OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
On Facebook, most ties are weak
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2014
Year: 2014

Pervasive socio-technical networks bring new conceptual and technological challenges to developers and users alike. A central research theme is evaluation of the intensity of relations linking users and how they facilitate communication and the spread of information. These aspects of human relationships have been studied extensively in the social sciences under the framework of the "strength of weak ties" theory proposed by Mark Granovetter.13 Some research has considered whether that theory can be extended to online social networks like Facebook, suggesting interaction data can be used to predict the strength of ties. The approaches being used require handling user-generated data that is often not publicly available due to privacy concerns. Here, we propose an alternative definition of weak and strong ties that requires knowledge of only the topology of the social network (such as who is a friend of whom on Facebook), relying on the fact that online social networks, or OSNs, tend to fragment into communities. We thus suggest classifying as weak ties those edges linking individuals belonging to different communities and strong ties as those connecting users in the same community. We tested this definition on a large network representing part of the Facebook social graph and studied how weak and strong ties affect the information-diffusion process. Our findings suggest individuals in OSNs self-organize to create well-connected communities, while weak ties yield cohesion and optimize the coverage of information spread.
Achievability proof via output statistics of random binning
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

This paper introduces a new and ubiquitous framework for establishing achievability results in \emph{network information theory} (NIT) problems. The framework uses random binning arguments and is based on a duality between channel and source coding problems. {Further,} the framework uses pmf approximation arguments instead of counting and typicality. This allows for proving coordination and \emph{strong} secrecy problems where certain statistical conditions on the distribution of random variables need to be satisfied. These statistical conditions include independence between messages and eavesdropper's observations in secrecy problems and closeness to a certain distribution (usually, i.i.d. distribution) in coordination problems. One important feature of the framework is to enable one {to} add an eavesdropper and obtain a result on the secrecy rates "for free." We make a case for generality of the framework by studying examples in the variety of settings containing channel coding, lossy source coding, joint source-channel coding, coordination, strong secrecy, feedback and relaying. In particular, by investigating the framework for the lossy source coding problem over broadcast channel, it is shown that the new framework provides a simple alternative scheme to \emph{hybrid} coding scheme. Also, new results on secrecy rate region (under strong secrecy criterion) of wiretap broadcast channel and wiretap relay channel are derived. In a set of accompanied papers, we have shown the usefulness of the framework to establish achievability results for coordination problems including interactive channel simulation, coordination via relay and channel simulation via another channel.
Optimal bounds for monotonicity and Lipschitz testing over hypercubes and hypergrids
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2014
Year: 2014

The problem of monotonicity testing over the hypergrid and its special case, the hypercube, is a classic, well-studied, yet unsolved question in property testing. We are given query access to $f:[k]^n \mapsto \R$ (for some ordered range $\R$). The hypergrid/cube has a natural partial order given by coordinate-wise ordering, denoted by $\prec$. A function is \emph{monotone} if for all pairs $x \prec y$, $f(x) \leq f(y)$. The distance to monotonicity, $\eps_f$, is the minimum fraction of values of $f$ that need to be changed to make $f$ monotone. For $k=2$ (the boolean hypercube), the usual tester is the \emph{edge tester}, which checks monotonicity on adjacent pairs of domain points. It is known that the edge tester using $O(\eps^{-1}n\log|\R|)$ samples can distinguish a monotone function from one where $\eps_f > \eps$. On the other hand, the best lower bound for monotonicity testing over the hypercube is $\min(|\R|^2,n)$. This leaves a quadratic gap in our knowledge, since $|\R|$ can be $2^n$. We resolve this long standing open problem and prove that $O(n/\eps)$ samples suffice for the edge tester. For hypergrids, known testers require $O(\eps^{-1}n\log k\log |\R|)$ samples, while the best known (non-adaptive) lower bound is $Ω(\eps^{-1} n\log k)$. We give a (non-adaptive) monotonicity tester for hypergrids running in $O(\eps^{-1} n\log k)$ time. Our techniques lead to optimal property testers (with the same running time) for the natural \emph{Lipschitz property} on hypercubes and hypergrids. (A $c$-Lipschitz function is one where $|f(x) - f(y)| \leq c\|x-y\|_1$.) In fact, we give a general unified proof for $O(\eps^{-1}n\log k)$-query testers for a class of "bounded-derivative" properties, a class containing both monotonicity and Lipschitz.
Approximation Limits of Linear Programs (Beyond Hierarchies)
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2014
Year: 2014

We develop a framework for approximation limits of polynomial-size linear programs from lower bounds on the nonnegative ranks of suitably defined matrices. This framework yields unconditional impossibility results that are applicable to any linear program as opposed to only programs generated by hierarchies. Using our framework, we prove that O(n^{1/2-eps})-approximations for CLIQUE require linear programs of size 2^{n^Ω(eps)}. (This lower bound applies to linear programs using a certain encoding of CLIQUE as a linear optimization problem.) Moreover, we establish a similar result for approximations of semidefinite programs by linear programs. Our main ingredient is a quantitative improvement of Razborov's rectangle corruption lemma for the high error regime, which gives strong lower bounds on the nonnegative rank of certain perturbations of the unique disjointness matrix.
Universal Algorithm for Online Trading Based on the Method of Calibration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2014
Year: 2014

We present a universal algorithm for online trading in Stock Market which performs asymptotically at least as good as any stationary trading strategy that computes the investment at each step using a fixed function of the side information that belongs to a given RKHS (Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space). Using a universal kernel, we extend this result for any continuous stationary strategy. In this learning process, a trader rationally chooses his gambles using predictions made by a randomized well-calibrated algorithm. Our strategy is based on Dawid's notion of calibration with more general checking rules and on some modification of Kakade and Foster's randomized rounding algorithm for computing the well-calibrated forecasts. We combine the method of randomized calibration with Vovk's method of defensive forecasting in RKHS. Unlike the statistical theory, no stochastic assumptions are made about the stock prices. Our empirical results on historical markets provide strong evidence that this type of technical trading can "beat the market" if transaction costs are ignored.
Parallel implementation of fast randomized algorithms for the decomposition of low rank matrices
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2014
Year: 2014

We analyze the parallel performance of randomized interpolative decomposition by decomposing low rank complex-valued Gaussian random matrices up to 64 GB. We chose a Cray XMT supercomputer as it provides an almost ideal PRAM model permitting quick investigation of parallel algorithms without obfuscation from hardware idiosyncrasies. We obtain that on non-square matrices performance becomes very good, with overall runtime over 70 times faster on 128 processors. We also verify that numerically discovered error bounds still hold on matrices nearly two orders of magnitude larger than those previously tested.
An overview to Software Architecture in Intrusion Detection System
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2014
Year: 2014

Today by growing network systems, security is a key feature of each network infrastructure. Network Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) provide defense model for all security threats which are harmful to any network. The IDS could detect and block attack-related network traffic. The network control is a complex model. Implementation of an IDS could make delay in the network. Several software-based network intrusion detection systems are developed. However, the model has a problem with high speed traffic. This paper reviews of many type of software architecture in intrusion detection systems and describes the design and implementation of a high-performance network intrusion detection system that combines the use of software-based network intrusion detection sensors and a network processor board. The network processor which is a hardware-based model could acts as a customized load balancing splitter. This model cooperates with a set of modified content-based network intrusion detection sensors rather than IDS in processing network traffic and controls the high-speed.
Parallelizing Mizar
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2014
Year: 2014

This paper surveys and describes the implementation of parallelization of the Mizar proof checking and of related Mizar utilities. The implementation makes use of Mizar's compiler-like division into several relatively independent passes, with typically quite different processing speeds. The information produced in earlier (typically much faster) passes can be used to parallelize the later (typically much slower) passes. The parallelization now works by splitting the formalization into a suitable number of pieces that are processed in parallel, assembling from them together the required results. The implementation is evaluated on examples from the Mizar library, and future extensions are discussed.
Mobile Online Gaming via Resource Sharing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2014
Year: 2014

Mobile gaming presents a number of main issues which remain open. These are concerned mainly with connectivity, computational capacities, memory and battery constraints. In this paper, we discuss the design of a fully distributed approach for the support of mobile Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs). In mobile environments, several features might be exploited to enable resource sharing among multiple devices / game consoles owned by different mobile users. We show the advantages of trading computing / networking facilities among mobile players. This operation mode opens a wide number of interesting sharing scenarios, thus promoting the deployment of novel mobile online games. In particular, once mobile nodes make their resource available for the community, it becomes possible to distribute the software modules that compose the game engine. This allows to distribute the workload for the game advancement management. We claim that resource sharing is in unison with the idea of ludic activity that is behind MOGs. Hence, such schemes can be profitably employed in these contexts.
A Poisson convolution model for characterizing topical content with word frequency and exclusivity
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2014
Year: 2014

An ongoing challenge in the analysis of document collections is how to summarize content in terms of a set of inferred themes that can be interpreted substantively in terms of topics. The current practice of parametrizing the themes in terms of most frequent words limits interpretability by ignoring the differential use of words across topics. We argue that words that are both common and exclusive to a theme are more effective at characterizing topical content. We consider a setting where professional editors have annotated documents to a collection of topic categories, organized into a tree, in which leaf-nodes correspond to the most specific topics. Each document is annotated to multiple categories, at different levels of the tree. We introduce a hierarchical Poisson convolution model to analyze annotated documents in this setting. The model leverages the structure among categories defined by professional editors to infer a clear semantic description for each topic in terms of words that are both frequent and exclusive. We carry out a large randomized experiment on Amazon Turk to demonstrate that topic summaries based on the FREX score are more interpretable than currently established frequency based summaries, and that the proposed model produces more efficient estimates of exclusivity than with currently models. We also develop a parallelized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo sampler that allows the inference to scale to millions of documents.
Dispersion of Infinite Constellations in Fast Fading Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

In this work we extend the setting of communication without power constraint, proposed by Poltyrev, to fast fading channels with channel state information (CSI) at the receiver. The optimal codewords density, or actually the optimal normalized log density (NLD), is considered. Poltyrev's capacity for this channel is the highest achievable NLD, at possibly large block length, that guarantees a vanishing error probability. For a given finite block length n and a fixed error probability, there is a gap between the highest achievable NLD and Poltyrev's capacity. As in other channels, this gap asymptotically vanishes as the square root of the channel dispersion V over n, multiplied by the inverse Q-function of the allowed error probability. This dispersion, derived in the paper, equals the dispersion of the power constrained fast fading channel at the high SNR regime. Connections to the error exponent of the peak power constrained fading channel are also discussed.
Performance Improvement of Iterative Multiuser Detection for Large Sparsely-Spread CDMA Systems by Spatial Coupling
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

Kudekar et al. proved that the belief-propagation (BP) performance for low-density parity check (LDPC) codes can be boosted up to the maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) performance by spatial coupling. In this paper, spatial coupling is applied to sparsely-spread code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems to improve the performance of iterative multiuser detection based on BP. Two iterative receivers based on BP are considered: One receiver is based on exact BP and the other on an approximate BP with Gaussian approximation. The performance of the two BP receivers is evaluated via density evolution (DE) in the dense limit after taking the large-system limit, in which the number of users and the spreading factor tend to infinity while their ratio is kept constant. The two BP receivers are shown to achieve the same performance as each other in these limits. Furthermore, taking a continuum limit for the obtained DE equations implies that the performance of the two BP receivers can be improved up to the performance achieved by the symbol-wise MAP detection, called individually-optimal detection, via spatial coupling. Numerical simulations show that spatial coupling can provide a significant improvement in bit error rate for finite-sized systems especially in the region of high system loads.
Maximum Secondary Stable Throughput of a Cooperative Secondary Transmitter-Receiver Pair: Protocol Design and Stability Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

In this paper, we investigate the impact of cooperation between a secondary transmitter-receiver pair and a primary transmitter (PT) on the maximum stable throughput of the primary-secondary network. Each transmitter, primary or secondary, has a buffer for storing its own traffic. In addition to its own buffer, the secondary transmitter (ST) has a buffer for storing a fraction of the undelivered primary packets due to channel impairments. Moreover, the secondary destination has a relaying queue for storing a fraction of the undelivered primary packets. In the proposed cooperative system, the ST and the secondary destination increase the spectrum availability for the secondary packets by relaying the unsuccessfully transmitted packets of the PT. We consider two multiple access strategies to be used by the ST and the secondary destination to utilize the silence sessions of the PT. Numerical results demonstrate the gains of the proposed cooperative system over the non-cooperation case.
Parity and Streett Games with Costs
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2014
Year: 2014

We consider two-player games played on finite graphs equipped with costs on edges and introduce two winning conditions, cost-parity and cost-Streett, which require bounds on the cost between requests and their responses. Both conditions generalize the corresponding classical omega-regular conditions and the corresponding finitary conditions. For parity games with costs we show that the first player has positional winning strategies and that determining the winner lies in NP and coNP. For Streett games with costs we show that the first player has finite-state winning strategies and that determining the winner is EXPTIME-complete. The second player might need infinite memory in both games. Both types of games with costs can be solved by solving linearly many instances of their classical variants.
On the Nuclear Norm heuristic for a Hankel matrix Recovery Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2014
Year: 2014

This note addresses the question if and why the nuclear norm heuristic can recover an impulse response generated by a stable single-real-pole system, if elements of the upper-triangle of the associated Hankel matrix were given. Since the setting is deterministic, theories based on stochastic assumptions for low-rank matrix recovery do not apply here. A 'certificate' which guarantees the completion is constructed by exploring the structural information of the hidden matrix. Experimental results and discussions regarding the nuclear norm heuristic applied to a more general setting are also given.
Building Blocks of Physical-layer Network Coding
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2014
Year: 2014

This paper investigates the fundamental building blocks of physical-layer network coding (PNC). Most prior work on PNC focused on its application in a simple two-way-relay channel (TWRC) consisting of three nodes only. Studies of the application of PNC in general networks are relatively few. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap. We put forth two ideas: 1) A general network can be decomposed into small building blocks of PNC, referred to as the PNC atoms, for scheduling of PNC transmissions. 2) We identify nine PNC atoms, with TWRC being one of them. Three major results are as follows. First, using the decomposition framework, the throughput performance of PNC is shown to be significantly better than those of the traditional multi-hop scheme and the conventional network coding scheme. For example, under heavy traffic volume, PNC can achieve 100% throughput gain relative to the traditional multi-hop scheme. Second, PNC decomposition based on a variety of different PNC atoms can yield much better performance than PNC decomposition based on the TWRC atom alone. Third, three out of the nine atoms are most important to good performance. Specifically, the decomposition based on these three atoms is good enough most of the time, and it is not necessary to use the other six atoms.
Effective Topological Degree Computation Based on Interval Arithmetic
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2014
Year: 2014

We describe a new algorithm for calculating the topological degree deg (f, B, 0) where B \subseteq Rn is a product of closed real intervals and f : B \rightarrow Rn is a real-valued continuous function given in the form of arithmetical expressions. The algorithm cleanly separates numerical from combinatorial computation. Based on this, the numerical part provably computes only the information that is strictly necessary for the following combinatorial part, and the combinatorial part may optimize its computation based on the numerical information computed before. We also present computational experiments based on an implementation of the algorithm. Also, in contrast to previous work, the algorithm does not assume knowledge of a Lipschitz constant of the function f, and works for arbitrary continuous functions for which some notion of interval arithmetic can be defined.
Extending Partial Representations of Proper and Unit Interval Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2014
Year: 2014

The recently introduced problem of extending partial interval representations asks, for an interval graph with some intervals pre-drawn by the input, whether the partial representation can be extended to a representation of the entire graph. In this paper, we give a linear-time algorithm for extending proper interval representations and an almost quadratic-time algorithm for extending unit interval representations. We also introduce the more general problem of bounded representations of unit interval graphs, where the input constrains the positions of some intervals by lower and upper bounds. We show that this problem is NP-complete for disconnected input graphs and give a polynomial-time algorithm for the special class of instances, where the ordering of the connected components of the input graph along the real line is prescribed. This includes the case of partial representation extension. The hardness result sharply contrasts the recent polynomial-time algorithm for bounded representations of proper interval graphs [Balko et al. ISAAC'13]. So unless $\text{P} = \text{NP}$, proper and unit interval representations have vastly different structure. This explains why partial representation extension problems for these different types of representations require substantially different techniques.
Space-Time Trade-offs for Stack-Based Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2014
Year: 2014

In memory-constrained algorithms we have read-only access to the input, and the number of additional variables is limited. In this paper we introduce the compressed stack technique, a method that allows to transform algorithms whose space bottleneck is a stack into memory-constrained algorithms. Given an algorithm \alg\ that runs in O(n) time using $Θ(n)$ variables, we can modify it so that it runs in $O(n^2/s)$ time using a workspace of O(s) variables (for any $s\in o(\log n)$) or $O(n\log n/\log p)$ time using $O(p\log n/\log p)$ variables (for any $2\leq p\leq n$). We also show how the technique can be applied to solve various geometric problems, namely computing the convex hull of a simple polygon, a triangulation of a monotone polygon, the shortest path between two points inside a monotone polygon, 1-dimensional pyramid approximation of a 1-dimensional vector, and the visibility profile of a point inside a simple polygon. Our approach exceeds or matches the best-known results for these problems in constant-workspace models (when they exist), and gives the first trade-off between the size of the workspace and running time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first general framework for obtaining memory-constrained algorithms.
Social Influence as a Voting System: a Complexity Analysis of Parameters and Properties
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2014
Year: 2014

We consider a simple and altruistic multiagent system in which the agents are eager to perform a collective task but where their real engagement depends on the willingness to perform the task of other influential agents. We model this scenario by an influence game, a cooperative simple game in which a team (or coalition) of players succeeds if it is able to convince enough agents to participate in the task (to vote in favor of a decision). We take the linear threshold model as the influence model. We show first the expressiveness of influence games showing that they capture the class of simple games. Then we characterize the computational complexity of various problems on influence games, including measures (length and width), values (Shapley-Shubik and Banzhaf) and properties (of teams and players). Finally, we analyze those problems for some particular extremal cases, with respect to the propagation of influence, showing tighter complexity characterizations.