OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
L-RCM: a method to detect connected components in undirected graphs by using the Laplacian matrix and the RCM algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2012
Year: 2012

In this paper we consider undirected graphs with no loops and multiple edges, consisting of k connected components. In these cases, it is well known that one can find a numbering of the vertices such that the adjacency matrix A is block diagonal with k blocks. This also holds for the (unnormalized) Laplacian matrix L= D-A, with D a diagonal matrix with the degrees of the nodes. In this paper we propose to use the Reverse Cuthill-McKee (RCM) algorithm to obtain a block diagonal form of L that reveals the number of connected components of the graph. We present some theoretical results about the irreducibility of the Laplacian matrix ordered by the RCM algorithm. As a practical application we present a very efficient method to detect connected components with a computational cost of O(m+n), being m the number of edges and n the number of nodes. The RCM method is implemented in some comercial packages like MATLAB and Mathematica. We make the computations by using the function symrcm of MATLAB. Some numerical results are shown
Black-box optimization benchmarking of IPOP-saACM-ES and BIPOP-saACM-ES on the BBOB-2012 noiseless testbed
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2012
Year: 2012

In this paper, we study the performance of IPOP-saACM-ES and BIPOP-saACM-ES, recently proposed self-adaptive surrogate-assisted Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategies. Both algorithms were tested using restarts till a total number of function evaluations of $10^6D$ was reached, where $D$ is the dimension of the function search space. We compared surrogate-assisted algorithms with their surrogate-less versions IPOP-saACM-ES and BIPOP-saACM-ES, two algorithms with one of the best overall performance observed during the BBOB-2009 and BBOB-2010. The comparison shows that the surrogate-assisted versions outperform the original CMA-ES algorithms by a factor from 2 to 4 on 8 out of 24 noiseless benchmark problems, showing the best results among all algorithms of the BBOB-2009 and BBOB-2010 on Ellipsoid, Discus, Bent Cigar, Sharp Ridge and Sum of different powers functions.
Revision of Defeasible Logic Preferences
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2012
Year: 2012

There are several contexts of non-monotonic reasoning where a priority between rules is established whose purpose is preventing conflicts. One formalism that has been widely employed for non-monotonic reasoning is the sceptical one known as Defeasible Logic. In Defeasible Logic the tool used for conflict resolution is a preference relation between rules, that establishes the priority among them. In this paper we investigate how to modify such a preference relation in a defeasible logic theory in order to change the conclusions of the theory itself. We argue that the approach we adopt is applicable to legal reasoning where users, in general, cannot change facts or rules, but can propose their preferences about the relative strength of the rules. We provide a comprehensive study of the possible combinatorial cases and we identify and analyse the cases where the revision process is successful. After this analysis, we identify three revision/update operators and study them against the AGM postulates for belief revision operators, to discover that only a part of these postulates are satisfied by the three operators.
Some bounds on the size of codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2012
Year: 2012

We present some upper bounds on the size of non-linear codes and their restriction to systematic codes and linear codes. These bounds are independent of other known theoretical bounds, e.g. the Griesmer bound, the Johnson bound or the Plotkin bound, and one of these is actually an improvement of a bound by Litsyn and Laihonen. Our experiments show that in some cases (the majority of cases for some q) our bounds provide the best value, compared to all other theoretical bounds.
Cloud Infrastructure Service Management - A Review
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2012
Year: 2012

The new era of computing called Cloud Computing allows the user to access the cloud services dynamically over the Internet wherever and whenever needed. Cloud consists of data and resources; and the cloud services include the delivery of software, infrastructure, applications, and storage over the Internet based on user demand through Internet. In short, cloud computing is a business and economic model allowing the users to utilize high-end computing and storage virtually with minimal infrastructure on their end. Cloud has three service models namely, Cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). This paper talks in depth of cloud infrastructure service management.
Bayesian Conditional Cointegration
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2012
Year: 2012

Cointegration is an important topic for time-series, and describes a relationship between two series in which a linear combination is stationary. Classically, the test for cointegration is based on a two stage process in which first the linear relation between the series is estimated by Ordinary Least Squares. Subsequently a unit root test is performed on the residuals. A well-known deficiency of this classical approach is that it can lead to erroneous conclusions about the presence of cointegration. As an alternative, we present a framework for estimating whether cointegration exists using Bayesian inference which is empirically superior to the classical approach. Finally, we apply our technique to model segmented cointegration in which cointegration may exist only for limited time. In contrast to previous approaches our model makes no restriction on the number of possible cointegration segments.
Regenerative and Adaptive schemes Based on Network Coding for Wireless Relay Network
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2012
Year: 2012

Recent technological advances in wireless communications offer new opportunities and challenges for relay network.To enhance system performance, Demodulate-Network Coding (Dm-NC) scheme has been examined at relay node; it works directly to De-map the received signals and after that forward the mixture to the destination. Simulation analysis has been proven that the performance of Dm-NC has superiority over analog-NC. In addition, the Quantize-Decode-NC scheme (QDF-NC) has been introduced. The presented simulation results clearly provide that the QDF-NC perform better than analog-NC. The toggle between analogNC and QDF-NC is simulated in order to investigate delay and power consumption reduction at relay node.
Aggregate Skyline Join Queries: Skylines with Aggregate Operations over Multiple Relations
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2012
Year: 2012

The multi-criteria decision making, which is possible with the advent of skyline queries, has been applied in many areas. Though most of the existing research is concerned with only a single relation, several real world applications require finding the skyline set of records over multiple relations. Consequently, the join operation over skylines where the preferences are local to each relation, has been proposed. In many of those cases, however, the join often involves performing aggregate operations among some of the attributes from the different relations. In this paper, we introduce such queries as "aggregate skyline join queries". Since the naive algorithm is impractical, we propose three algorithms to efficiently process such queries. The algorithms utilize certain properties of skyline sets, and processes the skylines as much as possible locally before computing the join. Experiments with real and synthetic datasets exhibit the practicality and scalability of the algorithms with respect to the cardinality and dimensionality of the relations.
Categorization of interestingness measures for knowledge extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2012
Year: 2012

Finding interesting association rules is an important and active research field in data mining. The algorithms of the Apriori family are based on two rule extraction measures, support and confidence. Although these two measures have the virtue of being algorithmically fast, they generate a prohibitive number of rules most of which are redundant and irrelevant. It is therefore necessary to use further measures which filter uninteresting rules. Many synthesis studies were then realized on the interestingness measures according to several points of view. Different reported studies have been carried out to identify "good" properties of rule extraction measures and these properties have been assessed on 61 measures. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First to extend the number of the measures and properties to be studied, in addition to the formalization of the properties proposed in the literature. Second, in the light of this formal study, to categorize the studied measures. This paper leads then to identify categories of measures in order to help the users to efficiently select an appropriate measure by choosing one or more measure(s) during the knowledge extraction process. The properties evaluation on the 61 measures has enabled us to identify 7 classes of measures, classes that we obtained using two different clustering techniques.
Detection of Configuration Vulnerabilities in Distributed (Web) Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2012
Year: 2012

Many tools and libraries are readily available to build and operate distributed Web applications. While the setup of operational environments is comparatively easy, practice shows that their continuous secure operation is more difficult to achieve, many times resulting in vulnerable systems exposed to the Internet. Authenticated vulnerability scanners and validation tools represent a means to detect security vulnerabilities caused by missing patches or misconfiguration, but current approaches center much around the concepts of hosts and operating systems. This paper presents a language and an approach for the declarative specification and execution of machine-readable security checks for sets of more fine-granular system components depending on each other in a distributed environment. Such a language, building on existing standards, fosters the creation and sharing of security content among security stakeholders. Our approach is exemplified by vulnerabilities of and corresponding checks for Open Source Software commonly used in today's Internet applications.
On the Robustness of Most Probable Explanations
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2012
Year: 2012

In Bayesian networks, a Most Probable Explanation (MPE) is a complete variable instantiation with a highest probability given the current evidence. In this paper, we discuss the problem of finding robustness conditions of the MPE under single parameter changes. Specifically, we ask the question: How much change in a single network parameter can we afford to apply while keeping the MPE unchanged? We will describe a procedure, which is the first of its kind, that computes this answer for each parameter in the Bayesian network variable in time O(n exp(w)), where n is the number of network variables and w is its treewidth.
Optimal Coordinated Planning Amongst Self-Interested Agents with Private State
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2012
Year: 2012

Consider a multi-agent system in a dynamic and uncertain environment. Each agent's local decision problem is modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP) and agents must coordinate on a joint action in each period, which provides a reward to each agent and causes local state transitions. A social planner knows the model of every agent's MDP and wants to implement the optimal joint policy, but agents are self-interested and have private local state. We provide an incentive-compatible mechanism for eliciting state information that achieves the optimal joint plan in a Markov perfect equilibrium of the induced stochastic game. In the special case in which local problems are Markov chains and agents compete to take a single action in each period, we leverage Gittins allocation indices to provide an efficient factored algorithm and distribute computation of the optimal policy among the agents. Distributed, optimal coordinated learning in a multi-agent variant of the multi-armed bandit problem is obtained as a special case.
Graphical Condition for Identification in recursive SEM
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2012
Year: 2012

The paper concerns the problem of predicting the effect of actions or interventions on a system from a combination of (i) statistical data on a set of observed variables, and (ii) qualitative causal knowledge encoded in the form of a directed acyclic graph (DAG). The DAG represents a set of linear equations called Structural Equations Model (SEM), whose coefficients are parameters representing direct causal effects. Reliable quantitative conclusions can only be obtained from the model if the causal effects are uniquely determined by the data. That is, if there exists a unique parametrization for the model that makes it compatible with the data. If this is the case, the model is called identified. The main result of the paper is a general sufficient condition for identification of recursive SEM models.
Advances in exact Bayesian structure discovery in Bayesian networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2012
Year: 2012

We consider a Bayesian method for learning the Bayesian network structure from complete data. Recently, Koivisto and Sood (2004) presented an algorithm that for any single edge computes its marginal posterior probability in O(n 2^n) time, where n is the number of attributes; the number of parents per attribute is bounded by a constant. In this paper we show that the posterior probabilities for all the n (n - 1) potential edges can be computed in O(n 2^n) total time. This result is achieved by a forward-backward technique and fast Moebius transform algorithms, which are of independent interest. The resulting speedup by a factor of about n^2 allows us to experimentally study the statistical power of learning moderate-size networks. We report results from a simulation study that covers data sets with 20 to 10,000 records over 5 to 25 discrete attributes
Matrix Tile Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2012
Year: 2012

Many tasks require finding groups of elements in a matrix of numbers, symbols or class likelihoods. One approach is to use efficient bi- or tri-linear factorization techniques including PCA, ICA, sparse matrix factorization and plaid analysis. These techniques are not appropriate when addition and multiplication of matrix elements are not sensibly defined. More directly, methods like bi-clustering can be used to classify matrix elements, but these methods make the overly-restrictive assumption that the class of each element is a function of a row class and a column class. We introduce a general computational problem, `matrix tile analysis' (MTA), which consists of decomposing a matrix into a set of non-overlapping tiles, each of which is defined by a subset of usually nonadjacent rows and columns. MTA does not require an algebra for combining tiles, but must search over discrete combinations of tile assignments. Exact MTA is a computationally intractable integer programming problem, but we describe an approximate iterative technique and a computationally efficient sum-product relaxation of the integer program. We compare the effectiveness of these methods to PCA and plaid on hundreds of randomly generated tasks. Using double-gene-knockout data, we show that MTA finds groups of interacting yeast genes that have biologically-related functions.
Dimension Reduction in Singularly Perturbed Continuous-Time Bayesian Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2012
Year: 2012

Continuous-time Bayesian networks (CTBNs) are graphical representations of multi-component continuous-time Markov processes as directed graphs. The edges in the network represent direct influences among components. The joint rate matrix of the multi-component process is specified by means of conditional rate matrices for each component separately. This paper addresses the situation where some of the components evolve on a time scale that is much shorter compared to the time scale of the other components. In this paper, we prove that in the limit where the separation of scales is infinite, the Markov process converges (in distribution, or weakly) to a reduced, or effective Markov process that only involves the slow components. We also demonstrate that for reasonable separation of scale (an order of magnitude) the reduced process is a good approximation of the marginal process over the slow components. We provide a simple procedure for building a reduced CTBN for this effective process, with conditional rate matrices that can be directly calculated from the original CTBN, and discuss the implications for approximate reasoning in large systems.
Predicting Conditional Quantiles via Reduction to Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2012
Year: 2012

We show how to reduce the process of predicting general order statistics (and the median in particular) to solving classification. The accompanying theoretical statement shows that the regret of the classifier bounds the regret of the quantile regression under a quantile loss. We also test this reduction empirically against existing quantile regression methods on large real-world datasets and discover that it provides state-of-the-art performance.
On the Number of Samples Needed to Learn the Correct Structure of a Bayesian Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2012
Year: 2012

Bayesian Networks (BNs) are useful tools giving a natural and compact representation of joint probability distributions. In many applications one needs to learn a Bayesian Network (BN) from data. In this context, it is important to understand the number of samples needed in order to guarantee a successful learning. Previous work have studied BNs sample complexity, yet it mainly focused on the requirement that the learned distribution will be close to the original distribution which generated the data. In this work, we study a different aspect of the learning, namely the number of samples needed in order to learn the correct structure of the network. We give both asymptotic results, valid in the large sample limit, and experimental results, demonstrating the learning behavior for feasible sample sizes. We show that structure learning is a more difficult task, compared to approximating the correct distribution, in the sense that it requires a much larger number of samples, regardless of the computational power available for the learner.
Infinite Hidden Relational Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2012
Year: 2012

In many cases it makes sense to model a relationship symmetrically, not implying any particular directionality. Consider the classical example of a recommendation system where the rating of an item by a user should symmetrically be dependent on the attributes of both the user and the item. The attributes of the (known) relationships are also relevant for predicting attributes of entities and for predicting attributes of new relations. In recommendation systems, the exploitation of relational attributes is often referred to as collaborative filtering. Again, in many applications one might prefer to model the collaborative effect in a symmetrical way. In this paper we present a relational model, which is completely symmetrical. The key innovation is that we introduce for each entity (or object) an infinite-dimensional latent variable as part of a Dirichlet process (DP) model. We discuss inference in the model, which is based on a DP Gibbs sampler, i.e., the Chinese restaurant process. We extend the Chinese restaurant process to be applicable to relational modeling. Our approach is evaluated in three applications. One is a recommendation system based on the MovieLens data set. The second application concerns the prediction of the function of yeast genes/proteins on the data set of KDD Cup 2001 using a multi-relational model. The third application involves a relational medical domain. The experimental results show that our model gives significantly improved estimates of attributes describing relationships or entities in complex relational models.
Variable noise and dimensionality reduction for sparse Gaussian processes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2012
Year: 2012

The sparse pseudo-input Gaussian process (SPGP) is a new approximation method for speeding up GP regression in the case of a large number of data points N. The approximation is controlled by the gradient optimization of a small set of M `pseudo-inputs', thereby reducing complexity from N^3 to NM^2. One limitation of the SPGP is that this optimization space becomes impractically big for high dimensional data sets. This paper addresses this limitation by performing automatic dimensionality reduction. A projection of the input space to a low dimensional space is learned in a supervised manner, alongside the pseudo-inputs, which now live in this reduced space. The paper also investigates the suitability of the SPGP for modeling data with input-dependent noise. A further extension of the model is made to make it even more powerful in this regard - we learn an uncertainty parameter for each pseudo-input. The combination of sparsity, reduced dimension, and input-dependent noise makes it possible to apply GPs to much larger and more complex data sets than was previously practical. We demonstrate the benefits of these methods on several synthetic and real world problems.
Efficient Selection of Disambiguating Actions for Stereo Vision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2012
Year: 2012

In many domains that involve the use of sensors, such as robotics or sensor networks, there are opportunities to use some form of active sensing to disambiguate data from noisy or unreliable sensors. These disambiguating actions typically take time and expend energy. One way to choose the next disambiguating action is to select the action with the greatest expected entropy reduction, or information gain. In this work, we consider active sensing in aid of stereo vision for robotics. Stereo vision is a powerful sensing technique for mobile robots, but it can fail in scenes that lack strong texture. In such cases, a structured light source, such as vertical laser line can be used for disambiguation. By treating the stereo matching problem as a specially structured HMM-like graphical model, we demonstrate that for a scan line with n columns and maximum stereo disparity d, the entropy minimizing aim point for the laser can be selected in O(nd) time - cost no greater than the stereo algorithm itself. In contrast, a typical HMM formulation would suggest at least O(nd^2) time for the entropy calculation alone.
Learning Neighborhoods for Metric Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2012
Year: 2012

Metric learning methods have been shown to perform well on different learning tasks. Many of them rely on target neighborhood relationships that are computed in the original feature space and remain fixed throughout learning. As a result, the learned metric reflects the original neighborhood relations. We propose a novel formulation of the metric learning problem in which, in addition to the metric, the target neighborhood relations are also learned in a two-step iterative approach. The new formulation can be seen as a generalization of many existing metric learning methods. The formulation includes a target neighbor assignment rule that assigns different numbers of neighbors to instances according to their quality; `high quality' instances get more neighbors. We experiment with two of its instantiations that correspond to the metric learning algorithms LMNN and MCML and compare it to other metric learning methods on a number of datasets. The experimental results show state-of-the-art performance and provide evidence that learning the neighborhood relations does improve predictive performance.