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0906.3149
Semi-Myopic Sensing Plans for Value Optimization
cs.AI
We consider the following sequential decision problem. Given a set of items of unknown utility, we need to select one of as high a utility as possible (``the selection problem''). Measurements (possibly noisy) of item values prior to selection are allowed, at a known cost. The goal is to optimize the overall sequential decision process of measurements and selection. Value of information (VOI) is a well-known scheme for selecting measurements, but the intractability of the problem typically leads to using myopic VOI estimates. In the selection problem, myopic VOI frequently badly underestimates the value of information, leading to inferior sensing plans. We relax the strict myopic assumption into a scheme we term semi-myopic, providing a spectrum of methods that can improve the performance of sensing plans. In particular, we propose the efficiently computable method of ``blinkered'' VOI, and examine theoretical bounds for special cases. Empirical evaluation of ``blinkered'' VOI in the selection problem with normally distributed item values shows that is performs much better than pure myopic VOI.
0906.3173
Compressed Sensing of Block-Sparse Signals: Uncertainty Relations and Efficient Recovery
cs.IT math.IT
We consider compressed sensing of block-sparse signals, i.e., sparse signals that have nonzero coefficients occurring in clusters. An uncertainty relation for block-sparse signals is derived, based on a block-coherence measure, which we introduce. We then show that a block-version of the orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm recovers block $k$-sparse signals in no more than $k$ steps if the block-coherence is sufficiently small. The same condition on block-coherence is shown to guarantee successful recovery through a mixed $\ell_2/\ell_1$-optimization approach. This complements previous recovery results for the block-sparse case which relied on small block-restricted isometry constants. The significance of the results presented in this paper lies in the fact that making explicit use of block-sparsity can provably yield better reconstruction properties than treating the signal as being sparse in the conventional sense, thereby ignoring the additional structure in the problem.
0906.3183
Approximate Characterizations for the Gaussian Source Broadcast Distortion Region
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the joint source-channel coding problem of sending a Gaussian source on a K-user Gaussian broadcast channel with bandwidth mismatch. A new outer bound to the achievable distortion region is derived using the technique of introducing more than one additional auxiliary random variable, which was previously used to derive sum-rate lower bound for the symmetric Gaussian multiple description problem. By combining this outer bound with the achievability result based on source-channel separation, we provide approximate characterizations of the achievable distortion region within constant multiplicative factors. Furthermore, we show that the results can be extended to general broadcast channels, and the performance of the source-channel separation based approach is also within the same constant multiplicative factors of the optimum.
0906.3192
Secured Communication over Frequency-Selective Fading Channels: a practical Vandermonde precoding
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we study the frequency-selective broadcast channel with confidential messages (BCC) in which the transmitter sends a confidential message to receiver 1 and a common message to receivers 1 and 2. In the case of a block transmission of N symbols followed by a guard interval of L symbols, the frequency-selective channel can be modeled as a N * (N+L) Toeplitz matrix. For this special type of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels, we propose a practical Vandermonde precoding that consists of projecting the confidential messages in the null space of the channel seen by receiver 2 while superposing the common message. For this scheme, we provide the achievable rate region, i.e. the rate-tuple of the common and confidential messages, and characterize the optimal covariance inputs for some special cases of interest. It is proved that the proposed scheme achieves the optimal degree of freedom (d.o.f) region. More specifically, it enables to send l <= L confidential messages and N-l common messages simultaneously over a block of N+L symbols. Interestingly, the proposed scheme can be applied to secured multiuser scenarios such as the K+1-user frequency-selective BCC with K confidential messages and the two-user frequency-selective BCC with two confidential messages. For each scenario, we provide the achievable secrecy degree of freedom (s.d.o.f.) region of the corresponding frequency-selective BCC and prove the optimality of the Vandermonde precoding. One of the appealing features of the proposed scheme is that it does not require any specific secrecy encoding technique but can be applied on top of any existing powerful encoding schemes.
0906.3200
On the Compound MIMO Broadcast Channels with Confidential Messages
cs.IT math.IT
We study the compound multi-input multi-output (MIMO) broadcast channel with confidential messages (BCC), where one transmitter sends a common message to two receivers and two confidential messages respectively to each receiver. The channel state may take one of a finite set of states, and the transmitter knows the state set but does not know the realization of the state. We study achievable rates with perfect secrecy in the high SNR regime by characterizing an achievable secrecy degree of freedom (s.d.o.f.) region for two models, the Gaussian MIMO-BCC and the ergodic fading multi-input single-output (MISO)-BCC without a common message. We show that by exploiting an additional temporal dimension due to state variation in the ergodic fading model, the achievable s.d.o.f. region can be significantly improved compared to the Gaussian model with a constant state, although at the price of a larger delay.
0906.3234
Asymptotic Analysis of MAP Estimation via the Replica Method and Applications to Compressed Sensing
cs.IT math.IT
The replica method is a non-rigorous but well-known technique from statistical physics used in the asymptotic analysis of large, random, nonlinear problems. This paper applies the replica method, under the assumption of replica symmetry, to study estimators that are maximum a posteriori (MAP) under a postulated prior distribution. It is shown that with random linear measurements and Gaussian noise, the replica-symmetric prediction of the asymptotic behavior of the postulated MAP estimate of an n-dimensional vector "decouples" as n scalar postulated MAP estimators. The result is based on applying a hardening argument to the replica analysis of postulated posterior mean estimators of Tanaka and of Guo and Verdu. The replica-symmetric postulated MAP analysis can be readily applied to many estimators used in compressed sensing, including basis pursuit, lasso, linear estimation with thresholding, and zero norm-regularized estimation. In the case of lasso estimation the scalar estimator reduces to a soft-thresholding operator, and for zero norm-regularized estimation it reduces to a hard-threshold. Among other benefits, the replica method provides a computationally-tractable method for precisely predicting various performance metrics including mean-squared error and sparsity pattern recovery probability.
0906.3235
Simplicity via Provability for Universal Prefix-free Turing Machines
cs.IT cs.LO math.IT
Universality is one of the most important ideas in computability theory. There are various criteria of simplicity for universal Turing machines. Probably the most popular one is to count the number of states/symbols. This criterion is more complex than it may appear at a first glance. In this note we review recent results in Algorithmic Information Theory and propose three new criteria of simplicity for universal prefix-free Turing machines. These criteria refer to the possibility of proving various natural properties of such a machine (its universality, for example) in a formal theory, PA or ZFC. In all cases some, but not all, machines are simple.
0906.3282
Maximum Error Modeling for Fault-Tolerant Computation using Maximum a posteriori (MAP) Hypothesis
cs.IT math.IT
The application of current generation computing machines in safety-centric applications like implantable biomedical chips and automobile safety has immensely increased the need for reviewing the worst-case error behavior of computing devices for fault-tolerant computation. In this work, we propose an exact probabilistic error model that can compute the maximum error over all possible input space in a circuit specific manner and can handle various types of structural dependencies in the circuit. We also provide the worst-case input vector, which has the highest probability to generate an erroneous output, for any given logic circuit. We also present a study of circuit-specific error bounds for fault-tolerant computation in heterogeneous circuits using the maximum error computed for each circuit. We model the error estimation problem as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate, over the joint error probability function of the entire circuit, calculated efficiently through an intelligent search of the entire input space using probabilistic traversal of a binary join tree using Shenoy-Shafer algorithm. We demonstrate this model using MCNC and ISCAS benchmark circuits and validate it using an equivalent HSpice model. Both results yield the same worst-case input vectors and the highest % difference of our error model over HSpice is just 1.23%. We observe that the maximum error probabilities are significantly larger than the average error probabilities, and provides a much tighter error bounds for fault-tolerant computation. We also find that the error estimates depend on the specific circuit structure and the maximum error probabilities are sensitive to the individual gate failure probabilities.
0906.3313
Efficient And Portable SDR Waveform Development: The Nucleus Concept
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
Future wireless communication systems should be flexible to support different waveforms (WFs) and be cognitive to sense the environment and tune themselves. This has lead to tremendous interest in software defined radios (SDRs). Constraints like throughput, latency and low energy demand high implementation efficiency. The tradeoff of going for a highly efficient implementation is the increase of porting effort to a new hardware (HW) platform. In this paper, we propose a novel concept for WF development, the Nucleus concept, that exploits the common structure in various wireless signal processing algorithms and provides a way for efficient and portable implementation. Tool assisted WF mapping and exploration is done efficiently by propagating the implementation and interface properties of Nuclei. The Nucleus concept aims at providing software flexibility with high level programmability, but at the same time limiting HW flexibility to maximize area and energy efficiency.
0906.3323
Adaptive Regularization of Ill-Posed Problems: Application to Non-rigid Image Registration
cs.CV
We introduce an adaptive regularization approach. In contrast to conventional Tikhonov regularization, which specifies a fixed regularization operator, we estimate it simultaneously with parameters. From a Bayesian perspective we estimate the prior distribution on parameters assuming that it is close to some given model distribution. We constrain the prior distribution to be a Gauss-Markov random field (GMRF), which allows us to solve for the prior distribution analytically and provides a fast optimization algorithm. We apply our approach to non-rigid image registration to estimate the spatial transformation between two images. Our evaluation shows that the adaptive regularization approach significantly outperforms standard variational methods.
0906.3352
Spreading Code and Widely-Linear Receiver Design: Non-Cooperative Games for Wireless CDMA Networks
cs.IT cs.GT math.IT
The issue of non-cooperative transceiver optimization in the uplink of a multiuser wireless code division multiple access data network with widely-linear detection at the receiver is considered. While previous work in this area has focused on a simple real signal model, in this paper a baseband complex representation of the data is used, so as to properly take into account the I and Q components of the received signal. For the case in which the received signal is improper, a widely-linear reception structure, processing separately the data and their complex conjugates, is considered. Several non-cooperative resource allocation games are considered for this new scenario, and the performance gains granted by the use of widely-linear detection are assessed through theoretical analysis. Numerical results confirm the validity of the theoretical findings, and show that exploiting the improper nature of the data in non-cooperative resource allocation brings remarkable performance improvements in multiuser wireless systems.
0906.3410
Quasi-cyclic LDPC codes with high girth
cs.IT math.IT
We study a class of quasi-cyclic LDPC codes. We provide precise conditions guaranteeing high girth in their Tanner graph. Experimentally, the codes we propose perform no worse than random LDPC codes with their same parameters, which is a significant achievement for algebraic codes.
0906.3421
Q-system Cluster Algebras, Paths and Total Positivity
q-fin.EC cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We review the solution of the $A_r$ Q-systems in terms of the partition function of paths on a weighted graph, and show that it is possible to modify the graphs and transfer matrices so as to provide an explicit connection to the theory of planar networks introduced in the context of totally positive matrices by Fomin and Zelevinsky.
0906.3461
AIS for Misbehavior Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks: Performance and Design Principles
cs.NI cs.AI cs.CR cs.PF
A sensor network is a collection of wireless devices that are able to monitor physical or environmental conditions. These devices (nodes) are expected to operate autonomously, be battery powered and have very limited computational capabilities. This makes the task of protecting a sensor network against misbehavior or possible malfunction a challenging problem. In this document we discuss performance of Artificial immune systems (AIS) when used as the mechanism for detecting misbehavior. We show that (i) mechanism of the AIS have to be carefully applied in order to avoid security weaknesses, (ii) the choice of genes and their interaction have a profound influence on the performance of the AIS, (iii) randomly created detectors do not comply with limitations imposed by communications protocols and (iv) the data traffic pattern seems not to impact significantly the overall performance. We identified a specific MAC layer based gene that showed to be especially useful for detection; genes measure a network's performance from a node's viewpoint. Furthermore, we identified an interesting complementarity property of genes; this property exploits the local nature of sensor networks and moves the burden of excessive communication from normally behaving nodes to misbehaving nodes. These results have a direct impact on the design of AIS for sensor networks and on engineering of sensor networks.
0906.3499
Convergence of fixed-point continuation algorithms for matrix rank minimization
math.OC cs.IT math.IT
The matrix rank minimization problem has applications in many fields such as system identification, optimal control, low-dimensional embedding, etc. As this problem is NP-hard in general, its convex relaxation, the nuclear norm minimization problem, is often solved instead. Recently, Ma, Goldfarb and Chen proposed a fixed-point continuation algorithm for solving the nuclear norm minimization problem. By incorporating an approximate singular value decomposition technique in this algorithm, the solution to the matrix rank minimization problem is usually obtained. In this paper, we study the convergence/recoverability properties of the fixed-point continuation algorithm and its variants for matrix rank minimization. Heuristics for determining the rank of the matrix when its true rank is not known are also proposed. Some of these algorithms are closely related to greedy algorithms in compressed sensing. Numerical results for these algorithms for solving affinely constrained matrix rank minimization problems are reported.
0906.3554
On the Algorithmic Nature of the World
cs.CC cs.IT math.IT
We propose a test based on the theory of algorithmic complexity and an experimental evaluation of Levin's universal distribution to identify evidence in support of or in contravention of the claim that the world is algorithmic in nature. To this end we have undertaken a statistical comparison of the frequency distributions of data from physical sources on the one hand--repositories of information such as images, data stored in a hard drive, computer programs and DNA sequences--and the frequency distributions generated by purely algorithmic means on the other--by running abstract computing devices such as Turing machines, cellular automata and Post Tag systems. Statistical correlations were found and their significance measured.
0906.3585
Finding Significant Subregions in Large Image Databases
cs.DB cs.CV cs.IR
Images have become an important data source in many scientific and commercial domains. Analysis and exploration of image collections often requires the retrieval of the best subregions matching a given query. The support of such content-based retrieval requires not only the formulation of an appropriate scoring function for defining relevant subregions but also the design of new access methods that can scale to large databases. In this paper, we propose a solution to this problem of querying significant image subregions. We design a scoring scheme to measure the similarity of subregions. Our similarity measure extends to any image descriptor. All the images are tiled and each alignment of the query and a database image produces a tile score matrix. We show that the problem of finding the best connected subregion from this matrix is NP-hard and develop a dynamic programming heuristic. With this heuristic, we develop two index based scalable search strategies, TARS and SPARS, to query patterns in a large image repository. These strategies are general enough to work with other scoring schemes and heuristics. Experimental results on real image datasets show that TARS saves more than 87% query time on small queries, and SPARS saves up to 52% query time on large queries as compared to linear search. Qualitative tests on synthetic and real datasets achieve precision of more than 80%.
0906.3667
A Deterministic Equivalent for the Analysis of Correlated MIMO Multiple Access Channels
cs.IT math.IT
In this article, novel deterministic equivalents for the Stieltjes transform and the Shannon transform of a class of large dimensional random matrices are provided. These results are used to characterise the ergodic rate region of multiple antenna multiple access channels, when each point-to-point propagation channel is modelled according to the Kronecker model. Specifically, an approximation of all rates achieved within the ergodic rate region is derived and an approximation of the linear precoders that achieve the boundary of the rate region as well as an iterative water-filling algorithm to obtain these precoders are provided. An original feature of this work is that the proposed deterministic equivalents are proved valid even for strong correlation patterns at both communication sides. The above results are validated by Monte Carlo simulations.
0906.3682
Large System Analysis of Linear Precoding in Correlated MISO Broadcast Channels under Limited Feedback
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we study the sum rate performance of zero-forcing (ZF) and regularized ZF (RZF) precoding in large MISO broadcast systems under the assumptions of imperfect channel state information at the transmitter and per-user channel transmit correlation. Our analysis assumes that the number of transmit antennas $M$ and the number of single-antenna users $K$ are large while their ratio remains bounded. We derive deterministic approximations of the empirical signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) at the receivers, which are tight as $M,K\to\infty$. In the course of this derivation, the per-user channel correlation model requires the development of a novel deterministic equivalent of the empirical Stieltjes transform of large dimensional random matrices with generalized variance profile. The deterministic SINR approximations enable us to solve various practical optimization problems. Under sum rate maximization, we derive (i) for RZF the optimal regularization parameter, (ii) for ZF the optimal number of users, (iii) for ZF and RZF the optimal power allocation scheme and (iv) the optimal amount of feedback in large FDD/TDD multi-user systems. Numerical simulations suggest that the deterministic approximations are accurate even for small $M,K$.
0906.3722
Two-Dimensional ARMA Modeling for Breast Cancer Detection and Classification
cs.AI cs.CV physics.med-ph
We propose a new model-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for tumor detection and classification (cancerous v.s. benign) in breast images. Specifically, we show that (x-ray, ultrasound and MRI) images can be accurately modeled by two-dimensional autoregressive-moving average (ARMA) random fields. We derive a two-stage Yule-Walker Least-Squares estimates of the model parameters, which are subsequently used as the basis for statistical inference and biophysical interpretation of the breast image. We use a k-means classifier to segment the breast image into three regions: healthy tissue, benign tumor, and cancerous tumor. Our simulation results on ultrasound breast images illustrate the power of the proposed approach.
0906.3736
Weight Optimization for Consensus Algorithms with Correlated Switching Topology
cs.IT math.IT
We design the weights in consensus algorithms with spatially correlated random topologies. These arise with: 1) networks with spatially correlated random link failures and 2) networks with randomized averaging protocols. We show that the weight optimization problem is convex for both symmetric and asymmetric random graphs. With symmetric random networks, we choose the consensus mean squared error (MSE) convergence rate as optimization criterion and explicitly express this rate as a function of the link formation probabilities, the link formation spatial correlations, and the consensus weights. We prove that the MSE convergence rate is a convex, nonsmooth function of the weights, enabling global optimization of the weights for arbitrary link formation probabilities and link correlation structures. We extend our results to the case of asymmetric random links. We adopt as optimization criterion the mean squared deviation (MSdev) of the nodes states from the current average state. We prove that MSdev is a convex function of the weights. Simulations show that significant performance gain is achieved with our weight design method when compared with methods available in the literature.
0906.3737
On the Beamforming Design for Efficient Interference Alignment
cs.IT math.IT
An efficient interference alignment (IA) scheme is developed for $K$-user single-input single-output frequency selective fading interference channels. The main idea is to steer the transmit beamforming matrices such that at each receiver the subspace dimensions occupied by interference-free desired streams are asymptotically the same as those occupied by all interferences. Our proposed scheme achieves a higher multiplexing gain at any given number of channel realizations in comparison with the original IA scheme, which is known to achieve the optimal multiplexing gain asymptotically.
0906.3741
How opinions are received by online communities: A case study on Amazon.com helpfulness votes
cs.CL cs.IR physics.data-an physics.soc-ph
There are many on-line settings in which users publicly express opinions. A number of these offer mechanisms for other users to evaluate these opinions; a canonical example is Amazon.com, where reviews come with annotations like "26 of 32 people found the following review helpful." Opinion evaluation appears in many off-line settings as well, including market research and political campaigns. Reasoning about the evaluation of an opinion is fundamentally different from reasoning about the opinion itself: rather than asking, "What did Y think of X?", we are asking, "What did Z think of Y's opinion of X?" Here we develop a framework for analyzing and modeling opinion evaluation, using a large-scale collection of Amazon book reviews as a dataset. We find that the perceived helpfulness of a review depends not just on its content but also but also in subtle ways on how the expressed evaluation relates to other evaluations of the same product. As part of our approach, we develop novel methods that take advantage of the phenomenon of review "plagiarism" to control for the effects of text in opinion evaluation, and we provide a simple and natural mathematical model consistent with our findings. Our analysis also allows us to distinguish among the predictions of competing theories from sociology and social psychology, and to discover unexpected differences in the collective opinion-evaluation behavior of user populations from different countries.
0906.3770
Automatic Defect Detection and Classification Technique from Image: A Special Case Using Ceramic Tiles
cs.CV
Quality control is an important issue in the ceramic tile industry. On the other hand maintaining the rate of production with respect to time is also a major issue in ceramic tile manufacturing. Again, price of ceramic tiles also depends on purity of texture, accuracy of color, shape etc. Considering this criteria, an automated defect detection and classification technique has been proposed in this report that can have ensured the better quality of tiles in manufacturing process as well as production rate. Our proposed method plays an important role in ceramic tiles industries to detect the defects and to control the quality of ceramic tiles. This automated classification method helps us to acquire knowledge about the pattern of defect within a very short period of time and also to decide about the recovery process so that the defected tiles may not be mixed with the fresh tiles.
0906.3778
Modified Euclidean Algorithms for Decoding Reed-Solomon Codes
cs.IT math.IT
The extended Euclidean algorithm (EEA) for polynomial greatest common divisors is commonly used in solving the key equation in the decoding of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes, and more generally in BCH decoding. For this particular application, the iterations in the EEA are stopped when the degree of the remainder polynomial falls below a threshold. While determining the degree of a polynomial is a simple task for human beings, hardware implementation of this stopping rule is more complicated. This paper describes a modified version of the EEA that is specifically adapted to the RS decoding problem. This modified algorithm requires no degree computation or comparison to a threshold, and it uses a fixed number of iterations. Another advantage of this modified version is in its application to the errors-and-erasures decoding problem for RS codes where significant hardware savings can be achieved via seamless computation.
0906.3782
On some sufficient conditions for distributed Quality-of-Service support in wireless networks
cs.IT math.IT
Given a wireless network where some pairs of communication links interfere with each other, we study sufficient conditions for determining whether a given set of minimum bandwidth Quality of Service (QoS) requirements can be satisfied. We are especially interested in algorithms which have low communication overhead and low processing complexity. The interference in the network is modeled using a conflict graph whose vertices are the communication links in the network. Two links are adjacent in this graph if and only if they interfere with each other due to being in the same vicinity and hence cannot be simultaneously active. The problem of scheduling the transmission of the various links is then essentially a fractional, weighted vertex coloring problem, for which upper bounds on the fractional chromatic number are sought using only localized information. We present some distributed algorithms for this problem, and discuss their worst-case performance. These algorithms are seen to be within a bounded factor away from optimal for some well known classes of networks and interference models.
0906.3815
Hybrid Rules with Well-Founded Semantics
cs.LO cs.AI cs.PL
A general framework is proposed for integration of rules and external first order theories. It is based on the well-founded semantics of normal logic programs and inspired by ideas of Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) and constructive negation for logic programs. Hybrid rules are normal clauses extended with constraints in the bodies; constraints are certain formulae in the language of the external theory. A hybrid program is a pair of a set of hybrid rules and an external theory. Instances of the framework are obtained by specifying the class of external theories, and the class of constraints. An example instance is integration of (non-disjunctive) Datalog with ontologies formalized as description logics. The paper defines a declarative semantics of hybrid programs and a goal-driven formal operational semantics. The latter can be seen as a generalization of SLS-resolution. It provides a basis for hybrid implementations combining Prolog with constraint solvers. Soundness of the operational semantics is proven. Sufficient conditions for decidability of the declarative semantics, and for completeness of the operational semantics are given.
0906.3816
A Monte-Carlo Implementation of the SAGE Algorithm for Joint Soft Multiuser and Channel Parameter Estimation
cs.IT math.IT
An efficient, joint transmission delay and channel parameter estimation algorithm is proposed for uplink asynchronous direct-sequence code-division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems based on the space-alternating generalized expectation maximization (SAGE) framework. The marginal likelihood of the unknown parameters, averaged over the data sequence, as well as the expectation and maximization steps of the SAGE algorithm are derived analytically. To implement the proposed algorithm, a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique, called Gibbs sampling, is employed to compute the {\em a posteriori} probabilities of data symbols in a computationally efficient way. Computer simulations show that the proposed algorithm has excellent estimation performance. This so-called MCMC-SAGE receiver is guaranteed to converge in likelihood.
0906.3821
Relaying Simultaneous Multicast Messages
cs.IT math.IT
The problem of multicasting multiple messages with the help of a relay, which may also have an independent message of its own to multicast, is considered. As a first step to address this general model, referred to as the compound multiple access channel with a relay (cMACr), the capacity region of the multiple access channel with a "cognitive" relay is characterized, including the cases of partial and rate-limited cognition. Achievable rate regions for the cMACr model are then presented based on decode-and-forward (DF) and compress-and-forward (CF) relaying strategies. Moreover, an outer bound is derived for the special case in which each transmitter has a direct link to one of the receivers while the connection to the other receiver is enabled only through the relay terminal. Numerical results for the Gaussian channel are also provided.
0906.3849
Squeezing the Arimoto-Blahut algorithm for faster convergence
cs.IT math.IT stat.CO
The Arimoto--Blahut algorithm for computing the capacity of a discrete memoryless channel is revisited. A so-called ``squeezing'' strategy is used to design algorithms that preserve its simplicity and monotonic convergence properties, but have provably better rates of convergence.
0906.3864
The Two-Tap Input-Erasure Gaussian Channel and its Application to Cellular Communications
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers the input-erasure Gaussian channel. In contrast to the output-erasure channel where erasures are applied to the output of a linear time-invariant (LTI) system, here erasures, known to the receiver, are applied to the inputs of the LTI system. Focusing on the case where the input symbols are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d)., it is shown that the two channels (input- and output-erasure) are equivalent. Furthermore, assuming that the LTI system consists of a two-tap finite impulse response (FIR) filter, and using simple properties of tri-diagonal matrices, an achievable rate expression is presented in the form of an infinite sum. The results are then used to study the benefits of joint multicell processing (MCP) over single-cell processing (SCP) in a simple linear cellular uplink, where each mobile terminal is received by only the two nearby base-stations (BSs). Specifically, the analysis accounts for ergodic shadowing that simultaneously blocks the mobile terminal (MT) signal from being received by the two BS. It is shown that the resulting ergodic per-cell capacity with optimal MCP is equivalent to that of the two-tap input-erasure channel. Finally, the same cellular uplink is addressed by accounting for dynamic user activity, which is modelled by assuming that each MT is randomly selected to be active or to remain silent throughout the whole transmission block. For this alternative model, a similar equivalence results to the input-erasure channel are reported.
0906.3883
Diversity Analysis of Peaky FSK Signaling in Fading Channels
cs.IT math.IT
Error performance of noncoherent detection of on-off frequency shift keying (OOFSK) modulation over fading channels is analyzed when the receiver is equipped with multiple antennas. The analysis is conducted for two cases: 1) the case in which the receiver has the channel distribution knowledge only; and 2) the case in which the receiver perfectly knows the fading magnitudes. For both cases, the maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) detection rule is derived and analytical probability of error expressions are obtained. Numerical and simulation results indicate that for sufficiently low duty cycle values, lower error probabilities with respect to FSK signaling are achieved. Equivalently, when compared to FSK modulation, OOFSK with low duty cycle requires less energy to achieve the same probability of error, which renders this modulation a more energy efficient transmission technique. Also, through numerical results, the impact of number of antennas, antenna correlation, duty cycle values, and unknown channel fading on the performance are investigated.
0906.3887
Energy-Efficient Modulation Design for Reliable Communication in Wireless Networks
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we have considered the optimization of the $M$-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (MQAM) constellation size to minimize the bit energy consumption under average bit error rate (BER) constraints. In the computation of the energy expenditure, the circuit, transmission, and retransmission energies are taken into account. A combined log-normal shadowing and Rayleigh fading model is employed to model the wireless channel. The link reliabilities and retransmission probabilities are determined through the outage probabilities under log-normal shadowing effects. Both single-hop and multi-hop transmissions are considered. Through numerical results, the optimal constellation sizes are identified. Several interesting observations with practical implications are made. It is seen that while large constellations are preferred at small transmission distances, constellation size should be decreased as the distance increases. Similar trends are observed in both fixed and variable transmit power scenarios. We have noted that variable power schemes can attain higher energy-efficiencies. The analysis of energy-efficient modulation design is also conducted in multi-hop linear networks. In this case, the modulation size and routing paths are jointly optimized, and the analysis of both the bit energy and delay experienced in the linear network is provided.
0906.3888
Effective Capacity Analysis of Cognitive Radio Channels for Quality of Service Provisioning
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, cognitive transmission under quality of service (QoS) constraints is studied. In the cognitive radio channel model, it is assumed that the secondary transmitter sends the data at two different average power levels, depending on the activity of the primary users, which is determined by channel sensing performed by the secondary users. A state-transition model is constructed for this cognitive transmission channel. Statistical limitations on the buffer lengths are imposed to take into account the QoS constraints. The maximum throughput under these statistical QoS constraints is identified by finding the effective capacity of the cognitive radio channel. This analysis is conducted for fixed-power/fixed-rate, fixed-power/variable-rate, and variable-power/variable-rate transmission schemes under different assumptions on the availability of channel side information (CSI) at the transmitter. The impact upon the effective capacity of several system parameters, including channel sensing duration, detection threshold, detection and false alarm probabilities, QoS parameters, and transmission rates, is investigated. The performances of fixed-rate and variable-rate transmission methods are compared in the presence of QoS limitations. It is shown that variable schemes outperform fixed-rate transmission techniques if the detection probabilities are high. Performance gains through adapting the power and rate are quantified and it is shown that these gains diminish as the QoS limitations become more stringent.
0906.3889
Energy Efficiency in the Low-SNR Regime under Queueing Constraints and Channel Uncertainty
cs.IT math.IT
Energy efficiency of fixed-rate transmissions is studied in the presence of queueing constraints and channel uncertainty. It is assumed that neither the transmitter nor the receiver has channel side information prior to transmission. The channel coefficients are estimated at the receiver via minimum mean-square-error (MMSE) estimation with the aid of training symbols. It is further assumed that the system operates under statistical queueing constraints in the form of limitations on buffer violation probabilities. The optimal fraction of power allocated to training is identified. Spectral efficiency--bit energy tradeoff is analyzed in the low-power and wideband regimes by employing the effective capacity formulation. In particular, it is shown that the bit energy increases without bound in the low-power regime as the average power vanishes. A similar conclusion is reached in the wideband regime if the number of noninteracting subchannels grow without bound with increasing bandwidth. On the other hand, it is proven that if the number of resolvable independent paths and hence the number of noninteracting subchannels remain bounded as the available bandwidth increases, the bit energy diminishes to its minimum value in the wideband regime. For this case, expressions for the minimum bit energy and wideband slope are derived. Overall, energy costs of channel uncertainty and queueing constraints are identified, and the impact of multipath richness and sparsity is determined.
0906.3923
Bayesian Forecasting of WWW Traffic on the Time Varying Poisson Model
cs.NI cs.LG
Traffic forecasting from past observed traffic data with small calculation complexity is one of important problems for planning of servers and networks. Focusing on World Wide Web (WWW) traffic as fundamental investigation, this paper would deal with Bayesian forecasting of network traffic on the time varying Poisson model from a viewpoint from statistical decision theory. Under this model, we would show that the estimated forecasting value is obtained by simple arithmetic calculation and expresses real WWW traffic well from both theoretical and empirical points of view.
0906.3926
Soft Constraints for Quality Aspects in Service Oriented Architectures
cs.AI cs.PL
We propose the use of Soft Constraints as a natural way to model Service Oriented Architecture. In the framework, constraints are used to model components and connectors and constraint aggregation is used to represent their interactions. The "quality of a service" is measured and considered when performing queries to service providers. Some examples consist in the levels of cost, performance and availability required by clients. In our framework, the QoS scores are represented by the softness level of the constraint and the measure of complex (web) services is computed by combining the levels of the components.
0906.3988
Theoretical Limits on Time Delay Estimation for Ultra-Wideband Cognitive Radios
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, theoretical limits on time delay estimation are studied for ultra-wideband (UWB) cognitive radio systems. For a generic UWB spectrum with dispersed bands, the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) is derived for unknown channel coefficients and carrier-frequency offsets (CFOs). Then, the effects of unknown channel coefficients and CFOs are investigated for linearly and non-linearly modulated training signals by obtaining specific CRLB expressions. It is shown that for linear modulations with a constant envelope, the effects of the unknown parameters can be mitigated. Finally, numerical results, which support the theoretical analysis, are presented.
0906.4008
Two generalizations on the minimum Hamming distance of repeated-root constacyclic codes
cs.IT math.IT
We study constacyclic codes, of length $np^s$ and $2np^s$, that are generated by the polynomials $(x^n + \gamma)^{\ell}$ and $(x^n - \xi)^i(x^n + \xi)^j$\ respectively, where $x^n + \gamma$, $x^n - \xi$ and $x^n + \xi$ are irreducible over the alphabet $\F_{p^a}$. We generalize the results of [5], [6] and [7] by computing the minimum Hamming distance of these codes. As a particular case, we determine the minimum Hamming distance of cyclic and negacyclic codes, of length $2p^s$, over a finite field of characteristic $p$.
0906.4012
Reduced-Feedback Opportunistic Scheduling and Beamforming with GMD for MIMO-OFDMA
cs.IT math.IT
Opportunistic scheduling and beamforming schemes have been proposed previously by the authors for reduced-feedback MIMO-OFDMA downlink systems where the MIMO channel of each subcarrier is decomposed into layered spatial subchannels. It has been demonstrated that significant feedback reduction can be achieved by returning information about only one beamforming matrix (BFM) for all subcarriers from each MT, compared to one BFM for each subcarrier in the conventional schemes. However, since the previously proposed channel decomposition was derived based on singular value decomposition, the resulting system performance is impaired by the subchannels associated with the smallest singular values. To circumvent this obstacle, this work proposes improved opportunistic scheduling and beamforming schemes based on geometric mean decomposition-based channel decomposition. In addition to the inherent advantage in reduced feedback, the proposed schemes can achieve improved system performance by decomposing the MIMO channels into spatial subchannels with more evenly distributed channel gains. Numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed opportunistic scheduling and beamforming schemes.
0906.4026
A Quantum-based Model for Interactive Information Retrieval (extended version)
cs.IR cs.DL
Even the best information retrieval model cannot always identify the most useful answers to a user query. This is in particular the case with web search systems, where it is known that users tend to minimise their effort to access relevant information. It is, however, believed that the interaction between users and a retrieval system, such as a web search engine, can be exploited to provide better answers to users. Interactive Information Retrieval (IR) systems, in which users access information through a series of interactions with the search system, are concerned with building models for IR, where interaction plays a central role. There are many possible interactions between a user and a search system, ranging from query (re)formulation to relevance feedback. However, capturing them within a single framework is difficult and previously proposed approaches have mostly focused on relevance feedback. In this paper, we propose a general framework for interactive IR that is able to capture the full interaction process in a principled way. Our approach relies upon a generalisation of the probability framework of quantum physics, whose strong geometric component can be a key towards a successful interactive IR model.
0906.4032
Bayesian two-sample tests
cs.LG
In this paper, we present two classes of Bayesian approaches to the two-sample problem. Our first class of methods extends the Bayesian t-test to include all parametric models in the exponential family and their conjugate priors. Our second class of methods uses Dirichlet process mixtures (DPM) of such conjugate-exponential distributions as flexible nonparametric priors over the unknown distributions.
0906.4036
Physical Modeling Techniques in Active Contours for Image Segmentation
cs.CV cs.GR
Physical modeling method, represented by simulation and visualization of the principles in physics, is introduced in the shape extraction of the active contours. The objectives of adopting this concept are to address the several major difficulties in the application of Active Contours. Primarily, a technique is developed to realize the topological changes of Parametric Active Contours (Snakes). The key strategy is to imitate the process of a balloon expanding and filling in a closed space with several objects. After removing the touched balloon surfaces, the objects can be identified by surrounded remaining balloon surfaces. A burned region swept by Snakes is utilized to trace the contour and to give a criterion for stopping the movement of Snake curve. When the Snakes terminates evolution totally, through ignoring this criterion, it can form a connected area by evolving the Snakes again and continuing the region burning. The contours extracted from the boundaries of the burned area can represent the child snake of each object respectively. Secondly, a novel scheme is designed to solve the problems of leakage of the contour from the large gaps, and the segmentation error in Geometric Active Contours (GAC). It divides the segmentation procedure into two processing stages. By simulating the wave propagating in the isotropic substance at the final stage, it can significantly enhance the effect of image force in GAC based on Level Set and give the satisfied solutions to the two problems. Thirdly, to support the physical models for active contours above, we introduce a general image force field created on a template plane over the image plane. This force is more adaptable to noisy images with complicated geometric shapes.
0906.4044
Recommender Systems for the Conference Paper Assignment Problem
cs.IR cs.AI
Conference paper assignment, i.e., the task of assigning paper submissions to reviewers, presents multi-faceted issues for recommender systems research. Besides the traditional goal of predicting `who likes what?', a conference management system must take into account aspects such as: reviewer capacity constraints, adequate numbers of reviews for papers, expertise modeling, conflicts of interest, and an overall distribution of assignments that balances reviewer preferences with conference objectives. Among these, issues of modeling preferences and tastes in reviewing have traditionally been studied separately from the optimization of paper-reviewer assignment. In this paper, we present an integrated study of both these aspects. First, due to the paucity of data per reviewer or per paper (relative to other recommender systems applications) we show how we can integrate multiple sources of information to learn paper-reviewer preference models. Second, our models are evaluated not just in terms of prediction accuracy but in terms of the end-assignment quality. Using a linear programming-based assignment optimization formulation, we show how our approach better explores the space of unsupplied assignments to maximize the overall affinities of papers assigned to reviewers. We demonstrate our results on real reviewer preference data from the IEEE ICDM 2007 conference.
0906.4096
An Event Based Approach To Situational Representation
cs.DB cs.AI
Many application domains require representing interrelated real-world activities and/or evolving physical phenomena. In the crisis response domain, for instance, one may be interested in representing the state of the unfolding crisis (e.g., forest fire), the progress of the response activities such as evacuation and traffic control, and the state of the crisis site(s). Such a situation representation can then be used to support a multitude of applications including situation monitoring, analysis, and planning. In this paper, we make a case for an event based representation of situations where events are defined to be domain-specific significant occurrences in space and time. We argue that events offer a unifying and powerful abstraction to building situational awareness applications. We identify challenges in building an Event Management System (EMS) for which traditional data and knowledge management systems prove to be limited and suggest possible directions and technologies to address the challenges.
0906.4131
Automatic Spatially-Adaptive Balancing of Energy Terms for Image Segmentation
cs.CV
Image segmentation techniques are predominately based on parameter-laden optimization. The objective function typically involves weights for balancing competing image fidelity and segmentation regularization cost terms. Setting these weights suitably has been a painstaking, empirical process. Even if such ideal weights are found for a novel image, most current approaches fix the weight across the whole image domain, ignoring the spatially-varying properties of object shape and image appearance. We propose a novel technique that autonomously balances these terms in a spatially-adaptive manner through the incorporation of image reliability in a graph-based segmentation framework. We validate on synthetic data achieving a reduction in mean error of 47% (p-value << 0.05) when compared to the best fixed parameter segmentation. We also present results on medical images (including segmentations of the corpus callosum and brain tissue in MRI data) and on natural images.
0906.4154
Distributed Fault Detection in Sensor Networks using a Recurrent Neural Network
cs.NE cs.DC
In long-term deployments of sensor networks, monitoring the quality of gathered data is a critical issue. Over the time of deployment, sensors are exposed to harsh conditions, causing some of them to fail or to deliver less accurate data. If such a degradation remains undetected, the usefulness of a sensor network can be greatly reduced. We present an approach that learns spatio-temporal correlations between different sensors, and makes use of the learned model to detect misbehaving sensors by using distributed computation and only local communication between nodes. We introduce SODESN, a distributed recurrent neural network architecture, and a learning method to train SODESN for fault detection in a distributed scenario. Our approach is evaluated using data from different types of sensors and is able to work well even with less-than-perfect link qualities and more than 50% of failed nodes.
0906.4162
A Divergence Formula for Randomness and Dimension (Short Version)
cs.CC cs.IT math.IT
If $S$ is an infinite sequence over a finite alphabet $\Sigma$ and $\beta$ is a probability measure on $\Sigma$, then the {\it dimension} of $ S$ with respect to $\beta$, written $\dim^\beta(S)$, is a constructive version of Billingsley dimension that coincides with the (constructive Hausdorff) dimension $\dim(S)$ when $\beta$ is the uniform probability measure. This paper shows that $\dim^\beta(S)$ and its dual $\Dim^\beta(S)$, the {\it strong dimension} of $S$ with respect to $\beta$, can be used in conjunction with randomness to measure the similarity of two probability measures $\alpha$ and $\beta$ on $\Sigma$. Specifically, we prove that the {\it divergence formula} $$\dim^\beta(R) = \Dim^\beta(R) =\CH(\alpha) / (\CH(\alpha) + \D(\alpha || \beta))$$ holds whenever $\alpha$ and $\beta$ are computable, positive probability measures on $\Sigma$ and $R \in \Sigma^\infty$ is random with respect to $\alpha$. In this formula, $\CH(\alpha)$ is the Shannon entropy of $\alpha$, and $\D(\alpha||\beta)$ is the Kullback-Leibler divergence between $\alpha$ and $\beta$.
0906.4172
Rough Set Model for Discovering Hybrid Association Rules
cs.DB cs.LG
In this paper, the mining of hybrid association rules with rough set approach is investigated as the algorithm RSHAR.The RSHAR algorithm is constituted of two steps mainly. At first, to join the participant tables into a general table to generate the rules which is expressing the relationship between two or more domains that belong to several different tables in a database. Then we apply the mapping code on selected dimension, which can be added directly into the information system as one certain attribute. To find the association rules, frequent itemsets are generated in second step where candidate itemsets are generated through equivalence classes and also transforming the mapping code in to real dimensions. The searching method for candidate itemset is similar to apriori algorithm. The analysis of the performance of algorithm has been carried out.
0906.4228
On Chase Termination Beyond Stratification
cs.DB cs.AI
We study the termination problem of the chase algorithm, a central tool in various database problems such as the constraint implication problem, Conjunctive Query optimization, rewriting queries using views, data exchange, and data integration. The basic idea of the chase is, given a database instance and a set of constraints as input, to fix constraint violations in the database instance. It is well-known that, for an arbitrary set of constraints, the chase does not necessarily terminate (in general, it is even undecidable if it does or not). Addressing this issue, we review the limitations of existing sufficient termination conditions for the chase and develop new techniques that allow us to establish weaker sufficient conditions. In particular, we introduce two novel termination conditions called safety and inductive restriction, and use them to define the so-called T-hierarchy of termination conditions. We then study the interrelations of our termination conditions with previous conditions and the complexity of checking our conditions. This analysis leads to an algorithm that checks membership in a level of the T-hierarchy and accounts for the complexity of termination conditions. As another contribution, we study the problem of data-dependent chase termination and present sufficient termination conditions w.r.t. fixed instances. They might guarantee termination although the chase does not terminate in the general case. As an application of our techniques beyond those already mentioned, we transfer our results into the field of query answering over knowledge bases where the chase on the underlying database may not terminate, making existing algorithms applicable to broader classes of constraints.
0906.4316
Constructive Decision Theory
cs.GT cs.AI econ.TH
In most contemporary approaches to decision making, a decision problem is described by a sets of states and set of outcomes, and a rich set of acts, which are functions from states to outcomes over which the decision maker (DM) has preferences. Most interesting decision problems, however, do not come with a state space and an outcome space. Indeed, in complex problems it is often far from clear what the state and outcome spaces would be. We present an alternative foundation for decision making, in which the primitive objects of choice are syntactic programs. A representation theorem is proved in the spirit of standard representation theorems, showing that if the DM's preference relation on objects of choice satisfies appropriate axioms, then there exist a set S of states, a set O of outcomes, a way of interpreting the objects of choice as functions from S to O, a probability on S, and a utility function on O, such that the DM prefers choice a to choice b if and only if the expected utility of a is higher than that of b. Thus, the state space and outcome space are subjective, just like the probability and utility; they are not part of the description of the problem. In principle, a modeler can test for SEU behavior without having access to states or outcomes. We illustrate the power of our approach by showing that it can capture decision makers who are subject to framing effects.
0906.4321
Reasoning About Knowledge of Unawareness Revisited
cs.AI cs.GT cs.LO
In earlier work, we proposed a logic that extends the Logic of General Awareness of Fagin and Halpern [1988] by allowing quantification over primitive propositions. This makes it possible to express the fact that an agent knows that there are some facts of which he is unaware. In that logic, it is not possible to model an agent who is uncertain about whether he is aware of all formulas. To overcome this problem, we keep the syntax of the earlier paper, but allow models where, with each world, a possibly different language is associated. We provide a sound and complete axiomatization for this logic and show that, under natural assumptions, the quantifier-free fragment of the logic is characterized by exactly the same axioms as the logic of Heifetz, Meier, and Schipper [2008].
0906.4326
A Logical Characterization of Iterated Admissibility
cs.AI cs.GT cs.LO
Brandenburger, Friedenberg, and Keisler provide an epistemic characterization of iterated admissibility (i.e., iterated deletion of weakly dominated strategies) where uncertainty is represented using LPSs (lexicographic probability sequences). Their characterization holds in a rich structure called a complete structure, where all types are possible. Here, a logical charaacterization of iterated admisibility is given that involves only standard probability and holds in all structures, not just complete structures. A stronger notion of strong admissibility is then defined. Roughly speaking, strong admissibility is meant to capture the intuition that "all the agent knows" is that the other agents satisfy the appropriate rationality assumptions. Strong admissibility makes it possible to relate admissibility, canonical structures (as typically considered in completeness proofs in modal logic), complete structures, and the notion of ``all I know''.
0906.4327
A Rough Sets Partitioning Model for Mining Sequential Patterns with Time Constraint
cs.DB
Now a days, data mining and knowledge discovery methods are applied to a variety of enterprise and engineering disciplines to uncover interesting patterns from databases. The study of Sequential patterns is an important data mining problem due to its wide applications to real world time dependent databases. Sequential patterns are inter-event patterns ordered over a time-period associated with specific objects under study. Analysis and discovery of frequent sequential patterns over a predetermined time-period are interesting data mining results, and can aid in decision support in many enterprise applications. The problem of sequential pattern mining poses computational challenges as a long frequent sequence contains enormous number of frequent subsequences. Also useful results depend on the right choice of event window. In this paper, we have studied the problem of sequential pattern mining through two perspectives, one the computational aspect of the problem and the other is incorporation and adjustability of time constraint. We have used Indiscernibility relation from theory of rough sets to partition the search space of sequential patterns and have proposed a novel algorithm that allows previsualization of patterns and allows adjustment of time constraint prior to execution of mining task. The algorithm Rough Set Partitioning is at least ten times faster than the naive time constraint based sequential pattern mining algorithm GSP. Besides this an additional knowledge of time interval of sequential patterns is also determined with the method.
0906.4332
Updating Sets of Probabilities
cs.AI
There are several well-known justifications for conditioning as the appropriate method for updating a single probability measure, given an observation. However, there is a significant body of work arguing for sets of probability measures, rather than single measures, as a more realistic model of uncertainty. Conditioning still makes sense in this context--we can simply condition each measure in the set individually, then combine the results--and, indeed, it seems to be the preferred updating procedure in the literature. But how justified is conditioning in this richer setting? Here we show, by considering an axiomatic account of conditioning given by van Fraassen, that the single-measure and sets-of-measures cases are very different. We show that van Fraassen's axiomatization for the former case is nowhere near sufficient for updating sets of measures. We give a considerably longer (and not as compelling) list of axioms that together force conditioning in this setting, and describe other update methods that are allowed once any of these axioms is dropped.
0906.4415
Robust Watermarking in Multiresolution Walsh-Hadamard Transform
cs.CR cs.IT cs.MM math.IT
In this paper, a newer version of Walsh-Hadamard Transform namely multiresolution Walsh-Hadamard Transform (MR-WHT) is proposed for images. Further, a robust watermarking scheme is proposed for copyright protection using MRWHT and singular value decomposition. The core idea of the proposed scheme is to decompose an image using MR-WHT and then middle singular values of high frequency sub-band at the coarsest and the finest level are modified with the singular values of the watermark. Finally, a reliable watermark extraction scheme is developed for the extraction of the watermark from the distorted image. The experimental results show better visual imperceptibility and resiliency of the proposed scheme against intentional or un-intentional variety of attacks.
0906.4454
Activatability for simulation tractability of NP problems: Application to Ecology
q-bio.QM cs.CE
Dynamics of biological-ecological systems is strongly depending on spatial dimensions. Most of powerful simulators in ecology take into account for system spatiality thus embedding stochastic processes. Due to the difficulty of researching particular trajectories, biologists and computer scientists aim at predicting the most probable trajectories of systems under study. Doing that, they considerably reduce computation times. However, because of the largeness of space, the execution time remains usually polynomial in time. In order to reduce execution times we propose an activatability-based search cycle through the process space. This cycle eliminates the redundant processes on a statistical basis (Generalized Linear Model), and converges to the minimal number of processes required to match simulation objectives.
0906.4539
Learning with Spectral Kernels and Heavy-Tailed Data
cs.LG cs.DS
Two ubiquitous aspects of large-scale data analysis are that the data often have heavy-tailed properties and that diffusion-based or spectral-based methods are often used to identify and extract structure of interest. Perhaps surprisingly, popular distribution-independent methods such as those based on the VC dimension fail to provide nontrivial results for even simple learning problems such as binary classification in these two settings. In this paper, we develop distribution-dependent learning methods that can be used to provide dimension-independent sample complexity bounds for the binary classification problem in these two popular settings. In particular, we provide bounds on the sample complexity of maximum margin classifiers when the magnitude of the entries in the feature vector decays according to a power law and also when learning is performed with the so-called Diffusion Maps kernel. Both of these results rely on bounding the annealed entropy of gap-tolerant classifiers in a Hilbert space. We provide such a bound, and we demonstrate that our proof technique generalizes to the case when the margin is measured with respect to more general Banach space norms. The latter result is of potential interest in cases where modeling the relationship between data elements as a dot product in a Hilbert space is too restrictive.
0906.4560
Coordinated Weighted Sampling for Estimating Aggregates Over Multiple Weight Assignments
cs.DB cs.NI
Many data sources are naturally modeled by multiple weight assignments over a set of keys: snapshots of an evolving database at multiple points in time, measurements collected over multiple time periods, requests for resources served at multiple locations, and records with multiple numeric attributes. Over such vector-weighted data we are interested in aggregates with respect to one set of weights, such as weighted sums, and aggregates over multiple sets of weights such as the $L_1$ difference. Sample-based summarization is highly effective for data sets that are too large to be stored or manipulated. The summary facilitates approximate processing queries that may be specified after the summary was generated. Current designs, however, are geared for data sets where a single {\em scalar} weight is associated with each key. We develop a sampling framework based on {\em coordinated weighted samples} that is suited for multiple weight assignments and obtain estimators that are {\em orders of magnitude tighter} than previously possible. We demonstrate the power of our methods through an extensive empirical evaluation on diverse data sets ranging from IP network to stock quotes data.
0906.4582
On landmark selection and sampling in high-dimensional data analysis
stat.ML cs.CV cs.LG
In recent years, the spectral analysis of appropriately defined kernel matrices has emerged as a principled way to extract the low-dimensional structure often prevalent in high-dimensional data. Here we provide an introduction to spectral methods for linear and nonlinear dimension reduction, emphasizing ways to overcome the computational limitations currently faced by practitioners with massive datasets. In particular, a data subsampling or landmark selection process is often employed to construct a kernel based on partial information, followed by an approximate spectral analysis termed the Nystrom extension. We provide a quantitative framework to analyse this procedure, and use it to demonstrate algorithmic performance bounds on a range of practical approaches designed to optimize the landmark selection process. We compare the practical implications of these bounds by way of real-world examples drawn from the field of computer vision, whereby low-dimensional manifold structure is shown to emerge from high-dimensional video data streams.
0906.4589
Further Analysis on Resource Allocation in Wireless Communications Under Imperfect Channel State Information
cs.IT math.IT
This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to some errors.
0906.4597
Large deviations sum-queue optimality of a radial sum-rate monotone opportunistic scheduler
cs.IT math.IT
A centralized wireless system is considered that is serving a fixed set of users with time varying channel capacities. An opportunistic scheduling rule in this context selects a user (or users) to serve based on the current channel state and user queues. Unless the user traffic is symmetric and/or the underlying capacity region a polymatroid, little is known concerning how performance optimal schedulers should tradeoff "maximizing current service rate" (being opportunistic) versus "balancing unequal queues" (enhancing user-diversity to enable future high service rate opportunities). By contrast with currently proposed opportunistic schedulers, e.g., MaxWeight and Exp Rule, a radial sum-rate monotone (RSM) scheduler de-emphasizes queue-balancing in favor of greedily maximizing the system service rate as the queue-lengths are scaled up linearly. In this paper it is shown that an RSM opportunistic scheduler, p-Log Rule, is not only throughput-optimal, but also maximizes the asymptotic exponential decay rate of the sum-queue distribution for a two-queue system. The result complements existing optimality results for opportunistic scheduling and point to RSM schedulers as a good design choice given the need for robustness in wireless systems with both heterogeneity and high degree of uncertainty.
0906.4602
Minimal Gr\"obner bases and the predictable leading monomial property
cs.IT math.IT
We focus on Gr\"obner bases for modules of univariate polynomial vectors over a ring. We identify a useful property, the "predictable leading monomial (PLM) property" that is shared by minimal Gr\"{o}bner bases of modules in F[x]^q, no matter what positional term order is used. The PLM property is useful in a range of applications and can be seen as a strengthening of the wellknown predictable degree property (= row reducedness), a terminology introduced by Forney in the 70's. Because of the presence of zero divisors, minimal Gr\"{o}bner bases over a finite ring of the type Z_p^r (where p is a prime integer and r is an integer >1) do not necessarily have the PLM property. In this paper we show how to derive, from an ordered minimal Gr\"{o}bner basis, a so-called "minimal Gr\"{o}bner p-basis" that does have a PLM property. We demonstrate that minimal Gr\"obner p-bases lend themselves particularly well to derive minimal realization parametrizations over Z_p^r. Applications are in coding and sequences over Z_p^r.
0906.4615
Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff for the Multiple-Antenna Wire-tap Channel
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper the fading multiple antenna (MIMO) wire-tap channel is investigated under short term power constraints. The secret diversity gain and the secret multiplexing gain are defined. Using these definitions, the secret diversitymultiplexing tradeoff (DMT) is calculated analytically for no transmitter side channel state information (CSI) and for full CSI. When there is no CSI at the transmitter, under the assumption of Gaussian codebooks, it is shown that the eavesdropper steals both transmitter and receiver antennas, and the secret DMT depends on the remaining degrees of freedom. When CSI is available at the transmitter (CSIT), the eavesdropper steals only transmitter antennas. This dependence on the availability of CSI is unlike the DMT results without secrecy constraints, where the DMT remains the same for no CSI and full CSI at the transmitter under short term power constraints. A zero-forcing type scheme is shown to achieve the secret DMT when CSIT is available.
0906.4643
The Poisson Channel with Side Information
cs.IT math.IT
The continuous-time, peak-limited, infinite-bandwidth Poisson channel with spurious counts is considered. It is shown that if the times at which the spurious counts occur are known noncausally to the transmitter but not to the receiver, then the capacity is equal to that of the Poisson channel with no spurious counts. Knowing the times at which the spurious counts occur only causally at the transmitter does not increase capacity.
0906.4663
Acquiring Knowledge for Evaluation of Teachers Performance in Higher Education using a Questionnaire
cs.LG
In this paper, we present the step by step knowledge acquisition process by choosing a structured method through using a questionnaire as a knowledge acquisition tool. Here we want to depict the problem domain as, how to evaluate teachers performance in higher education through the use of expert system technology. The problem is how to acquire the specific knowledge for a selected problem efficiently and effectively from human experts and encode it in the suitable computer format. Acquiring knowledge from human experts in the process of expert systems development is one of the most common problems cited till yet. This questionnaire was sent to 87 domain experts within all public and private universities in Pakistani. Among them 25 domain experts sent their valuable opinions. Most of the domain experts were highly qualified, well experienced and highly responsible persons. The whole questionnaire was divided into 15 main groups of factors, which were further divided into 99 individual questions. These facts were analyzed further to give a final shape to the questionnaire. This knowledge acquisition technique may be used as a learning tool for further research work.
0906.4675
Competition for Popularity in Bipartite Networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI physics.data-an
We present a dynamical model for rewiring and attachment in bipartite networks in which edges are added between nodes that belong to catalogs that can either be fixed in size or growing in size. The model is motivated by an empirical study of data from the video rental service Netflix, which invites its users to give ratings to the videos available in its catalog. We find that the distribution of the number of ratings given by users and that of the number of ratings received by videos both follow a power law with an exponential cutoff. We also examine the activity patterns of Netflix users and find bursts of intense video-rating activity followed by long periods of inactivity. We derive ordinary differential equations to model the acquisition of edges by the nodes over time and obtain the corresponding time-dependent degree distributions. We then compare our results with the Netflix data and find good agreement. We conclude with a discussion of how catalog models can be used to study systems in which agents are forced to choose, rate, or prioritize their interactions from a very large set of options.
0906.4690
Fuzzy Logic Based Method for Improving Text Summarization
cs.IR
Text summarization can be classified into two approaches: extraction and abstraction. This paper focuses on extraction approach. The goal of text summarization based on extraction approach is sentence selection. One of the methods to obtain the suitable sentences is to assign some numerical measure of a sentence for the summary called sentence weighting and then select the best ones. The first step in summarization by extraction is the identification of important features. In our experiment, we used 125 test documents in DUC2002 data set. Each document is prepared by preprocessing process: sentence segmentation, tokenization, removing stop word, and word stemming. Then, we use 8 important features and calculate their score for each sentence. We propose text summarization based on fuzzy logic to improve the quality of the summary created by the general statistic method. We compare our results with the baseline summarizer and Microsoft Word 2007 summarizers. The results show that the best average precision, recall, and f-measure for the summaries were obtained by fuzzy method.
0906.4692
On optimally partitioning a text to improve its compression
cs.DS cs.IT math.IT
In this paper we investigate the problem of partitioning an input string T in such a way that compressing individually its parts via a base-compressor C gets a compressed output that is shorter than applying C over the entire T at once. This problem was introduced in the context of table compression, and then further elaborated and extended to strings and trees. Unfortunately, the literature offers poor solutions: namely, we know either a cubic-time algorithm for computing the optimal partition based on dynamic programming, or few heuristics that do not guarantee any bounds on the efficacy of their computed partition, or algorithms that are efficient but work in some specific scenarios (such as the Burrows-Wheeler Transform) and achieve compression performance that might be worse than the optimal-partitioning by a $\Omega(\sqrt{\log n})$ factor. Therefore, computing efficiently the optimal solution is still open. In this paper we provide the first algorithm which is guaranteed to compute in $O(n \log_{1+\eps}n)$ time a partition of T whose compressed output is guaranteed to be no more than $(1+\epsilon)$-worse the optimal one, where $\epsilon$ may be any positive constant.
0906.4764
A Novel Bid Optimizer for Sponsored Search Auctions based on Cooperative Game Theory
cs.GT cs.MA
In this paper, we propose a bid optimizer for sponsored keyword search auctions which leads to better retention of advertisers by yielding attractive utilities to the advertisers without decreasing the revenue to the search engine. The bid optimizer is positioned as a key value added tool the search engine provides to the advertisers. The proposed bid optimizer algorithm transforms the reported values of the advertisers for a keyword into a correlated bid profile using many ideas from cooperative game theory. The algorithm is based on a characteristic form game involving the search engine and the advertisers. Ideas from Nash bargaining theory are used in formulating the characteristic form game to provide for a fair share of surplus among the players involved. The algorithm then computes the nucleolus of the characteristic form game since we find that the nucleolus is an apt way of allocating the gains of cooperation among the search engine and the advertisers. The algorithm next transforms the nucleolus into a correlated bid profile using a linear programming formulation. This bid profile is input to a standard generalized second price mechanism (GSP) for determining the allocation of sponsored slots and the prices to be be paid by the winners. The correlated bid profile that we determine is a locally envy-free equilibrium and also a correlated equilibrium of the underlying game. Through detailed simulation experiments, we show that the proposed bid optimizer retains more customers than a plain GSP mechanism and also yields better long-run utilities to the search engine and the advertisers.
0906.4779
Minimum Probability Flow Learning
cs.LG physics.data-an stat.ML
Fitting probabilistic models to data is often difficult, due to the general intractability of the partition function and its derivatives. Here we propose a new parameter estimation technique that does not require computing an intractable normalization factor or sampling from the equilibrium distribution of the model. This is achieved by establishing dynamics that would transform the observed data distribution into the model distribution, and then setting as the objective the minimization of the KL divergence between the data distribution and the distribution produced by running the dynamics for an infinitesimal time. Score matching, minimum velocity learning, and certain forms of contrastive divergence are shown to be special cases of this learning technique. We demonstrate parameter estimation in Ising models, deep belief networks and an independent component analysis model of natural scenes. In the Ising model case, current state of the art techniques are outperformed by at least an order of magnitude in learning time, with lower error in recovered coupling parameters.
0906.4789
Efficient IRIS Recognition through Improvement of Feature Extraction and subset Selection
cs.CV
The selection of the optimal feature subset and the classification has become an important issue in the field of iris recognition. In this paper we propose several methods for iris feature subset selection and vector creation. The deterministic feature sequence is extracted from the iris image by using the contourlet transform technique. Contourlet transform captures the intrinsic geometrical structures of iris image. It decomposes the iris image into a set of directional sub-bands with texture details captured in different orientations at various scales so for reducing the feature vector dimensions we use the method for extract only significant bit and information from normalized iris images. In this method we ignore fragile bits. And finally we use SVM (Support Vector Machine) classifier for approximating the amount of people identification in our proposed system. Experimental result show that most proposed method reduces processing time and increase the classification accuracy and also the iris feature vector length is much smaller versus the other methods.
0906.4805
A Trivial Observation related to Sparse Recovery
cs.IT math.IT
We make a trivial modification to the elegant analysis of Garg and Khandekar (\emph{Gradient Descent with Sparsification} ICML 2009) that replaces the standard Restricted Isometry Property (RIP), with another RIP-type property (which could be simpler than the RIP, but we are not sure; it could be as hard as the RIP to check, thereby rendering this little writeup totally worthless).
0906.4827
Physical Layer Security: Coalitional Games for Distributed Cooperation
cs.IT cs.GT math.IT
Cooperation between wireless network nodes is a promising technique for improving the physical layer security of wireless transmission, in terms of secrecy capacity, in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers. While existing physical layer security literature answered the question "what are the link-level secrecy capacity gains from cooperation?", this paper attempts to answer the question of "how to achieve those gains in a practical decentralized wireless network and in the presence of a secrecy capacity cost for information exchange?". For this purpose, we model the physical layer security cooperation problem as a coalitional game with non-transferable utility and propose a distributed algorithm for coalition formation. Through the proposed algorithm, the wireless users can autonomously cooperate and self-organize into disjoint independent coalitions, while maximizing their secrecy capacity taking into account the security costs during information exchange. We analyze the resulting coalitional structures, discuss their properties, and study how the users can self-adapt the network topology to environmental changes such as mobility. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm allows the users to cooperate and self-organize while improving the average secrecy capacity per user up to 25.32% relative to the non-cooperative case.
0906.4838
Forecasting Model for Crude Oil Price Using Artificial Neural Networks and Commodity Futures Prices
cs.NE q-fin.PM
This paper presents a model based on multilayer feedforward neural network to forecast crude oil spot price direction in the short-term, up to three days ahead. A great deal of attention was paid on finding the optimal ANN model structure. In addition, several methods of data pre-processing were tested. Our approach is to create a benchmark based on lagged value of pre-processed spot price, then add pre-processed futures prices for 1, 2, 3,and four months to maturity, one by one and also altogether. The results on the benchmark suggest that a dynamic model of 13 lags is the optimal to forecast spot price direction for the short-term. Further, the forecast accuracy of the direction of the market was 78%, 66%, and 53% for one, two, and three days in future conclusively. For all the experiments, that include futures data as an input, the results show that on the short-term, futures prices do hold new information on the spot price direction. The results obtained will generate comprehensive understanding of the crude oil dynamic which help investors and individuals for risk managements.
0906.4846
A genetic algorithm for structure-activity relationships: software implementation
cs.NE
The design and the implementation of a genetic algorithm are described. The applicability domain is on structure-activity relationships expressed as multiple linear regressions and predictor variables are from families of structure-based molecular descriptors. An experiment to compare different selection and survival strategies was designed and realized. The genetic algorithm was run using the designed experiment on a set of 206 polychlorinated biphenyls searching on structure-activity relationships having known the measured octanol-water partition coefficients and a family of molecular descriptors. The experiment shows that different selection and survival strategies create different partitions on the entire population of all possible genotypes.
0906.4913
Explicit Construction of Optimal Exact Regenerating Codes for Distributed Storage
cs.IT math.IT
Erasure coding techniques are used to increase the reliability of distributed storage systems while minimizing storage overhead. Also of interest is minimization of the bandwidth required to repair the system following a node failure. In a recent paper, Wu et al. characterize the tradeoff between the repair bandwidth and the amount of data stored per node. They also prove the existence of regenerating codes that achieve this tradeoff. In this paper, we introduce Exact Regenerating Codes, which are regenerating codes possessing the additional property of being able to duplicate the data stored at a failed node. Such codes require low processing and communication overheads, making the system practical and easy to maintain. Explicit construction of exact regenerating codes is provided for the minimum bandwidth point on the storage-repair bandwidth tradeoff, relevant to distributed-mail-server applications. A subspace based approach is provided and shown to yield necessary and sufficient conditions on a linear code to possess the exact regeneration property as well as prove the uniqueness of our construction. Also included in the paper, is an explicit construction of regenerating codes for the minimum storage point for parameters relevant to storage in peer-to-peer systems. This construction supports a variable number of nodes and can handle multiple, simultaneous node failures. All constructions given in the paper are of low complexity, requiring low field size in particular.
0906.4927
Fast Probabilistic Ranking under x-Relation Model
cs.DB
The probabilistic top-k queries based on the interplay of score and probability, under the possible worlds semantic, become an important research issue that considers both score and uncertainty on the same basis. In the literature, many different probabilistic top-k queries are proposed. Almost all of them need to compute the probability of a tuple t_i to be ranked at the j-th position across the entire set of possible worlds. The cost of such computing is the dominant cost and is known as O(kn^2), where n is the size of dataset. In this paper, we propose a new novel algorithm that computes such probability in O(kn).
0906.4973
Vision Based Navigation for a Mobile Robot with Different Field of Views
cs.RO
The basic idea behind evolutionary robotics is to evolve a set of neural controllers for a particular task at hand. It involves use of various input parameters such as infrared sensors, light sensors and vision based methods. This paper aims to explore the evolution of vision based navigation in a mobile robot. It discusses in detail the effect of different field of views for a mobile robot. The individuals have been evolved using different FOV values and the results have been recorded and analyzed.The optimum values for FOV have been proposed after evaluating more than 100 different values. It has been observed that the optimum FOV value requires lesser number of generations for evolution and the mobile robot trained with that particular value is able to navigate well in the environment.
0906.4982
Concept-based Recommendations for Internet Advertisement
cs.AI cs.CY cs.IR stat.ML
The problem of detecting terms that can be interesting to the advertiser is considered. If a company has already bought some advertising terms which describe certain services, it is reasonable to find out the terms bought by competing companies. A part of them can be recommended as future advertising terms to the company. The goal of this work is to propose better interpretable recommendations based on FCA and association rules.
0906.5007
Spread of Misinformation in Social Networks
cs.IT cs.DC math.IT math.PR
We provide a model to investigate the tension between information aggregation and spread of misinformation in large societies (conceptualized as networks of agents communicating with each other). Each individual holds a belief represented by a scalar. Individuals meet pairwise and exchange information, which is modeled as both individuals adopting the average of their pre-meeting beliefs. When all individuals engage in this type of information exchange, the society will be able to effectively aggregate the initial information held by all individuals. There is also the possibility of misinformation, however, because some of the individuals are "forceful," meaning that they influence the beliefs of (some) of the other individuals they meet, but do not change their own opinion. The paper characterizes how the presence of forceful agents interferes with information aggregation. Under the assumption that even forceful agents obtain some information (however infrequent) from some others (and additional weak regularity conditions), we first show that beliefs in this class of societies converge to a consensus among all individuals. This consensus value is a random variable, however, and we characterize its behavior. Our main results quantify the extent of misinformation in the society by either providing bounds or exact results (in some special cases) on how far the consensus value can be from the benchmark without forceful agents (where there is efficient information aggregation). The worst outcomes obtain when there are several forceful agents and forceful agents themselves update their beliefs only on the basis of information they obtain from individuals most likely to have received their own information previously.
0906.5017
Collaborative filtering with diffusion-based similarity on tripartite graphs
cs.IR
Collaborative tags are playing more and more important role for the organization of information systems. In this paper, we study a personalized recommendation model making use of the ternary relations among users, objects and tags. We propose a measure of user similarity based on his preference and tagging information. Two kinds of similarities between users are calculated by using a diffusion-based process, which are then integrated for recommendation. We test the proposed method in a standard collaborative filtering framework with three metrics: ranking score, Recall and Precision, and demonstrate that it performs better than the commonly used cosine similarity.
0906.5022
Chemical Power for Microscopic Robots in Capillaries
cs.RO physics.bio-ph
The power available to microscopic robots (nanorobots) that oxidize bloodstream glucose while aggregated in circumferential rings on capillary walls is evaluated with a numerical model using axial symmetry and time-averaged release of oxygen from passing red blood cells. Robots about one micron in size can produce up to several tens of picowatts, in steady-state, if they fully use oxygen reaching their surface from the blood plasma. Robots with pumps and tanks for onboard oxygen storage could collect oxygen to support burst power demands two to three orders of magnitude larger. We evaluate effects of oxygen depletion and local heating on surrounding tissue. These results give the power constraints when robots rely entirely on ambient available oxygen and identify aspects of the robot design significantly affecting available power. More generally, our numerical model provides an approach to evaluating robot design choices for nanomedicine treatments in and near capillaries.
0906.5023
An Upper Bound on the Minimum Weight of Type II $\ZZ_{2k}$-Codes
math.CO cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we give a new upper bound on the minimum Euclidean weight of Type II $\ZZ_{2k}$-codes and the concept of extremality for the Euclidean weights when $k=3,4,5,6$. Together with the known result, we demonstrate that there is an extremal Type II $\ZZ_{2k}$-code of length $8m$ $(m \le 8)$ when $k=3,4,5,6$.
0906.5034
Effective Focused Crawling Based on Content and Link Structure Analysis
cs.IR
A focused crawler traverses the web selecting out relevant pages to a predefined topic and neglecting those out of concern. While surfing the internet it is difficult to deal with irrelevant pages and to predict which links lead to quality pages. In this paper a technique of effective focused crawling is implemented to improve the quality of web navigation. To check the similarity of web pages w.r.t. topic keywords a similarity function is used and the priorities of extracted out links are also calculated based on meta data and resultant pages generated from focused crawler. The proposed work also uses a method for traversing the irrelevant pages that met during crawling to improve the coverage of a specific topic.
0906.5038
A Novel Two-Stage Dynamic Decision Support based Optimal Threat Evaluation and Defensive Resource Scheduling Algorithm for Multi Air-borne threats
cs.AI
This paper presents a novel two-stage flexible dynamic decision support based optimal threat evaluation and defensive resource scheduling algorithm for multi-target air-borne threats. The algorithm provides flexibility and optimality by swapping between two objective functions, i.e. the preferential and subtractive defense strategies as and when required. To further enhance the solution quality, it outlines and divides the critical parameters used in Threat Evaluation and Weapon Assignment (TEWA) into three broad categories (Triggering, Scheduling and Ranking parameters). Proposed algorithm uses a variant of many-to-many Stable Marriage Algorithm (SMA) to solve Threat Evaluation (TE) and Weapon Assignment (WA) problem. In TE stage, Threat Ranking and Threat-Asset pairing is done. Stage two is based on a new flexible dynamic weapon scheduling algorithm, allowing multiple engagements using shoot-look-shoot strategy, to compute near-optimal solution for a range of scenarios. Analysis part of this paper presents the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed algorithm over an alternative greedy algorithm as applied to different offline scenarios.
0906.5039
A new approach for digit recognition based on hand gesture analysis
cs.CV
We present in this paper a new approach for hand gesture analysis that allows digit recognition. The analysis is based on extracting a set of features from a hand image and then combining them by using an induction graph. The most important features we extract from each image are the fingers locations, their heights and the distance between each pair of fingers. Our approach consists of three steps: (i) Hand detection and localization, (ii) fingers extraction and (iii) features identification and combination to digit recognition. Each input image is assumed to contain only one person, thus we apply a fuzzy classifier to identify the skin pixels. In the finger extraction step, we attempt to remove all the hand components except the fingers, this process is based on the hand anatomy properties. The final step consists on representing histogram of the detected fingers in order to extract features that will be used for digit recognition. The approach is invariant to scale, rotation and translation of the hand. Some experiments have been undertaken to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
0906.5040
Towards the Patterns of Hard CSPs with Association Rule Mining
cs.DB cs.AI
The hardness of finite domain Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) is a very important research area in Constraint Programming (CP) community. However, this problem has not yet attracted much attention from the researchers in the association rule mining community. As a popular data mining technique, association rule mining has an extremely wide application area and it has already been successfully applied to many interdisciplines. In this paper, we study the association rule mining techniques and propose a cascaded approach to extract the interesting patterns of the hard CSPs. As far as we know, this problem is investigated with the data mining techniques for the first time. Specifically, we generate the random CSPs and collect their characteristics by solving all the CSP instances, and then apply the data mining techniques on the data set and further to discover the interesting patterns of the hardness of the randomly generated CSPs
0906.5110
Statistical Analysis of Privacy and Anonymity Guarantees in Randomized Security Protocol Implementations
cs.CR cs.LG
Security protocols often use randomization to achieve probabilistic non-determinism. This non-determinism, in turn, is used in obfuscating the dependence of observable values on secret data. Since the correctness of security protocols is very important, formal analysis of security protocols has been widely studied in literature. Randomized security protocols have also been analyzed using formal techniques such as process-calculi and probabilistic model checking. In this paper, we consider the problem of validating implementations of randomized protocols. Unlike previous approaches which treat the protocol as a white-box, our approach tries to verify an implementation provided as a black box. Our goal is to infer the secrecy guarantees provided by a security protocol through statistical techniques. We learn the probabilistic dependency of the observable outputs on secret inputs using Bayesian network. This is then used to approximate the leakage of secret. In order to evaluate the accuracy of our statistical approach, we compare our technique with the probabilistic model checking technique on two examples: crowds protocol and dining crypotgrapher's protocol.
0906.5114
Non-Parametric Bayesian Areal Linguistics
cs.CL
We describe a statistical model over linguistic areas and phylogeny. Our model recovers known areas and identifies a plausible hierarchy of areal features. The use of areas improves genetic reconstruction of languages both qualitatively and quantitatively according to a variety of metrics. We model linguistic areas by a Pitman-Yor process and linguistic phylogeny by Kingman's coalescent.
0906.5119
General combination rules for qualitative and quantitative beliefs
cs.AI
Martin and Osswald \cite{Martin07} have recently proposed many generalizations of combination rules on quantitative beliefs in order to manage the conflict and to consider the specificity of the responses of the experts. Since the experts express themselves usually in natural language with linguistic labels, Smarandache and Dezert \cite{Li07} have introduced a mathematical framework for dealing directly also with qualitative beliefs. In this paper we recall some element of our previous works and propose the new combination rules, developed for the fusion of both qualitative or quantitative beliefs.
0906.5120
Comments on "A new combination of evidence based on compromise" by K. Yamada
cs.CV cs.AI
Comments on ``A new combination of evidence based on compromise'' by K. Yamada
0906.5131
A Comment on Nonextensive Statistical Mechanics
cs.IT math.IT
There is a conception that Boltzmann-Gibbs statistics cannot yield the long tail distribution. This is the justification for the intensive research of nonextensive entropies (i.e. Tsallis entropy and others). Here the error that caused this misconception is explained and it is shown that a long tail distribution exists in equilibrium thermodynamics for more than a century.
0906.5148
Explicit probabilistic models for databases and networks
cs.AI cs.DB cs.IT math.IT
Recent work in data mining and related areas has highlighted the importance of the statistical assessment of data mining results. Crucial to this endeavour is the choice of a non-trivial null model for the data, to which the found patterns can be contrasted. The most influential null models proposed so far are defined in terms of invariants of the null distribution. Such null models can be used by computation intensive randomization approaches in estimating the statistical significance of data mining results. Here, we introduce a methodology to construct non-trivial probabilistic models based on the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) principle. We show how MaxEnt models allow for the natural incorporation of prior information. Furthermore, they satisfy a number of desirable properties of previously introduced randomization approaches. Lastly, they also have the benefit that they can be represented explicitly. We argue that our approach can be used for a variety of data types. However, for concreteness, we have chosen to demonstrate it in particular for databases and networks.
0906.5151
Unsupervised Search-based Structured Prediction
cs.LG
We describe an adaptation and application of a search-based structured prediction algorithm "Searn" to unsupervised learning problems. We show that it is possible to reduce unsupervised learning to supervised learning and demonstrate a high-quality unsupervised shift-reduce parsing model. We additionally show a close connection between unsupervised Searn and expectation maximization. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of a semi-supervised extension. The key idea that enables this is an application of the predict-self idea for unsupervised learning.
0906.5233
Restricted Global Grammar Constraints
cs.AI cs.FL
We investigate the global GRAMMAR constraint over restricted classes of context free grammars like deterministic and unambiguous context-free grammars. We show that detecting disentailment for the GRAMMAR constraint in these cases is as hard as parsing an unrestricted context free grammar.We also consider the class of linear grammars and give a propagator that runs in quadratic time. Finally, to demonstrate the use of linear grammars, we show that a weighted linear GRAMMAR constraint can efficiently encode the EDITDISTANCE constraint, and a conjunction of the EDITDISTANCE constraint and the REGULAR constraint
0906.5278
Spectrum of Fractal Interpolation Functions
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper we compute the Fourier spectrum of the Fractal Interpolation Functions FIFs as introduced by Michael Barnsley. We show that there is an analytical way to compute them. In this paper we attempt to solve the inverse problem of FIF by using the spectrum
0906.5286
Putting Recommendations on the Map -- Visualizing Clusters and Relations
cs.IR
For users, recommendations can sometimes seem odd or counterintuitive. Visualizing recommendations can remove some of this mystery, showing how a recommendation is grouped with other choices. A drawing can also lead a user's eye to other options. Traditional 2D-embeddings of points can be used to create a basic layout, but these methods, by themselves, do not illustrate clusters and neighborhoods very well. In this paper, we propose the use of geographic maps to enhance the definition of clusters and neighborhoods, and consider the effectiveness of this approach in visualizing similarities and recommendations arising from TV shows and music selections. All the maps referenced in this paper can be found in http://www.research.att.com/~volinsky/maps
0906.5289
Green Cellular - Optimizing the Cellular Network for Minimal Emission from Mobile Stations
cs.IT math.IT
Wireless systems, which include cellular phones, have become an essential part of the modern life. However the mounting evidence that cellular radiation might adversely affect the health of its users, leads to a growing concern among authorities and the general public. Radiating antennas in the proximity of the user, such as antennas of mobile phones are of special interest for this matter. In this paper we suggest a new architecture for wireless networks, aiming at minimal emission from mobile stations, without any additional radiation sources. The new architecture, dubbed Green Cellular, abandons the classical transceiver base station design and suggests the augmentation of transceiver base stations with receive only devices. These devices, dubbed Green Antennas, are not aiming at coverage extension but rather at minimizing the emission from mobile stations. We discuss the implications of the Green Cellular architecture on 3G and 4G cellular technologies. We conclude by showing that employing the Green Cellular approach may lead to a significant decrease in the emission from mobile stations, especially in indoor scenarios. This is achieved without exposing the user to any additional radiation source.
0906.5325
Online Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Multimedia Systems
cs.LG cs.MM
In our previous work, we proposed a systematic cross-layer framework for dynamic multimedia systems, which allows each layer to make autonomous and foresighted decisions that maximize the system's long-term performance, while meeting the application's real-time delay constraints. The proposed solution solved the cross-layer optimization offline, under the assumption that the multimedia system's probabilistic dynamics were known a priori. In practice, however, these dynamics are unknown a priori and therefore must be learned online. In this paper, we address this problem by allowing the multimedia system layers to learn, through repeated interactions with each other, to autonomously optimize the system's long-term performance at run-time. We propose two reinforcement learning algorithms for optimizing the system under different design constraints: the first algorithm solves the cross-layer optimization in a centralized manner, and the second solves it in a decentralized manner. We analyze both algorithms in terms of their required computation, memory, and inter-layer communication overheads. After noting that the proposed reinforcement learning algorithms learn too slowly, we introduce a complementary accelerated learning algorithm that exploits partial knowledge about the system's dynamics in order to dramatically improve the system's performance. In our experiments, we demonstrate that decentralized learning can perform as well as centralized learning, while enabling the layers to act autonomously. Additionally, we show that existing application-independent reinforcement learning algorithms, and existing myopic learning algorithms deployed in multimedia systems, perform significantly worse than our proposed application-aware and foresighted learning methods.