of $O(n2^n)$ integer operations. This way, with a different approach, we reach the same complexity of established algorithms, such as those based on the fast Walsh transform.
1404.2520
Posterior Matching for Gaussian Broadcast Channels with Feedback
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, the posterior matching scheme proposed by Shayevits and Feder is extended to the Gaussian broadcast channel with feedback, and the error probabilities and achievable rate region are derived for this coding strategy by using the iterated random function theory. A variant of the Ozarow-Leung code for the general two-user broadcast channel with feedback can be realized as a special case of our coding scheme. Furthermore, for the symmetric Gaussian broadcast channel with feedback, our coding scheme achieves the linear-feedback sum-capacity like the LQG code and outperforms the Kramer code.
1404.2537
A Signal-Space Analysis of Spatial Self-Interference Isolation for Full-Duplex Wireless
cs.IT math.IT
The challenge to in-band full-duplex wireless communication is managing self-interference. Many designs have employed spatial isolation mechanisms, such as shielding or multi-antenna beamforming, to isolate the self-interference wave from the receiver. Such spatial isolation methods are effective, but by confining the transmit and receive signals to a subset of the available space, the full spatial resources of the channel be under-utilized, expending a cost that may nullify the net benefit of operating in full-duplex mode. In this paper we leverage an antenna-theory-based channel model to analyze the spatial degrees of freedom available to a full-duplex capable base station, and observe that whether or not spatial isolation out-performs time-division (i.e. half-duplex) depends heavily on the geometric distribution of scatterers. Unless the angular spread of the objects that scatter to the intended users is overlapped by the spread of objects that backscatter to the base station, then spatial isolation outperforms time division, otherwise time division may be optimal.
1404.2570
Modelling View-count Dynamics in YouTube
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
The goal of this paper is to study the behaviour of view-count in YouTube. We first propose several bio-inspired models for the evolution of the view-count of YouTube videos. We show, using a large set of empirical data, that the view-count for 90% of videos in YouTube can indeed be associated to at least one of these models, with a Mean Error which does not exceed 5%. We derive automatic ways of classifying the view-count curve into one of these models and of extracting the most suitable parameters of the model. We study empirically the impact of videos' popularity and category on the evolution of its view-count. We finally use the above classification along with the automatic parameters extraction in order to predict the evolution of videos' view-count.
1404.2571
RANCOR: Non-Linear Image Registration with Total Variation Regularization
cs.CV
Optimization techniques have been widely used in deformable registration, allowing for the incorporation of similarity metrics with regularization mechanisms. These regularization mechanisms are designed to mitigate the effects of trivial solutions to ill-posed registration problems and to otherwise ensure the resulting deformation fields are well-behaved. This paper introduces a novel deformable registration algorithm, RANCOR, which uses iterative convexification to address deformable registration problems under total-variation regularization. Initial comparative results against four state-of-the-art registration algorithms are presented using the Internet Brain Segmentation Repository (IBSR) database.
1404.2576
Asymptotics of Fingerprinting and Group Testing: Tight Bounds from Channel Capacities
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
In this work we consider the large-coalition asymptotics of various fingerprinting and group testing games, and derive explicit expressions for the capacities for each of these models. We do this both for simple decoders (fast but suboptimal) and for joint decoders (slow but optimal). For fingerprinting, we show that if the pirate strategy is known, the capacity often decreases linearly with the number of colluders, instead of quadratically as in the uninformed fingerprinting game. For many attacks the joint capacity is further shown to be strictly higher than the simple capacity. For group testing, we improve upon known results about the joint capacities, and derive new explicit asymptotics for the simple capacities. These show that existing simple group testing algorithms are suboptimal, and that simple decoders cannot asymptotically be as efficient as joint decoders. For the traditional group testing model, we show that the gap between the simple and joint capacities is a factor 1.44 for large numbers of defectives.
1404.2584
MIMO MAC-BC Duality with Linear-Feedback Coding Schemes
cs.IT math.IT
We show that for the multi-antenna Gaussian multi-access channel (MAC) and broadcast channel (BC) with perfect feedback, the rate regions achieved by linear-feedback coding schemes (called linear-feedback capacity regions) coincide when the same total input-power constraint is imposed on both channels and when the MAC channel matrices are the transposes of the BC channel matrices. Such a pair of MAC and BC is called dual. We also identify sub-classes of linear-feedback coding schemes that achieve the linear-feedback capacity regions of these two channels and present multi-letter expressions for the linear-feedback capacity regions. Moreover, within the two sub-classes of coding schemes that achieve the linear-feedback capacity regions for a given MAC and its dual BC, we identify for each MAC scheme a BC scheme and for each BC scheme a MAC scheme so that the two schemes have same total input power and achieve the same rate regions.
1404.2590
Cluster analysis of weighted bipartite networks: a new copula-based approach
physics.data-an cs.SI physics.soc-ph
In this work we are interested in identifying clusters of "positional equivalent" actors, i.e. actors who play a similar role in a system. In particular, we analyze weighted bipartite networks that describes the relationships between actors on one side and features or traits on the other, together with the intensity level to which actors show their features. The main contribution of our work is twofold. First, we develop a methodological approach that takes into account the underlying multivariate dependence among groups of actors. The idea is that positions in a network could be defined on the basis of the similar intensity levels that the actors exhibit in expressing some features, instead of just considering relationships that actors hold with each others. Second, we propose a new clustering procedure that exploits the potentiality of copula functions, a mathematical instrument for the modelization of the stochastic dependence structure. Our clustering algorithm can be applied both to binary and real-valued matrices. We validate it with simulations and applications to real-world data.
1404.2644
A Distributed Frank-Wolfe Algorithm for Communication-Efficient Sparse Learning
cs.DC cs.AI cs.LG stat.ML
Learning sparse combinations is a frequent theme in machine learning. In this paper, we study its associated optimization problem in the distributed setting where the elements to be combined are not centrally located but spread over a network. We address the key challenges of balancing communication costs and optimization errors. To this end, we propose a distributed Frank-Wolfe (dFW) algorithm. We obtain theoretical guarantees on the optimization error $\epsilon$ and communication cost that do not depend on the total number of combining elements. We further show that the communication cost of dFW is optimal by deriving a lower-bound on the communication cost required to construct an $\epsilon$-approximate solution. We validate our theoretical analysis with empirical studies on synthetic and real-world data, which demonstrate that dFW outperforms both baselines and competing methods. We also study the performance of dFW when the conditions of our analysis are relaxed, and show that dFW is fairly robust.
1404.2655
Open problem: Tightness of maximum likelihood semidefinite relaxations
math.OC cs.LG stat.ML
We have observed an interesting, yet unexplained, phenomenon: Semidefinite programming (SDP) based relaxations of maximum likelihood estimators (MLE) tend to be tight in recovery problems with noisy data, even when MLE cannot exactly recover the ground truth. Several results establish tightness of SDP based relaxations in the regime where exact recovery from MLE is possible. However, to the best of our knowledge, their tightness is not understood beyond this regime. As an illustrative example, we focus on the generalized Procrustes problem.
1404.2656
Wireless Backhaul Node Placement for Small Cell Networks
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
Small cells have been proposed as a vehicle for wireless networks to keep up with surging demand. Small cells come with a significant challenge of providing backhaul to transport data to(from) a gateway node in the core network. Fiber based backhaul offers the high rates needed to meet this requirement, but is costly and time-consuming to deploy, when not readily available. Wireless backhaul is an attractive option for small cells as it provides a less expensive and easy-to-deploy alternative to fiber. However, there are multitude of bands and features (e.g. LOS/NLOS, spatial multiplexing etc.) associated with wireless backhaul that need to be used intelligently for small cells. Candidate bands include: sub-6 GHz band that is useful in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenarios, microwave band (6-42 GHz) that is useful in point-to-point line-of-sight (LOS) scenarios, and millimeter wave bands (e.g. 60, 70 and 80 GHz) that are recently being commercially used in LOS scenarios. In many deployment topologies, it is advantageous to use aggregator nodes, located at the roof tops of tall buildings near small cells. These nodes can provide high data rate to multiple small cells in NLOS paths, sustain the same data rate to gateway nodes using LOS paths and take advantage of all available bands. This work performs the joint cost optimal aggregator node placement, power allocation, channel scheduling and routing to optimize the wireless backhaul network. We formulate mixed integer nonlinear programs (MINLP) to capture the different interference and multiplexing patterns at sub-6 GHz and microwave band. We solve the MINLP through linear relaxation and branch-and-bound algorithm and apply our algorithm in an example wireless backhaul network of downtown Manhattan.
1404.2668
How Complex Contagions Spread Quickly in the Preferential Attachment Model and Other Time-Evolving Networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
In this paper, we study the spreading speed of complex contagions in a social network. A $k$-complex contagion starts from a set of initially infected seeds such that any node with at least $k$ infected neighbors gets infected. Simple contagions, i.e., $k=1$, quickly spread to the entire network in small world graphs. However, fast spreading of complex contagions appears to be less likely and more delicate; the successful cases depend crucially on the network structure~\cite{G08,Ghasemiesfeh:2013:CCW}. Our main result shows that complex contagions can spread fast in a general family of time-evolving networks that includes the preferential attachment model~\cite{barabasi99emergence}. We prove that if the initial seeds are chosen as the oldest nodes in a network of this family, a $k$-complex contagion covers the entire network of $n$ nodes in $O(\log n)$ steps. We show that the choice of the initial seeds is crucial. If the initial seeds are uniformly randomly chosen in the PA model, even with a polynomial number of them, a complex contagion would stop prematurely. The oldest nodes in a preferential attachment model are likely to have high degrees. However, we remark that it is actually not the power law degree distribution per se that facilitates fast spreading of complex contagions, but rather the evolutionary graph structure of such models. Some members of the said family do not even have a power-law distribution. We also prove that complex contagions are fast in the copy model~\cite{KumarRaRa00}, a variant of the preferential attachment family. Finally, we prove that when a complex contagion starts from an arbitrary set of initial seeds on a general graph, determining if the number of infected vertices is above a given threshold is $\mathbf{P}$-complete. Thus, one cannot hope to categorize all the settings in which complex contagions percolate in a graph.
1404.2725
Concave Switching in Single and Multihop Networks
cs.SY cs.NI math.OC math.PR
Switched queueing networks model wireless networks, input queued switches and numerous other networked communications systems. For single-hop networks, we consider a {($\alpha,g$)-switch policy} which combines the MaxWeight policies with bandwidth sharing networks -- a further well studied model of Internet congestion. We prove the maximum stability property for this class of randomized policies. Thus these policies have the same first order behavior as the MaxWeight policies. However, for multihop networks some of these generalized polices address a number of critical weakness of the MaxWeight/BackPressure policies. For multihop networks with fixed routing, we consider the Proportional Scheduler (or (1,log)-policy). In this setting, the BackPressure policy is maximum stable, but must maintain a queue for every route-destination, which typically grows rapidly with a network's size. However, this proportionally fair policy only needs to maintain a queue for each outgoing link, which is typically bounded in number. As is common with Internet routing, by maintaining per-link queueing each node only needs to know the next hop for each packet and not its entire route. Further, in contrast to BackPressure, the Proportional Scheduler does not compare downstream queue lengths to determine weights, only local link information is required. This leads to greater potential for decomposed implementations of the policy. Through a reduction argument and an entropy argument, we demonstrate that, whilst maintaining substantially less queueing overhead, the Proportional Scheduler achieves maximum throughput stability.
1404.2728
Real-time Decolorization using Dominant Colors
cs.GR cs.CV
Decolorization is the process to convert a color image or video to its grayscale version, and it has received great attention in recent years. An ideal decolorization algorithm should preserve the original color contrast as much as possible. Meanwhile, it should provide the final decolorized result as fast as possible. However, most of the current methods are suffering from either unsatisfied color information preservation or high computational cost, limiting their application value. In this paper, a simple but effective technique is proposed for real-time decolorization. Based on the typical rgb2gray() color conversion model, which produces a grayscale image by linearly combining R, G, and B channels, we propose a dominant color hypothesis and a corresponding distance measurement metric to evaluate the quality of grayscale conversion. The local optimum scheme provides several "good" candidates in a confidence interval, from which the "best" result can be extracted. Experimental results demonstrate that remarkable simplicity of the proposed method facilitates the process of high resolution images and videos in real-time using a common CPU.
1404.2741
Nonlinearity of Boolean functions: an algorithmic approach based on multivariate polynomials
cs.IT math.IT
We compute the nonlinearity of Boolean functions with Groebner basis techniques, providing two algorithms: one over the binary field and the other over the rationals. We also estimate their complexity. Then we show how to improve our rational algorithm, arriving at a worst-case complexity of $O(n2^n)$ operations over the integers, that is, sums and doublings. This way, with a different approach, we reach the same complexity of established algorithms, such as those based on the fast Walsh transform.
1404.2745
Approximate controllability and lack of controllability to zero of the heat equation with memory
cs.SY math.OC
In this paper we consider the heat equation with memory in a bounded region $\Omega \subset\mathbb{R}^d$, $d\geq 1$, in the case that the propagation speed of the signal is infinite (i.e. the Colemann-Gurtin model). The memory kernel is of class $C^1$. We examine its controllability properties both under the action of boundary controls or when the controls are distributed in a subregion of $\Omega$. We prove approximate controllability of the system and, in contrast with this, we prove the existence of initial conditions which cannot be steered to hit the target $0$ in a certain time $T$, of course when the memory kernel is not identically zero. In both the cases we derive our results from well known properties of the heat equation.
1404.2750
Efficient Advert Assignment
cs.GT cs.SY math.OC
We develop a framework for the analysis of large-scale Ad-auctions where adverts are assigned over a continuum of search types. For this pay-per-click market, we provide an efficient mechanism that maximizes social welfare. In particular, we show that the social welfare optimization can be solved in separate optimizations conducted on the time-scales relevant to the search platform and advertisers. Here, on each search occurrence, the platform solves an assignment problem and, on a slower time-scale, each advertiser submits a bid which matches its demand for click-throughs with supply. Importantly, knowledge of global parameters, such as the distribution of search terms, is not required when separating the problem in this way. Exploiting the information asymmetry between the platform and advertiser, we describe a simple mechanism which incentivizes truthful bidding and has a unique Nash equilibrium that is socially optimal, and thus implements our decomposition. Further, we consider models where advertisers adapt their bids smoothly over time, and prove convergence to the solution that maximizes social welfare. Finally, we describe several extensions which illustrate the flexibility and tractability of our framework.
1404.2768
Verification of confliction and unreachability in rule-based expert systems with model checking
cs.AI
It is important to find optimal solutions for structural errors in rule-based expert systems .Solutions to discovering such errors by using model checking techniques have already been proposed, but these solutions have problems such as state space explosion. In this paper, to overcome these problems, we model the rule-based systems as finite state transition systems and express confliction and unreachability as Computation Tree Logic (CTL) logic formula and then use the technique of model checking to detect confliction and unreachability in rule-based systems with the model checker UPPAAL.
1404.2772
A New Clustering Approach for Anomaly Intrusion Detection
cs.DC cs.CR cs.LG
Recent advances in technology have made our work easier compare to earlier times. Computer network is growing day by day but while discussing about the security of computers and networks it has always been a major concerns for organizations varying from smaller to larger enterprises. It is true that organizations are aware of the possible threats and attacks so they always prepare for the safer side but due to some loopholes attackers are able to make attacks. Intrusion detection is one of the major fields of research and researchers are trying to find new algorithms for detecting intrusions. Clustering techniques of data mining is an interested area of research for detecting possible intrusions and attacks. This paper presents a new clustering approach for anomaly intrusion detection by using the approach of K-medoids method of clustering and its certain modifications. The proposed algorithm is able to achieve high detection rate and overcomes the disadvantages of K-means algorithm.
1404.2796
Linear Batch Codes
cs.IT math.IT
In an application, where a client wants to obtain many elements from a large database, it is often desirable to have some load balancing. Batch codes (introduced by Ishai et al. in STOC 2004) make it possible to do exactly that: the large database is divided between many servers, so that the client has to only make a small number of queries to every server to obtain sufficient information to reconstruct all desired elements. Other important parameters of the batch codes are total storage and the number of servers. Batch codes also have applications in cryptography (namely, in the construction of multi-query computationally-private information retrieval protocols). In this work, we initiate the study of linear batch codes. These codes, in particular, are of potential use in distributed storage systems. We show that a generator matrix of a binary linear batch code is also a generator matrix of classical binary linear error-correcting code. This immediately yields that a variety of upper bounds, which were developed for error-correcting codes, are applicable also to binary linear batch codes. We also propose new methods to construct large linear batch codes from the smaller ones.
1404.2813
Cycle flow based module detection in directed recurrence networks
physics.data-an cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We present a new cycle flow based method for finding fuzzy partitions of weighted directed networks coming from time series data. We show that this method overcomes essential problems of most existing clustering approaches, which tend to ignore important directional information by considering only one-step, one-directional node connections. Our method introduces a novel measure of communication between nodes using multi-step, bidirectional transitions encoded by a cycle decomposition of the probability flow. Symmetric properties of this measure enable us to construct an undirected graph that captures information flow of the original graph seen by the data and apply clustering methods designed for undirected graphs. Finally, we demonstrate our algorithm by analyzing earthquake time series data, which naturally induce (time-)directed networks. This article has been published originally in EPL, DOI: 10.1209/0295-5075/108/68008. This version differs from the published version by minor formatting details.
1404.2819
Decoding of Quasi-Cyclic Codes up to A New Lower Bound on the Minimum Distance
cs.IT math.IT
A new lower bound on the minimum Hamming distance of linear quasi-cyclic codes over finite fields is proposed. It is based on spectral analysis and generalizes the Semenov- Trifonov bound in a similar way as the Hartmann-Tzeng bound extends the BCH approach for cyclic codes. Furthermore, a syndrome-based algebraic decoding algorithm is given.
1404.2825
Asymptotics of Fingerprinting and Group Testing: Capacity-Achieving Log-Likelihood Decoders
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT math.ST stat.TH
We study the large-coalition asymptotics of fingerprinting and group testing, and derive explicit decoders that provably achieve capacity for many of the considered models. We do this both for simple decoders (fast but suboptimal) and for joint decoders (slow but optimal), and both for informed and uninformed settings. For fingerprinting, we show that if the pirate strategy is known, the Neyman-Pearson-based log-likelihood decoders provably achieve capacity, regardless of the strategy. The decoder built against the interleaving attack is further shown to be a universal decoder, able to deal with arbitrary attacks and achieving the uninformed capacity. This universal decoder is shown to be closely related to the Lagrange-optimized decoder of Oosterwijk et al. and the empirical mutual information decoder of Moulin. Joint decoders are also proposed, and we conjecture that these also achieve the corresponding joint capacities. For group testing, the simple decoder for the classical model is shown to be more efficient than the one of Chan et al. and it provably achieves the simple group testing capacity. For generalizations of this model such as noisy group testing, the resulting simple decoders also achieve the corresponding simple capacities.
1404.2843
Practical Comparison of Optimization Algorithms for Learning-Based MPC with Linear Models
math.OC cs.RO
Learning-based control methods are an attractive approach for addressing performance and efficiency challenges in robotics and automation systems. One such technique that has found application in these domains is learning-based model predictive control (LBMPC). An important novelty of LBMPC lies in the fact that its robustness and stability properties are independent of the type of online learning used. This allows the use of advanced statistical or machine learning methods to provide the adaptation for the controller. This paper is concerned with providing practical comparisons of different optimization algorithms for implementing the LBMPC method, for the special case where the dynamic model of the system is linear and the online learning provides linear updates to the dynamic model. For comparison purposes, we have implemented a primal-dual infeasible start interior point method that exploits the sparsity structure of LBMPC. Our open source implementation (called LBmpcIPM) is available through a BSD license and is provided freely to enable the rapid implementation of LBMPC on other platforms. This solver is compared to the dense active set solvers LSSOL and qpOASES using a quadrotor helicopter platform. Two scenarios are considered: The first is a simulation comparing hovering control for the quadrotor, and the second is on-board control experiments of dynamic quadrotor flight. Though the LBmpcIPM method has better asymptotic computational complexity than LSSOL and qpOASES, we find that for certain integrated systems (like our quadrotor testbed) these methods can outperform LBmpcIPM. This suggests that actual benchmarks should be used when choosing which algorithm is used to implement LBMPC on practical systems.
1404.2862
Tangle Machines
cs.IT cs.SY math.GT math.IT quant-ph
Tangle machines are topologically inspired diagrammatic models. Their novel feature is their natural notion of equivalence. Equivalent tangle machines may differ locally, but globally they are considered to share the same information content. The goal of tangle machine equivalence is to provide a context-independent method to select, from among many ways to perform a task, the `best' way to perform the task. The concept of equivalent tangle machines is illustrated through examples in which they represent recursive computations, networks of adiabatic quantum computations, and networks of distributed information processing.
1404.2863
Tangle Machines II: Invariants
cs.IT cs.SY math.GT math.IT quant-ph
The preceding paper constructed tangle machines as diagrammatic models, and illustrated their utility with a number of examples. The information content of a tangle machine is contained in characteristic quantities associated to equivalence classes of tangle machines, which are called invariants. This paper constructs invariants of tangle machines. Chief among these are the prime factorizations of a machine, which are essentially unique. This is proven using low dimensional topology, through representing a colour-suppressed machine as a diagram for a network of jointly embedded spheres and intervals in 4-space. The complexity of a tangle machine is defined as its number of prime factors.
1404.2864
LDPC coded transmissions over the Gaussian broadcast channel with confidential messages
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
We design and assess some practical low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded transmission schemes for the Gaussian broadcast channel with confidential messages (BCC). This channel model is different from the classical wiretap channel model as the unauthorized receiver (Eve) must be able to decode some part of the information. Hence, the reliability and security targets are different from those of the wiretap channel. In order to design and assess practical coding schemes, we use the error rate as a metric of the performance achieved by the authorized receiver (Bob) and the unauthorized receiver (Eve). We study the system feasibility, and show that two different levels of protection against noise are required on the public and the secret messages. This can be achieved in two ways: i) by using LDPC codes with unequal error protection (UEP) of the transmitted information bits or ii) by using two classical non-UEP LDPC codes with different rates. We compare these two approaches and show that, for the considered examples, the solution exploiting UEP LDPC codes is more efficient than that using non-UEP LDPC codes.
1404.2872
TreQ-CG: Clustering Accelerates High-Throughput Sequencing Read Mapping
cs.CE
As high-throughput sequencers become standard equipment outside of sequencing centers, there is an increasing need for efficient methods for pre-processing and primary analysis. While a vast literature proposes methods for HTS data analysis, we argue that significant improvements can still be gained by exploiting expensive pre-processing steps which can be amortized with savings from later stages. We propose a method to accelerate and improve read mapping based on an initial clustering of possibly billions of high-throughput sequencing reads, yielding clusters of high stringency and a high degree of overlap. This clustering improves on the state-of-the-art in running time for small datasets and, for the first time, makes clustering high-coverage human libraries feasible. Given the efficiently computed clusters, only one representative read from each cluster needs to be mapped using a traditional readmapper such as BWA, instead of individually mapping all reads. On human reads, all processing steps, including clustering and mapping, only require 11%-59% of the time for individually mapping all reads, achieving speed-ups for all readmappers, while minimally affecting mapping quality. This accelerates a highly sensitive readmapper such as Stampy to be competitive with a fast readmapper such as BWA on unclustered reads.
1404.2878
Overview of Stemming Algorithms for Indian and Non-Indian Languages
cs.CL
Stemming is a pre-processing step in Text Mining applications as well as a very common requirement of Natural Language processing functions. Stemming is the process for reducing inflected words to their stem. The main purpose of stemming is to reduce different grammatical forms / word forms of a word like its noun, adjective, verb, adverb etc. to its root form. Stemming is widely uses in Information Retrieval system and reduces the size of index files. We can say that the goal of stemming is to reduce inflectional forms and sometimes derivationally related forms of a word to a common base form. In this paper we have discussed different stemming algorithm for non-Indian and Indian language, methods of stemming, accuracy and errors.
1404.2885
A Networks and Machine Learning Approach to Determine the Best College Coaches of the 20th-21st Centuries
stat.AP cs.LG cs.SI
Our objective is to find the five best college sports coaches of past century for three different sports. We decided to look at men's basketball, football, and baseball. We wanted to use an approach that could definitively determine team skill from the games played, and then use a machine-learning algorithm to calculate the correct coach skills for each team in a given year. We created a networks-based model to calculate team skill from historical game data. A digraph was created for each year in each sport. Nodes represented teams, and edges represented a game played between two teams. The arrowhead pointed towards the losing team. We calculated the team skill of each graph using a right-hand eigenvector centrality measure. This way, teams that beat good teams will be ranked higher than teams that beat mediocre teams. The eigenvector centrality rankings for most years were well correlated with tournament performance and poll-based rankings. We assumed that the relationship between coach skill $C_s$, player skill $P_s$, and team skill $T_s$ was $C_s \cdot P_s = T_s$. We then created a function to describe the probability that a given score difference would occur based on player skill and coach skill. We multiplied the probabilities of all edges in the network together to find the probability that the correct network would occur with any given player skill and coach skill matrix. We was able to determine player skill as a function of team skill and coach skill, eliminating the need to optimize two unknown matrices. The top five coaches in each year were noted, and the top coach of all time was calculated by dividing the number of times that coach ranked in the yearly top five by the years said coach had been active.
1404.2892
Modelling of Walking Humanoid Robot With Capability of Floor Detection and Dynamic Balancing Using Colored Petri Net
cs.RO
Most humanoid robots have highly complicated structure and design of robots that are very similar to human is extremely difficult. In this paper, modelling of a general and comprehensive algorithm for control of humanoid robots is presented using Colored Petri Nets. For keeping dynamic balance of the robot, combination of Gyroscope and Accelerometer sensors are used in algorithm. Image processing is used to identify two fundamental issues: first, detection of target or an object which robot must follow; second, detecting surface of the ground so that walking robot could maintain its balance just like a human and shows its best performance. Presented model gives high-level view of humanoid robot's operations.
1404.2903
Thoughts on a Recursive Classifier Graph: a Multiclass Network for Deep Object Recognition
cs.CV cs.LG cs.NE
We propose a general multi-class visual recognition model, termed the Classifier Graph, which aims to generalize and integrate ideas from many of today's successful hierarchical recognition approaches. Our graph-based model has the advantage of enabling rich interactions between classes from different levels of interpretation and abstraction. The proposed multi-class system is efficiently learned using step by step updates. The structure consists of simple logistic linear layers with inputs from features that are automatically selected from a large pool. Each newly learned classifier becomes a potential new feature. Thus, our feature pool can consist both of initial manually designed features as well as learned classifiers from previous steps (graph nodes), each copied many times at different scales and locations. In this manner we can learn and grow both a deep, complex graph of classifiers and a rich pool of features at different levels of abstraction and interpretation. Our proposed graph of classifiers becomes a multi-class system with a recursive structure, suitable for deep detection and recognition of several classes simultaneously.
1404.2904
Construction A of Lattices over Number Fields and Block Fading Wiretap Coding
cs.IT math.IT math.NT
We propose a lattice construction from totally real and CM fields, which naturally generalizes the Construction A of lattices from $p$-ary codes obtained from the cyclotomic field $\mathbb{Q}(\zeta_p)$, $p$ a prime, which in turn contains the so-called Construction A of lattices from binary codes as a particular case. We focus on the maximal totally real subfield $\mathbb{Q}(\zeta_{p^r}+\zeta_{p}^{-r})$ of the cyclotomic field $\mathbb{Q}(\zeta_{p^r})$, $r\geq 1$. Our construction has applications to coset encoding of algebraic lattice codes, and we detail the case of coset encoding of block fading wiretap codes.
1404.2923
Self-organization towards optimally interdependent networks by means of coevolution
physics.soc-ph cs.SI q-bio.PE
Coevolution between strategy and network structure is established as a means to arrive at optimal conditions for resolving social dilemmas. Yet recent research highlights that the interdependence between networks may be just as important as the structure of an individual network. We therefore introduce coevolution of strategy and network interdependence to study whether it can give rise to elevated levels of cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma game. We show that the interdependence between networks self-organizes so as to yield optimal conditions for the evolution of cooperation. Even under extremely adverse conditions cooperators can prevail where on isolated networks they would perish. This is due to the spontaneous emergence of a two-class society, with only the upper class being allowed to control and take advantage of the interdependence. Spatial patterns reveal that cooperators, once arriving to the upper class, are much more competent than defectors in sustaining compact clusters of followers. Indeed, the asymmetric exploitation of interdependence confers to them a strong evolutionary advantage that may resolve even the toughest of social dilemmas.
1404.2948
Gradient-based Laplacian Feature Selection
cs.LG
Analysis of high dimensional noisy data is of essence across a variety of research fields. Feature selection techniques are designed to find the relevant feature subset that can facilitate classification or pattern detection. Traditional (supervised) feature selection methods utilize label information to guide the identification of relevant feature subsets. In this paper, however, we consider the unsupervised feature selection problem. Without the label information, it is particularly difficult to identify a small set of relevant features due to the noisy nature of real-world data which corrupts the intrinsic structure of the data. Our Gradient-based Laplacian Feature Selection (GLFS) selects important features by minimizing the variance of the Laplacian regularized least squares regression model. With $\ell_1$ relaxation, GLFS can find a sparse subset of features that is relevant to the Laplacian manifolds. Extensive experiments on simulated, three real-world object recognition and two computational biology datasets, have illustrated the power and superior performance of our approach over multiple state-of-the-art unsupervised feature selection methods. Additionally, we show that GLFS selects a sparser set of more relevant features in a supervised setting outperforming the popular elastic net methodology.
1404.2959
SocioAware Content Distribution using P2P solutions in Hybrid Networks
cs.SI cs.NI
The growing online traffic that is bringing the infrastructure to its limits induces an urgent demand for an efficient content delivery model. Capitalizing social networks and using advanced delivery networks potentially can help to solve this problem. However, due to the complex nature of the involved networks such a model is difficult to assess. In this paper we use a simulative approach to analyze how the SatTorrent P2P protocol supported by social networks can improve content delivery by means of reduced download duration and traffic.
1404.2983
Couple Control Model Implementation on Antagonistic Mono- and Bi-Articular Actuators
physics.med-ph cs.RO
Recently, robot assisted therapy devices are increasingly used for spinal cord injury (SCI) rehabilitation in assisting handicapped patients to regain their impaired movements. Assistive robotic systems may not be able to cure or fully compensate impairments, but it should be able to assist certain impaired functions and ease movements. In this study, a couple control model for lower-limb orthosis of a body weight support gait training system is proposed. The developed leg orthosis implements the use of pneumatic artificial muscle as an actuation system. The pneumatic muscle was arranged antagonistically to form two pair of mono-articular muscles (i.e., hip and knee joints), and a pair of bi-articular actuators (i.e., rectus femoris and hamstring). The results of the proposed couple control model showed that, it was able to simultaneously control the antagonistic mono- and bi-articular actuators and sufficiently performed walking motion of the leg orthosis.
1404.2984
Distribution-Aware Sampling and Weighted Model Counting for SAT
cs.AI cs.DS
Given a CNF formula and a weight for each assignment of values to variables, two natural problems are weighted model counting and distribution-aware sampling of satisfying assignments. Both problems have a wide variety of important applications. Due to the inherent complexity of the exact versions of the problems, interest has focused on solving them approximately. Prior work in this area scaled only to small problems in practice, or failed to provide strong theoretical guarantees, or employed a computationally-expensive maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) oracle that assumes prior knowledge of a factored representation of the weight distribution. We present a novel approach that works with a black-box oracle for weights of assignments and requires only an {\NP}-oracle (in practice, a SAT-solver) to solve both the counting and sampling problems. Our approach works under mild assumptions on the distribution of weights of satisfying assignments, provides strong theoretical guarantees, and scales to problems involving several thousand variables. We also show that the assumptions can be significantly relaxed while improving computational efficiency if a factored representation of the weights is known.
1404.2986
A Tutorial on Independent Component Analysis
cs.LG stat.ML
Independent component analysis (ICA) has become a standard data analysis technique applied to an array of problems in signal processing and machine learning. This tutorial provides an introduction to ICA based on linear algebra formulating an intuition for ICA from first principles. The goal of this tutorial is to provide a solid foundation on this advanced topic so that one might learn the motivation behind ICA, learn why and when to apply this technique and in the process gain an introduction to this exciting field of active research.
1404.2993
On More Bent Functions From Dillon Exponents
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we obtain a new class of $p$-ary binomial bent functions which are determined by Kloosterman sums. The bentness of another three classes of functions is characterized by some exponential sums and some results in \cite{Linian2013} are generalized. Furthermore we obtain, in some special cases, some bent functions are determined by Kloosterman sums.
1404.2997
Automatic Detection of Reuses and Citations in Literary Texts
cs.CL cs.DL
For more than forty years now, modern theories of literature (Compagnon, 1979) insist on the role of paraphrases, rewritings, citations, reciprocal borrowings and mutual contributions of any kinds. The notions of intertextuality, transtextuality, hypertextuality/hypotextuality, were introduced in the seventies and eighties to approach these phenomena. The careful analysis of these references is of particular interest in evaluating the distance that the creator voluntarily introduces with his/her masters. Phoebus is collaborative project that makes computer scientists from the University Pierre and Marie Curie (LIP6-UPMC) collaborate with the literary teams of Paris-Sorbonne University with the aim to develop efficient tools for literary studies that take advantage of modern computer science techniques. In this context, we have developed a piece of software that automatically detects and explores networks of textual reuses in classical literature. This paper describes the principles on which is based this program, the significant results that have already been obtained and the perspectives for the near future.
1404.2999
A Reverse Hierarchy Model for Predicting Eye Fixations
cs.CV
A number of psychological and physiological evidences suggest that early visual attention works in a coarse-to-fine way, which lays a basis for the reverse hierarchy theory (RHT). This theory states that attention propagates from the top level of the visual hierarchy that processes gist and abstract information of input, to the bottom level that processes local details. Inspired by the theory, we develop a computational model for saliency detection in images. First, the original image is downsampled to different scales to constitute a pyramid. Then, saliency on each layer is obtained by image super-resolution reconstruction from the layer above, which is defined as unpredictability from this coarse-to-fine reconstruction. Finally, saliency on each layer of the pyramid is fused into stochastic fixations through a probabilistic model, where attention initiates from the top layer and propagates downward through the pyramid. Extensive experiments on two standard eye-tracking datasets show that the proposed method can achieve competitive results with state-of-the-art models.
1404.3001
Joint Successive Cancellation Decoding of Polar Codes over Intersymbol Interference Channels
cs.IT math.IT
Polar codes are a class of capacity-achieving codes for the binary-input discrete memoryless channels (B-DMCs). However, when applied in channels with intersymbol interference (ISI), the codes may perform poorly with BCJR equalization and conventional decoding methods. To deal with the ISI problem, in this paper a new joint successive cancellation (SC) decoding algorithm is proposed for polar codes in ISI channels, which combines the equalization and conventional decoding. The initialization information of the decoding method is the likelihood functions of ISI codeword symbols rather than the codeword symbols. The decoding adopts recursion formulas like conventional SC decoding and is without iterations. This is in contrast to the conventional iterative algorithm which performs iterations between the equalizer and decoder. In addition, the proposed SC trellis decoding can be easily extended to list decoding which can further improve the performance. Simulation shows that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the conventional decoding schemes in ISI channels.
1404.3010
On the Energy-Spectral Efficiency Trade-off of the MRC Receiver in Massive MIMO Systems with Transceiver Power Consumption
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the uplink of a multiuser massive MIMO system wherein a base station (BS) having $M$ antennas communicates coherently with $K$ single antenna user terminals (UTs). We study the energy efficiency of this system while taking the transceiver power consumption at the UTs and the BS into consideration. For a given spectral efficiency $R$ and fixed transceiver power consumption parameters, we propose and analyze the problem of maximizing the energy efficiency as a function of $(M,K)$. For the maximum ratio combining (MRC) detector at the BS we show that with increasing $R$, $(M,K)$ can be adaptively increased in such a way that the energy efficiency converges to a positive constant as $R \rightarrow \infty$ ($(M,K)$ is increased in such a way that a constant per-user spectral efficiency $R/K$ is maintained). This is in contrast to the fixed $(M,K)$ scenario where the energy efficiency is known to converge to zero as $R \rightarrow \infty$. We also observe that for large $R$, the optimal $(M,K)$ maximizing the energy efficiency is such that, the total power consumed by the power amplifiers (PA) in all the $K$ UTs is a small fraction of the total system power consumption.
1404.3012
Bayesian image segmentations by Potts prior and loopy belief propagation
cs.CV cond-mat.dis-nn cond-mat.stat-mech cs.LG stat.ML
This paper presents a Bayesian image segmentation model based on Potts prior and loopy belief propagation. The proposed Bayesian model involves several terms, including the pairwise interactions of Potts models, and the average vectors and covariant matrices of Gauss distributions in color image modeling. These terms are often referred to as hyperparameters in statistical machine learning theory. In order to determine these hyperparameters, we propose a new scheme for hyperparameter estimation based on conditional maximization of entropy in the Potts prior. The algorithm is given based on loopy belief propagation. In addition, we compare our conditional maximum entropy framework with the conventional maximum likelihood framework, and also clarify how the first order phase transitions in LBP's for Potts models influence our hyperparameter estimation procedures.
1404.3017
A Link-based Approach to Entity Resolution in Social Networks
cs.IR cs.DS cs.SI
Social networks initially had been places for people to contact each other, find friends or new acquaintances. As such they ever proved interesting for machine aided analysis. Recent developments, however, pivoted social networks to being among the main fields of information exchange, opinion expression and debate. As a result there is growing interest in both analyzing and integrating social network services. In this environment efficient information retrieval is hindered by the vast amount and varying quality of the user-generated content. Guiding users to relevant information is a valuable service and also a difficult task, where a crucial part of the process is accurately resolving duplicate entities to real-world ones. In this paper we propose a novel approach that utilizes the principles of link mining to successfully extend the methodology of entity resolution to multitype problems. The proposed method is presented using an illustrative social network-based real-world example and validated by comprehensive evaluation of the results.
1404.3022
Multi-Trial Guruswami-Sudan Decoding for Generalised Reed--Solomon Codes
cs.IT math.IT
An iterated refinement procedure for the Guruswami-Sudan list decoding algorithm for Generalised Reed-Solomon codes based on Alekhnovich's module minimisation is proposed. The method is parametrisable and allows variants of the usual list decoding approach. In particular, finding the list of closest codewords within an intermediate radius can be performed with improved average-case complexity while retaining the worst-case complexity. We provide a detailed description of the module minimisation, reanalysing the Mulders-Storjohann algorithm and drawing new connections to both Alekhnovich's algorithm and Lee-O'Sullivan's. Furthermore, we show how to incorporate the re-encoding technique of K\"otter and Vardy into our iterative algorithm.
1404.3023
Markov Chain Analysis of Evolution Strategies on a Linear Constraint Optimization Problem
cs.NE math.OC
This paper analyses a $(1,\lambda)$-Evolution Strategy, a randomised comparison-based adaptive search algorithm, on a simple constraint optimisation problem. The algorithm uses resampling to handle the constraint and optimizes a linear function with a linear constraint. Two cases are investigated: first the case where the step-size is constant, and second the case where the step-size is adapted using path length control. We exhibit for each case a Markov chain whose stability analysis would allow us to deduce the divergence of the algorithm depending on its internal parameters. We show divergence at a constant rate when the step-size is constant. We sketch that with step-size adaptation geometric divergence takes place. Our results complement previous studies where stability was assumed.
1404.3026
On the Ground Validation of Online Diagnosis with Twitter and Medical Records
cs.SI cs.CL cs.LG
Social media has been considered as a data source for tracking disease. However, most analyses are based on models that prioritize strong correlation with population-level disease rates over determining whether or not specific individual users are actually sick. Taking a different approach, we develop a novel system for social-media based disease detection at the individual level using a sample of professionally diagnosed individuals. Specifically, we develop a system for making an accurate influenza diagnosis based on an individual's publicly available Twitter data. We find that about half (17/35 = 48.57%) of the users in our sample that were sick explicitly discuss their disease on Twitter. By developing a meta classifier that combines text analysis, anomaly detection, and social network analysis, we are able to diagnose an individual with greater than 99% accuracy even if she does not discuss her health.
1404.3033
How to go Viral: Cheaply and Quickly
cs.SI cs.DS math.CO
Given a social network represented by a graph $G$, we consider the problem of finding a bounded cardinality set of nodes $S$ with the property that the influence spreading from $S$ in $G$ is as large as possible. The dynamics that govern the spread of influence is the following: initially only elements in $S$ are influenced; subsequently at each round, the set of influenced elements is augmented by all nodes in the network that have a sufficiently large number of already influenced neighbors. While it is known that the general problem is hard to solve --- even in the approximate sense --- we present exact polynomial time algorithms for trees, paths, cycles, and complete graphs.
1404.3041
Labelled OSPA metric for fixed and known number of targets
cs.SY
The evaluation of multiple target tracking algorithms with labelled sets can be done using the labelled optimal subpattern assignment (LOSPA) metric. In this paper, we provide the expression of the same metric for fixed and known number of targets when vector notation is used.
1404.3075
Practical LDPC coded modulation schemes for the fading broadcast channel with confidential messages
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
The broadcast channel with confidential messages is a well studied scenario from the theoretical standpoint, but there is still lack of practical schemes able to achieve some fixed level of reliability and security over such a channel. In this paper, we consider a quasi-static fading channel in which both public and private messages must be sent from the transmitter to the receivers, and we aim at designing suitable coding and modulation schemes to achieve such a target. For this purpose, we adopt the error rate as a metric, by considering that reliability (security) is achieved when a sufficiently low (high) error rate is experienced at the receiving side. We show that some conditions exist on the system feasibility, and that some outage probability must be tolerated to cope with the fading nature of the channel. The proposed solution exploits low-density parity-check codes with unequal error protection, which are able to guarantee two different levels of protection against noise for the public and the private information, in conjunction with different modulation schemes for the public and the private message bits.
1404.3078
Distributed Compressed Sensing for Sensor Networks with Packet Erasures
cs.IT math.IT
We study two approaches to distributed compressed sensing for in-network data compression and signal reconstruction at a sink in a wireless sensor network where sensors are placed on a straight line. Communication to the sink is considered to be bandwidth-constrained due to the large number of devices. By using distributed compressed sensing for compression of the data in the network, the communication cost (bandwith usage) to the sink can be decreased at the expense of delay induced by the local communication necessary for compression. We investigate the relation between cost and delay given a certain reconstruction performance requirement when using basis pursuit denoising for reconstruction. Moreover, we analyze and compare the performance degradation due to erased packets sent to the sink of the two approaches.
1404.3114
Conditions for viral influence spreading through multiplex correlated social networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI physics.data-an
A fundamental problem in network science is to predict how certain individuals are able to initiate new networks to spring up "new ideas". Frequently, these changes in trends are triggered by a few innovators who rapidly impose their ideas through "viral" influence spreading producing cascades of followers fragmenting an old network to create a new one. Typical examples include the raise of scientific ideas or abrupt changes in social media, like the raise of Facebook.com to the detriment of Myspace.com. How this process arises in practice has not been conclusively demonstrated. Here, we show that a condition for sustaining a viral spreading process is the existence of a multiplex correlated graph with hidden "influence links". Analytical solutions predict percolation phase transitions, either abrupt or continuous, where networks are disintegrated through viral cascades of followers as in empirical data. Our modeling predicts the strict conditions to sustain a large viral spreading via a scaling form of the local correlation function between multilayers, which we also confirm empirically. Ultimately, the theory predicts the conditions for viral cascading in a large class of multiplex networks ranging from social to financial systems and markets.
1404.3131
The Possibility Problem for Probabilistic XML (Extended Version)
cs.DB cs.CC cs.LO
We consider the possibility problem of determining if a document is a possible world of a probabilistic document, in the setting of probabilistic XML. This basic question is a special case of query answering or tree automata evaluation, but it has specific practical uses, such as checking whether an user-provided probabilistic document outcome is possible or sufficiently likely. In this paper, we study the complexity of the possibility problem for probabilistic XML models of varying expressiveness. We show that the decision problem is often tractable in the absence of long-distance dependencies, but that its computation variant is intractable on unordered documents. We also introduce an explicit matches variant to generalize practical situations where node labels are unambiguous; this ensures tractability of the possibility problem, even under long-distance dependencies, provided event conjunctions are disallowed. Our results entirely classify the tractability boundary over all considered problem variants.
1404.3141
Datalog Rewritability of Disjunctive Datalog Programs and its Applications to Ontology Reasoning
cs.AI cs.LO
We study the problem of rewriting a disjunctive datalog program into plain datalog. We show that a disjunctive program is rewritable if and only if it is equivalent to a linear disjunctive program, thus providing a novel characterisation of datalog rewritability. Motivated by this result, we propose weakly linear disjunctive datalog---a novel rule-based KR language that extends both datalog and linear disjunctive datalog and for which reasoning is tractable in data complexity. We then explore applications of weakly linear programs to ontology reasoning and propose a tractable extension of OWL 2 RL with disjunctive axioms. Our empirical results suggest that many non-Horn ontologies can be reduced to weakly linear programs and that query answering over such ontologies using a datalog engine is feasible in practice.
1404.3145
Distributed Local Linear Parameter Estimation using Gaussian SPAWN
cs.MA cs.SY
We consider the problem of estimating local sensor parameters, where the local parameters and sensor observations are related through linear stochastic models. Sensors exchange messages and cooperate with each other to estimate their own local parameters iteratively. We study the Gaussian Sum-Product Algorithm over a Wireless Network (gSPAWN) procedure, which is based on belief propagation, but uses fixed size broadcast messages at each sensor instead. Compared with the popular diffusion strategies for performing network parameter estimation, whose communication cost at each sensor increases with increasing network density, the gSPAWN algorithm allows sensors to broadcast a message whose size does not depend on the network size or density, making it more suitable for applications in wireless sensor networks. We show that the gSPAWN algorithm converges in mean and has mean-square stability under some technical sufficient conditions, and we describe an application of the gSPAWN algorithm to a network localization problem in non-line-of-sight environments. Numerical results suggest that gSPAWN converges much faster in general than the diffusion method, and has lower communication costs, with comparable root mean square errors.
1404.3146
Reconsidering unique information: Towards a multivariate information decomposition
cs.IT math.IT
The information that two random variables $Y$, $Z$ contain about a third random variable $X$ can have aspects of shared information (contained in both $Y$ and $Z$), of complementary information (only available from $(Y,Z)$ together) and of unique information (contained exclusively in either $Y$ or $Z$). Here, we study measures $\widetilde{SI}$ of shared, $\widetilde{UI}$ unique and $\widetilde{CI}$ complementary information introduced by Bertschinger et al., which are motivated from a decision theoretic perspective. We find that in most cases the intuitive rule that more variables contain more information applies, with the exception that $\widetilde{SI}$ and $\widetilde{CI}$ information are not monotone in the target variable $X$. Additionally, we show that it is not possible to extend the bivariate information decomposition into $\widetilde{SI}$, $\widetilde{UI}$ and $\widetilde{CI}$ to a non-negative decomposition on the partial information lattice of Williams and Beer. Nevertheless, the quantities $\widetilde{UI}$, $\widetilde{SI}$ and $\widetilde{CI}$ have a well-defined interpretation, even in the multivariate setting.
1404.3152
Change Detection with Compressive Measurements
cs.IT math.IT math.ST stat.TH
Quickest change point detection is concerned with the detection of statistical change(s) in sequences while minimizing the detection delay subject to false alarm constraints. In this paper, the problem of change point detection is studied when the decision maker only has access to compressive measurements. First, an expression for the average detection delay of Shiryaev's procedure with compressive measurements is derived in the asymptotic regime where the probability of false alarm goes to zero. Second, the dependence of the delay on the compression ratio and the signal to noise ratio is explicitly quantified. The ratio of delays with and without compression is studied under various sensing matrix constructions, including Gaussian ensembles and random projections. For a target ratio of the delays after and before compression, a sufficient condition on the number of measurements required to meet this objective with prespecified probability is derived.
1404.3165
Energy-Efficient Power Adaptation for Cognitive Radio Systems under Imperfect Channel Sensing
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, energy efficient power adaptation is considered in sensing-based spectrum sharing cognitive radio systems in which secondary users first perform channel sensing and then initiate data transmission with two power levels based on the sensing decisions (e.g., idle or busy). It is assumed that spectrum sensing is performed by the cognitive secondary users, albeit with possible errors. In this setting, the optimization problem of maximizing the energy efficiency (EE) subject to peak/average transmission power constraints and average interference constraints is considered. The circuit power is taken into account for total power consumption. By exploiting the quasiconcave property of the EE maximization problem, the original problem is transformed into an equivalent parameterized concave problem and Dinkelbach's method-based iterative power adaptation algorithm is proposed. The impact of sensing performance, peak/average transmit power constraints and average interference constraint on the energy efficiency of cognitive radio systems is analyzed.
1404.3181
FAST-PPR: Scaling Personalized PageRank Estimation for Large Graphs
cs.DS cs.SI
We propose a new algorithm, FAST-PPR, for estimating personalized PageRank: given start node $s$ and target node $t$ in a directed graph, and given a threshold $\delta$, FAST-PPR estimates the Personalized PageRank $\pi_s(t)$ from $s$ to $t$, guaranteeing a small relative error as long $\pi_s(t)>\delta$. Existing algorithms for this problem have a running-time of $\Omega(1/\delta)$; in comparison, FAST-PPR has a provable average running-time guarantee of ${O}(\sqrt{d/\delta})$ (where $d$ is the average in-degree of the graph). This is a significant improvement, since $\delta$ is often $O(1/n)$ (where $n$ is the number of nodes) for applications. We also complement the algorithm with an $\Omega(1/\sqrt{\delta})$ lower bound for PageRank estimation, showing that the dependence on $\delta$ cannot be improved. We perform a detailed empirical study on numerous massive graphs, showing that FAST-PPR dramatically outperforms existing algorithms. For example, on the 2010 Twitter graph with 1.5 billion edges, for target nodes sampled by popularity, FAST-PPR has a $20$ factor speedup over the state of the art. Furthermore, an enhanced version of FAST-PPR has a $160$ factor speedup on the Twitter graph, and is at least $20$ times faster on all our candidate graphs.
1404.3184
Decreasing Weighted Sorted $\ell_1$ Regularization
cs.CV cs.IT cs.LG math.IT
We consider a new family of regularizers, termed {\it weighted sorted $\ell_1$ norms} (WSL1), which generalizes the recently introduced {\it octagonal shrinkage and clustering algorithm for regression} (OSCAR) and also contains the $\ell_1$ and $\ell_{\infty}$ norms as particular instances. We focus on a special case of the WSL1, the {\sl decreasing WSL1} (DWSL1), where the elements of the argument vector are sorted in non-increasing order and the weights are also non-increasing. In this paper, after showing that the DWSL1 is indeed a norm, we derive two key tools for its use as a regularizer: the dual norm and the Moreau proximity operator.
1404.3190
Pareto-Path Multi-Task Multiple Kernel Learning
cs.LG
A traditional and intuitively appealing Multi-Task Multiple Kernel Learning (MT-MKL) method is to optimize the sum (thus, the average) of objective functions with (partially) shared kernel function, which allows information sharing amongst tasks. We point out that the obtained solution corresponds to a single point on the Pareto Front (PF) of a Multi-Objective Optimization (MOO) problem, which considers the concurrent optimization of all task objectives involved in the Multi-Task Learning (MTL) problem. Motivated by this last observation and arguing that the former approach is heuristic, we propose a novel Support Vector Machine (SVM) MT-MKL framework, that considers an implicitly-defined set of conic combinations of task objectives. We show that solving our framework produces solutions along a path on the aforementioned PF and that it subsumes the optimization of the average of objective functions as a special case. Using algorithms we derived, we demonstrate through a series of experimental results that the framework is capable of achieving better classification performance, when compared to other similar MTL approaches.
1404.3203
Compressive classification and the rare eclipse problem
cs.LG cs.IT math.IT math.ST stat.TH
This paper addresses the fundamental question of when convex sets remain disjoint after random projection. We provide an analysis using ideas from high-dimensional convex geometry. For ellipsoids, we provide a bound in terms of the distance between these ellipsoids and simple functions of their polynomial coefficients. As an application, this theorem provides bounds for compressive classification of convex sets. Rather than assuming that the data to be classified is sparse, our results show that the data can be acquired via very few measurements yet will remain linearly separable. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach in the context of hyperspectral imaging.
1404.3221
UAV Circumnavigating an Unknown Target Under a GPS-denied Environment with Range-only Measurements
cs.SY cs.RO math.OC
One typical application of unmanned aerial vehicles is the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission, where the objective is to improve situation awareness through information acquisition. For examples, an efficient way to gather information regarding a target is to deploy UAV in such a way that it orbits around this target at a desired distance. Such a UAV motion is called circumnavigation. The objective of the paper is to design a UAV control algorithm such that this circumnavigation mission is achieved under a GPS-denied environment using range-only measurement. The control algorithm is constructed in two steps. The first step is to design a UAV control algorithm by assuming the availability of both range and range rate measurements, where the associated control input is always bounded. The second step is to further eliminate the use of range rate measurement by using an estimated range rate, obtained via a sliding-mode estimator using range measurement, to replace actual range rate measurement. Such a controller design technique is applicable in the control design of other UAV navigation and control missions under a GPS-denied environment.
1404.3233
Pagination: It's what you say, not how long it takes to say it
cs.CL cs.IR
Pagination - the process of determining where to break an article across pages in a multi-article layout is a common layout challenge for most commercially printed newspapers and magazines. To date, no one has created an algorithm that determines a minimal pagination break point based on the content of the article. Existing approaches for automatic multi-article layout focus exclusively on maximizing content (number of articles) and optimizing aesthetic presentation (e.g., spacing between articles). However, disregarding the semantic information within the article can lead to overly aggressive cutting, thereby eliminating key content and potentially confusing the reader, or setting too generous of a break point, thereby leaving in superfluous content and making automatic layout more difficult. This is one of the remaining challenges on the path from manual layouts to fully automated processes that still ensure article content quality. In this work, we present a new approach to calculating a document minimal break point for the task of pagination. Our approach uses a statistical language model to predict minimal break points based on the semantic content of an article. We then compare 4 novel candidate approaches, and 4 baselines (currently in use by layout algorithms). Results from this experiment show that one of our approaches strongly outperforms the baselines and alternatives. Results from a second study suggest that humans are not able to agree on a single "best" break point. Therefore, this work shows that a semantic-based lower bound break point prediction is necessary for ideal automated document synthesis within a real-world context.
1404.3238
Bounds on Distance Estimation via Diffusive Molecular Communication
cs.IT math.IT
This paper studies distance estimation for diffusive molecular communication. The Cramer-Rao lower bound on the variance of the distance estimation error is derived. The lower bound is derived for a physically unbounded environment with molecule degradation and steady uniform flow. The maximum likelihood distance estimator is derived and its accuracy is shown via simulation to perform very close to the Cramer-Rao lower bound. An existing protocol is shown to be equivalent to the maximum likelihood distance estimator if only one observation is made. Simulation results also show the accuracy of existing protocols with respect to the Cramer-Rao lower bound.
1404.3250
On the rank of random matrices over finite fields
cs.IT math.IT
A novel lower bound is introduced for the full rank probability of random finite field matrices, where a number of elements with known location are identically zero, and remaining elements are chosen independently of each other, uniformly over the field. The main ingredient is a result showing that constraining additional elements to be zero cannot result in a higher probability of full rank. The bound then follows by "zeroing" elements to produce a block-diagonal matrix, whose full rank probability can be computed exactly. The bound is shown to be at least as tight and can be strictly tighter than existing bounds.
1404.3263
Compressive Origin-Destination Matrix Estimation
cs.SY math.DS
The paper presents an approach to estimate Origin-Destination (OD) flows and their path splits, based on traffic counts on links in the network. The approach called Compressive Origin-Destination Estimation (CODE) is inspired by Compressive Sensing (CS) techniques. Even though the estimation problem is underdetermined, CODE recovers the unknown variables exactly when the number of alternative paths for each OD pair is small. Noiseless, noisy, and weighted versions of CODE are illustrated for synthetic networks, and with real data for a small region in East Providence. CODE's versatility is suggested by its use to estimate the number of vehicles and the Vehicle-Miles Traveled (VMT) using link counts.
1404.3285
An Integer Programming Model for the Dynamic Location and Relocation of Emergency Vehicles: A Case Study
cs.AI
In this paper, we address the dynamic Emergency Medical Service (EMS) systems. A dynamic location model is presented that tries to locate and relocate the ambulances. The proposed model controls the movements and locations of ambulances in order to provide a better coverage of the demand points under different fluctuation patterns that may happen during a given period of time. Some numerical experiments have been carried out by using some real-world data sets that have been collected through the French EMS system.
1404.3286
A Continuous Optimization Approach for the Financial Portfolio Selection under Discrete Asset Choice Constraints
cs.CE
In this paper we consider a generalization of the Markowitz's Mean-Variance model under linear transaction costs and cardinality constraints. The cardinality constraints are used to limit the number of assets in the optimal portfolio. The generalized model is formulated as a mixed integer quadratic programming (MIP) problem. The purpose of this paper is to investigate a continuous approach based on difference of convex functions (DC) programming for solving the MIP model. The preliminary comparative results of the proposed approach versus CPLEX are presented.
1404.3290
Motion-Compensated Coding and Frame-Rate Up-Conversion: Models and Analysis
cs.MM cs.CV
Block-based motion estimation (ME) and compensation (MC) techniques are widely used in modern video processing algorithms and compression systems. The great variety of video applications and devices results in numerous compression specifications. Specifically, there is a diversity of frame-rates and bit-rates. In this paper, we study the effect of frame-rate and compression bit-rate on block-based ME and MC as commonly utilized in inter-frame coding and frame-rate up conversion (FRUC). This joint examination yields a comprehensive foundation for comparing MC procedures in coding and FRUC. First, the video signal is modeled as a noisy translational motion of an image. Then, we theoretically model the motion-compensated prediction of an available and absent frames as in coding and FRUC applications, respectively. The theoretic MC-prediction error is further analyzed and its autocorrelation function is calculated for coding and FRUC applications. We show a linear relation between the variance of the MC-prediction error and temporal-distance. While the affecting distance in MC-coding is between the predicted and reference frames, MC-FRUC is affected by the distance between the available frames used for the interpolation. Moreover, the dependency in temporal-distance implies an inverse effect of the frame-rate. FRUC performance analysis considers the prediction error variance, since it equals to the mean-squared-error of the interpolation. However, MC-coding analysis requires the entire autocorrelation function of the error; hence, analytic simplicity is beneficial. Therefore, we propose two constructions of a separable autocorrelation function for prediction error in MC-coding. We conclude by comparing our estimations with experimental results.
1404.3291
Cost-Effective HITs for Relative Similarity Comparisons
cs.CV cs.LG
Similarity comparisons of the form "Is object a more similar to b than to c?" are useful for computer vision and machine learning applications. Unfortunately, an embedding of $n$ points is specified by $n^3$ triplets, making collecting every triplet an expensive task. In noticing this difficulty, other researchers have investigated more intelligent triplet sampling techniques, but they do not study their effectiveness or their potential drawbacks. Although it is important to reduce the number of collected triplets, it is also important to understand how best to display a triplet collection task to a user. In this work we explore an alternative display for collecting triplets and analyze the monetary cost and speed of the display. We propose best practices for creating cost effective human intelligence tasks for collecting triplets. We show that rather than changing the sampling algorithm, simple changes to the crowdsourcing UI can lead to much higher quality embeddings. We also provide a dataset as well as the labels collected from crowd workers.
1404.3301
Efficient Inference and Learning in a Large Knowledge Base: Reasoning with Extracted Information using a Locally Groundable First-Order Probabilistic Logic
cs.AI
One important challenge for probabilistic logics is reasoning with very large knowledge bases (KBs) of imperfect information, such as those produced by modern web-scale information extraction systems. One scalability problem shared by many probabilistic logics is that answering queries involves "grounding" the query---i.e., mapping it to a propositional representation---and the size of a "grounding" grows with database size. To address this bottleneck, we present a first-order probabilistic language called ProPPR in which that approximate "local groundings" can be constructed in time independent of database size. Technically, ProPPR is an extension to stochastic logic programs (SLPs) that is biased towards short derivations; it is also closely related to an earlier relational learning algorithm called the path ranking algorithm (PRA). We show that the problem of constructing proofs for this logic is related to computation of personalized PageRank (PPR) on a linearized version of the proof space, and using on this connection, we develop a proveably-correct approximate grounding scheme, based on the PageRank-Nibble algorithm. Building on this, we develop a fast and easily-parallelized weight-learning algorithm for ProPPR. In experiments, we show that learning for ProPPR is orders magnitude faster than learning for Markov logic networks; that allowing mutual recursion (joint learning) in KB inference leads to improvements in performance; and that ProPPR can learn weights for a mutually recursive program with hundreds of clauses, which define scores of interrelated predicates, over a KB containing one million entities.
1404.3312
Shrinkage Optimized Directed Information using Pictorial Structures for Action Recognition
cs.CV
In this paper, we propose a novel action recognition framework. The method uses pictorial structures and shrinkage optimized directed information assessment (SODA) coupled with Markov Random Fields called SODA+MRF to model the directional temporal dependency and bidirectional spatial dependency. As a variant of mutual information, directional information captures the directional information flow and temporal structure of video sequences across frames. Meanwhile, within each frame, Markov random fields are utilized to model the spatial relations among different parts of a human body and the body parts of different people. The proposed SODA+MRF model is robust to view point transformations and detect complex interactions accurately. We compare the proposed method against several baseline methods to highlight the effectiveness of the SODA+MRF model. We demonstrate that our algorithm has superior action recognition performance on the UCF action recognition dataset, the Olympic sports dataset and the collective activity dataset over several state-of-the-art methods.
1404.3316
Embed System for Robotic Arm with 3 Degree of Freedom Controller using Computational Vision on Real-Time
cs.RO cs.SY
This Paper deals with robotic arm embed controller system, with distributed system based on protocol communication between one server supporting multiple points and mobile applications trough sockets .The proposed system utilizes hand with glove gesture in three-dimensional recognition using fuzzy implementation to set x,y,z coordinates. This approach present all implementation over: two raspberry PI arm based computer running client program, x64 PC running server program, and one robot arm controlled by ATmega328p based board.
1404.3325
A Weighted Correlation Index for Rankings with Ties
cs.SI cs.IR
Understanding the correlation between two different scores for the same set of items is a common problem in information retrieval, and the most commonly used statistics that quantifies this correlation is Kendall's $\tau$. However, the standard definition fails to capture that discordances between items with high rank are more important than those between items with low rank. Recently, a new measure of correlation based on average precision has been proposed to solve this problem, but like many alternative proposals in the literature it assumes that there are no ties in the scores. This is a major deficiency in a number of contexts, and in particular while comparing centrality scores on large graphs, as the obvious baseline, indegree, has a very large number of ties in web and social graphs. We propose to extend Kendall's definition in a natural way to take into account weights in the presence of ties. We prove a number of interesting mathematical properties of our generalization and describe an $O(n\log n)$ algorithm for its computation. We also validate the usefulness of our weighted measure of correlation using experimental data.
1404.3329
Portfolio Selection Under Buy-In Threshold Constraints Using DC Programming and DCA
cs.CE
In matter of Portfolio selection, we consider a generalization of the Markowitz Mean-Variance model which includes buy-in threshold constraints. These constraints limit the amount of capital to be invested in each asset and prevent very small investments in any asset. The new model can be converted into a NP-hard mixed integer quadratic programming problem. The purpose of this paper is to investigate a continuous approach based on DC programming and DCA for solving this new model. DCA is a local continuous approach to solve a wide variety of nonconvex programs for which it provided quite often a global solution and proved to be more robust and efficient than standard methods. Preliminary comparative results of DCA and a classical Branch-and-Bound algorithm will be presented. These results show that DCA is an efficient and promising approach for the considered portfolio selection problem.
1404.3330
A DC programming approach for constrained two-dimensional non-guillotine cutting problem
cs.CE
We investigate a new application of Difference of Convex functions programming and DCA in solving the constrained two-dimensional non-guillotine cutting problem. This problem consists of cutting a number of rectangular pieces from a large rectangular object. The cuts are done under some constraints and the objective is to maximize the total value of the pieces cut. We reformulate this problem as a DC program and solve it by DCA. The performance of the approach is compared with the standard solver CPLEX.
1404.3366
Learning Deep Convolutional Features for MRI Based Alzheimer's Disease Classification
cs.CV
Effective and accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) or mild cognitive impairment (MCI) can be critical for early treatment and thus has attracted more and more attention nowadays. Since first introduced, machine learning methods have been gaining increasing popularity for AD related research. Among the various identified biomarkers, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are widely used for the prediction of AD or MCI. However, before a machine learning algorithm can be applied, image features need to be extracted to represent the MRI images. While good representations can be pivotal to the classification performance, almost all the previous studies typically rely on human labelling to find the regions of interest (ROI) which may be correlated to AD, such as hippocampus, amygdala, precuneus, etc. This procedure requires domain knowledge and is costly and tedious. Instead of relying on extraction of ROI features, it is more promising to remove manual ROI labelling from the pipeline and directly work on the raw MRI images. In other words, we can let the machine learning methods to figure out these informative and discriminative image structures for AD classification. In this work, we propose to learn deep convolutional image features using unsupervised and supervised learning. Deep learning has emerged as a powerful tool in the machine learning community and has been successfully applied to various tasks. We thus propose to exploit deep features of MRI images based on a pre-trained large convolutional neural network (CNN) for AD and MCI classification, which spares the effort of manual ROI annotation process.
1404.3368
Near-optimal sample compression for nearest neighbors
cs.LG cs.CC
We present the first sample compression algorithm for nearest neighbors with non-trivial performance guarantees. We complement these guarantees by demonstrating almost matching hardness lower bounds, which show that our bound is nearly optimal. Our result yields new insight into margin-based nearest neighbor classification in metric spaces and allows us to significantly sharpen and simplify existing bounds. Some encouraging empirical results are also presented.
1404.3370
Distance function of D numbers
cs.AI
Dempster-Shafer theory is widely applied in uncertainty modelling and knowledge reasoning due to its ability of expressing uncertain information. A distance between two basic probability assignments(BPAs) presents a measure of performance for identification algorithms based on the evidential theory of Dempster-Shafer. However, some conditions lead to limitations in practical application for Dempster-Shafer theory, such as exclusiveness hypothesis and completeness constraint. To overcome these shortcomings, a novel theory called D numbers theory is proposed. A distance function of D numbers is proposed to measure the distance between two D numbers. The distance function of D numbers is an generalization of distance between two BPAs, which inherits the advantage of Dempster-Shafer theory and strengthens the capability of uncertainty modeling. An illustrative case is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed function.
1404.3377
A Generalized Language Model as the Combination of Skipped n-grams and Modified Kneser-Ney Smoothing
cs.CL
We introduce a novel approach for building language models based on a systematic, recursive exploration of skip n-gram models which are interpolated using modified Kneser-Ney smoothing. Our approach generalizes language models as it contains the classical interpolation with lower order models as a special case. In this paper we motivate, formalize and present our approach. In an extensive empirical experiment over English text corpora we demonstrate that our generalized language models lead to a substantial reduction of perplexity between 3.1% and 12.7% in comparison to traditional language models using modified Kneser-Ney smoothing. Furthermore, we investigate the behaviour over three other languages and a domain specific corpus where we observed consistent improvements. Finally, we also show that the strength of our approach lies in its ability to cope in particular with sparse training data. Using a very small training data set of only 736 KB text we yield improvements of even 25.7% reduction of perplexity.