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1102.0372
XWeB: the XML Warehouse Benchmark
cs.DB
With the emergence of XML as a standard for representing business data, new decision support applications are being developed. These XML data warehouses aim at supporting On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) operations that manipulate irregular XML data. To ensure feasibility of these new tools, important performance issues must be addressed. Performance is customarily assessed with the help of benchmarks. However, decision support benchmarks do not currently support XML features. In this paper, we introduce the XML Warehouse Benchmark (XWeB), which aims at filling this gap. XWeB derives from the relational decision support benchmark TPC-H. It is mainly composed of a test data warehouse that is based on a unified reference model for XML warehouses and that features XML-specific structures, and its associate XQuery decision support workload. XWeB's usage is illustrated by experiments on several XML database management systems.
1102.0406
Threshold Saturation on Channels with Memory via Spatial Coupling
cs.IT math.IT
We consider spatially coupled code ensembles. A particular instance are convolutional LDPC ensembles. It was recently shown that, for transmission over the memoryless binary erasure channel, this coupling increases the belief propagation threshold of the ensemble to the maximum a-posteriori threshold of the underlying component ensemble. This paved the way for a new class of capacity achieving low-density parity check codes. It was also shown empirically that the same threshold saturation occurs when we consider transmission over general binary input memoryless channels. In this work, we report on empirical evidence which suggests that the same phenomenon also occurs when transmission takes place over a class of channels with memory. This is confirmed both by simulations as well as by computing EXIT curves.
1102.0424
Design of Finite-Length Irregular Protograph Codes with Low Error Floors over the Binary-Input AWGN Channel Using Cyclic Liftings
cs.IT math.IT
We propose a technique to design finite-length irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over the binary-input additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel with good performance in both the waterfall and the error floor region. The design process starts from a protograph which embodies a desirable degree distribution. This protograph is then lifted cyclically to a certain block length of interest. The lift is designed carefully to satisfy a certain approximate cycle extrinsic message degree (ACE) spectrum. The target ACE spectrum is one with extremal properties, implying a good error floor performance for the designed code. The proposed construction results in quasi-cyclic codes which are attractive in practice due to simple encoder and decoder implementation. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed construction in comparison with similar existing constructions.
1102.0454
Evaluation of Three Vision Based Object Perception Methods for a Mobile Robot
cs.RO
This paper addresses object perception applied to mobile robotics. Being able to perceive semantically meaningful objects in unstructured environments is a key capability in order to make robots suitable to perform high-level tasks in home environments. However, finding a solution for this task is daunting: it requires the ability to handle the variability in image formation in a moving camera with tight time constraints. The paper brings to attention some of the issues with applying three state of the art object recognition and detection methods in a mobile robotics scenario, and proposes methods to deal with windowing/segmentation. Thus, this work aims at evaluating the state-of-the-art in object perception in an attempt to develop a lightweight solution for mobile robotics use/research in typical indoor settings.
1102.0467
Delays Induce an Exponential Memory Gap for Rendezvous in Trees
cs.DC cs.RO
The aim of rendezvous in a graph is meeting of two mobile agents at some node of an unknown anonymous connected graph. In this paper, we focus on rendezvous in trees, and, analogously to the efforts that have been made for solving the exploration problem with compact automata, we study the size of memory of mobile agents that permits to solve the rendezvous problem deterministically. We assume that the agents are identical, and move in synchronous rounds. We first show that if the delay between the starting times of the agents is arbitrary, then the lower bound on memory required for rendezvous is Omega(log n) bits, even for the line of length n. This lower bound meets a previously known upper bound of O(log n) bits for rendezvous in arbitrary graphs of size at most n. Our main result is a proof that the amount of memory needed for rendezvous with simultaneous start depends essentially on the number L of leaves of the tree, and is exponentially less impacted by the number n of nodes. Indeed, we present two identical agents with O(log L + loglog n) bits of memory that solve the rendezvous problem in all trees with at most n nodes and at most L leaves. Hence, for the class of trees with polylogarithmically many leaves, there is an exponential gap in minimum memory size needed for rendezvous between the scenario with arbitrary delay and the scenario with delay zero. Moreover, we show that our upper bound is optimal by proving that Omega(log L + loglog n)$ bits of memory are required for rendezvous, even in the class of trees with degrees bounded by 3.
1102.0485
Design, Implementation and Characterization of a Cooperative Communications System
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
Cooperative communications is a class of techniques which seek to improve reliability and throughput in wireless systems by pooling the resources of distributed nodes. While cooperation can occur at different network layers and time scales, physical layer cooperation at symbol time scales offers the largest benefit in combating losses due to fading. However, symbol level cooperation poses significant implementation challenges, especially in synchronizing the behaviors and carrier frequencies of distributed nodes. We present the implementation and characterization of a complete, real-time cooperative physical layer transceiver built on the Rice Wireless Open-Access Research Platform (WARP). In our implementation autonomous nodes employ physical layer cooperation without a central synchronization source, and are capable of selecting between non-cooperative and cooperative communication per packet. Cooperative transmissions use a distributed Alamouti space-time block code and employ either amplify-and-forward or decode-and-forward relaying. We also present experimental results of our transceiver's real-time performance under a variety of topologies and propagation conditions. Our results clearly demonstrate significant performance gains (more than 40x improvement in PER in some topologies) provided by physical layer cooperation, even when subject to the constraints of a real-time implementation. We also present methodologies to isolate and understand the sources of performance bottlenecks in our design. As with all our work on WARP, our transceiver design and experimental framework are available via the open-source WARP repository for use by other wireless researchers.
1102.0522
Uncertainty Relations and Sparse Signal Recovery for Pairs of General Signal Sets
cs.IT math.IT
We present an uncertainty relation for the representation of signals in two different general (possibly redundant or incomplete) signal sets. This uncertainty relation is relevant for the analysis of signals containing two distinct features each of which can be described sparsely in a suitable general signal set. Furthermore, the new uncertainty relation is shown to lead to improved sparsity thresholds for recovery of signals that are sparse in general dictionaries. Specifically, our results improve on the well-known $(1+1/d)/2$-threshold for dictionaries with coherence $d$ by up to a factor of two. Furthermore, we provide probabilistic recovery guarantees for pairs of general dictionaries that also allow us to understand which parts of a general dictionary one needs to randomize over to "weed out" the sparsity patterns that prohibit breaking the square-root bottleneck.
1102.0540
Information theory of massively parallel probe storage channels
cs.IT cs.IR math.IT
Motivated by the concept of probe storage, we study the problem of information retrieval using a large array of N nano-mechanical probes, N ~ 4000. At the nanometer scale it is impossible to avoid errors in the positioning of the array, thus all signals retrieved by the probes of the array at a given sampling moment are affected by the same amount of random position jitter. Therefore a massively parallel probe storage device is an example of a noisy communication channel with long range correlations between channel outputs due to the global positioning errors. We find that these correlations have a profound effect on the channel's properties. For example, it turns out that the channel's information capacity does approach 1 bit per probe in the limit of high signal-to-noise ratio, but the rate of the approach is only polynomial in the channel noise strength. Moreover, any error correction code with block size N >> 1 such that codewords correspond to the instantaneous outputs of the all probes in the array exhibits an error floor independently of the code rate. We illustrate this phenomenon explicitly using Reed-Solomon codes the performance of which is easy to simulate numerically. We also discuss capacity-achieving error correction codes for the global jitter channel and their complexity.
1102.0603
Persistent Robotic Tasks: Monitoring and Sweeping in Changing Environments
cs.RO math.OC
We present controllers that enable mobile robots to persistently monitor or sweep a changing environment. The changing environment is modeled as a field which grows in locations that are not within range of a robot, and decreases in locations that are within range of a robot. We assume that the robots travel on given closed paths. The speed of each robot along its path is controlled to prevent the field from growing unbounded at any location. We consider the space of speed controllers that can be parametrized by a finite set of basis functions. For a single robot, we develop a linear program that is guaranteed to compute a speed controller in this space to keep the field bounded, if such a controller exists. Another linear program is then derived whose solution is the speed controller that minimizes the maximum field value over the environment. We extend our linear program formulation to develop a multi-robot controller that keeps the field bounded. The multi-robot controller has the unique feature that it does not require communication among the robots. Simulation studies demonstrate the robustness of the controllers to modeling errors, and to stochasticity in the environment.
1102.0604
A small-world of weak ties provides optimal global integration of self-similar modules in functional brain networks
physics.bio-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI physics.soc-ph q-bio.NC
The human brain is organized in functional modules. Such an organization presents a basic conundrum: modules ought to be sufficiently independent to guarantee functional specialization and sufficiently connected to bind multiple processors for efficient information transfer. It is commonly accepted that small-world architecture of short lengths and large local clustering may solve this problem. However, there is intrinsic tension between shortcuts generating small-worlds and the persistence of modularity; a global property unrelated to local clustering. Here, we present a possible solution to this puzzle. We first show that a modified percolation theory can define a set of hierarchically organized modules made of strong links in functional brain networks. These modules are "large-world" self-similar structures and, therefore, are far from being small-world. However, incorporating weaker ties to the network converts it into a small-world preserving an underlying backbone of well-defined modules. Remarkably, weak ties are precisely organized as predicted by theory maximizing information transfer with minimal wiring cost. This trade-off architecture is reminiscent of the "strength of weak ties" crucial concept of social networks. Such a design suggests a natural solution to the paradox of efficient information flow in the highly modular structure of the brain.
1102.0629
Time-Varying Graphs and Social Network Analysis: Temporal Indicators and Metrics
cs.SI cs.AI cs.DC physics.soc-ph
Most instruments - formalisms, concepts, and metrics - for social networks analysis fail to capture their dynamics. Typical systems exhibit different scales of dynamics, ranging from the fine-grain dynamics of interactions (which recently led researchers to consider temporal versions of distance, connectivity, and related indicators), to the evolution of network properties over longer periods of time. This paper proposes a general approach to study that evolution for both atemporal and temporal indicators, based respectively on sequences of static graphs and sequences of time-varying graphs that cover successive time-windows. All the concepts and indicators, some of which are new, are expressed using a time-varying graph formalism.
1102.0651
Wikipedia information flow analysis reveals the scale-free architecture of the Semantic Space
physics.soc-ph cs.IR cs.SI physics.data-an
In this paper we extract the topology of the semantic space in its encyclopedic acception, measuring the semantic flow between the different entries of the largest modern encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and thus creating a directed complex network of semantic flows. Notably at the percolation threshold the semantic space is characterised by scale-free behaviour at different levels of complexity and this relates the semantic space to a wide range of biological, social and linguistics phenomena. In particular we find that the cluster size distribution, representing the size of different semantic areas, is scale-free. Moreover the topology of the resulting semantic space is scale-free in the connectivity distribution and displays small-world properties. However its statistical properties do not allow a classical interpretation via a generative model based on a simple multiplicative process. After giving a detailed description and interpretation of the topological properties of the semantic space, we introduce a stochastic model of content-based network, based on a copy and mutation algorithm and on the Heaps' law, that is able to capture the main statistical properties of the analysed semantic space, including the Zipf's law for the word frequency distribution.
1102.0674
Effective Mechanism for Social Recommendation of News
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Recommendation systems represent an important tool for news distribution on the Internet. In this work we modify a recently proposed social recommendation model in order to deal with no explicit ratings of users on news. The model consists of a network of users which continually adapts in order to achieve an efficient news traffic. To optimize network's topology we propose different stochastic algorithms that are scalable with respect to the network's size. Agent-based simulations reveal the features and the performance of these algorithms. To overcome the resultant drawbacks of each method we introduce two improved algorithms and show that they can optimize network's topology almost as fast and effectively as other not-scalable methods that make use of much more information.
1102.0676
Architecture of A Scalable Dynamic Parallel WebCrawler with High Speed Downloadable Capability for a Web Search Engine
cs.IR
Today World Wide Web (WWW) has become a huge ocean of information and it is growing in size everyday. Downloading even a fraction of this mammoth data is like sailing through a huge ocean and it is a challenging task indeed. In order to download a large portion of data from WWW, it has become absolutely essential to make the crawling process parallel. In this paper we offer the architecture of a dynamic parallel Web crawler, christened as "WEB-SAILOR," which presents a scalable approach based on Client-Server model to speed up the download process on behalf of a Web Search Engine in a distributed Domain-set specific environment. WEB-SAILOR removes the possibility of overlapping of downloaded documents by multiple crawlers without even incurring the cost of communication overhead among several parallel "client" crawling processes.
1102.0683
Volatility made observable at last
q-fin.CP cs.CE q-fin.ST
The Cartier-Perrin theorem, which was published in 1995 and is expressed in the language of nonstandard analysis, permits, for the first time perhaps, a clear-cut mathematical definition of the volatility of a financial asset. It yields as a byproduct a new understanding of the means of returns, of the beta coefficient, and of the Sharpe and Treynor ratios. New estimation techniques from automatic control and signal processing, which were already successfully applied in quantitative finance, lead to several computer experiments with some quite convincing forecasts.
1102.0686
Towards an axiomatic system for Kolmogorov complexity
cs.IT cs.CC cs.LO math.IT math.LO
In [She82], it is shown that four basic functional properties are enough to characterize plain Kolmogorov complexity, hence obtaining an axiomatic characterization of this notion. In this paper, we try to extend this work, both by looking at alternative axiomatic systems for plain complexity and by considering potential axiomatic systems for other types of complexity. First we show that the axiomatic system given by Shen cannot be weakened (at least in any natural way). We then give an analogue of Shen's axiomatic system for conditional complexity. In a the second part of the paper, we look at prefix-free complexity and try to construct an axiomatic system for it. We show however that the natural analogues of Shen's axiomatic systems fails to characterize prefix-free complexity.
1102.0690
A New Sum-Rate Outer Bound for Interference Channels with Three Source-Destination Pairs
cs.IT math.IT
This paper derives a novel sum-rate outer bound for the general memoryless interference channel with three users. The derivation is a generalization of the techniques developed by Kramer and by Etkin et al for the Gaussian two-user channel. For the three-user Gaussian channel the proposed sum-rate outer bound outperforms known bounds for certain channel parameters.
1102.0694
A Syntactic Classification based Web Page Ranking Algorithm
cs.IR
The existing search engines sometimes give unsatisfactory search result for lack of any categorization of search result. If there is some means to know the preference of user about the search result and rank pages according to that preference, the result will be more useful and accurate to the user. In the present paper a web page ranking algorithm is being proposed based on syntactic classification of web pages. Syntactic Classification does not bother about the meaning of the content of a web page. The proposed approach mainly consists of three steps: select some properties of web pages based on user's demand, measure them, and give different weightage to each property during ranking for different types of pages. The existence of syntactic classification is supported by running fuzzy c-means algorithm and neural network classification on a set of web pages. The change in ranking for difference in type of pages but for same query string is also being demonstrated.
1102.0695
A Domain Specific Ontology Based Semantic Web Search Engine
cs.IR
Since its emergence in the 1990s the World Wide Web (WWW) has rapidly evolved into a huge mine of global information and it is growing in size everyday. The presence of huge amount of resources on the Web thus poses a serious problem of accurate search. This is mainly because today's Web is a human-readable Web where information cannot be easily processed by machine. Highly sophisticated, efficient keyword based search engines that have evolved today have not been able to bridge this gap. So comes up the concept of the Semantic Web which is envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee as the Web of machine interpretable information to make a machine processable form for expressing information. Based on the semantic Web technologies we present in this paper the design methodology and development of a semantic Web search engine which provides exact search results for a domain specific search. This search engine is developed for an agricultural Website which hosts agricultural information about the state of West Bengal.
1102.0699
Explore what-if scenarios with SONG: Social Network Write Generator
cs.SI cs.NI physics.soc-ph
Online Social Networks (OSNs) have witnessed a tremendous growth the last few years, becoming a platform for online users to communicate, exchange content and even find employment. The emergence of OSNs has attracted researchers and analysts and much data-driven research has been conducted. However, collecting data-sets is non-trivial and sometimes it is difficult for data-sets to be shared between researchers. The main contribution of this paper is a framework called SONG (Social Network Write Generator) to generate synthetic traces of write activity on OSNs. We build our framework based on a characterization study of a large Twitter data-set and identifying the important factors that need to be accounted for. We show how one can generate traces with SONG and validate it by comparing against real data. We discuss how one can extend and use SONG to explore different `what-if' scenarios. We build a Twitter clone using 16 machines and Cassandra. We then show by example the usefulness of SONG by stress-testing our implementation. We hope that SONG is used by researchers and analysts for their own work that involves write activity.
1102.0710
Universal Communication over Arbitrarily Varying Channels
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the problem of universally communicating over an unknown and arbitrarily varying channel, using feedback. The focus of this paper is on determining the input behavior, and specifically, a prior distribution which is used to randomly generate the codebook. We pose the problem of setting the prior as a sequential universal prediction problem, that attempts to approach a given target rate, which depends on the unknown channel sequence. The main result is that, for a channel comprised of an unknown, arbitrary sequence of memoryless channels, there is a system using feedback and common randomness that asymptotically attains, with high probability, the capacity of the time-averaged channel, universally for every sequence of channels. While no prior knowledge of the channel sequence is assumed, the rate achieved meets or exceeds the traditional arbitrarily varying channel (AVC) capacity for every memoryless AVC defined over the same alphabets, and therefore the system universally attains the random code AVC capacity, without knowledge of the AVC parameters. The system we present combines rateless coding with a universal prediction scheme for the prior. We present rough upper bounds on the rates that can be achieved in this setting and lower bounds for the redundancies.
1102.0714
An architecture for the evaluation of intelligent systems
cs.AI
One of the main research areas in Artificial Intelligence is the coding of agents (programs) which are able to learn by themselves in any situation. This means that agents must be useful for purposes other than those they were created for, as, for example, playing chess. In this way we try to get closer to the pristine goal of Artificial Intelligence. One of the problems to decide whether an agent is really intelligent or not is the measurement of its intelligence, since there is currently no way to measure it in a reliable way. The purpose of this project is to create an interpreter that allows for the execution of several environments, including those which are generated randomly, so that an agent (a person or a program) can interact with them. Once the interaction between the agent and the environment is over, the interpreter will measure the intelligence of the agent according to the actions, states and rewards the agent has undergone inside the environment during the test. As a result we will be able to measure agents' intelligence in any possible environment, and to make comparisons between several agents, in order to determine which of them is the most intelligent. In order to perform the tests, the interpreter must be able to randomly generate environments that are really useful to measure agents' intelligence, since not any randomly generated environment will serve that purpose.
1102.0735
Analyzing the Impact of Visitors on Page Views with Google Analytics
cs.IR
This paper develops a flexible methodology to analyze the effectiveness of different variables on various dependent variables which all are times series and especially shows how to use a time series regression on one of the most important and primary index (page views per visit) on Google analytic and in conjunction it shows how to use the most suitable data to gain a more accurate result. Search engine visitors have a variety of impact on page views which cannot be described by single regression. On one hand referral visitors are well-fitted on linear regression with low impact. On the other hand, direct visitors made a huge impact on page views. The higher connection speed does not simply imply higher impact on page views and the content of web page and the territory of visitors can help connection speed to describe user behavior. Returning visitors have some similarities with direct visitors.
1102.0755
Message and State Cooperation in a Relay Channel When the Relay Has Strictly Causal State Information
cs.IT math.IT
A state-dependent relay channel is studied in which strictly causal channel state information is available at the relay and no state information is available at the source and destination. Source and relay are connected via two unidirectional out-of-band orthogonal links of finite capacity, and a state-dependent memoryless channel connects source and relay, on one side, and the destination, on the other. Via the orthogonal links, the source can convey information about the message to be delivered to the destination to the relay while the relay can forward state information to the source. This exchange enables cooperation between source and relay on both transmission of message and state information to the destination. First, an achievable scheme, inspired by noisy network coding, is proposed that exploits both message and state cooperation. Next, based on the given achievable rate and appropriate upper bounds, capacity results are identified for some special cases. Finally, a Gaussian model is studied, along with corresponding numerical results that illuminate the relative merits of state and message cooperation.
1102.0768
Message and State Cooperation in a Relay Channel When Only the Relay Knows the State
cs.IT math.IT
A state-dependent relay channel is studied in which strictly causal channel state information is available at the relay and no state information is available at the source and destination. The source and the relay are connected via two unidirectional out-of-band orthogonal links of finite capacity, and a state-dependent memoryless channel connects the source and the relay, on one side, and the destination, on the other. Via the orthogonal links, the source can convey information about the message to be delivered to the destination to the relay while the relay can forward state information to the source. This exchange enables cooperation between the source and the relay on transmission of message and state information to the destination. First, two achievable schemes are proposed that exploit both message and state cooperation. It is shown that a transmission scheme inspired by noisy network coding performs better than a strategy based on block Markov coding and backward decoding. Next, based on the given achievable schemes and appropriate upper bounds, capacity results are identified for some special cases. Finally, a Gaussian model is studied, along with corresponding numerical results that illuminate the relative merits of state and message cooperation.
1102.0817
Natural images from the birthplace of the human eye
q-bio.NC cs.CV
Here we introduce a database of calibrated natural images publicly available through an easy-to-use web interface. Using a Nikon D70 digital SLR camera, we acquired about 5000 six-megapixel images of Okavango Delta of Botswana, a tropical savanna habitat similar to where the human eye is thought to have evolved. Some sequences of images were captured unsystematically while following a baboon troop, while others were designed to vary a single parameter such as aperture, object distance, time of day or position on the horizon. Images are available in the raw RGB format and in grayscale. Images are also available in units relevant to the physiology of human cone photoreceptors, where pixel values represent the expected number of photoisomerizations per second for cones sensitive to long (L), medium (M) and short (S) wavelengths. This database is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial Unported license to facilitate research in computer vision, psychophysics of perception, and visual neuroscience.
1102.0831
Intelligent Semantic Web Search Engines: A Brief Survey
cs.AI
The World Wide Web (WWW) allows the people to share the information (data) from the large database repositories globally. The amount of information grows billions of databases. We need to search the information will specialize tools known generically search engine. There are many of search engines available today, retrieving meaningful information is difficult. However to overcome this problem in search engines to retrieve meaningful information intelligently, semantic web technologies are playing a major role. In this paper we present survey on the search engine generations and the role of search engines in intelligent web and semantic search technologies.
1102.0836
EigenNet: A Bayesian hybrid of generative and conditional models for sparse learning
cs.LG
It is a challenging task to select correlated variables in a high dimensional space. To address this challenge, the elastic net has been developed and successfully applied to many applications. Despite its great success, the elastic net does not explicitly use correlation information embedded in data to select correlated variables. To overcome this limitation, we present a novel Bayesian hybrid model, the EigenNet, that uses the eigenstructures of data to guide variable selection. Specifically, it integrates a sparse conditional classification model with a generative model capturing variable correlations in a principled Bayesian framework. We reparameterize the hybrid model in the eigenspace to avoid overfiting and to increase the computational efficiency of its MCMC sampler. Furthermore, we provide an alternative view to the EigenNet from a regularization perspective: the EigenNet has an adaptive eigenspace-based composite regularizer, which naturally generalizes the $l_{1/2}$ regularizer used by the elastic net. Experiments on synthetic and real data show that the EigenNet significantly outperforms the lasso, the elastic net, and the Bayesian lasso in terms of prediction accuracy, especially when the number of training samples is smaller than the number of variables.
1102.0899
Evidence Feed Forward Hidden Markov Model: A New Type of Hidden Markov Model
cs.AI cs.CV cs.LG math.NA math.PR
The ability to predict the intentions of people based solely on their visual actions is a skill only performed by humans and animals. The intelligence of current computer algorithms has not reached this level of complexity, but there are several research efforts that are working towards it. With the number of classification algorithms available, it is hard to determine which algorithm works best for a particular situation. In classification of visual human intent data, Hidden Markov Models (HMM), and their variants, are leading candidates. The inability of HMMs to provide a probability in the observation to observation linkages is a big downfall in this classification technique. If a person is visually identifying an action of another person, they monitor patterns in the observations. By estimating the next observation, people have the ability to summarize the actions, and thus determine, with pretty good accuracy, the intention of the person performing the action. These visual cues and linkages are important in creating intelligent algorithms for determining human actions based on visual observations. The Evidence Feed Forward Hidden Markov Model is a newly developed algorithm which provides observation to observation linkages. The following research addresses the theory behind Evidence Feed Forward HMMs, provides mathematical proofs of their learning of these parameters to optimize the likelihood of observations with a Evidence Feed Forwards HMM, which is important in all computational intelligence algorithm, and gives comparative examples with standard HMMs in classification of both visual action data and measurement data; thus providing a strong base for Evidence Feed Forward HMMs in classification of many types of problems.
1102.0902
Disorder induced phase transition in kinetic models of opinion dynamics
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI
We propose a model of continuous opinion dynamics, where mutual interactions can be both positive and negative. Different types of distributions for the interactions, all characterized by a single parameter $p$ denoting the fraction of negative interactions, are considered. Results from exact calculation of a discrete version and numerical simulations of the continuous version of the model indicate the existence of a universal continuous phase transition at p=p_c below which a consensus is reached. Although the order-disorder transition is analogous to a ferromagnetic-paramagnetic phase transition with comparable critical exponents, the model is characterized by some distinctive features relevant to a social system.
1102.0918
Incentive Compatible Influence Maximization in Social Networks and Application to Viral Marketing
cs.GT cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Information diffusion and influence maximization are important and extensively studied problems in social networks. Various models and algorithms have been proposed in the literature in the context of the influence maximization problem. A crucial assumption in all these studies is that the influence probabilities are known to the social planner. This assumption is unrealistic since the influence probabilities are usually private information of the individual agents and strategic agents may not reveal them truthfully. Moreover, the influence probabilities could vary significantly with the type of the information flowing in the network and the time at which the information is propagating in the network. In this paper, we use a mechanism design approach to elicit influence probabilities truthfully from the agents. We first work with a simple model, the influencer model, where we assume that each user knows the level of influence she has on her neighbors but this is private information. In the second model, the influencer-influencee model, which is more realistic, we determine influence probabilities by combining the probability values reported by the influencers and influencees. In the context of the first model, we present how VCG (Vickrey-Clarke-Groves) mechanisms could be used for truthfully eliciting the influence probabilities. Our main contribution is to design a scoring rule based mechanism in the context of the influencer-influencee model. In particular, we show the incentive compatibility of the mechanisms when the scoring rules are proper and propose a reverse weighted scoring rule based mechanism as an appropriate mechanism to use. We also discuss briefly the implementation of such a mechanism in viral marketing applications.
1102.0930
An Evaluation of Link Neighborhood Lexical Signatures to Rediscover Missing Web Pages
cs.IR cs.DL cs.SI
For discovering the new URI of a missing web page, lexical signatures, which consist of a small number of words chosen to represent the "aboutness" of a page, have been previously proposed. However, prior methods relied on computing the lexical signature before the page was lost, or using cached or archived versions of the page to calculate a lexical signature. We demonstrate a system of constructing a lexical signature for a page from its link neighborhood, that is the "backlinks", or pages that link to the missing page. After testing various methods, we show that one can construct a lexical signature for a missing web page using only ten backlink pages. Further, we show that only the first level of backlinks are useful in this effort. The text that the backlinks use to point to the missing page is used as input for the creation of a four-word lexical signature. That lexical signature is shown to successfully find the target URI in over half of the test cases.
1102.0952
Pattern tree-based XOLAP rollup operator for XML complex hierarchies
cs.DB
With the rise of XML as a standard for representing business data, XML data warehousing appears as a suitable solution for decision-support applications. In this context, it is necessary to allow OLAP analyses on XML data cubes. Thus, XQuery extensions are needed. To define a formal framework and allow much-needed performance optimizations on analytical queries expressed in XQuery, defining an algebra is desirable. However, XML-OLAP (XOLAP) algebras from the literature still largely rely on the relational model. Hence, we propose in this paper a rollup operator based on a pattern tree in order to handle multidimensional XML data expressed within complex hierarchies.
1102.0958
Quantitative Stability and Optimality Conditions in Convex Semi-Infinite and Infinite Programming
math.OC cs.SY
This paper concerns parameterized convex infinite (or semi-infinite) inequality systems whose decision variables run over general infinite-dimensional Banach (resp. finite-dimensional) spaces and that are indexed by an arbitrary fixed set T . Parameter perturbations on the right-hand side of the inequalities are measurable and bounded, and thus the natural parameter space is $l_{\infty}(T)$. Based on advanced variational analysis, we derive a precise formula for computing the exact Lipschitzian bound of the feasible solution map, which involves only the system data, and then show that this exact bound agrees with the coderivative norm of the aforementioned mapping. On one hand, in this way we extend to the convex setting the results of [4] developed in the linear framework under the boundedness assumption on the system coefficients. On the other hand, in the case when the decision space is reflexive, we succeed to remove this boundedness assumption in the general convex case, establishing therefore results new even for linear infinite and semi-infinite systems. The last part of the paper provides verifiable necessary optimality conditions for infinite and semi-infinite programs with convex inequality constraints and general nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives. In this way we extend the corresponding results of [5] obtained for programs with linear infinite inequality constraints.
1102.0964
Structured interference-mitigation in two-hop networks
cs.IT math.IT
We consider two-hop S-R-D Gaussian networks with a source (S), a relay (R) and a destination (D), some of which experience additive interference. This additive interference, which renders the channels state-dependent, is either a) experienced at the destination D and known non-causally at the source S, or b) experienced at the relay R and known at the destination D. In both cases, one would hope to exploit this knowledge of the channel state at some of the nodes to obtain "clean" or interference-free channels, just as Costa's dirty-paper coding does for one-hop channels with state non-causally known to the transmitter. We demonstrate a scheme which achieves to within 0.5 bit of a "clean" channel. This novel scheme is based on nested-lattice code and a Decode-and-Forward (DF) relay. Intuitively, this strategy uses the structure provided by nested lattice codes to cancel the "integer" (or lattice quantized) part of the interference and treats the "residual" (or quantization noise) as noise.
1102.0969
On the Complexity of Newman's Community Finding Approach for Biological and Social Networks
physics.soc-ph cs.CC cs.DM cs.SI
Given a graph of interactions, a module (also called a community or cluster) is a subset of nodes whose fitness is a function of the statistical significance of the pairwise interactions of nodes in the module. The topic of this paper is a model-based community finding approach, commonly referred to as modularity clustering, that was originally proposed by Newman and has subsequently been extremely popular in practice. Various heuristic methods are currently employed for finding the optimal solution. However, the exact computational complexity of this approach is still largely unknown. To this end, we initiate a systematic study of the computational complexity of modularity clustering. Due to the specific quadratic nature of the modularity function, it is necessary to study its value on sparse graphs and dense graphs separately. Our main results include a (1+\eps)-inapproximability for dense graphs and a logarithmic approximation for sparse graphs. We make use of several combinatorial properties of modularity to get these results. These are the first non-trivial approximability results beyond the previously known NP-hardness results.
1102.0987
Propagation on networks: an exact alternative perspective
cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI physics.soc-ph
By generating the specifics of a network structure only when needed (on-the-fly), we derive a simple stochastic process that exactly models the time evolution of susceptible-infectious dynamics on finite-size networks. The small number of dynamical variables of this birth-death Markov process greatly simplifies analytical calculations. We show how a dual analytical description, treating large scale epidemics with a Gaussian approximations and small outbreaks with a branching process, provides an accurate approximation of the distribution even for rather small networks. The approach also offers important computational advantages and generalizes to a vast class of systems.
1102.1025
Deformed Statistics Kullback-Leibler Divergence Minimization within a Scaled Bregman Framework
cond-mat.stat-mech cs.IT math-ph math.IT math.MP
The generalized Kullback-Leibler divergence (K-Ld) in Tsallis statistics [constrained by the additive duality of generalized statistics (dual generalized K-Ld)] is here reconciled with the theory of Bregman divergences for expectations defined by normal averages, within a measure-theoretic framework. Specifically, it is demonstrated that the dual generalized K-Ld is a scaled Bregman divergence. The Pythagorean theorem is derived from the minimum discrimination information-principle using the dual generalized K-Ld as the measure of uncertainty, with constraints defined by normal averages. The minimization of the dual generalized K-Ld, with normal averages constraints, is shown to exhibit distinctly unique features.
1102.1027
Collective Classification of Textual Documents by Guided Self-Organization in T-Cell Cross-Regulation Dynamics
cs.IR cs.AI cs.LG nlin.AO q-bio.OT
We present and study an agent-based model of T-Cell cross-regulation in the adaptive immune system, which we apply to binary classification. Our method expands an existing analytical model of T-cell cross-regulation (Carneiro et al. in Immunol Rev 216(1):48-68, 2007) that was used to study the self-organizing dynamics of a single population of T-Cells in interaction with an idealized antigen presenting cell capable of presenting a single antigen. With agent-based modeling we are able to study the self-organizing dynamics of multiple populations of distinct T-cells which interact via antigen presenting cells that present hundreds of distinct antigens. Moreover, we show that such self-organizing dynamics can be guided to produce an effective binary classification of antigens, which is competitive with existing machine learning methods when applied to biomedical text classification. More specifically, here we test our model on a dataset of publicly available full-text biomedical articles provided by the BioCreative challenge (Krallinger in The biocreative ii. 5 challenge overview, p 19, 2009). We study the robustness of our model's parameter configurations, and show that it leads to encouraging results comparable to state-of-the-art classifiers. Our results help us understand both T-cell cross-regulation as a general principle of guided self-organization, as well as its applicability to document classification. Therefore, we show that our bio-inspired algorithm is a promising novel method for biomedical article classification and for binary document classification in general.
1102.1038
Prisoner's Dilemma on Graphs with Large Girth
cs.SI math.PR physics.soc-ph
We study the evolution of cooperation in populations where individuals play prisoner's dilemma on a network. Every node of the network corresponds on an individual choosing whether to cooperate or defect in a repeated game. The players revise their actions by imitating those neighbors who have higher payoffs. We show that when the interactions take place on graphs with large girth, cooperation is more likely to emerge. On the flip side, in graphs with many cycles of length 3 and 4, defection spreads more rapidly. One of the key ideas of our analysis is that our dynamics can be seen as a perturbation of the voter model. We write the transition kernel of the corresponding Markov chain in terms of the pairwise correlations in the voter model. We analyze the pairwise correlation and show that in graphs with relatively large girth, cooperators cluster and help each other.
1102.1064
A Decade of Database Research Publications
cs.DL cs.DB
We analyze the database research publications of four major core database technology conferences (SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, EDBT), two main theoretical database conferences (PODS, ICDT) and three database journals (TODS, VLDB Journal, TKDE) over a period of 10 years (2001 - 2010). Our analysis considers only regular papers as we do not include short papers, demo papers, posters, tutorials or panels into our statistics. We rank the research scholars according to their number of publication in each conference/journal separately and in combined. We also report about the growth in the number of research publications and the size of the research community in the last decade.
1102.1101
Total variation regularization for fMRI-based prediction of behaviour
cs.CV q-bio.NC
While medical imaging typically provides massive amounts of data, the extraction of relevant information for predictive diagnosis remains a difficult challenge. Functional MRI (fMRI) data, that provide an indirect measure of task-related or spontaneous neuronal activity, are classically analyzed in a mass-univariate procedure yielding statistical parametric maps. This analysis framework disregards some important principles of brain organization: population coding, distributed and overlapping representations. Multivariate pattern analysis, i.e., the prediction of behavioural variables from brain activation patterns better captures this structure. To cope with the high dimensionality of the data, the learning method has to be regularized. However, the spatial structure of the image is not taken into account in standard regularization methods, so that the extracted features are often hard to interpret. More informative and interpretable results can be obtained with the l_1 norm of the image gradient, a.k.a. its Total Variation (TV), as regularization. We apply for the first time this method to fMRI data, and show that TV regularization is well suited to the purpose of brain mapping while being a powerful tool for brain decoding. Moreover, this article presents the first use of TV regularization for classification.
1102.1103
Compound Outage Probability and Capacity of a Class of Fading MIMO Channels with Channel Distribution Uncertainty
cs.IT math.IT
Outage probability and capacity of a class of block-fading MIMO channels are considered with partial channel distribution information. Specifically, the channel or its distribution are not known but the latter is known to belong to a class of distributions where each member is within a certain distance (uncertainty) from a nominal distribution. Relative entropy is used as a measure of distance between distributions. Compound outage probability defined as min (over the transmit signal distribution) -max (over the channel distribution class) outage probability is introduced and investigated. This generalizes the standard outage probability to the case of partial channel distribution information. Compound outage probability characterization (via one-dimensional convex optimization), its properties and approximations are given. It is shown to have two-regime behavior: when the nominal outage probability decreases (e.g. by increasing the SNR), the compound outage first decreases linearly down to a certain threshold (related to relative entropy distance) and then only logarithmically (i.e. very slowly), so that no significant further decrease is possible. The compound outage depends on the relative entropy distance and the nominal outage only, all other details (nominal fading and noise distributions) being irrelevant. The transmit signal distribution optimized for the nominal channel distribution is shown to be also optimal for the whole class of distributions. The effect of swapping the distributions in relative entropy is investigated and an error floor effect is established. The compound outage probability under Lp distance constraint is also investigated. The obtained results hold for a generic channel model (arbitrary nominal fading and noise distributions).
1102.1107
Robust Distributed Routing in Dynamical Flow Networks - Part I: Locally Responsive Policies and Weak Resilience
cs.SY math.CA math.DS math.OC nlin.AO
Robustness of distributed routing policies is studied for dynamical flow networks, with respect to adversarial disturbances that reduce the link flow capacities. A dynamical flow network is modeled as a system of ordinary differential equations derived from mass conservation laws on a directed acyclic graph with a single origin-destination pair and a constant inflow at the origin. Routing policies regulate the way the inflow at a non-destination node gets split among its outgoing links as a function of the current particle density, while the outflow of a link is modeled to depend on the current particle density on that link through a flow function. The dynamical flow network is called partially transferring if the total inflow at the destination node is asymptotically bounded away from zero, and its weak resilience is measured as the minimum sum of the link-wise magnitude of all disturbances that make it not partially transferring. The weak resilience of a dynamical flow network with arbitrary routing policy is shown to be upper-bounded by the network's min-cut capacity, independently of the initial flow conditions. Moreover, a class of distributed routing policies that rely exclusively on local information on the particle densities, and are locally responsive to that, is shown to yield such maximal weak resilience. These results imply that locality constraints on the information available to the routing policies do not cause loss of weak resilience. Some fundamental properties of dynamical flow networks driven by locally responsive distributed policies are analyzed in detail, including global convergence to a unique limit flow.
1102.1111
Treelicious: a System for Semantically Navigating Tagged Web Pages
cs.IR
Collaborative tagging has emerged as a popular and effective method for organizing and describing pages on the Web. We present Treelicious, a system that allows hierarchical navigation of tagged web pages. Our system enriches the navigational capabilities of standard tagging systems, which typically exploit only popularity and co-occurrence data. We describe a prototype that leverages the Wikipedia category structure to allow a user to semantically navigate pages from the Delicious social bookmarking service. In our system a user can perform an ordinary keyword search and browse relevant pages but is also given the ability to broaden the search to more general topics and narrow it to more specific topics. We show that Treelicious indeed provides an intuitive framework that allows for improved and effective discovery of knowledge.
1102.1115
Adaptive Resource Allocation in Jamming Teams Using Game Theory
cs.GT cs.IT cs.SY math.IT math.OC
In this work, we study the problem of power allocation and adaptive modulation in teams of decision makers. We consider the special case of two teams with each team consisting of two mobile agents. Agents belonging to the same team communicate over wireless ad hoc networks, and they try to split their available power between the tasks of communication and jamming the nodes of the other team. The agents have constraints on their total energy and instantaneous power usage. The cost function adopted is the difference between the rates of erroneously transmitted bits of each team. We model the adaptive modulation problem as a zero-sum matrix game which in turn gives rise to a a continuous kernel game to handle power control. Based on the communications model, we present sufficient conditions on the physical parameters of the agents for the existence of a pure strategy saddle-point equilibrium (PSSPE).
1102.1140
Ranking-Based Black-Box Complexity
cs.NE cs.CC cs.DS
Randomized search heuristics such as evolutionary algorithms, simulated annealing, and ant colony optimization are a broadly used class of general-purpose algorithms. Analyzing them via classical methods of theoretical computer science is a growing field. While several strong runtime analysis results have appeared in the last 20 years, a powerful complexity theory for such algorithms is yet to be developed. We enrich the existing notions of black-box complexity by the additional restriction that not the actual objective values, but only the relative quality of the previously evaluated solutions may be taken into account by the black-box algorithm. Many randomized search heuristics belong to this class of algorithms. We show that the new ranking-based model gives more realistic complexity estimates for some problems. For example, the class of all binary-value functions has a black-box complexity of $O(\log n)$ in the previous black-box models, but has a ranking-based complexity of $\Theta(n)$. For the class of all OneMax functions, we present a ranking-based black-box algorithm that has a runtime of $\Theta(n / \log n)$, which shows that the OneMax problem does not become harder with the additional ranking-basedness restriction.
1102.1165
Achievable Rate Region for Multiple Access Channel with Correlated Channel States and Cooperating Encoders
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, a two-user discrete memoryless multiple-access channel (DM-MAC) with correlated channel states, each known at one of the encoders is considered, in which each encoder transmits independent messages and tries to cooperate with the other one. To consider cooperating encoders, it is assumed that each encoder strictly-causally receives and learns the other encoder's transmitted symbols and tries to cooperate with the other encoder by transmitting its message. Next, we study this channel in a special case; we assume that the common part of both states is known at both, hence encoders use this opportunity to get better rate region. For these scenarios, an achievable rate region is derived based on a combination of block-Markov encoding and Gel'fand-Pinsker coding techniques. Furthermore, the achievable rate region is established for the Gaussian channel, and it is shown that the capacity region is achieved in certain circumstances.
1102.1167
Seats at the table: the network of the editorial boards in information and library science
cs.DL cs.SI physics.soc-ph
The structural properties of the network generated by the editorial activities of the members of the boards of "Information Science & Library Science" journals are explored through network analysis techniques. The crossed presence of scholars on editorial boards, the phenomenon called interlocking editorship, is considered a proxy of the similarity of editorial policies. The evidences support the idea that this group of journals is better described as a set of only relatively connected subfields. In particular two main subfield are identified, consisting of research oriented journals devoted respectively to LIS and MIS. The links between these two subsets are weak. Around these two subsets there are a lot of (relatively) isolated professional journals or journals characterized more by their subject-matter content than by their focus on information flows. It is possible to suggest that this configuration of the network may be the consequence of the youthfulness of Information Science & Library Science, which has not permitted yet to reach a general consensus through scholars on research aims, methods and instruments.
1102.1168
Interlocking editorship. A network analysis of the links between economic journals
cs.DL cs.SI physics.soc-ph
The exploratory analysis developed in this paper relies on the hypothesis that each editor possesses some power in the definition of the editorial policy of her journal. Consequently if the same scholar sits on the board of editors of two journals, those journals could have some common elements in their editorial policies. The proximity of the editorial policies of two scientific journals can be assessed by the number of common editors sitting on their boards. A database of all editors of ECONLIT journals is used. The structure of the network generated by interlocking editorship is explored by applying the instruments of network analysis. Evidences have been found of a compact network containing different components. This is interpreted as the result of a plurality of perspectives about the appropriate methods for the investigation of problems and the construction of theories within the domain of economics.
1102.1173
Multi-Parameter Tikhonov Regularization
math.NA cs.SY math.OC
We study multi-parameter Tikhonov regularization, i.e., with multiple penalties. Such models are useful when the sought-for solution exhibits several distinct features simultaneously. Two choice rules, i.e., discrepancy principle and balancing principle, are studied for choosing an appropriate (vector-valued) regularization parameter, and some theoretical results are presented. In particular, the consistency of the discrepancy principle as well as convergence rate are established, and an a posteriori error estimate for the balancing principle is established. Also two fixed point algorithms are proposed for computing the regularization parameter by the latter rule. Numerical results for several nonsmooth multi-parameter models are presented, which show clearly their superior performance over their single-parameter counterparts.
1102.1182
Phase transition in the detection of modules in sparse networks
cond-mat.stat-mech cs.LG cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We present an asymptotically exact analysis of the problem of detecting communities in sparse random networks. Our results are also applicable to detection of functional modules, partitions, and colorings in noisy planted models. Using a cavity method analysis, we unveil a phase transition from a region where the original group assignment is undetectable to one where detection is possible. In some cases, the detectable region splits into an algorithmically hard region and an easy one. Our approach naturally translates into a practical algorithm for detecting modules in sparse networks, and learning the parameters of the underlying model.
1102.1227
Exact recoverability from dense corrupted observations via $L_1$ minimization
cs.IT math.IT math.ST stat.TH
This paper confirms a surprising phenomenon first observed by Wright \textit{et al.} \cite{WYGSM_Face_2009_J} \cite{WM_denseError_2010_J} under different setting: given $m$ highly corrupted measurements $y = A_{\Omega \bullet} x^{\star} + e^{\star}$, where $A_{\Omega \bullet}$ is a submatrix whose rows are selected uniformly at random from rows of an orthogonal matrix $A$ and $e^{\star}$ is an unknown sparse error vector whose nonzero entries may be unbounded, we show that with high probability $\ell_1$-minimization can recover the sparse signal of interest $x^{\star}$ exactly from only $m = C \mu^2 k (\log n)^2$ where $k$ is the number of nonzero components of $x^{\star}$ and $\mu = n \max_{ij} A_{ij}^2$, even if nearly 100% of the measurements are corrupted. We further guarantee that stable recovery is possible when measurements are polluted by both gross sparse and small dense errors: $y = A_{\Omega \bullet} x^{\star} + e^{\star}+ \nu$ where $\nu$ is the small dense noise with bounded energy. Numerous simulation results under various settings are also presented to verify the validity of the theory as well as to illustrate the promising potential of the proposed framework.
1102.1231
Cramer-Rao Bound for Blind Channel Estimators in Redundant Block Transmission Systems
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we derive the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for blind channel estimation in redundant block transmission systems, a lower bound for the mean squared error of any blind channel estimators. The derived CRB is valid for any full-rank linear redundant precoder, including both zero-padded (ZP) and cyclic-prefixed (CP) precoders. A simple form of CRBs for multiple complex parameters is also derived and presented which facilitates the CRB derivation of the problem of interest. A comparison is made between the derived CRBs and performances of existing subspace-based blind channel estimators for both CP and ZP systems. Numerical results show that there is still some room for performance improvement of blind channel estimators.
1102.1232
Asymptotic Spectral Efficiency of the Uplink in Spatially Distributed Wireless Networks With Multi-Antenna Base Stations
cs.IT math.IT
The spectral efficiency of a representative uplink of a given length, in interference-limited, spatially-distributed wireless networks with hexagonal cells, simple power control, and multiantenna linear Minimum-Mean-Square-Error receivers is found to approach an asymptote as the numbers of base-station antennas N and wireless nodes go to infinity. An approximation for the area-averaged spectral efficiency of a representative link (averaged over the spatial base-station and mobile distributions), for Poisson distributed base stations, is also provided. For large N, in the interference-limited regime, the area-averaged spectral efficiency is primarily a function of the ratio of the product of N and the ratio of base-station to wireless-node densities, indicating that it is possible to scale such networks by linearly increasing the product of the number of base-station antennas and the relative density of base stations to wireless nodes, with wireless-node density. The results are useful for designers of wireless systems with high inter-cell interference because it provides simple expressions for spectral efficiency as a function of tangible system parameters like base-station and wireless-node densities, and number of antennas. These results were derived combining infinite random matrix theory and stochastic geometry.
1102.1247
Randomness and dependencies extraction via polarization, with applications to Slepian-Wolf coding and secrecy
cs.IT math.IT
The polarization phenomenon for a single source is extended to a framework with multiple correlated sources. It is shown in addition to extracting the randomness of the source, the polar transforms takes the original arbitrary dependencies to extremal dependencies. Polar coding schemes for the Slepian-Wolf problem and for secret key generations are then proposed based on this phenomenon. In particular, constructions of secret keys achieving the secrecy capacity and compression schemes achieving the Slepian-Wolf capacity region are obtained with a complexity of $O(n \log (n))$.
1102.1249
Compressible Distributions for High-dimensional Statistics
math.ST cs.IT math.IT stat.TH
We develop a principled way of identifying probability distributions whose independent and identically distributed (iid) realizations are compressible, i.e., can be well-approximated as sparse. We focus on Gaussian random underdetermined linear regression (GULR) problems, where compressibility is known to ensure the success of estimators exploiting sparse regularization. We prove that many distributions revolving around maximum a posteriori (MAP) interpretation of sparse regularized estimators are in fact incompressible, in the limit of large problem sizes. A highlight is the Laplace distribution and $\ell^{1}$ regularized estimators such as the Lasso and Basis Pursuit denoising. To establish this result, we identify non-trivial undersampling regions in GULR where the simple least squares solution almost surely outperforms an oracle sparse solution, when the data is generated from the Laplace distribution. We provide simple rules of thumb to characterize classes of compressible (respectively incompressible) distributions based on their second and fourth moments. Generalized Gaussians and generalized Pareto distributions serve as running examples for concreteness.
1102.1256
Stochastic Optimal Multi-Modes Switching with a Viscosity Solution Approach
math.OC cs.SY math.PR
We consider the problem of optimal multi-modes switching in finite horizon, when the state of the system, including the switching cost functions are arbitrary ($g_{ij}(t,x)\geq 0$). We show existence of the optimal strategy, and give when the optimal strategy is finite via a verification theorem. Finally, when the state of the system is a markov process, we show that the vector of value functions of the optimal problem is the unique viscosity solution to the system of $m$ variational partial differential inequalities with inter-connected obstacles.
1102.1261
Symmetry in behavior of complex social systems - discussion of models of crowd evacuation organized in agreement with symmetry conditions
cs.MA
The evacuation of football stadium scenarios are discussed as model realizing ordered states, described as movements of individuals according to fields of displacements, calculated correspondingly to given scenario. The symmetry of the evacuation space is taken into account in calculation of displacements field - the displacements related to every point of this space are presented in the coordinate frame in the best way adapted to given symmetry space group, which the set of basic vectors of irreducible representation of given group is. The speeds of individuals at every point in the presented model have the same quantity. As the results the times of evacuation and average forces acting on individuals during the evacuation are given. Both parameters are compared with the same parameters got without symmetry considerations. They are calculated in the simulation procedure. The new program (using modified Helbing model) has been elaborated and presented in this work for realization the simulation tasks the.
1102.1265
Sphere decoding complexity exponent for decoding full rate codes over the quasi-static MIMO channel
cs.IT math.IT
In the setting of quasi-static multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels, we consider the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) asymptotic complexity required by the sphere decoding (SD) algorithm for decoding a large class of full rate linear space-time codes. With SD complexity having random fluctuations induced by the random channel, noise and codeword realizations, the introduced SD complexity exponent manages to concisely describe the computational reserves required by the SD algorithm to achieve arbitrarily close to optimal decoding performance. Bounds and exact expressions for the SD complexity exponent are obtained for the decoding of large families of codes with arbitrary performance characteristics. For the particular example of decoding the recently introduced threaded cyclic division algebra (CDA) based codes -- the only currently known explicit designs that are uniformly optimal with respect to the diversity multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) -- the SD complexity exponent is shown to take a particularly concise form as a non-monotonic function of the multiplexing gain. To date, the SD complexity exponent also describes the minimum known complexity of any decoder that can provably achieve a gap to maximum likelihood (ML) performance which vanishes in the high SNR limit.
1102.1292
Modeling Dynamic Swarms
cs.CV
This paper proposes the problem of modeling video sequences of dynamic swarms (DS). We define DS as a large layout of stochastically repetitive spatial configurations of dynamic objects (swarm elements) whose motions exhibit local spatiotemporal interdependency and stationarity, i.e., the motions are similar in any small spatiotemporal neighborhood. Examples of DS abound in nature, e.g., herds of animals and flocks of birds. To capture the local spatiotemporal properties of the DS, we present a probabilistic model that learns both the spatial layout of swarm elements and their joint dynamics that are modeled as linear transformations. To this end, a spatiotemporal neighborhood is associated with each swarm element, in which local stationarity is enforced both spatially and temporally. We assume that the prior on the swarm dynamics is distributed according to an MRF in both space and time. Embedding this model in a MAP framework, we iterate between learning the spatial layout of the swarm and its dynamics. We learn the swarm transformations using ICM, which iterates between estimating these transformations and updating their distribution in the spatiotemporal neighborhoods. We demonstrate the validity of our method by conducting experiments on real video sequences. Real sequences of birds, geese, robot swarms, and pedestrians evaluate the applicability of our model to real world data.
1102.1324
Refinement of Operator-valued Reproducing Kernels
cs.LG math.FA
This paper studies the construction of a refinement kernel for a given operator-valued reproducing kernel such that the vector-valued reproducing kernel Hilbert space of the refinement kernel contains that of the given one as a subspace. The study is motivated from the need of updating the current operator-valued reproducing kernel in multi-task learning when underfitting or overfitting occurs. Numerical simulations confirm that the established refinement kernel method is able to meet this need. Various characterizations are provided based on feature maps and vector-valued integral representations of operator-valued reproducing kernels. Concrete examples of refining translation invariant and finite Hilbert-Schmidt operator-valued reproducing kernels are provided. Other examples include refinement of Hessian of scalar-valued translation-invariant kernels and transformation kernels. Existence and properties of operator-valued reproducing kernels preserved during the refinement process are also investigated.
1102.1345
Introducing a New Mechanism for Construction of an Efficient Search Model
cs.IR
Search engine has become an inevitable tool for retrieving information from the WWW. Web researchers introduce lots of algorithms to modify search engine based on different features. Sometimes those algorithms are domain related, sometimes they are Web page ranking related, and sometimes they are efficiency related and so on. We are introducing such a type of algorithm which is multiple domains as well as efficiency related. In this paper, we are providing multilevel indexing on top of Index Based Acyclic Graph (IBAG) which support multiple Ontologies as well as reduce search time. IBAG contains only domains related pages and are constructed from Relevant Page Graph (RPaG). We have also provided a comparative study of time complexity for the various models.
1102.1379
Structural and functional networks in complex systems with delay
cond-mat.dis-nn cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Functional networks of complex systems are obtained from the analysis of the temporal activity of their components, and are often used to infer their unknown underlying connectivity. We obtain the equations relating topology and function in a system of diffusively delay-coupled elements in complex networks. We solve exactly the resulting equations in motifs (directed structures of three nodes), and in directed networks. The mean-field solution for directed uncorrelated networks shows that the clusterization of the activity is dominated by the in-degree of the nodes, and that the locking frequency decreases with increasing average degree. We find that the exponent of a power law degree distribution of the structural topology, b, is related to the exponent of the associated functional network as a =1/(2-b), for b < 2.
1102.1398
Efficient Bayesian Social Learning on Trees
cs.SI cs.GT cs.MA
We consider a set of agents who are attempting to iteratively learn the 'state of the world' from their neighbors in a social network. Each agent initially receives a noisy observation of the true state of the world. The agents then repeatedly 'vote' and observe the votes of some of their peers, from which they gain more information. The agents' calculations are Bayesian and aim to myopically maximize the expected utility at each iteration. This model, introduced by Gale and Kariv (2003), is a natural approach to learning on networks. However, it has been criticized, chiefly because the agents' decision rule appears to become computationally intractable as the number of iterations advances. For instance, a dynamic programming approach (part of this work) has running time that is exponentially large in \min(n, (d-1)^t), where n is the number of agents. We provide a new algorithm to perform the agents' computations on locally tree-like graphs. Our algorithm uses the dynamic cavity method to drastically reduce computational effort. Let d be the maximum degree and t be the iteration number. The computational effort needed per agent is exponential only in O(td) (note that the number of possible information sets of a neighbor at time t is itself exponential in td). Under appropriate assumptions on the rate of convergence, we deduce that each agent is only required to spend polylogarithmic (in 1/\eps) computational effort to approximately learn the true state of the world with error probability \eps, on regular trees of degree at least five. We provide numerical and other evidence to justify our assumption on convergence rate. We extend our results in various directions, including loopy graphs. Our results indicate efficiency of iterative Bayesian social learning in a wide range of situations, contrary to widely held beliefs.
1102.1407
Stable Parallel Looped Systems -- A New Theoretical Framework for the Evolution of Order
cs.NE nlin.AO
The objective of the paper is to identify laws and mechanisms that allow the creation of more order from disorder using natural means i.e., without the help of conscious beings. While this is not possible for the collection of all dynamical systems as it violates the second law of thermodynamics, I show that this is possible within a special subset called stable parallel looped (SPL) dynamical systems. I identify a new infinite family of physical and chemical dynamical SPL systems, which are (a) easy to create naturally and (b) easy to merge, link and combine to create dynamical systems of any specified complexity. Within SPL systems, I propose a special collection of designs called active material-energy looped systems using which it is possible to generate large-scale ordered chemical networks, like the metabolic networks, in a reliable, repeatable, iterative and natural manner. The resulting SPL systems provide a new theoretical framework for the problem of origin of life.
1102.1441
Generating Probability Distributions using Multivalued Stochastic Relay Circuits
cs.IT cs.DM math.IT
The problem of random number generation dates back to von Neumann's work in 1951. Since then, many algorithms have been developed for generating unbiased bits from complex correlated sources as well as for generating arbitrary distributions from unbiased bits. An equally interesting, but less studied aspect is the structural component of random number generation as opposed to the algorithmic aspect. That is, given a network structure imposed by nature or physical devices, how can we build networks that generate arbitrary probability distributions in an optimal way? In this paper, we study the generation of arbitrary probability distributions in multivalued relay circuits, a generalization in which relays can take on any of N states and the logical 'and' and 'or' are replaced with 'min' and 'max' respectively. Previous work was done on two-state relays. We generalize these results, describing a duality property and networks that generate arbitrary rational probability distributions. We prove that these networks are robust to errors and design a universal probability generator which takes input bits and outputs arbitrary binary probability distributions.
1102.1462
Diversity of MMSE MIMO Receivers
cs.IT math.IT
In most MIMO systems, the family of waterfall error curves, calculated at different spectral efficiencies, are asymptotically parallel at high SNR. In other words, most MIMO systems exhibit a single diversity value for all fixed rates. The MIMO MMSE receiver does not follow this pattern and exhibits a varying diversity in its family of error curves. This work analyzes this interesting behavior of the MMSE MIMO receiver and produces the MMSE MIMO diversity at all rates. The diversity of the quasi-static flat-fading MIMO channel consisting of any arbitrary number of transmit and receive antennas is fully characterized, showing that full spatial diversity is possible if and only if the rate is within a certain bound which is a function of the number of antennas. For other rates, the available diversity is fully characterized. At sufficiently low rates, the MMSE receiver has a diversity similar to the maximum likelihood receiver (maximal diversity), while at high rates it performs similarly to the zero-forcing receiver (minimal diversity). Linear receivers are also studied in the context of the MIMO multiple access channel (MAC). Then, the quasi-static frequency selective MIMO channel is analyzed under zero-padding (ZP) and cyclic-prefix (CP) block transmissions and MMSE reception, and lower and upper bounds on diversity are derived. For the special case of SIMO under CP, it is shown that the above-mentioned bounds are tight.
1102.1465
An Introduction to Artificial Prediction Markets for Classification
stat.ML cs.LG math.ST stat.TH
Prediction markets are used in real life to predict outcomes of interest such as presidential elections. This paper presents a mathematical theory of artificial prediction markets for supervised learning of conditional probability estimators. The artificial prediction market is a novel method for fusing the prediction information of features or trained classifiers, where the fusion result is the contract price on the possible outcomes. The market can be trained online by updating the participants' budgets using training examples. Inspired by the real prediction markets, the equations that govern the market are derived from simple and reasonable assumptions. Efficient numerical algorithms are presented for solving these equations. The obtained artificial prediction market is shown to be a maximum likelihood estimator. It generalizes linear aggregation, existent in boosting and random forest, as well as logistic regression and some kernel methods. Furthermore, the market mechanism allows the aggregation of specialized classifiers that participate only on specific instances. Experimental comparisons show that the artificial prediction markets often outperform random forest and implicit online learning on synthetic data and real UCI datasets. Moreover, an extensive evaluation for pelvic and abdominal lymph node detection in CT data shows that the prediction market improves adaboost's detection rate from 79.6% to 81.2% at 3 false positives/volume.
1102.1466
Distributed Throughput-optimal Scheduling in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we propose a distributed throughput-optimal ad hoc wireless network scheduling algorithm, which is motivated by the celebrated simplex algorithm for solving linear programming (LP) problems. The scheduler stores a sparse set of basic schedules, and chooses the max-weight basic schedule for transmission in each time slot. At the same time, the scheduler tries to update the set of basic schedules by searching for a new basic schedule in a throughput increasing direction. We show that both of the above procedures can be achieved in a distributed manner. Specifically, we propose an average consensus based link contending algorithm to implement the distributed max weight scheduling. Further, we show that the basic schedule update can be implemented using CSMA mechanisms, which is similar to the one proposed by Jiang et al. Compared to the optimal distributed scheduler in Jiang's paper, where schedules change in a random walk fashion, our algorithm has a better delay performance by achieving faster schedule transitions in the steady state. The performance of the algorithm is finally confirmed by simulation results.
1102.1475
Security Embedding Codes
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers the problem of simultaneously communicating two messages, a high-security message and a low-security message, to a legitimate receiver, referred to as the security embedding problem. An information-theoretic formulation of the problem is presented. A coding scheme that combines rate splitting, superposition coding, nested binning and channel prefixing is considered and is shown to achieve the secrecy capacity region of the channel in several scenarios. Specifying these results to both scalar and independent parallel Gaussian channels (under an average individual per-subchannel power constraint), it is shown that the high-security message can be embedded into the low-security message at full rate (as if the low-security message does not exist) without incurring any loss on the overall rate of communication (as if both messages are low-security messages). Extensions to the wiretap channel II setting of Ozarow and Wyner are also considered, where it is shown that "perfect" security embedding can be achieved by an encoder that uses a two-level coset code.
1102.1480
Joint Decoding of LDPC Codes and Finite-State Channels via Linear-Programming
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers the joint-decoding (JD) problem for finite-state channels (FSCs) and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. In the first part, the linear-programming (LP) decoder for binary linear codes is extended to JD of binary-input FSCs. In particular, we provide a rigorous definition of LP joint-decoding pseudo-codewords (JD-PCWs) that enables evaluation of the pairwise error probability between codewords and JD-PCWs in AWGN. This leads naturally to a provable upper bound on decoder failure probability. If the channel is a finite-state intersymbol interference channel, then the joint LP decoder also has the maximum-likelihood (ML) certificate property and all integer-valued solutions are codewords. In this case, the performance loss relative to ML decoding can be explained completely by fractional-valued JD-PCWs. After deriving these results, we discovered some elements were equivalent to earlier work by Flanagan on LP receivers. In the second part, we develop an efficient iterative solver for the joint LP decoder discussed in the first part. In particular, we extend the approach of iterative approximate LP decoding, proposed by Vontobel and Koetter and analyzed by Burshtein, to this problem. By taking advantage of the dual-domain structure of the JD-LP, we obtain a convergent iterative algorithm for joint LP decoding whose structure is similar to BCJR-based turbo equalization (TE). The result is a joint iterative decoder whose per-iteration complexity is similar to that of TE but whose performance is similar to that of joint LP decoding. The main advantage of this decoder is that it appears to provide the predictability of joint LP decoding and superior performance with the computational complexity of TE. One expected application is coding for magnetic storage where the required block-error rate is extremely low and system performance is difficult to verify by simulation.
1102.1487
Rumor Evolution in Social Networks
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
Social network is a main tunnel of rumor spreading. Previous studies are concentrated on a static rumor spreading. The content of the rumor is invariable during the whole spreading process. Indeed, the rumor evolves constantly in its spreading process, which grows shorter, more concise, more easily grasped and told. In an early psychological experiment, researchers found about 70% of details in a rumor were lost in the first 6 mouth-to-mouth transmissions \cite{TPR}. Based on the facts, we investigate rumor spreading on social networks, where the content of the rumor is modified by the individuals with a certain probability. In the scenario, they have two choices, to forward or to modify. As a forwarder, an individual disseminates the rumor directly to its neighbors. As a modifier, conversely, an individual revises the rumor before spreading it out. When the rumor spreads on the social networks, for instance, scale-free networks and small-world networks, the majority of individuals actually are infected by the multi-revised version of the rumor, if the modifiers dominate the networks. Our observation indicates that the original rumor may lose its influence in the spreading process. Similarly, a true information may turn to be a rumor as well. Our result suggests the rumor evolution should not be a negligible question, which may provide a better understanding of the generation and destruction of a rumor.
1102.1497
Belief Propagation for Error Correcting Codes and Lossy Compression Using Multilayer Perceptrons
cs.IT math.IT physics.data-an
The belief propagation (BP) based algorithm is investigated as a potential decoder for both of error correcting codes and lossy compression, which are based on non-monotonic tree-like multilayer perceptron encoders. We discuss that whether the BP can give practical algorithms or not in these schemes. The BP implementations in those kind of fully connected networks unfortunately shows strong limitation, while the theoretical results seems a bit promising. Instead, it reveals it might have a rich and complex structure of the solution space via the BP-based algorithms.
1102.1498
On Rate-Splitting by a Secondary Link in Multiple Access Primary Network
cs.IT math.IT
An achievable rate region is obtained for a primary multiple access network coexisting with a secondary link of one transmitter and a corresponding receiver. The rate region depicts the sum primary rate versus the secondary rate and is established assuming that the secondary link performs rate-splitting. The achievable rate region is the union of two types of achievable rate regions. The first type is a rate region established assuming that the secondary receiver cannot decode any primary signal, whereas the second is established assuming that the secondary receiver can decode the signal of one primary receiver. The achievable rate region is determined first assuming discrete memoryless channel (DMC) then the results are applied to a Gaussian channel. In the Gaussian channel, the performance of rate-splitting is characterized for the two types of rate regions. Moreover, a necessary and sufficient condition to determine which primary signal that the secondary receiver can decode without degrading the range of primary achievable sum rates is provided. When this condition is satisfied by a certain primary user, the secondary receiver can decode its signal and achieve larger rates without reducing the primary achievable sum rates from the case in which it does not decode any primary signal. It is also shown that, the probability of having at least one primary user satisfying this condition grows with the primary signal to noise ratio.
1102.1502
On the Statistics and Predictability of Go-Arounds
cs.SY
This paper takes an empirical approach to identify operational factors at busy airports that may predate go-around maneuvers. Using four years of data from San Francisco International Airport, we begin our investigation with a statistical approach to investigate which features of airborne, ground operations (e.g., number of inbound aircraft, number of aircraft taxiing from gate, etc.) or weather are most likely to fluctuate, relative to nominal operations, in the minutes immediately preceding a missed approach. We analyze these findings both in terms of their implication on current airport operations and discuss how the antecedent factors may affect NextGen. Finally, as a means to assist air traffic controllers, we draw upon techniques from the machine learning community to develop a preliminary alert system for go-around prediction.
1102.1503
Peer-to-Peer Multimedia Sharing based on Social Norms
cs.MM cs.SI
Empirical data shows that in the absence of incentives, a peer participating in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network wishes to free-riding. Most solutions for providing incentives in P2P networks are based on direct reciprocity, which are not appropriate for most P2P multimedia sharing networks due to the unique features exhibited by such networks: large populations of anonymous agents interacting infrequently, asymmetric interests of peers, network errors, and multiple concurrent transactions. In this paper, we design and rigorously analyze a new family of incentive protocols that utilizes indirect reciprocity which is based on the design of efficient social norms. In the proposed P2P protocols, the social norms consist of a social strategy, which represents the rule prescribing to the peers when they should or should not provide content to other peers, and a reputation scheme, which rewards or punishes peers depending on whether they comply or not with the social strategy. We first define the concept of a sustainable social norm, under which no peer has an incentive to deviate. We then formulate the problem of designing optimal social norms, which selects the social norm that maximizes the network performance among all sustainable social norms. Hence, we prove that it becomes in the self-interest of peers to contribute their content to the network rather than to free-ride. We also investigate the impact of various punishment schemes on the social welfare as well as how should the optimal social norms be designed if altruistic and malicious peers are active in the network. Our results show that optimal social norms are capable of providing significant improvements in the sharing efficiency of multimedia P2P networks.
1102.1507
Generalized Measures of Information Transfer
physics.data-an cs.IT math.DS math.IT
Transfer entropy provides a general tool for analyzing the magnitudes and directions---but not the \emph{kinds}---of information transfer in a system. We extend transfer entropy in two complementary ways. First, we distinguish state-dependent from state-independent transfer, based on whether a source's influence depends on the state of the target. Second, for multiple sources, we distinguish between unique, redundant, and synergistic transfer. The new measures are demonstrated on several systems that extend examples from previous literature.
1102.1536
Evolutionary multiobjective optimization of the multi-location transshipment problem
cs.AI math.OC
We consider a multi-location inventory system where inventory choices at each location are centrally coordinated. Lateral transshipments are allowed as recourse actions within the same echelon in the inventory system to reduce costs and improve service level. However, this transshipment process usually causes undesirable lead times. In this paper, we propose a multiobjective model of the multi-location transshipment problem which addresses optimizing three conflicting objectives: (1) minimizing the aggregate expected cost, (2) maximizing the expected fill rate, and (3) minimizing the expected transshipment lead times. We apply an evolutionary multiobjective optimization approach using the strength Pareto evolutionary algorithm (SPEA2), to approximate the optimal Pareto front. Simulation with a wide choice of model parameters shows the different trades-off between the conflicting objectives.
1102.1552
Multiuser Diversity in Downlink Channels: When does the Feedback Cost Outweigh the Spectral Efficiency Gain?
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we perform a cost-benefit analysis of multiuser diversity in single antenna broadcast channels. It is well known that multiuser diversity can be beneficial but there is a significant cost associated with acquiring instantaneous CSI. We perform a cost-benefit analysis of multiuser diversity for 2 types of CSI feedback methods, dedicated feedback and SNR dependent feedback, quantifying how many users should feedback CSI from a net throughput perspective. Dedicated feedback, in which orthogonal resources are allocated to each user, has significant feedback cost and this limits the amount of available multiuser diversity that can be used. SNR dependent feedback method, in which only users with SNR above a threshold attempt to feedback, has relatively much smaller feedback cost and this allows for all of the available multiuser diversity to be used. Next, we study the effect of single user multiantenna techniques, which reduce the SNR variation, on the number of feedback users neccessary. It is seen that a broadcast channel using single user multiantenna techniques should reduce the number of feedback users with the spatial dimension.
1102.1609
Exact Minimum-Repair-Bandwidth Cooperative Regenerating Codes for Distributed Storage Systems
cs.IT cs.DC math.IT
In order to provide high data reliability, distributed storage systems disperse data with redundancy to multiple storage nodes. Regenerating codes is a new class of erasure codes to introduce redundancy for the purpose of improving the data repair performance in distributed storage. Most of the studies on regenerating codes focus on the single-failure recovery, but it is not uncommon to see two or more node failures at the same time in large storage networks. To exploit the opportunity of repairing multiple failed nodes simultaneously, a cooperative repair mechanism, in the sense that the nodes to be repaired can exchange data among themselves, is investigated. A lower bound on the repair-bandwidth for cooperative repair is derived and a construction of a family of exact cooperative regenerating codes matching this lower bound is presented.
1102.1621
Recovery of Sparsely Corrupted Signals
cs.IT math.IT
We investigate the recovery of signals exhibiting a sparse representation in a general (i.e., possibly redundant or incomplete) dictionary that are corrupted by additive noise admitting a sparse representation in another general dictionary. This setup covers a wide range of applications, such as image inpainting, super-resolution, signal separation, and recovery of signals that are impaired by, e.g., clipping, impulse noise, or narrowband interference. We present deterministic recovery guarantees based on a novel uncertainty relation for pairs of general dictionaries and we provide corresponding practicable recovery algorithms. The recovery guarantees we find depend on the signal and noise sparsity levels, on the coherence parameters of the involved dictionaries, and on the amount of prior knowledge about the signal and noise support sets.
1102.1660
ATC Taskload Inherent to the Geometry of Stochastic 4-D Trajectory Flows with Flight Technical Errors
cs.SY
A method to quantify the probabilistic controller taskload inherent to maintaining aircraft adherence to 4-D trajectories within flow corridors is presented. An Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model of the aircraft motion and a Poisson model of the flow scheduling are introduced along with reasonable numerical values of the model parameters. Analytic expressions are derived for the taskload probability density functions for basic functional elements of the flow structure. Monte Carlo simulations are performed for these basic functional elements and the controller taskload probabilities are exhibited.
1102.1691
Schema Redescription in Cellular Automata: Revisiting Emergence in Complex Systems
nlin.CG cs.AI cs.FL cs.NE q-bio.QM
We present a method to eliminate redundancy in the transition tables of Boolean automata: schema redescription with two symbols. One symbol is used to capture redundancy of individual input variables, and another to capture permutability in sets of input variables: fully characterizing the canalization present in Boolean functions. Two-symbol schemata explain aspects of the behaviour of automata networks that the characterization of their emergent patterns does not capture. We use our method to compare two well-known cellular automata for the density classification task: the human engineered CA GKL, and another obtained via genetic programming (GP). We show that despite having very different collective behaviour, these rules are very similar. Indeed, GKL is a special case of GP. Therefore, we demonstrate that it is more feasible to compare cellular automata via schema redescriptions of their rules, than by looking at their emergent behaviour, leading us to question the tendency in complexity research to pay much more attention to emergent patterns than to local interactions.
1102.1745
Restructuring in Combinatorial Optimization
cs.DS cs.AI math.CO math.OC
The paper addresses a new class of combinatorial problems which consist in restructuring of solutions (as structures) in combinatorial optimization. Two main features of the restructuring process are examined: (i) a cost of the restructuring, (ii) a closeness to a goal solution. This problem corresponds to redesign (improvement, upgrade) of modular systems or solutions. The restructuring approach is described and illustrated for the following combinatorial optimization problems: knapsack problem, multiple choice problem, assignment problem, spanning tree problems. Examples illustrate the restructuring processes.
1102.1747
Graph Coalition Structure Generation
cs.DS cs.AI cs.CC cs.GT cs.MA
We give the first analysis of the computational complexity of {\it coalition structure generation over graphs}. Given an undirected graph $G=(N,E)$ and a valuation function $v:2^N\rightarrow\RR$ over the subsets of nodes, the problem is to find a partition of $N$ into connected subsets, that maximises the sum of the components' values. This problem is generally NP--complete; in particular, it is hard for a defined class of valuation functions which are {\it independent of disconnected members}---that is, two nodes have no effect on each other's marginal contribution to their vertex separator. Nonetheless, for all such functions we provide bounds on the complexity of coalition structure generation over general and minor free graphs. Our proof is constructive and yields algorithms for solving corresponding instances of the problem. Furthermore, we derive polynomial time bounds for acyclic, $K_{2,3}$ and $K_4$ minor free graphs. However, as we show, the problem remains NP--complete for planar graphs, and hence, for any $K_k$ minor free graphs where $k\geq 5$. Moreover, our hardness result holds for a particular subclass of valuation functions, termed {\it edge sum}, where the value of each subset of nodes is simply determined by the sum of given weights of the edges in the induced subgraph.
1102.1753
Predictors of short-term decay of cell phone contacts in a large scale communication network
cs.SI physics.soc-ph stat.ML
Under what conditions is an edge present in a social network at time t likely to decay or persist by some future time t + Delta(t)? Previous research addressing this issue suggests that the network range of the people involved in the edge, the extent to which the edge is embedded in a surrounding structure, and the age of the edge all play a role in edge decay. This paper uses weighted data from a large-scale social network built from cell-phone calls in an 8-week period to determine the importance of edge weight for the decay/persistence process. In particular, we study the relative predictive power of directed weight, embeddedness, newness, and range (measured as outdegree) with respect to edge decay and assess the effectiveness with which a simple decision tree and logistic regression classifier can accurately predict whether an edge that was active in one time period continues to be so in a future time period. We find that directed edge weight, weighted reciprocity and time-dependent measures of edge longevity are highly predictive of whether we classify an edge as persistent or decayed, relative to the other types of factors at the dyad and neighborhood level.
1102.1782
On network coding for acyclic networks with delays
cs.IT math.IT
Problems related to network coding for acyclic, instantaneous networks (where the edges of the acyclic graph representing the network are assumed to have zero-delay) have been extensively dealt with in the recent past. The most prominent of these problems include (a) the existence of network codes that achieve maximum rate of transmission, (b) efficient network code constructions, and (c) field size issues. In practice, however, networks have transmission delays. In network coding theory, such networks with transmission delays are generally abstracted by assuming that their edges have integer delays. Note that using enough memory at the nodes of an acyclic network with integer delays can effectively simulate instantaneous behavior, which is probably why only acyclic instantaneous networks have been primarily focused on thus far. In this work, we elaborate on issues ((a), (b) and (c) above) related to network coding for acyclic networks with integer delays, which have till now mostly been overlooked. We show that the delays associated with the edges of the network cannot be ignored, and in fact turn out to be advantageous, disadvantageous or immaterial, depending on the topology of the network and the problem considered i.e., (a), (b) or (c). In the process, we also show that for a single source multicast problem in acyclic networks (instantaneous and with delays), the network coding operations at each node can simply be limited to storing old symbols and coding them over a binary field. Therefore, operations over elements of larger fields are unnecessary in the network, the trade-off being that enough memory exists at the nodes and at the sinks, and that the sinks have more processing power.
1102.1789
Extreme events on complex networks
cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We study the extreme events taking place on complex networks. The transport on networks is modelled using random walks and we compute the probability for the occurance and recurrence of extreme events on the network. We show that the nodes with smaller number of links are more prone to extreme events than the ones with larger number of links. We obtain analytical estimates and verify them with numerical simulations. They are shown to be robust even when random walkers follow shortest path on the network. The results suggest a revision of design principles and can be used as an input for designing the nodes of a network so as to smoothly handle an extreme event.
1102.1803
Proposing LT based Search in PDM Systems for Better Information Retrieval
cs.IR cs.AI
PDM Systems contain and manage heavy amount of data but the search mechanism of most of the systems is not intelligent which can process user"s natural language based queries to extract desired information. Currently available search mechanisms in almost all of the PDM systems are not very efficient and based on old ways of searching information by entering the relevant information to the respective fields of search forms to find out some specific information from attached repositories. Targeting this issue, a thorough research was conducted in fields of PDM Systems and Language Technology. Concerning the PDM System, conducted research provides the information about PDM and PDM Systems in detail. Concerning the field of Language Technology, helps in implementing a search mechanism for PDM Systems to search user"s needed information by analyzing user"s natural language based requests. The accomplished goal of this research was to support the field of PDM with a new proposition of a conceptual model for the implementation of natural language based search. The proposed conceptual model is successfully designed and partially implementation in the form of a prototype. Describing the proposition in detail the main concept, implementation designs and developed prototype of proposed approach is discussed in this paper. Implemented prototype is compared with respective functions of existing PDM systems .i.e., Windchill and CIM to evaluate its effectiveness against targeted challenges.
1102.1808
From Machine Learning to Machine Reasoning
cs.AI cs.LG
A plausible definition of "reasoning" could be "algebraically manipulating previously acquired knowledge in order to answer a new question". This definition covers first-order logical inference or probabilistic inference. It also includes much simpler manipulations commonly used to build large learning systems. For instance, we can build an optical character recognition system by first training a character segmenter, an isolated character recognizer, and a language model, using appropriate labeled training sets. Adequately concatenating these modules and fine tuning the resulting system can be viewed as an algebraic operation in a space of models. The resulting model answers a new question, that is, converting the image of a text page into a computer readable text. This observation suggests a conceptual continuity between algebraically rich inference systems, such as logical or probabilistic inference, and simple manipulations, such as the mere concatenation of trainable learning systems. Therefore, instead of trying to bridge the gap between machine learning systems and sophisticated "all-purpose" inference mechanisms, we can instead algebraically enrich the set of manipulations applicable to training systems, and build reasoning capabilities from the ground up.
1102.1820
Optimal Synthesis for Nonholonomic Vehicles With Constrained Side Sensors
cs.RO
We present a complete characterization of shortest paths to a goal position for a vehicle with unicycle kinematics and a limited range sensor, constantly keeping a given landmark in sight. Previous work on this subject studied the optimal paths in case of a frontal, symmetrically limited Field--Of--View (FOV). In this paper we provide a generalization to the case of arbitrary FOVs, including the case that the direction of motion is not an axis of symmetry for the FOV, and even that it is not contained in the FOV. The provided solution is of particular relevance to applications using side-scanning, such as e.g. in underwater sonar-based surveying and navigation.
1102.1889
Ologs: a categorical framework for knowledge representation
cs.LO cs.AI math.CT
In this paper we introduce the olog, or ontology log, a category-theoretic model for knowledge representation (KR). Grounded in formal mathematics, ologs can be rigorously formulated and cross-compared in ways that other KR models (such as semantic networks) cannot. An olog is similar to a relational database schema; in fact an olog can serve as a data repository if desired. Unlike database schemas, which are generally difficult to create or modify, ologs are designed to be user-friendly enough that authoring or reconfiguring an olog is a matter of course rather than a difficult chore. It is hoped that learning to author ologs is much simpler than learning a database definition language, despite their similarity. We describe ologs carefully and illustrate with many examples. As an application we show that any primitive recursive function can be described by an olog. We also show that ologs can be aligned or connected together into a larger network using functors. The various methods of information flow and institutions can then be used to integrate local and global world-views. We finish by providing several different avenues for future research.
1102.1929
Suppressing Epidemics with a Limited Amount of Immunization Units
physics.soc-ph cond-mat.stat-mech cs.SI
The way diseases spread through schools, epidemics through countries, and viruses through the Internet is crucial in determining their risk. Although each of these threats has its own characteristics, its underlying network determines the spreading. To restrain the spreading, a widely used approach is the fragmentation of these networks through immunization, so that epidemics cannot spread. Here we develop an immunization approach based on optimizing the susceptible size, which outperforms the best known strategy based on immunizing the highest-betweenness links or nodes. We find that the network's vulnerability can be significantly reduced, demonstrating this on three different real networks: the global flight network, a school friendship network, and the internet. In all cases, we find that not only is the average infection probability significantly suppressed, but also for the most relevant case of a small and limited number of immunization units the infection probability can be reduced by up to 55%.
1102.1959
Distributed Uplink Resource Allocation in Cognitive Radio Networks -- Part I: Equilibria and Algorithms for Power Allocation
cs.IT math.IT
Spectrum management has been identified as a crucial step towards enabling the technology of a cognitive radio network (CRN). Most of the current works dealing with spectrum management in the CRN focus on a single task of the problem, e.g., spectrum sensing, spectrum decision, spectrum sharing or spectrum mobility. In this two-part paper, we argue that for certain network configurations, jointly performing several tasks of the spectrum management improves the spectrum efficiency. Specifically, our aim is to study the uplink resource management problem in a CRN where there exist multiple cognitive users (CUs) and access points (APs). The CUs, in order to maximize their uplink transmission rates, have to associate to a suitable AP (spectrum decision), and to share the channels used by this AP with other CUs (spectrum sharing). These tasks are clearly interdependent, and the problem of how they should be carried out efficiently and in a distributed manner is still open in the literature.
1102.1960
Averaged Iterative Water-Filling Algorithm: Robustness and Convergence
cs.IT math.IT
The convergence properties of the Iterative water-filling (IWF) based algorithms have been derived in the ideal situation where the transmitters in the network are able to obtain the exact value of the interference plus noise (IPN) experienced at the corresponding receivers in each iteration of the algorithm. However, these algorithms are not robust because they diverge when there is it time-varying estimation error of the IPN, a situation that arises in real communication system. In this correspondence, we propose an algorithm that possesses convergence guarantees in the presence of various forms of such time-varying error. Moreover, we also show by simulation that in scenarios where the interference is strong, the conventional IWF diverges while our proposed algorithm still converges.
1102.1963
On quantum limit of optical communications: concatenated codes and joint-detection receivers
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
When classical information is sent over a channel with quantum-state modulation alphabet, such as the free-space optical (FSO) channel, attaining the ultimate (Holevo) limit to channel capacity requires the receiver to make joint measurements over long codeword blocks. In recent work, we showed a receiver for a pure-state channel that can attain the ultimate capacity by applying a single-shot optical (unitary) transformation on the received codeword state followed by simultaneous (but separable) projective measurements on the single-modulation-symbol state spaces. In this paper, we study the ultimate tradeoff between photon efficiency and spectral efficiency for the FSO channel. Based on our general results for the pure-state quantum channel, we show some of the first concrete examples of codes and laboratory-realizable joint-detection optical receivers that can achieve fundamentally higher (superadditive) channel capacity than receivers that physically detect each modulation symbol one at a time, as is done by all conventional (coherent or direct-detection) optical receivers.
1102.1965
Distributed Uplink Resource Allocation in Cognitive Radio Networks -- Part II: Equilibria and Algorithms for Joint Access Point Selection and Power Allocation
cs.IT math.IT
In the first part of this paper, we have studied solely the spectrum sharing aspect of the above problem, and proposed algorithms for the CUs in the single AP network to efficiently share the spectrum. In this second part of the paper, we build upon our previous understanding of the single AP network, and formulate the joint spectrum decision and spectrum sharing problem in a multiple AP network into a non-cooperative game, in which the feasible strategy of a player contains a discrete variable (the AP/spectrum decision) and a continuous vector (the power allocation among multiple channels). The structure of the game is hence very different from most non-cooperative spectrum management game proposed in the literature. We provide characterization of the Nash Equilibrium (NE) of this game, and present a set of novel algorithms that allow the CUs to distributively and efficiently select the suitable AP and share the channels with other CUs. Finally, we study the properties of the proposed algorithms as well as their performance via extensive simulations.
1102.1985
What Stops Social Epidemics?
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Theoretical progress in understanding the dynamics of spreading processes on graphs suggests the existence of an epidemic threshold below which no epidemics form and above which epidemics spread to a significant fraction of the graph. We have observed information cascades on the social media site Digg that spread fast enough for one initial spreader to infect hundreds of people, yet end up affecting only 0.1% of the entire network. We find that two effects, previously studied in isolation, combine cooperatively to drastically limit the final size of cascades on Digg. First, because of the highly clustered structure of the Digg network, most people who are aware of a story have been exposed to it via multiple friends. This structure lowers the epidemic threshold while moderately slowing the overall growth of cascades. In addition, we find that the mechanism for social contagion on Digg points to a fundamental difference between information spread and other contagion processes: despite multiple opportunities for infection within a social group, people are less likely to become spreaders of information with repeated exposure. The consequences of this mechanism become more pronounced for more clustered graphs. Ultimately, this effect severely curtails the size of social epidemics on Digg.
1102.2017
Synthesis of Mechanism for single- and hybrid-tasks using Differential Evolution
cs.CE
The optimal dimensional synthesis for planar mechanisms using differential evolution (DE) is demonstrated. Four examples are included: in the first case, the synthesis of a mechanism for hybrid-tasks, considering path generation, function generation, and motion generation, is carried out. The second and third cases pertain to path generation, with and without prescribed timing. Finally, the synthesis of an Ackerman mechanism is reported. Order defect problem is solved by manipulating individuals instead of penalizing or discretizing the search space for the parameters. A technique that consists in applying a transformation in order to satisfy the Grashof and crank conditions to generate an initial elitist population is introduced. As a result, the evolutionary algorithm increases its efficiency.