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1003.0095
Multiuser MIMO Downlink Beamforming Design Based on Group Maximum SINR Filtering
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper we aim to solve the multiuser multi-input multi-output (MIMO) downlink beamforming problem where one multi-antenna base station broadcasts data to many users. Each user is assigned multiple data streams and has multiple antennas at its receiver. Efficient solutions to the joint transmit-receive beamforming and power allocation problem based on iterative methods are proposed. We adopt the group maximum signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) filter bank (GSINR-FB) as our beamformer which exploits receiver diversity through cooperation between the data streams of a user. The data streams for each user are subject to an average SINR constraint, which has many important applications in wireless communication systems and serves as a good metric to measure the quality of service (QoS). The GSINR-FB also optimizes the average SINR of its output. Based on the GSINR-FB beamformer, we find an SINR balancing structure for optimal power allocation which simplifies the complicated power allocation problem to a linear one. Simulation results verify the superiority of the proposed algorithms over previous works with approximately the same complexity.
1003.0120
Learning from Logged Implicit Exploration Data
cs.LG cs.AI
We provide a sound and consistent foundation for the use of \emph{nonrandom} exploration data in "contextual bandit" or "partially labeled" settings where only the value of a chosen action is learned. The primary challenge in a variety of settings is that the exploration policy, in which "offline" data is logged, is not explicitly known. Prior solutions here require either control of the actions during the learning process, recorded random exploration, or actions chosen obliviously in a repeated manner. The techniques reported here lift these restrictions, allowing the learning of a policy for choosing actions given features from historical data where no randomization occurred or was logged. We empirically verify our solution on two reasonably sized sets of real-world data obtained from Yahoo!.
1003.0146
A Contextual-Bandit Approach to Personalized News Article Recommendation
cs.LG cs.AI cs.IR
Personalized web services strive to adapt their services (advertisements, news articles, etc) to individual users by making use of both content and user information. Despite a few recent advances, this problem remains challenging for at least two reasons. First, web service is featured with dynamically changing pools of content, rendering traditional collaborative filtering methods inapplicable. Second, the scale of most web services of practical interest calls for solutions that are both fast in learning and computation. In this work, we model personalized recommendation of news articles as a contextual bandit problem, a principled approach in which a learning algorithm sequentially selects articles to serve users based on contextual information about the users and articles, while simultaneously adapting its article-selection strategy based on user-click feedback to maximize total user clicks. The contributions of this work are three-fold. First, we propose a new, general contextual bandit algorithm that is computationally efficient and well motivated from learning theory. Second, we argue that any bandit algorithm can be reliably evaluated offline using previously recorded random traffic. Finally, using this offline evaluation method, we successfully applied our new algorithm to a Yahoo! Front Page Today Module dataset containing over 33 million events. Results showed a 12.5% click lift compared to a standard context-free bandit algorithm, and the advantage becomes even greater when data gets more scarce.
1003.0205
Detecting Weak but Hierarchically-Structured Patterns in Networks
cs.IT cs.LG math.IT math.ST stat.TH
The ability to detect weak distributed activation patterns in networks is critical to several applications, such as identifying the onset of anomalous activity or incipient congestion in the Internet, or faint traces of a biochemical spread by a sensor network. This is a challenging problem since weak distributed patterns can be invisible in per node statistics as well as a global network-wide aggregate. Most prior work considers situations in which the activation/non-activation of each node is statistically independent, but this is unrealistic in many problems. In this paper, we consider structured patterns arising from statistical dependencies in the activation process. Our contributions are three-fold. First, we propose a sparsifying transform that succinctly represents structured activation patterns that conform to a hierarchical dependency graph. Second, we establish that the proposed transform facilitates detection of very weak activation patterns that cannot be detected with existing methods. Third, we show that the structure of the hierarchical dependency graph governing the activation process, and hence the network transform, can be learnt from very few (logarithmic in network size) independent snapshots of network activity.
1003.0206
Why has (reasonably accurate) Automatic Speech Recognition been so hard to achieve?
cs.CL
Hidden Markov models (HMMs) have been successfully applied to automatic speech recognition for more than 35 years in spite of the fact that a key HMM assumption -- the statistical independence of frames -- is obviously violated by speech data. In fact, this data/model mismatch has inspired many attempts to modify or replace HMMs with alternative models that are better able to take into account the statistical dependence of frames. However it is fair to say that in 2010 the HMM is the consensus model of choice for speech recognition and that HMMs are at the heart of both commercially available products and contemporary research systems. In this paper we present a preliminary exploration aimed at understanding how speech data depart from HMMs and what effect this departure has on the accuracy of HMM-based speech recognition. Our analysis uses standard diagnostic tools from the field of statistics -- hypothesis testing, simulation and resampling -- which are rarely used in the field of speech recognition. Our main result, obtained by novel manipulations of real and resampled data, demonstrates that real data have statistical dependency and that this dependency is responsible for significant numbers of recognition errors. We also demonstrate, using simulation and resampling, that if we `remove' the statistical dependency from data, then the resulting recognition error rates become negligible. Taken together, these results suggest that a better understanding of the structure of the statistical dependency in speech data is a crucial first step towards improving HMM-based speech recognition.
1003.0219
Sequential Compressed Sensing
cs.IT math.IT
Compressed sensing allows perfect recovery of sparse signals (or signals sparse in some basis) using only a small number of random measurements. Existing results in compressed sensing literature have focused on characterizing the achievable performance by bounding the number of samples required for a given level of signal sparsity. However, using these bounds to minimize the number of samples requires a-priori knowledge of the sparsity of the unknown signal, or the decay structure for near-sparse signals. Furthermore, there are some popular recovery methods for which no such bounds are known. In this paper, we investigate an alternative scenario where observations are available in sequence. For any recovery method, this means that there is now a sequence of candidate reconstructions. We propose a method to estimate the reconstruction error directly from the samples themselves, for every candidate in this sequence. This estimate is universal in the sense that it is based only on the measurement ensemble, and not on the recovery method or any assumed level of sparsity of the unknown signal. With these estimates, one can now stop observations as soon as there is reasonable certainty of either exact or sufficiently accurate reconstruction. They also provide a way to obtain "run-time" guarantees for recovery methods that otherwise lack a-priori performance bounds. We investigate both continuous (e.g. Gaussian) and discrete (e.g. Bernoulli) random measurement ensembles, both for exactly sparse and general near-sparse signals, and with both noisy and noiseless measurements.
1003.0242
Peak to Average Power Ratio Reduction for Space-Time Codes That Achieve Diversity-Multiplexing Gain Tradeoff
cs.IT math.IT
Zheng and Tse have shown that over a quasi-static channel, there exists a fundamental tradeoff, known as the diversity-multiplexing gain (D-MG) tradeoff. In a realistic system, to avoid inefficiently operating the power amplifier, one should consider the situation where constraints are imposed on the peak to average power ratio (PAPR) of the transmitted signal. In this paper, the D-MG tradeoff of multi-antenna systems with PAPR constraints is analyzed. For Rayleigh fading channels, we show that the D-MG tradeoff remains unchanged with any PAPR constraints larger than one. This result implies that, instead of designing codes on a case-by-case basis, as done by most existing works, there possibly exist general methodologies for designing space-time codes with low PAPR that achieve the optimal D-MG tradeoff. As an example of such methodologies, we propose a PAPR reduction method based on constellation shaping that can be applied to existing optimal space-time codes without affecting their optimality in the D-MG tradeoff. Unlike most PAPR reduction methods, the proposed method does not introduce redundancy or require side information being transmitted to the decoder. Two realizations of the proposed method are considered. The first is similar to the method proposed by Kwok except that we employ the Hermite Normal Form (HNF) decomposition instead of the Smith Normal Form (SNF) to reduce complexity. The second takes the idea of integer reversible mapping which avoids the difficulty in matrix decomposition when the number of antennas becomes large. Sphere decoding is performed to verify that the proposed PAPR reduction method does not affect the performance of optimal space-time codes.
1003.0248
Outage Probability of General Ad Hoc Networks in the High-Reliability Regime
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT math.ST stat.TH
Outage probabilities in wireless networks depend on various factors: the node distribution, the MAC scheme, and the models for path loss, fading and transmission success. In prior work on outage characterization for networks with randomly placed nodes, most of the emphasis was put on networks whose nodes are Poisson distributed and where ALOHA is used as the MAC protocol. In this paper we provide a general framework for the analysis of outage probabilities in the high-reliability regime. The outage probability characterization is based on two parameters: the intrinsic spatial contention $\gamma$ of the network, introduced in [1], and the coordination level achieved by the MAC as measured by the interference scaling exponent $\kappa$ introduced in this paper. We study outage probabilities under the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) model, Rayleigh fading, and power-law path loss, and explain how the two parameters depend on the network model. The main result is that the outage probability approaches $\gamma\eta^{\kappa}$ as the density of interferers $\eta$ goes to zero, and that $\kappa$ assumes values in the range $1\leq \kappa\leq \alpha/2$ for all practical MAC protocols, where $\alpha$ is the path loss exponent. This asymptotic expression is valid for all motion-invariant point processes. We suggest a novel and complete taxonomy of MAC protocols based mainly on the value of $\kappa$. Finally, our findings suggest a conjecture that tightly bounds the outage probability for all interferer densities.
1003.0319
Further Exploration of the Dendritic Cell Algorithm: Antigen Multiplier and Time Windows
cs.AI cs.CR cs.NE
As an immune-inspired algorithm, the Dendritic Cell Algorithm (DCA), produces promising performances in the field of anomaly detection. This paper presents the application of the DCA to a standard data set, the KDD 99 data set. The results of different implementation versions of the DXA, including the antigen multiplier and moving time windows are reported. The real-valued Negative Selection Algorithm (NSA) using constant-sized detectors and the C4.5 decision tree algorithm are used, to conduct a baseline comparison. The results suggest that the DCA is applicable to KDD 99 data set, and the antigen multiplier and moving time windows have the same effect on the DCA for this particular data set. The real-valued NSA with constant-sized detectors is not applicable to the data set, and the C4.5 decision tree algorithm provides a benchmark of the classification performance for this data set.
1003.0332
On the Optimal Number of Cooperative Base Stations in Network MIMO Systems
cs.IT math.IT
We consider a multi-cell, frequency-selective fading, uplink channel (network MIMO) where K user terminals (UTs) communicate simultaneously with B cooperative base stations (BSs). Although the potential benefit of multi-cell cooperation grows with B, the overhead related to the acquisition of channel state information (CSI) will rapidly dominate the uplink resource. Thus, there exists a non-trivial tradeoff between the performance gains of network MIMO and the related overhead in channel estimation for a finite coherence time. Using a close approximation of the net ergodic achievable rate based on recent results from random matrix theory, we study this tradeoff by taking some realistic aspects into account such as unreliable backhaul links and different path losses between the UTs and BSs. We determine the optimal training length, the optimal number of cooperative BSs and the optimal number of sub-carriers to be used for an extended version of the circular Wyner model where each UT can communicate with B BSs. Our results provide some insight into practical limitations as well as realistic dimensions of network MIMO systems.
1003.0337
Change of word types to word tokens ratio in the course of translation (based on Russian translations of K. Vonnegut novels)
cs.CL
The article provides lexical statistical analysis of K. Vonnegut's two novels and their Russian translations. It is found out that there happen some changes between the speed of word types and word tokens ratio change in the source and target texts. The author hypothesizes that these changes are typical for English-Russian translations, and moreover, they represent an example of Baker's translation feature of levelling out.
1003.0339
libtissue - implementing innate immunity
cs.AI cs.NE
In a previous paper the authors argued the case for incorporating ideas from innate immunity into articficial immune systems (AISs) and presented an outline for a conceptual framework for such systems. A number of key general properties observed in the biological innate and adaptive immune systems were hughlighted, and how such properties might be instantiated in artificial systems was discussed in detail. The next logical step is to take these ideas and build a software system with which AISs with these properties can be implemented and experimentally evaluated. This paper reports on the results of that step - the libtissue system.
1003.0358
Deep Big Simple Neural Nets Excel on Handwritten Digit Recognition
cs.NE cs.AI
Good old on-line back-propagation for plain multi-layer perceptrons yields a very low 0.35% error rate on the famous MNIST handwritten digits benchmark. All we need to achieve this best result so far are many hidden layers, many neurons per layer, numerous deformed training images, and graphics cards to greatly speed up learning.
1003.0367
Stopping Set Distributions of Some Linear Codes
cs.IT math.IT
Stopping sets and stopping set distribution of an low-density parity-check code are used to determine the performance of this code under iterative decoding over a binary erasure channel (BEC). Let $C$ be a binary $[n,k]$ linear code with parity-check matrix $H$, where the rows of $H$ may be dependent. A stopping set $S$ of $C$ with parity-check matrix $H$ is a subset of column indices of $H$ such that the restriction of $H$ to $S$ does not contain a row of weight one. The stopping set distribution $\{T_i(H)\}_{i=0}^n$ enumerates the number of stopping sets with size $i$ of $C$ with parity-check matrix $H$. Note that stopping sets and stopping set distribution are related to the parity-check matrix $H$ of $C$. Let $H^{*}$ be the parity-check matrix of $C$ which is formed by all the non-zero codewords of its dual code $C^{\perp}$. A parity-check matrix $H$ is called BEC-optimal if $T_i(H)=T_i(H^*), i=0,1,..., n$ and $H$ has the smallest number of rows. On the BEC, iterative decoder of $C$ with BEC-optimal parity-check matrix is an optimal decoder with much lower decoding complexity than the exhaustive decoder. In this paper, we study stopping sets, stopping set distributions and BEC-optimal parity-check matrices of binary linear codes. Using finite geometry in combinatorics, we obtain BEC-optimal parity-check matrices and then determine the stopping set distributions for the Simplex codes, the Hamming codes, the first order Reed-Muller codes and the extended Hamming codes.
1003.0381
Modelling and Verification of Multiple UAV Mission Using SMV
cs.LO cs.MA cs.RO
Model checking has been used to verify the correctness of digital circuits, security protocols, communication protocols, as they can be modelled by means of finite state transition model. However, modelling the behaviour of hybrid systems like UAVs in a Kripke model is challenging. This work is aimed at capturing the behaviour of an UAV performing cooperative search mission into a Kripke model, so as to verify it against the temporal properties expressed in Computation Tree Logic (CTL). SMV model checker is used for the purpose of model checking.
1003.0396
Developing Experimental Models for NASA Missions with ASSL
cs.SE cs.RO
NASA's new age of space exploration augurs great promise for deep space exploration missions whereby spacecraft should be independent, autonomous, and smart. Nowadays NASA increasingly relies on the concepts of autonomic computing, exploiting these to increase the survivability of remote missions, particularly when human tending is not feasible. Autonomic computing has been recognized as a promising approach to the development of self-managing spacecraft systems that employ onboard intelligence and rely less on control links. The Autonomic System Specification Language (ASSL) is a framework for formally specifying and generating autonomic systems. As part of long-term research targeted at the development of models for space exploration missions that rely on principles of autonomic computing, we have employed ASSL to develop formal models and generate functional prototypes for NASA missions. This helps to validate features and perform experiments through simulation. Here, we discuss our work on developing such missions with ASSL.
1003.0400
Collaborative Hierarchical Sparse Modeling
cs.IT math.IT
Sparse modeling is a powerful framework for data analysis and processing. Traditionally, encoding in this framework is done by solving an l_1-regularized linear regression problem, usually called Lasso. In this work we first combine the sparsity-inducing property of the Lasso model, at the individual feature level, with the block-sparsity property of the group Lasso model, where sparse groups of features are jointly encoded, obtaining a sparsity pattern hierarchically structured. This results in the hierarchical Lasso, which shows important practical modeling advantages. We then extend this approach to the collaborative case, where a set of simultaneously coded signals share the same sparsity pattern at the higher (group) level but not necessarily at the lower one. Signals then share the same active groups, or classes, but not necessarily the same active set. This is very well suited for applications such as source separation. An efficient optimization procedure, which guarantees convergence to the global optimum, is developed for these new models. The underlying presentation of the new framework and optimization approach is complemented with experimental examples and preliminary theoretical results.
1003.0404
Exploration Of The Dendritic Cell Algorithm Using The Duration Calculus
cs.AI cs.LO
As one of the newest members in Artificial Immune Systems (AIS), the Dendritic Cell Algorithm (DCA) has been applied to a range of problems. These applications mainly belong to the field of anomaly detection. However, real-time detection, a new challenge to anomaly detection, requires improvement on the real-time capability of the DCA. To assess such capability, formal methods in the research of rea-time systems can be employed. The findings of the assessment can provide guideline for the future development of the algorithm. Therefore, in this paper we use an interval logic based method, named the Duration Calculus (DC), to specify a simplified single-cell model of the DCA. Based on the DC specifications with further induction, we find that each individual cell in the DCA can perform its function as a detector in real-time. Since the DCA can be seen as many such cells operating in parallel, it is potentially capable of performing real-time detection. However, the analysis process of the standard DCA constricts its real-time capability. As a result, we conclude that the analysis process of the standard DCA should be replaced by a real-time analysis component, which can perform periodic analysis for the purpose of real-time detection.
1003.0415
The Sparsity Gap: Uncertainty Principles Proportional to Dimension
cs.IT math.IT
In an incoherent dictionary, most signals that admit a sparse representation admit a unique sparse representation. In other words, there is no way to express the signal without using strictly more atoms. This work demonstrates that sparse signals typically enjoy a higher privilege: each nonoptimal representation of the signal requires far more atoms than the sparsest representation-unless it contains many of the same atoms as the sparsest representation. One impact of this finding is to confer a certain degree of legitimacy on the particular atoms that appear in a sparse representation. This result can also be viewed as an uncertainty principle for random sparse signals over an incoherent dictionary.
1003.0445
On The Design of Signature Codes in Decentralized Wireless Networks
cs.IT math.IT
This paper addresses a unified approach towards communication in decentralized wireless networks of separate transmitter-receiver pairs. In general, users are unaware of each other's codebooks and there is no central controller to assign the resources in the network to the users. A randomized signaling scheme is introduced in which each user locally spreads its Gaussian signal along a randomly generated spreading code comprised of a sequence of nonzero elements over a certain alphabet. Along with spreading, each transmitter also masks its output independently from transmission to transmission. Using a conditional version of entropy power inequality and a key lemma on the differential entropy of mixed Gaussian random vectors, achievable rates are developed for the users. It is seen that as the number of users increases, the achievable Sum Multiplexing Gain of the network approaches that of a centralized orthogonal scheme where multiuser interference is completely avoided. An interesting observation is that in general the elements of a spreading code are not equiprobable over the underlying alphabet. Finally, using the recently developed extremal inequality of Liu-Viswanath, we present an optimality result showing that transmission of Gaussian signals via spreading and masking yields higher achievable rates than the maximum achievable rate attained by applying masking only.
1003.0470
Unsupervised Supervised Learning II: Training Margin Based Classifiers without Labels
cs.LG
Many popular linear classifiers, such as logistic regression, boosting, or SVM, are trained by optimizing a margin-based risk function. Traditionally, these risk functions are computed based on a labeled dataset. We develop a novel technique for estimating such risks using only unlabeled data and the marginal label distribution. We prove that the proposed risk estimator is consistent on high-dimensional datasets and demonstrate it on synthetic and real-world data. In particular, we show how the estimate is used for evaluating classifiers in transfer learning, and for training classifiers with no labeled data whatsoever.
1003.0487
Scalable Large-Margin Mahalanobis Distance Metric Learning
cs.CV
For many machine learning algorithms such as $k$-Nearest Neighbor ($k$-NN) classifiers and $ k $-means clustering, often their success heavily depends on the metric used to calculate distances between different data points. An effective solution for defining such a metric is to learn it from a set of labeled training samples. In this work, we propose a fast and scalable algorithm to learn a Mahalanobis distance metric. By employing the principle of margin maximization to achieve better generalization performances, this algorithm formulates the metric learning as a convex optimization problem and a positive semidefinite (psd) matrix is the unknown variable. a specialized gradient descent method is proposed. our algorithm is much more efficient and has a better performance in scalability compared with existing methods. Experiments on benchmark data sets suggest that, compared with state-of-the-art metric learning algorithms, our algorithm can achieve a comparable classification accuracy with reduced computational complexity.
1003.0488
On Secure Distributed Data Storage Under Repair Dynamics
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
We address the problem of securing distributed storage systems against passive eavesdroppers that can observe a limited number of storage nodes. An important aspect of these systems is node failures over time, which demand a repair mechanism aimed at maintaining a targeted high level of system reliability. If an eavesdropper observes a node that is added to the system to replace a failed node, it will have access to all the data downloaded during repair, which can potentially compromise the entire information in the system. We are interested in determining the secrecy capacity of distributed storage systems under repair dynamics, i.e., the maximum amount of data that can be securely stored and made available to a legitimate user without revealing any information to any eavesdropper. We derive a general upper bound on the secrecy capacity and show that this bound is tight for the bandwidth-limited regime which is of importance in scenarios such as peer-to-peer distributed storage systems. We also provide a simple explicit code construction that achieves the capacity for this regime.
1003.0514
The finite-dimensional Witsenhausen counterexample
cs.IT cs.CC math.IT math.OC
Recently, a vector version of Witsenhausen's counterexample was considered and it was shown that in that limit of infinite vector length, certain quantization-based control strategies are provably within a constant factor of the optimal cost for all possible problem parameters. In this paper, finite vector lengths are considered with the dimension being viewed as an additional problem parameter. By applying a large-deviation "sphere-packing" philosophy, a lower bound to the optimal cost for the finite dimensional case is derived that uses appropriate shadows of the infinite-length bound. Using the new lower bound, we show that good lattice-based control strategies achieve within a constant factor of the optimal cost uniformly over all possible problem parameters, including the vector length. For Witsenhausen's original problem -- the scalar case -- the gap between regular lattice-based strategies and the lower bound is numerically never more than a factor of 8.
1003.0516
Model Selection with the Loss Rank Principle
cs.LG
A key issue in statistics and machine learning is to automatically select the "right" model complexity, e.g., the number of neighbors to be averaged over in k nearest neighbor (kNN) regression or the polynomial degree in regression with polynomials. We suggest a novel principle - the Loss Rank Principle (LoRP) - for model selection in regression and classification. It is based on the loss rank, which counts how many other (fictitious) data would be fitted better. LoRP selects the model that has minimal loss rank. Unlike most penalized maximum likelihood variants (AIC, BIC, MDL), LoRP depends only on the regression functions and the loss function. It works without a stochastic noise model, and is directly applicable to any non-parametric regressor, like kNN.
1003.0520
Information embedding meets distributed control
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the problem of information embedding where the encoder modifies a white Gaussian host signal in a power-constrained manner to encode the message, and the decoder recovers both the embedded message and the modified host signal. This extends the recent work of Sumszyk and Steinberg to the continuous-alphabet Gaussian setting. We show that a dirty-paper-coding based strategy achieves the optimal rate for perfect recovery of the modified host and the message. We also provide bounds for the extension wherein the modified host signal is recovered only to within a specified distortion. When specialized to the zero-rate case, our results provide the tightest known lower bounds on the asymptotic costs for the vector version of a famous open problem in distributed control -- the Witsenhausen counterexample. Using this bound, we characterize the asymptotically optimal costs for the vector Witsenhausen problem numerically to within a factor of 1.3 for all problem parameters, improving on the earlier best known bound of 2.
1003.0529
A Unified Algorithmic Framework for Multi-Dimensional Scaling
cs.LG cs.CG cs.CV
In this paper, we propose a unified algorithmic framework for solving many known variants of \mds. Our algorithm is a simple iterative scheme with guaranteed convergence, and is \emph{modular}; by changing the internals of a single subroutine in the algorithm, we can switch cost functions and target spaces easily. In addition to the formal guarantees of convergence, our algorithms are accurate; in most cases, they converge to better quality solutions than existing methods, in comparable time. We expect that this framework will be useful for a number of \mds variants that have not yet been studied. Our framework extends to embedding high-dimensional points lying on a sphere to points on a lower dimensional sphere, preserving geodesic distances. As a compliment to this result, we also extend the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma to this spherical setting, where projecting to a random $O((1/\eps^2) \log n)$-dimensional sphere causes $\eps$-distortion.
1003.0590
A new model for solution of complex distributed constrained problems
cs.AI
In this paper we describe an original computational model for solving different types of Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems (DCSP). The proposed model is called Controller-Agents for Constraints Solving (CACS). This model is intended to be used which is an emerged field from the integration between two paradigms of different nature: Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and the Constraint Satisfaction Problem paradigm (CSP) where all constraints are treated in central manner as a black-box. This model allows grouping constraints to form a subset that will be treated together as a local problem inside the controller. Using this model allows also handling non-binary constraints easily and directly so that no translating of constraints into binary ones is needed. This paper presents the implementation outlines of a prototype of DCSP solver, its usage methodology and overview of the CACS application for timetabling problems.
1003.0617
Agent Based Approaches to Engineering Autonomous Space Software
cs.MA cs.AI
Current approaches to the engineering of space software such as satellite control systems are based around the development of feedback controllers using packages such as MatLab's Simulink toolbox. These provide powerful tools for engineering real time systems that adapt to changes in the environment but are limited when the controller itself needs to be adapted. We are investigating ways in which ideas from temporal logics and agent programming can be integrated with the use of such control systems to provide a more powerful layer of autonomous decision making. This paper will discuss our initial approaches to the engineering of such systems.
1003.0628
Linguistic Geometries for Unsupervised Dimensionality Reduction
cs.CL
Text documents are complex high dimensional objects. To effectively visualize such data it is important to reduce its dimensionality and visualize the low dimensional embedding as a 2-D or 3-D scatter plot. In this paper we explore dimensionality reduction methods that draw upon domain knowledge in order to achieve a better low dimensional embedding and visualization of documents. We consider the use of geometries specified manually by an expert, geometries derived automatically from corpus statistics, and geometries computed from linguistic resources.
1003.0642
Text Region Extraction from Business Card Images for Mobile Devices
cs.CV
Designing a Business Card Reader (BCR) for mobile devices is a challenge to the researchers because of huge deformation in acquired images, multiplicity in nature of the business cards and most importantly the computational constraints of the mobile devices. This paper presents a text extraction method designed in our work towards developing a BCR for mobile devices. At first, the background of a camera captured image is eliminated at a coarse level. Then, various rule based techniques are applied on the Connected Components (CC) to filter out the noises and picture regions. The CCs identified as text are then binarized using an adaptive but light-weight binarization technique. Experiments show that the text extraction accuracy is around 98% for a wide range of resolutions with varying computation time and memory requirements. The optimum performance is achieved for the images of resolution 1024x768 pixels with text extraction accuracy of 98.54% and, space and time requirements as 1.1 MB and 0.16 seconds respectively.
1003.0645
Binarizing Business Card Images for Mobile Devices
cs.CV
Business card images are of multiple natures as these often contain graphics, pictures and texts of various fonts and sizes both in background and foreground. So, the conventional binarization techniques designed for document images can not be directly applied on mobile devices. In this paper, we have presented a fast binarization technique for camera captured business card images. A card image is split into small blocks. Some of these blocks are classified as part of the background based on intensity variance. Then the non-text regions are eliminated and the text ones are skew corrected and binarized using a simple yet adaptive technique. Experiment shows that the technique is fast, efficient and applicable for the mobile devices.
1003.0659
Particle Filtering on the Audio Localization Manifold
cs.AI cs.SD
We present a novel particle filtering algorithm for tracking a moving sound source using a microphone array. If there are N microphones in the array, we track all $N \choose 2$ delays with a single particle filter over time. Since it is known that tracking in high dimensions is rife with difficulties, we instead integrate into our particle filter a model of the low dimensional manifold that these delays lie on. Our manifold model is based off of work on modeling low dimensional manifolds via random projection trees [1]. In addition, we also introduce a new weighting scheme to our particle filtering algorithm based on recent advancements in online learning. We show that our novel TDOA tracking algorithm that integrates a manifold model can greatly outperform standard particle filters on this audio tracking task.
1003.0691
Statistical and Computational Tradeoffs in Stochastic Composite Likelihood
cs.LG
Maximum likelihood estimators are often of limited practical use due to the intensive computation they require. We propose a family of alternative estimators that maximize a stochastic variation of the composite likelihood function. Each of the estimators resolve the computation-accuracy tradeoff differently, and taken together they span a continuous spectrum of computation-accuracy tradeoff resolutions. We prove the consistency of the estimators, provide formulas for their asymptotic variance, statistical robustness, and computational complexity. We discuss experimental results in the context of Boltzmann machines and conditional random fields. The theoretical and experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the estimators when the computational resources are insufficient. They also demonstrate that in some cases reduced computational complexity is associated with robustness thereby increasing statistical accuracy.
1003.0696
Exponential Family Hybrid Semi-Supervised Learning
cs.LG
We present an approach to semi-supervised learning based on an exponential family characterization. Our approach generalizes previous work on coupled priors for hybrid generative/discriminative models. Our model is more flexible and natural than previous approaches. Experimental results on several data sets show that our approach also performs better in practice.
1003.0723
Securing Interactive Sessions Using Mobile Device through Visual Channel and Visual Inspection
cs.CR cs.CV
Communication channel established from a display to a device's camera is known as visual channel, and it is helpful in securing key exchange protocol. In this paper, we study how visual channel can be exploited by a network terminal and mobile device to jointly verify information in an interactive session, and how such information can be jointly presented in a user-friendly manner, taking into account that the mobile device can only capture and display a small region, and the user may only want to authenticate selective regions-of-interests. Motivated by applications in Kiosk computing and multi-factor authentication, we consider three security models: (1) the mobile device is trusted, (2) at most one of the terminal or the mobile device is dishonest, and (3) both the terminal and device are dishonest but they do not collude or communicate. We give two protocols and investigate them under the abovementioned models. We point out a form of replay attack that renders some other straightforward implementations cumbersome to use. To enhance user-friendliness, we propose a solution using visual cues embedded into the 2D barcodes and incorporate the framework of "augmented reality" for easy verifications through visual inspection. We give a proof-of-concept implementation to show that our scheme is feasible in practice.
1003.0727
On the comparison of volumes of quantum states
quant-ph cs.IT math-ph math.FA math.IT math.MP
This paper aims to study the $\a$-volume of $\cK$, an arbitrary subset of the set of $N\times N$ density matrices. The $\a$-volume is a generalization of the Hilbert-Schmidt volume and the volume induced by partial trace. We obtain two-side estimates for the $\a$-volume of $\cK$ in terms of its Hilbert-Schmidt volume. The analogous estimates between the Bures volume and the $\a$-volume are also established. We employ our results to obtain bounds for the $\a$-volume of the sets of separable quantum states and of states with positive partial transpose (PPT). Hence, our asymptotic results provide answers for questions listed on page 9 in \cite{K. Zyczkowski1998} for large $N$ in the sense of $\a$-volume. \vskip 3mm PACS numbers: 02.40.Ft, 03.65.Db, 03.65.Ud, 03.67.Mn
1003.0729
On the Secure Degrees-of-Freedom of the Multiple-Access-Channel
cs.IT math.IT
A $K$-user secure Gaussian Multiple-Access-Channel (MAC) with an external eavesdropper is considered in this paper. An achievable rate region is established for the secure discrete memoryless MAC. The secrecy sum capacity of the degraded Gaussian MIMO MAC is proven using Gaussian codebooks. For the non-degraded Gaussian MIMO MAC, an algorithm inspired by interference alignment technique is proposed to achieve the largest possible total Secure-Degrees-of-Freedom (S-DoF). When all the terminals are equipped with a single antenna, Gaussian codebooks have shown to be inefficient in providing a positive S-DoF. Instead, a novel secure coding scheme is proposed to achieve a positive S-DoF in the single antenna MAC. This scheme converts the single-antenna system into a multiple-dimension system with fractional dimensions. The achievability scheme is based on the alignment of signals into a small sub-space at the eavesdropper, and the simultaneous separation of the signals at the intended receiver. Tools from the field of Diophantine Approximation in number theory are used to analyze the probability of error in the coding scheme. It is proven that the total S-DoF of $\frac{K-1}{K}$ can be achieved for almost all channel gains. For the other channel gains, a multi-layer coding scheme is proposed to achieve a positive S-DoF. As a function of channel gains, therefore, the achievable S-DoF is discontinued.
1003.0735
Compress-and-Forward Performance in Low-SNR Relay Channels
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we study the Gaussian relay channels in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime with the time-sharing compress-and-forward (CF) scheme, where at each time slot all the nodes keep silent at the first fraction of time and then transmit with CF at a higher peak power in the second fraction. Such a silent vs. active two-phase relay scheme is preferable in the low-SNR regime. With this setup, the upper and lower bounds on the minimum energy per bit required over the relay channel are established under both full-duplex and half-duplex relaying modes. In particular, the lower bound is derived by applying the max-flow min-cut capacity theorem; the upper bound is established with the aforementioned time-sharing CF scheme, and is further minimized by letting the active phase fraction decrease to zero at the same rate as the SNR value. Numerical results are presented to validate the theoretical results.
1003.0746
Automatically Discovering Hidden Transformation Chaining Constraints
cs.AI
Model transformations operate on models conforming to precisely defined metamodels. Consequently, it often seems relatively easy to chain them: the output of a transformation may be given as input to a second one if metamodels match. However, this simple rule has some obvious limitations. For instance, a transformation may only use a subset of a metamodel. Therefore, chaining transformations appropriately requires more information. We present here an approach that automatically discovers more detailed information about actual chaining constraints by statically analyzing transformations. The objective is to provide developers who decide to chain transformations with more data on which to base their choices. This approach has been successfully applied to the case of a library of endogenous transformations. They all have the same source and target metamodel but have some hidden chaining constraints. In such a case, the simple metamodel matching rule given above does not provide any useful information.
1003.0776
Properties of the Discrete Pulse Transform for Multi-Dimensional Arrays
cs.CV
This report presents properties of the Discrete Pulse Transform on multi-dimensional arrays introduced by the authors two or so years ago. The main result given here in Lemma 2.1 is also formulated in a paper to appear in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. However, the proof, being too technical, was omitted there and hence it appears in full in this publication.
1003.0789
Information Fusion for Anomaly Detection with the Dendritic Cell Algorithm
cs.AI cs.CR cs.NE
Dendritic cells are antigen presenting cells that provide a vital link between the innate and adaptive immune system, providing the initial detection of pathogenic invaders. Research into this family of cells has revealed that they perform information fusion which directs immune responses. We have derived a Dendritic Cell Algorithm based on the functionality of these cells, by modelling the biological signals and differentiation pathways to build a control mechanism for an artificial immune system. We present algorithmic details in addition to experimental results, when the algorithm was applied to anomaly detection for the detection of port scans. The results show the Dendritic Cell Algorithm is sucessful at detecting port scans.
1003.0888
Support Recovery of Sparse Signals
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the problem of exact support recovery of sparse signals via noisy measurements. The main focus is the sufficient and necessary conditions on the number of measurements for support recovery to be reliable. By drawing an analogy between the problem of support recovery and the problem of channel coding over the Gaussian multiple access channel, and exploiting mathematical tools developed for the latter problem, we obtain an information theoretic framework for analyzing the performance limits of support recovery. Sharp sufficient and necessary conditions on the number of measurements in terms of the signal sparsity level and the measurement noise level are derived. Specifically, when the number of nonzero entries is held fixed, the exact asymptotics on the number of measurements for support recovery is developed. When the number of nonzero entries increases in certain manners, we obtain sufficient conditions tighter than existing results. In addition, we show that the proposed methodology can deal with a variety of models of sparse signal recovery, hence demonstrating its potential as an effective analytical tool.
1003.0931
A student's guide to searching the literature using online databases
physics.ed-ph cs.DL cs.IR
A method is described to empower students to efficiently perform general and literature searches using online resources. The method was tested on undergraduate and graduate students with varying backgrounds with scientific literature. Students involved in this study showed marked improvement in their awareness of how and where to find accurate scientific information.
1003.0953
Information Flow in One-Dimensional Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks
cs.IT math.IT
We consider content distribution in vehicular ad hoc networks. We assume that a file is encoded using fountain code, and the encoded message is cached at infostations. Vehicles are allowed to download data packets from infostations, which are placed along a highway. In addition, two vehicles can exchange packets with each other when they are in proximity. As long as a vehicle has received enough packets from infostations or from other vehicles, the original file can be recovered. In this work, we show that system throughput increases linearly with number of users, meaning that the system exhibits linear scalability. Furthermore, we analyze the effect of mobility on system throughput by considering both discrete and continuous velocity distributions for the vehicles. In both cases, system throughput is shown to decrease when the average speed of all vehicles increases. In other words, higher overall mobility reduces system throughput.
1003.1010
Verifying Recursive Active Documents with Positive Data Tree Rewriting
cs.DB cs.OH
This paper proposes a data tree-rewriting framework for modeling evolving documents. The framework is close to Guarded Active XML, a platform used for handling XML repositories evolving through web services. We focus on automatic verification of properties of evolving documents that can contain data from an infinite domain. We establish the boundaries of decidability, and show that verification of a {\em positive} fragment that can handle recursive service calls is decidable. We also consider bounded model-checking in our data tree-rewriting framework and show that it is $\nexptime$-complete.
1003.1018
Zipf's law and log-normal distributions in measures of scientific output across fields and institutions: 40 years of Slovenia's research as an example
physics.data-an cs.DB stat.AP
Slovenia's Current Research Information System (SICRIS) currently hosts 86,443 publications with citation data from 8,359 researchers working on the whole plethora of social and natural sciences from 1970 till present. Using these data, we show that the citation distributions derived from individual publications have Zipfian properties in that they can be fitted by a power law $P(x) \sim x^{-\alpha}$, with $\alpha$ between 2.4 and 3.1 depending on the institution and field of research. Distributions of indexes that quantify the success of researchers rather than individual publications, on the other hand, cannot be associated with a power law. We find that for Egghe's g-index and Hirsch's h-index the log-normal form $P(x) \sim \exp[-a\ln x -b(\ln x)^2]$ applies best, with $a$ and $b$ depending moderately on the underlying set of researchers. In special cases, particularly for institutions with a strongly hierarchical constitution and research fields with high self-citation rates, exponential distributions can be observed as well. Both indexes yield distributions with equivalent statistical properties, which is a strong indicator for their consistency and logical connectedness. At the same time, differences in the assessment of citation histories of individual researchers strengthen their importance for properly evaluating the quality and impact of scientific output.
1003.1020
Learning by random walks in the weight space of the Ising perceptron
cond-mat.dis-nn cond-mat.stat-mech cs.LG q-bio.NC
Several variants of a stochastic local search process for constructing the synaptic weights of an Ising perceptron are studied. In this process, binary patterns are sequentially presented to the Ising perceptron and are then learned as the synaptic weight configuration is modified through a chain of single- or double-weight flips within the compatible weight configuration space of the earlier learned patterns. This process is able to reach a storage capacity of $\alpha \approx 0.63$ for pattern length N = 101 and $\alpha \approx 0.41$ for N = 1001. If in addition a relearning process is exploited, the learning performance is further improved to a storage capacity of $\alpha \approx 0.80$ for N = 101 and $\alpha \approx 0.42$ for N=1001. We found that, for a given learning task, the solutions constructed by the random walk learning process are separated by a typical Hamming distance, which decreases with the constraint density $\alpha$ of the learning task; at a fixed value of $\alpha$, the width of the Hamming distance distributions decreases with $N$.
1003.1048
Tag Clusters as Information Retrieval Interfaces
cs.IR
The paper presents our design of a next generation information retrieval system based on tag co-occurrences and subsequent clustering. We help users getting access to digital data through information visualization in the form of tag clusters. Current problems like the absence of interactivity and semantics between tags or the difficulty of adding additional search arguments are solved. In the evaluation, based upon SERVQUAL and IT systems quality indicators, we found out that tag clusters are perceived as more useful than tag clouds, are much more trustworthy, and are more enjoyable to use.
1003.1072
An Offline Technique for Localization of License Plates for Indian Commercial Vehicles
cs.CV
Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) is a challenging area of research due to its importance to variety of commercial applications. The overall problem may be subdivided into two key modules, firstly, localization of license plates from vehicle images, and secondly, optical character recognition of extracted license plates. In the current work, we have concentrated on the first part of the problem, i.e., localization of license plate regions from Indian commercial vehicles as a significant step towards development of a complete ALPR system for Indian vehicles. The technique is based on color based segmentation of vehicle images and identification of potential license plate regions. True license plates are finally localized based on four spatial and horizontal contrast features. The technique successfully localizes the actual license plates in 73.4% images.
1003.1141
From Frequency to Meaning: Vector Space Models of Semantics
cs.CL cs.IR cs.LG
Computers understand very little of the meaning of human language. This profoundly limits our ability to give instructions to computers, the ability of computers to explain their actions to us, and the ability of computers to analyse and process text. Vector space models (VSMs) of semantics are beginning to address these limits. This paper surveys the use of VSMs for semantic processing of text. We organize the literature on VSMs according to the structure of the matrix in a VSM. There are currently three broad classes of VSMs, based on term-document, word-context, and pair-pattern matrices, yielding three classes of applications. We survey a broad range of applications in these three categories and we take a detailed look at a specific open source project in each category. Our goal in this survey is to show the breadth of applications of VSMs for semantics, to provide a new perspective on VSMs for those who are already familiar with the area, and to provide pointers into the literature for those who are less familiar with the field.
1003.1179
View Synthesis from Schema Mappings
cs.DB
In data management, and in particular in data integration, data exchange, query optimization, and data privacy, the notion of view plays a central role. In several contexts, such as data integration, data mashups, and data warehousing, the need arises of designing views starting from a set of known correspondences between queries over different schemas. In this paper we deal with the issue of automating such a design process. We call this novel problem "view synthesis from schema mappings": given a set of schema mappings, each relating a query over a source schema to a query over a target schema, automatically synthesize for each source a view over the target schema in such a way that for each mapping, the query over the source is a rewriting of the query over the target wrt the synthesized views. We study view synthesis from schema mappings both in the relational setting, where queries and views are (unions of) conjunctive queries, and in the semistructured data setting, where queries and views are (two-way) regular path queries, as well as unions of conjunctions thereof. We provide techniques and complexity upper bounds for each of these cases.
1003.1251
Minimum Spanning Tree on Spatio-Temporal Networks
cs.DS cs.DB
Given a spatio-temporal network (ST network) where edge properties vary with time, a time-sub-interval minimum spanning tree (TSMST) is a collection of minimum spanning trees of the ST network, where each tree is associated with a time interval. During this time interval, the total cost of tree is least among all the spanning trees. The TSMST problem aims to identify a collection of distinct minimum spanning trees and their respective time-sub-intervals under the constraint that the edge weight functions are piecewise linear. This is an important problem in ST network application domains such as wireless sensor networks (e.g., energy efficient routing). Computing TSMST is challenging because the ranking of candidate spanning trees is non-stationary over a given time interval. Existing methods such as dynamic graph algorithms and kinetic data structures assume separable edge weight functions. In contrast, we propose novel algorithms to find TSMST for large ST networks by accounting for both separable and non-separable piecewise linear edge weight functions. The algorithms are based on the ordering of edges in edge-order-intervals and intersection points of edge weight functions.
1003.1256
Integrating Innate and Adaptive Immunity for Intrusion Detection
cs.AI cs.CR cs.NE
Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NDIS) monitor a network with the aim of discerning malicious from benign activity on that network. While a wide range of approaches have met varying levels of success, most IDS's rely on having access to a database of known attack signatures which are written by security experts. Nowadays, in order to solve problems with false positive alters, correlation algorithms are used to add additional structure to sequences of IDS alerts. However, such techniques are of no help in discovering novel attacks or variations of known attacks, something the human immune system (HIS) is capable of doing in its own specialised domain. This paper presents a novel immune algorithm for application to an intrusion detection problem. The goal is to discover packets containing novel variations of attacks covered by an existing signature base.
1003.1257
On the symbol error probability of regular polytopes
cs.IT math.IT
An exact expression for the symbol error probability of the four-dimensional 24-cell in Gaussian noise is derived. Corresponding expressions for other regular convex polytopes are summarized. Numerically stable versions of these error probabilities are also obtained.
1003.1266
Hitting and commute times in large graphs are often misleading
cs.DS cs.LG math.PR
Next to the shortest path distance, the second most popular distance function between vertices in a graph is the commute distance (resistance distance). For two vertices u and v, the hitting time H_{uv} is the expected time it takes a random walk to travel from u to v. The commute time is its symmetrized version C_{uv} = H_{uv} + H_{vu}. In our paper we study the behavior of hitting times and commute distances when the number n of vertices in the graph is very large. We prove that as n converges to infinty, hitting times and commute distances converge to expressions that do not take into account the global structure of the graph at all. Namely, the hitting time H_{uv} converges to 1/d_v and the commute time to 1/d_u + 1/d_v where d_u and d_v denote the degrees of vertices u and v. In these cases, the hitting and commute times are misleading in the sense that they do not provide information about the structure of the graph. We focus on two major classes of random graphs: random geometric graphs (k-nearest neighbor graphs, epsilon-graphs, Gaussian similarity graphs) and random graphs with given expected degrees (in particular, Erdos-Renyi graphs with and without planted partitions)
1003.1343
What does Newcomb's paradox teach us?
cs.GT cs.AI math.OC math.PR
In Newcomb's paradox you choose to receive either the contents of a particular closed box, or the contents of both that closed box and another one. Before you choose, a prediction algorithm deduces your choice, and fills the two boxes based on that deduction. Newcomb's paradox is that game theory appears to provide two conflicting recommendations for what choice you should make in this scenario. We analyze Newcomb's paradox using a recent extension of game theory in which the players set conditional probability distributions in a Bayes net. We show that the two game theory recommendations in Newcomb's scenario have different presumptions for what Bayes net relates your choice and the algorithm's prediction. We resolve the paradox by proving that these two Bayes nets are incompatible. We also show that the accuracy of the algorithm's prediction, the focus of much previous work, is irrelevant. In addition we show that Newcomb's scenario only provides a contradiction between game theory's expected utility and dominance principles if one is sloppy in specifying the underlying Bayes net. We also show that Newcomb's paradox is time-reversal invariant; both the paradox and its resolution are unchanged if the algorithm makes its `prediction' after you make your choice rather than before.
1003.1354
Faster Rates for training Max-Margin Markov Networks
cs.LG cs.CC
Structured output prediction is an important machine learning problem both in theory and practice, and the max-margin Markov network (\mcn) is an effective approach. All state-of-the-art algorithms for optimizing \mcn\ objectives take at least $O(1/\epsilon)$ number of iterations to find an $\epsilon$ accurate solution. Recent results in structured optimization suggest that faster rates are possible by exploiting the structure of the objective function. Towards this end \citet{Nesterov05} proposed an excessive gap reduction technique based on Euclidean projections which converges in $O(1/\sqrt{\epsilon})$ iterations on strongly convex functions. Unfortunately when applied to \mcn s, this approach does not admit graphical model factorization which, as in many existing algorithms, is crucial for keeping the cost per iteration tractable. In this paper, we present a new excessive gap reduction technique based on Bregman projections which admits graphical model factorization naturally, and converges in $O(1/\sqrt{\epsilon})$ iterations. Compared with existing algorithms, the convergence rate of our method has better dependence on $\epsilon$ and other parameters of the problem, and can be easily kernelized.
1003.1399
Automatic derivation of domain terms and concept location based on the analysis of the identifiers
cs.CL
Developers express the meaning of the domain ideas in specifically selected identifiers and comments that form the target implemented code. Software maintenance requires knowledge and understanding of the encoded ideas. This paper presents a way how to create automatically domain vocabulary. Knowledge of domain vocabulary supports the comprehension of a specific domain for later code maintenance or evolution. We present experiments conducted in two selected domains: application servers and web frameworks. Knowledge of domain terms enables easy localization of chunks of code that belong to a certain term. We consider these chunks of code as "concepts" and their placement in the code as "concept location". Application developers may also benefit from the obtained domain terms. These terms are parts of speech that characterize a certain concept. Concepts are encoded in "classes" (OO paradigm) and the obtained vocabulary of terms supports the selection and the comprehension of the class' appropriate identifiers. We measured the following software products with our tool: JBoss, JOnAS, GlassFish, Tapestry, Google Web Toolkit and Echo2.
1003.1410
Local Space-Time Smoothing for Version Controlled Documents
cs.GR cs.CL cs.LG
Unlike static documents, version controlled documents are continuously edited by one or more authors. Such collaborative revision process makes traditional modeling and visualization techniques inappropriate. In this paper we propose a new representation based on local space-time smoothing that captures important revision patterns. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework using experiments on synthetic and real-world data.
1003.1422
Polar Coding for Secure Transmission and Key Agreement
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
Wyner's work on wiretap channels and the recent works on information theoretic security are based on random codes. Achieving information theoretical security with practical coding schemes is of definite interest. In this note, the attempt is to overcome this elusive task by employing the polar coding technique of Ar{\i}kan. It is shown that polar codes achieve non-trivial perfect secrecy rates for binary-input degraded wiretap channels while enjoying their low encoding-decoding complexity. In the special case of symmetric main and eavesdropper channels, this coding technique achieves the secrecy capacity. Next, fading erasure wiretap channels are considered and a secret key agreement scheme is proposed, which requires only the statistical knowledge of the eavesdropper channel state information (CSI). The enabling factor is the creation of advantage over Eve, by blindly using the proposed scheme over each fading block, which is then exploited with privacy amplification techniques to generate secret keys.
1003.1450
A New Clustering Approach based on Page's Path Similarity for Navigation Patterns Mining
cs.LG
In recent years, predicting the user's next request in web navigation has received much attention. An information source to be used for dealing with such problem is the left information by the previous web users stored at the web access log on the web servers. Purposed systems for this problem work based on this idea that if a large number of web users request specific pages of a website on a given session, it can be concluded that these pages are satisfying similar information needs, and therefore they are conceptually related. In this study, a new clustering approach is introduced that employs logical path storing of a website pages as another parameter which is regarded as a similarity parameter and conceptual relation between web pages. The results of simulation have shown that the proposed approach is more than others precise in determining the clusters.
1003.1455
A Computational Algorithm based on Empirical Analysis, that Composes Sanskrit Poetry
cs.CL
Poetry-writing in Sanskrit is riddled with problems for even those who know the language well. This is so because the rules that govern Sanskrit prosody are numerous and stringent. We propose a computational algorithm that converts prose given as E-text into poetry in accordance with the metrical rules of Sanskrit prosody, simultaneously taking care to ensure that sandhi or euphonic conjunction, which is compulsory in verse, is handled. The algorithm is considerably speeded up by a novel method of reducing the target search database. The algorithm further gives suggestions to the poet in case what he/she has given as the input prose is impossible to fit into any allowed metrical format. There is also an interactive component of the algorithm by which the algorithm interacts with the poet to resolve ambiguities. In addition, this unique work, which provides a solution to a problem that has never been addressed before, provides a simple yet effective speech recognition interface that would help the visually impaired dictate words in E-text, which is in turn versified by our Poetry Composer Engine.
1003.1457
The Comparison of Methods Artificial Neural Network with Linear Regression Using Specific Variables for Prediction Stock Price in Tehran Stock Exchange
cs.NE
In this paper, researchers estimated the stock price of activated companies in Tehran (Iran) stock exchange. It is used Linear Regression and Artificial Neural Network methods and compared these two methods. In Artificial Neural Network, of General Regression Neural Network method (GRNN) for architecture is used. In this paper, first, researchers considered 10 macro economic variables and 30 financial variables and then they obtained seven final variables including 3 macro economic variables and 4 financial variables to estimate the stock price using Independent components Analysis (ICA). So, we presented an equation for two methods and compared their results which shown that artificial neural network method is more efficient than linear regression method.
1003.1458
Secured Cryptographic Key Generation From Multimodal Biometrics: Feature Level Fusion of Fingerprint and Iris
cs.CR cs.CV
Human users have a tough time remembering long cryptographic keys. Hence, researchers, for so long, have been examining ways to utilize biometric features of the user instead of a memorable password or passphrase, in an effort to generate strong and repeatable cryptographic keys. Our objective is to incorporate the volatility of the user's biometric features into the generated key, so as to make the key unguessable to an attacker lacking significant knowledge of the user's biometrics. We go one step further trying to incorporate multiple biometric modalities into cryptographic key generation so as to provide better security. In this article, we propose an efficient approach based on multimodal biometrics (Iris and fingerprint) for generation of secure cryptographic key. The proposed approach is composed of three modules namely, 1) Feature extraction, 2) Multimodal biometric template generation and 3) Cryptographic key generation. Initially, the features, minutiae points and texture properties are extracted from the fingerprint and iris images respectively. Subsequently, the extracted features are fused together at the feature level to construct the multi-biometric template. Finally, a 256-bit secure cryptographic key is generated from the multi-biometric template. For experimentation, we have employed the fingerprint images obtained from publicly available sources and the iris images from CASIA Iris Database. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
1003.1460
Ontology Based Query Expansion Using Word Sense Disambiguation
cs.IR
The existing information retrieval techniques do not consider the context of the keywords present in the user's queries. Therefore, the search engines sometimes do not provide sufficient information to the users. New methods based on the semantics of user keywords must be developed to search in the vast web space without incurring loss of information. The semantic based information retrieval techniques need to understand the meaning of the concepts in the user queries. This will improve the precision-recall of the search results. Therefore, this approach focuses on the concept based semantic information retrieval. This work is based on Word sense disambiguation, thesaurus WordNet and ontology of any domain for retrieving information in order to capture the context of particular concept(s) and discover semantic relationships between them.
1003.1493
Integration of Rule Based Expert Systems and Case Based Reasoning in an Acute Bacterial Meningitis Clinical Decision Support System
cs.AI
This article presents the results of the research carried out on the development of a medical diagnostic system applied to the Acute Bacterial Meningitis, using the Case Based Reasoning methodology. The research was focused on the implementation of the adaptation stage, from the integration of Case Based Reasoning and Rule Based Expert Systems. In this adaptation stage we use a higher level RBC that stores and allows reutilizing change experiences, combined with a classic rule-based inference engine. In order to take into account the most evident clinical situation, a pre-diagnosis stage is implemented using a rule engine that, given an evident situation, emits the corresponding diagnosis and avoids the complete process.
1003.1494
Formal Concept Analysis for Information Retrieval
cs.IR
In this paper we describe a mechanism to improve Information Retrieval (IR) on the web. The method is based on Formal Concepts Analysis (FCA) that it is makes semantical relations during the queries, and allows a reorganizing, in the shape of a lattice of concepts, the answers provided by a search engine. We proposed for the IR an incremental algorithm based on Galois lattice. This algorithm allows a formal clustering of the data sources, and the results which it turns over are classified by order of relevance. The control of relevance is exploited in clustering, we improved the result by using ontology in field of image processing, and reformulating the user queries which make it possible to give more relevant documents.
1003.1499
Evaluation of E-Learners Behaviour using Different Fuzzy Clustering Models: A Comparative Study
cs.CY cs.LG
This paper introduces an evaluation methodologies for the e-learners' behaviour that will be a feedback to the decision makers in e-learning system. Learner's profile plays a crucial role in the evaluation process to improve the e-learning process performance. The work focuses on the clustering of the e-learners based on their behaviour into specific categories that represent the learner's profiles. The learners' classes named as regular, workers, casual, bad, and absent. The work may answer the question of how to return bad students to be regular ones. The work presented the use of different fuzzy clustering techniques as fuzzy c-means and kernelized fuzzy c-means to find the learners' categories and predict their profiles. The paper presents the main phases as data description, preparation, features selection, and the experiments design using different fuzzy clustering models. Analysis of the obtained results and comparison with the real world behavior of those learners proved that there is a match with percentage of 78%. Fuzzy clustering reflects the learners' behavior more than crisp clustering. Comparison between FCM and KFCM proved that the KFCM is much better than FCM in predicting the learners' behaviour.
1003.1500
Hierarchical Approach for Online Mining--Emphasis towards Software Metrics
cs.DB
Several multi-pass algorithms have been proposed for Association Rule Mining from static repositories. However, such algorithms are incapable of online processing of transaction streams. In this paper we introduce an efficient single-pass algorithm for mining association rules, given a hierarchical classification amongest items. Processing efficiency is achieved by utilizing two optimizations, hierarchy aware counting and transaction reduction, which become possible in the context of hierarchical classification. This paper considers the problem of integrating constraints that are Boolean expression over the presence or absence of items into the association discovery algorithm. This paper present three integrated algorithms for mining association rules with item constraints and discuss their tradeoffs. It is concluded that the variation of complexity depends on the measure of DIT (Depth of Inheritance Tree) and NOC (Number of Children) in the context of Hierarchical Classification.
1003.1504
Indexer Based Dynamic Web Services Discovery
cs.AI
Recent advancement in web services plays an important role in business to business and business to consumer interaction. Discovery mechanism is not only used to find a suitable service but also provides collaboration between service providers and consumers by using standard protocols. A static web service discovery mechanism is not only time consuming but requires continuous human interaction. This paper proposed an efficient dynamic web services discovery mechanism that can locate relevant and updated web services from service registries and repositories with timestamp based on indexing value and categorization for faster and efficient discovery of service. The proposed prototype focuses on quality of service issues and introduces concept of local cache, categorization of services, indexing mechanism, CSP (Constraint Satisfaction Problem) solver, aging and usage of translator. Performance of proposed framework is evaluated by implementing the algorithm and correctness of our method is shown. The results of proposed framework shows greater performance and accuracy in dynamic discovery mechanism of web services resolving the existing issues of flexibility, scalability, based on quality of service, and discovers updated and most relevant services with ease of usage.
1003.1510
Hierarchical Web Page Classification Based on a Topic Model and Neighboring Pages Integration
cs.LG
Most Web page classification models typically apply the bag of words (BOW) model to represent the feature space. The original BOW representation, however, is unable to recognize semantic relationships between terms. One possible solution is to apply the topic model approach based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm to cluster the term features into a set of latent topics. Terms assigned into the same topic are semantically related. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical classification method based on a topic model and by integrating additional term features from neighboring pages. Our hierarchical classification method consists of two phases: (1) feature representation by using a topic model and integrating neighboring pages, and (2) hierarchical Support Vector Machines (SVM) classification model constructed from a confusion matrix. From the experimental results, the approach of using the proposed hierarchical SVM model by integrating current page with neighboring pages via the topic model yielded the best performance with the accuracy equal to 90.33% and the F1 measure of 90.14%; an improvement of 5.12% and 5.13% over the original SVM model, respectively.
1003.1511
Clinical gait data analysis based on Spatio-Temporal features
cs.CV
Analysing human gait has found considerable interest in recent computer vision research. So far, however, contributions to this topic exclusively dealt with the tasks of person identification or activity recognition. In this paper, we consider a different application for gait analysis and examine its use as a means of deducing the physical well-being of people. The proposed method is based on transforming the joint motion trajectories using wavelets to extract spatio-temporal features which are then fed as input to a vector quantiser; a self-organising map for classification of walking patterns of individuals with and without pathology. We show that our proposed algorithm is successful in extracting features that successfully discriminate between individuals with and without locomotion impairment.
1003.1588
On the Failure of the Finite Model Property in some Fuzzy Description Logics
cs.AI
Fuzzy Description Logics (DLs) are a family of logics which allow the representation of (and the reasoning with) structured knowledge affected by vagueness. Although most of the not very expressive crisp DLs, such as ALC, enjoy the Finite Model Property (FMP), this is not the case once we move into the fuzzy case. In this paper we show that if we allow arbitrary knowledge bases, then the fuzzy DLs ALC under Lukasiewicz and Product fuzzy logics do not verify the FMP even if we restrict to witnessed models; in other words, finite satisfiability and witnessed satisfiability are different for arbitrary knowledge bases. The aim of this paper is to point out the failure of FMP because it affects several algorithms published in the literature for reasoning under fuzzy ALC.
1003.1598
Information Fusion in the Immune System
cs.AI cs.NE
Biologically-inspired methods such as evolutionary algorithms and neural networks are proving useful in the field of information fusion. Artificial Immune Systems (AISs) are a biologically-inspired approach which take inspiration from the biological immune system. Interestingly, recent research has show how AISs which use multi-level information sources as input data can be used to build effective algorithms for real time computer intrusion detection. This research is based on biological information fusion mechanisms used by the human immune system and as such might be of interest to the information fusion community. The aim of this paper is to present a summary of some of the biological information fusion mechanisms seen in the human immune system, and of how these mechanisms have been implemented as AISs
1003.1655
Inner and Outer Bounds for the Public Information Embedding Capacity Region Under Multiple Access Attacks
cs.IT math.IT
We consider a public multi-user information embedding (watermarking) system in which two messages (watermarks) are independently embedded into two correlated covertexts and are transmitted through a multiple-access attack channel. The tradeoff between the achievable embedding rates and the average distortions for the two embedders is studied. For given distortion levels, inner and outer bounds for the embedding capacity region are obtained in single-letter form. Tighter bounds are also given for independent covertexts.
1003.1658
A multivalued knowledge-base model
cs.AI
The basic aim of our study is to give a possible model for handling uncertain information. This model is worked out in the framework of DATALOG. At first the concept of fuzzy Datalog will be summarized, then its extensions for intuitionistic- and interval-valued fuzzy logic is given and the concept of bipolar fuzzy Datalog is introduced. Based on these ideas the concept of multivalued knowledge-base will be defined as a quadruple of any background knowledge; a deduction mechanism; a connecting algorithm, and a function set of the program, which help us to determine the uncertainty levels of the results. At last a possible evaluation strategy is given.
1003.1738
MISO Capacity with Per-Antenna Power Constraint
cs.IT math.IT
We establish in closed-form the capacity and the optimal signaling scheme for a MISO channel with per-antenna power constraint. Two cases of channel state information are considered: constant channel known at both the transmitter and receiver, and Rayleigh fading channel known only at the receiver. For the first case, the optimal signaling scheme is beamforming with the phases of the beam weights matched to the phases of the channel coefficients, but the amplitudes independent of the channel coefficients and dependent only on the constrained powers. For the second case, the optimal scheme is to send independent signals from the antennas with the constrained powers. In both cases, the capacity with per-antenna power constraint is usually less than that with sum power constraint.
1003.1787
Vulnerability of MRD-Code-based Universal Secure Network Coding against Stronger Eavesdroppers
cs.IT math.IT
Silva et al. proposed a universal secure network coding scheme based on MRD codes, which can be applied to any underlying network code. This paper considers a stronger eavesdropping model where the eavesdroppers possess the ability to re-select the tapping links during the transmission. We give a proof for the impossibility of attaining universal security against such adversaries using Silva et al.'s code for all choices of code parameters, even with restricted number of tapped links. We also consider the cases with restricted tapping duration and derive some conditions for this code to be secure.
1003.1792
A Hybrid System based on Multi-Agent System in the Data Preprocessing Stage
cs.MA
We describe the usage of the Multi-agent system in the data preprocessing stage of an on-going project, called e-Wedding. The aim of this project is to utilize MAS and various approaches, like Web services, Ontology, and Data mining techniques, in e-Business that want to improve responsiveness and efficiency of systems so as to extract customer behavior model on Wedding Businesses. However, in this paper, we propose and implement the multi-agent-system, based on JADE, to only cope data preprocessing stage specified on handle with missing value techniques. JADE is quite easy to learn and use. Moreover, it supports many agent approaches such as agent communication, protocol, behavior and ontology. This framework has been experimented and evaluated in the realization of a simple, but realistic. The results, though still preliminary, are quite.
1003.1795
A Survey of Na\"ive Bayes Machine Learning approach in Text Document Classification
cs.LG cs.IR
Text Document classification aims in associating one or more predefined categories based on the likelihood suggested by the training set of labeled documents. Many machine learning algorithms play a vital role in training the system with predefined categories among which Na\"ive Bayes has some intriguing facts that it is simple, easy to implement and draws better accuracy in large datasets in spite of the na\"ive dependence. The importance of Na\"ive Bayes Machine learning approach has felt hence the study has been taken up for text document classification and the statistical event models available. This survey the various feature selection methods has been discussed and compared along with the metrics related to text document classification.
1003.1803
Nonlinear Filter Based Image Denoising Using AMF Approach
cs.CV
This paper proposes a new technique based on nonlinear Adaptive Median filter (AMF) for image restoration. Image denoising is a common procedure in digital image processing aiming at the removal of noise, which may corrupt an image during its acquisition or transmission, while retaining its quality. This procedure is traditionally performed in the spatial or frequency domain by filtering. The aim of image enhancement is to reconstruct the true image from the corrupted image. The process of image acquisition frequently leads to degradation and the quality of the digitized image becomes inferior to the original image. Filtering is a technique for enhancing the image. Linear filter is the filtering in which the value of an output pixel is a linear combination of neighborhood values, which can produce blur in the image. Thus a variety of smoothing techniques have been developed that are non linear. Median filter is the one of the most popular non-linear filter. When considering a small neighborhood it is highly efficient but for large window and in case of high noise it gives rise to more blurring to image. The Centre Weighted Median (CWM) filter has got a better average performance over the median filter [8]. However the original pixel corrupted and noise reduction is substantial under high noise condition. Hence this technique has also blurring affect on the image. To illustrate the superiority of the proposed approach by overcoming the existing problem, the proposed new scheme (AMF) Adaptive Median Filter has been simulated along with the standard ones and various performance measures have been compared.
1003.1810
Reconfigurable Parallel Data Flow Architecture
cs.MA
This paper presents a reconfigurable parallel data flow architecture. This architecture uses the concepts of multi-agent paradigm in reconfigurable hardware systems. The utilization of this new paradigm has the potential to greatly increase the flexibility, efficiency, expandability of data flow systems and to provide an attractive alternative to the current set of disjoint approaches that are currently applied to this problem domain. The ability of methodology to implement data flow type processing with different models is presented in this paper.
1003.1814
An Analytical Approach to Document Clustering Based on Internal Criterion Function
cs.IR
Fast and high quality document clustering is an important task in organizing information, search engine results obtaining from user query, enhancing web crawling and information retrieval. With the large amount of data available and with a goal of creating good quality clusters, a variety of algorithms have been developed having quality-complexity trade-offs. Among these, some algorithms seek to minimize the computational complexity using certain criterion functions which are defined for the whole set of clustering solution. In this paper, we are proposing a novel document clustering algorithm based on an internal criterion function. Most commonly used partitioning clustering algorithms (e.g. k-means) have some drawbacks as they suffer from local optimum solutions and creation of empty clusters as a clustering solution. The proposed algorithm usually does not suffer from these problems and converge to a global optimum, its performance enhances with the increase in number of clusters. We have checked our algorithm against three different datasets for four different values of k (required number of clusters).
1003.1816
Role of Data Mining in E-Payment systems
cs.DB
Data Mining deals extracting hidden knowledge, unexpected pattern and new rules from large database. Various customized data mining tools have been developed for domain specific applications such as Biomedicine, DNA analysis and telecommunication. Trends in data mining include further efforts towards the exploration of new application areas and methods for handling complex data types, algorithm scalability, constraint based data mining and visualization methods. In this paper we will present domain specific Secure Multiparty computation technique and applications. Data mining has matured as a field of basic and applied research in computer science in general. In this paper, we survey some of the recent approaches and architectures where data mining has been applied in the fields of e-payment systems. In this paper we limit our discussion to data mining in the context of e-payment systems. We also mention a few directions for further work in this domain, based on the survey.
1003.1819
Facial Gesture Recognition Using Correlation And Mahalanobis Distance
cs.CV
Augmenting human computer interaction with automated analysis and synthesis of facial expressions is a goal towards which much research effort has been devoted recently. Facial gesture recognition is one of the important component of natural human-machine interfaces; it may also be used in behavioural science, security systems and in clinical practice. Although humans recognise facial expressions virtually without effort or delay, reliable expression recognition by machine is still a challenge. The face expression recognition problem is challenging because different individuals display the same expression differently. This paper presents an overview of gesture recognition in real time using the concepts of correlation and Mahalanobis distance.We consider the six universal emotional categories namely joy, anger, fear, disgust, sadness and surprise.
1003.1826
A GA based Window Selection Methodology to Enhance Window based Multi wavelet transformation and thresholding aided CT image denoising technique
cs.CV
Image denoising is getting more significance, especially in Computed Tomography (CT), which is an important and most common modality in medical imaging. This is mainly due to that the effectiveness of clinical diagnosis using CT image lies on the image quality. The denoising technique for CT images using window-based Multi-wavelet transformation and thresholding shows the effectiveness in denoising, however, a drawback exists in selecting the closer windows in the process of window-based multi-wavelet transformation and thresholding. Generally, the windows of the duplicate noisy image that are closer to each window of original noisy image are obtained by the checking them sequentially. This leads to the possibility of missing out very closer windows and so enhancement is required in the aforesaid process of the denoising technique. In this paper, we propose a GA-based window selection methodology to include the denoising technique. With the aid of the GA-based window selection methodology, the windows of the duplicate noisy image that are very closer to every window of the original noisy image are extracted in an effective manner. By incorporating the proposed GA-based window selection methodology, the denoising the CT image is performed effectively. Eventually, a comparison is made between the denoising technique with and without the proposed GA-based window selection methodology.
1003.1827
Investigation and Assessment of Disorder of Ultrasound B-mode Images
cs.CV
Digital image plays a vital role in the early detection of cancers, such as prostate cancer, breast cancer, lungs cancer, cervical cancer. Ultrasound imaging method is also suitable for early detection of the abnormality of fetus. The accurate detection of region of interest in ultrasound image is crucial. Since the result of reflection, refraction and deflection of ultrasound waves from different types of tissues with different acoustic impedance. Usually, the contrast in ultrasound image is very low and weak edges make the image difficult to identify the fetus region in the ultrasound image. So the analysis of ultrasound image is more challenging one. We try to develop a new algorithmic approach to solve the problem of non clarity and find disorder of it. Generally there is no common enhancement approach for noise reduction. This paper proposes different filtering techniques based on statistical methods for the removal of various noise. The quality of the enhanced images is measured by the statistical quantity measures: Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE).
1003.1888
Biology-Derived Algorithms in Engineering Optimization
math.OC cs.CE cs.NE q-bio.QM
Biology-derived algorithms are an important part of computational sciences, which are essential to many scientific disciplines and engineering applications. Many computational methods are derived from or based on the analogy to natural evolution and biological activities, and these biologically inspired computations include genetic algorithms, neural networks, cellular automata, and other algorithms.
1003.1891
Handwritten Arabic Numeral Recognition using a Multi Layer Perceptron
cs.CV
Handwritten numeral recognition is in general a benchmark problem of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence. Compared to the problem of printed numeral recognition, the problem of handwritten numeral recognition is compounded due to variations in shapes and sizes of handwritten characters. Considering all these, the problem of handwritten numeral recognition is addressed under the present work in respect to handwritten Arabic numerals. Arabic is spoken throughout the Arab World and the fifth most popular language in the world slightly before Portuguese and Bengali. For the present work, we have developed a feature set of 88 features is designed to represent samples of handwritten Arabic numerals for this work. It includes 72 shadow and 16 octant features. A Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) based classifier is used here for recognition handwritten Arabic digits represented with the said feature set. On experimentation with a database of 3000 samples, the technique yields an average recognition rate of 94.93% evaluated after three-fold cross validation of results. It is useful for applications related to OCR of handwritten Arabic Digit and can also be extended to include OCR of handwritten characters of Arabic alphabet.
1003.1894
A comparative study of different feature sets for recognition of handwritten Arabic numerals using a Multi Layer Perceptron
cs.CV
The work presents a comparative assessment of seven different feature sets for recognition of handwritten Arabic numerals using a Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) based classifier. The seven feature sets employed here consist of shadow features, octant centroids, longest runs, angular distances, effective spans, dynamic centers of gravity, and some of their combinations. On experimentation with a database of 3000 samples, the maximum recognition rate of 95.80% is observed with both of two separate combinations of features. One of these combinations consists of shadow and centriod features, i. e. 88 features in all, and the other shadow, centroid and longest run features, i. e. 124 features in all. Out of these two, the former combination having a smaller number of features is finally considered effective for applications related to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of handwritten Arabic numerals. The work can also be extended to include OCR of handwritten characters of Arabic alphabet.
1003.1931
Hypergraph model of social tagging networks
physics.soc-ph cs.IR
The past few years have witnessed the great success of a new family of paradigms, so-called folksonomy, which allows users to freely associate tags to resources and efficiently manage them. In order to uncover the underlying structures and user behaviors in folksonomy, in this paper, we propose an evolutionary hypergrah model to explain the emerging statistical properties. The present model introduces a novel mechanism that one can not only assign tags to resources, but also retrieve resources via collaborative tags. We then compare the model with a real-world dataset: \emph{Del.icio.us}. Indeed, the present model shows considerable agreement with the empirical data in following aspects: power-law hyperdegree distributions, negtive correlation between clustering coefficients and hyperdegrees, and small average distances. Furthermore, the model indicates that most tagging behaviors are motivated by labeling tags to resources, and tags play a significant role in effectively retrieving interesting resources and making acquaintance with congenial friends. The proposed model may shed some light on the in-depth understanding of the structure and function of folksonomy.
1003.1954
Estimation of R\'enyi Entropy and Mutual Information Based on Generalized Nearest-Neighbor Graphs
stat.ML cs.AI
We present simple and computationally efficient nonparametric estimators of R\'enyi entropy and mutual information based on an i.i.d. sample drawn from an unknown, absolutely continuous distribution over $\R^d$. The estimators are calculated as the sum of $p$-th powers of the Euclidean lengths of the edges of the `generalized nearest-neighbor' graph of the sample and the empirical copula of the sample respectively. For the first time, we prove the almost sure consistency of these estimators and upper bounds on their rates of convergence, the latter of which under the assumption that the density underlying the sample is Lipschitz continuous. Experiments demonstrate their usefulness in independent subspace analysis.
1003.2005
Control of Complex Maneuvers for a Quadrotor UAV using Geometric Methods on SE(3)
math.OC cs.SY
This paper provides new results for control of complex flight maneuvers for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The flight maneuvers are defined by a concatenation of flight modes or primitives, each of which is achieved by a nonlinear controller that solves an output tracking problem. A mathematical model of the quadrotor UAV rigid body dynamics, defined on the configuration space $\SE$, is introduced as a basis for the analysis. The quadrotor UAV has four input degrees of freedom, namely the magnitudes of the four rotor thrusts; each flight mode is defined by solving an asymptotic optimal tracking problem. Although many flight modes can be studied, we focus on three output tracking problems, namely (1) outputs given by the vehicle attitude, (2) outputs given by the three position variables for the vehicle center of mass, and (3) output given by the three velocity variables for the vehicle center of mass. A nonlinear tracking controller is developed on the special Euclidean group $\SE$ for each flight mode, and the closed loop is shown to have desirable closed loop properties that are almost global in each case. Several numerical examples, including one example in which the quadrotor recovers from being initially upside down and another example that includes switching and transitions between different flight modes, illustrate the versatility and generality of the proposed approach.
1003.2022
Fast space-variant elliptical filtering using box splines
cs.CV cs.CE cs.IT cs.NA math.IT
The efficient realization of linear space-variant (non-convolution) filters is a challenging computational problem in image processing. In this paper, we demonstrate that it is possible to filter an image with a Gaussian-like elliptic window of varying size, elongation and orientation using a fixed number of computations per pixel. The associated algorithm, which is based on a family of smooth compactly supported piecewise polynomials, the radially-uniform box splines, is realized using pre-integration and local finite-differences. The radially-uniform box splines are constructed through the repeated convolution of a fixed number of box distributions, which have been suitably scaled and distributed radially in an uniform fashion. The attractive features of these box splines are their asymptotic behavior, their simple covariance structure, and their quasi-separability. They converge to Gaussians with the increase of their order, and are used to approximate anisotropic Gaussians of varying covariance simply by controlling the scales of the constituent box distributions. Based on the second feature, we develop a technique for continuously controlling the size, elongation and orientation of these Gaussian-like functions. Finally, the quasi-separable structure, along with a certain scaling property of box distributions, is used to efficiently realize the associated space-variant elliptical filtering, which requires O(1) computations per pixel irrespective of the shape and size of the filter.
1003.2138
Need-based Communication for Smart Grid: When to Inquire Power Price?
cs.IT math.IT
In smart grid, a home appliance can adjust its power consumption level according to the realtime power price obtained from communication channels. Most studies on smart grid do not consider the cost of communications which cannot be ignored in many situations. Therefore, the total cost in smart grid should be jointly optimized with the communication cost. In this paper, a probabilistic mechanism of locational margin price (LMP) is applied and a model for the stochastic evolution of the underlying load which determines the power price is proposed. Based on this framework of power price, the problem of determining when to inquire the power price is formulated as a Markov decision process and the corresponding elements, namely the action space, system state and reward function, are defined. Dynamic programming is then applied to obtain the optimal strategy. A simpler myopic approach is proposed by comparing the cost of communications and the penalty incurred by using the old value of power price. Numerical results show the significant performance gain of the optimal strategy of price inquiry, as well as the near-optimality of the myopic approach.
1003.2142
QoS Routing in Smart Grid
cs.IT math.IT
Smart grid is an emerging technology which is able to control the power load via price signaling. The communication between the power supplier and power customers is a key issue in smart grid. Performance degradation like delay or outage may cause significant impact on the stability of the pricing based control and thus the reward of smart grid. Therefore, a QoS mechanism is proposed for the communication system in smart grid, which incorporates the derivation of QoS requirement and applies QoS routing in the communication network. For deriving the QoS requirement, the dynamics of power load and the load-price mapping are studied. The corresponding impacts of different QoS metrics like delay are analyzed. Then, the QoS is derived via an optimization problem that maximizes the total revenue. Based on the derived QoS requirement, a simple greedy QoS routing algorithm is proposed for the requirement of high speed routing in smart grid. It is also proven that the proposed greedy algorithm is a $K$-approximation. Numerical simulation shows that the proposed mechanism and algorithm can effectively derive and secure the communication QoS in smart grid.
1003.2218
Supermartingales in Prediction with Expert Advice
cs.LG
We apply the method of defensive forecasting, based on the use of game-theoretic supermartingales, to prediction with expert advice. In the traditional setting of a countable number of experts and a finite number of outcomes, the Defensive Forecasting Algorithm is very close to the well-known Aggregating Algorithm. Not only the performance guarantees but also the predictions are the same for these two methods of fundamentally different nature. We discuss also a new setting where the experts can give advice conditional on the learner's future decision. Both the algorithms can be adapted to the new setting and give the same performance guarantees as in the traditional setting. Finally, we outline an application of defensive forecasting to a setting with several loss functions.
1003.2226
Interference Focusing for Mitigating Cross-Phase Modulation in a Simplified Optical Fiber Model
cs.IT math.IT
A memoryless interference network model is introduced that is based on non-linear phenomena observed when transmitting information over optical fiber using wavelength division multiplexing. The main characteristic of the model is that amplitude variations on one carrier wave are converted to phase variations on another carrier wave, i.e., the carriers interfere with each other through amplitude-to-phase conversion. For the case of two carriers, a new technique called interference focusing is proposed where each carrier achieves the capacity pre-log 1, thereby doubling the pre-log of 1/2 achieved by using conventional methods. The technique requires neither channel time variations nor global channel state information. Generalizations to more than two carriers are outlined.
1003.2257
Bit Allocation Law for Multi-Antenna Channel Feedback Quantization: Single-User Case
cs.IT math.IT
This paper studies the design and optimization of a limited feedback single-user system with multiple-antenna transmitter and single-antenna receiver. The design problem is cast in form of the minimizing the average transmission power at the base station subject to the user's outage probability constraint. The optimization is over the user's channel quantization codebook and the transmission power control function at the base station. Our approach is based on fixing the outage scenarios in advance and transforming the design problem into a robust system design problem. We start by showing that uniformly quantizing the channel magnitude in dB scale is asymptotically optimal, regardless of the magnitude distribution function. We derive the optimal uniform (in dB) channel magnitude codebook and combine it with a spatially uniform channel direction codebook to arrive at a product channel quantization codebook. We then optimize such a product structure in the asymptotic regime of $B\rightarrow \infty$, where $B$ is the total number of quantization feedback bits. The paper shows that for channels in the real space, the asymptotically optimal number of direction quantization bits should be ${(M{-}1)}/{2}$ times the number of magnitude quantization bits, where $M$ is the number of base station antennas. We also show that the performance of the designed system approaches the performance of the perfect channel state information system as $2^{-\frac{2B}{M+1}}$. For complex channels, the number of magnitude and direction quantization bits are related by a factor of $(M{-}1)$ and the system performance scales as $2^{-\frac{B}{M}}$ as $B\rightarrow\infty$.