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As an algorithmic framework, message passing is extremely powerful and has wide applications in the context of different disciplines including communications, coding theory, statistics, signal processing, artificial intelligence and combinatorial optimization. In this paper, we investigate the performance of a message-passing algorithm called min-sum belief propagation (BP) for the vertex-disjoint shortest $k$ -path problem ($k$ -VDSP) on weighted directed graphs, and derive the iterative message-passing update rules. As the main result of this paper, we prove that for a weighted directed graph $G$ of order $n$ , BP algorithm converges to the unique optimal solution of $k$ -VDSP on $G$ within $O(n^{2}w_{max})$ iterations, provided that the weight $w_{e}$ is nonnegative integral for each arc $e\in E(G)$ , where $w_{max}=\max \{w_{e}: e\in E(G)\}$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first instance where BP algorithm is proved correct for NP-hard problems. Additionally, we establish the extensions of $k$ -VDSP to the case of multiple sources or sinks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gossip protocols are popular methods for average consensus problems in distributed computing. We prove new convergence guarantees for a variety of such protocols, including path, clique, and synchronous pairwise gossip. These arise by exploiting the connection between these protocols and the block randomized Kaczmarz method for solving linear systems. Moreover, we extend existing convergence results for block randomized Kaczmarz to allow for a more general choice of blocks, rank-deficient systems, and provide a tighter convergence rate guarantee. Previous results for block randomized Kaczmarz assumed blocks formed a paving of the systems; our analysis, contrary to the title of our paper, generalizes to a broader class of blocks that we call coverings. We furthermore apply this analysis to inconsistent consensus models and obtain similar guarantees. An extensive empirical analysis of these methods is provided for a variety of synthetic and real networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies distributed algorithms for (strongly convex) composite optimization problems over mesh networks, subject to quantized communications. Instead of focusing on a specific algorithmic design, a black-box model is proposed, casting linearly convergent distributed algorithms in the form of fixed-point iterates. The algorithmic model is equipped with a novel random or deterministic Biased Compression (BC) rule on the quantizer design, and a new Adaptive encoding Non-uniform Quantizer (ANQ) coupled with a communication-efficient encoding scheme, which implements the BC-rule using a finite number of bits (below machine precision). This fills a gap existing in most state-of-the-art quantization schemes, such as those based on the popular compression rule, which rely on communication of some scalar signals with negligible quantization error (in practice quantized at the machine precision). A unified communication complexity analysis is developed for the black-box model, determining the average number of bits required to reach a solution of the optimization problem within a target accuracy. It is shown that the proposed BC-rule preserves linear convergence of the unquantized algorithms, and a trade-off between convergence rate and communication cost under ANQ-based quantization is characterized. Numerical results validate our theoretical findings and show that distributed algorithms equipped with the proposed ANQ have more favorable communication cost than algorithms using state-of-the-art quantization rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the convergence speed of the Arimoto-Blahut algorithm. For many channel matrices, the convergence speed is exponential, but for some channel matrices it is slower than exponential. By analyzing the Taylor expansion of the defining function of the Arimoto-Blahut algorithm, we will make the conditions clear for the exponential or slower convergence. The analysis of the slow convergence in this paper is new. Based on this analysis, we will compare the convergence speeds of the Arimoto-Blahut algorithm numerically with the values obtained in our theorems for several channel matrices. The purpose of this paper is to obtain a complete understanding of the convergence speed of the Arimoto-Blahut algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In image detection, one problem is to test whether the set, though mainly consisting of uniformly scattered points, also contains a small fraction of points sampled from some (a priori unknown) curve, for example, a curve with Cα-norm bounded by β. One approach is to analyze the data by counting membership in multiscale multianisotropic strips, which involves an algorithm that delves into the length of the path connecting many consecutive “significant” nodes. In this paper, we develop the mathematical formalism of this algorithm and analyze the statistical property of the length of the longest significant run. The rate of convergence is derived. Using percolation theory and random graph theory, we present a novel probabilistic model named, pseudo-tree model. Based on the asymptotic results for the pseudo-tree model, we further study the length of the longest significant run in an “inflating” Bernoulli net. We find that the probability parameter p of significant node plays an important role: there is a threshold pc, such that in the cases of p < pc and p > pc, very different asymptotic behaviors of the length of the significant runs are observed. We apply our results to the detection of an underlying curvilinear feature and prove that the test based on our proposed longest run theory is asymptotically powerful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses a sequential changepoint detection problem for a general stochastic model, assuming that the observed data may be non-i.i.d. (i.e., dependent and non-identically distributed) and prior distribution of the change point is arbitrary. Tartakovsky and Veeravalli (2005), Baron and Tartakovsky (2006), and, more recently, Tartakovsky (2017) developed a general asymptotic theory of changepoint detection for non-i.i.d. stochastic models, assuming certain stability of the log-likelihood ratio process, in the case of simple hypotheses when both pre-change and post-change models are completely specified. However, in most applications, the post-change distribution is not completely known. In the present paper, we generalize previous results to the case of parametric uncertainty, assuming that the parameter of the post-change distribution is unknown. We introduce two detection rules based on mixtures–the mixture Shiryaev rule and the mixture Shiryaev–Roberts rule–and study their asymptotic properties in the Bayesian context. In particular, we provide sufficient conditions under which these rules are first-order asymptotically optimal, minimizing moments of the delay to detection as the probability of false alarm approaches zero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many different applications, it is important to determine the Hilbert transform of a given function. However, it is generally impossible to calculate it in closed form. Therefore Hilbert transform approximations are used. This paper studies the convergence and divergence behavior of general classes of such approximation methods. These classes are characterized by two very natural axioms and they include basically all known traditional numerical algorithms. The convergence of these methods is investigated on a family of signal spaces of continuous functions with finite energy. These spaces are parametrized by a number which measures the energy concentration in the low frequency components of the signal. It is shown that stable methods only exist on signal spaces with a sufficient energy concentration and this paper gives some explicit examples of convergent methods. On all other spaces in the family of signal spaces, every sampling-based Hilbert transform approximation shows a blowup behavior of its peak value, i.e., on these spaces, every sampling-based Hilbert transform approximation diverges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suppose that ${ { y}}= \lvert \text {A} { x}_{0}\rvert +\eta $ where ${ x}_{0}\in {\mathbb R} ^{{d}}$ is the target signal and $\eta \in {\mathbb R}^{{m}}$ is a noise vector. The aim of phase retrieval is to estimate ${x}_{0}$ from ${ { y}}$. A popular model for estimating ${ x}_{0}$ is the nonlinear least squares ${\widehat { {x}}}:={\mathrm{ argmin}}_{ x} \| \lvert \text {A} { x}\rvert - { { y}}\|_{2}$. One has already developed many efficient algorithms for solving the model, such as the seminal error reduction algorithm. In this paper, we present the estimation performance of the model with proving that $\| {\widehat { {x}}}- { x}_{0}\|\lesssim {\|\eta \|_{2}}/{\sqrt {{m}}}$ under the assumption of A being a Gaussian random matrix. We also prove the reconstruction error ${\|\eta \|_{2}}/{\sqrt {{m}}}$ is sharp. For the case where ${ x}_{0}$ is sparse, we study the estimation performance of both the nonlinear Lasso of phase retrieval and its unconstrained version. Our results are non-asymptotic, and we do not assume any distribution on the noise $\eta $. To the best of our knowledge, our results represent the first theoretical guarantee for the nonlinear least squares and for the nonlinear Lasso of phase retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce a powerful technique based on Leave-One-Out analysis to the study of low-rank matrix completion problems. Using this technique, we develop a general approach for obtaining fine-grained, entrywise bounds for iterative stochastic procedures in the presence of probabilistic dependency. We demonstrate the power of this approach in analyzing two of the most important algorithms for matrix completion: (i) the non-convex approach based on Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) for a rank-constrained formulation, also known as the Singular Value Projection algorithm, and (ii) the convex relaxation approach based on nuclear norm minimization (NNM). Using this approach, we establish the first convergence guarantee for the original form of PGD without regularization or sample splitting, and in particular shows that it converges linearly in the infinity norm. For NNM, we use this approach to study a fictitious iterative procedure that arises in the dual analysis. Our results show that NNM recovers an $d$ -by- $d$ rank- $r$ matrix with $\mathcal {O}(\mu r \log (\mu r) d\log d)$ observed entries. This bound has optimal dependence on the matrix dimension and is independent of the condition number. To the best of our knowledge, none of previous sample complexity results for tractable matrix completion algorithms satisfies these two properties simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graphical data is comprised of a graph with marks on its edges and vertices. The mark indicates the value of some attribute associated to the respective edge or vertex. Examples of such data arise in social networks, molecular and systems biology, and web graphs, as well as in several other application areas. Our goal is to design schemes that can efficiently compress such graphical data without making assumptions about its stochastic properties. Namely, we wish to develop a universal compression algorithm for graphical data sources. To formalize this goal, we employ the framework of local weak convergence, also called the objective method, which provides a technique to think of a marked graph as a kind of stationary stochastic processes, stationary with respect to movement between vertices of the graph. In recent work, we have generalized a notion of entropy for unmarked graphs in this framework, due to Bordenave and Caputo, to the case of marked graphs. We use this notion to evaluate the efficiency of a compression scheme. The lossless compression scheme we propose in this paper is then proved to be universally optimal in a precise technical sense. It is also capable of performing local data queries in the compressed form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the problem of recovering a signal $ \mathbf {x^{*}}\in \mathbb {R}^{n}$ , from magnitude-only measurements, $y_{i} = \left |{ \left \langle{ { \mathbf {a}_{i}}, \mathbf {x^{*}} }\right \rangle }\right | $ for $i=\{1,2,\ldots ,m\}$. This is a stylized version of the classical phase retrieval problem, and is a fundamental challenge in nano- and bio-imaging systems, astronomical imaging, and speech processing. It is well-known that the above problem is ill-posed, and therefore some additional assumptions on the signal and/or the measurements are necessary. In this paper, we consider the case where the underlying signal $ \mathbf {x^{*}}$ is $s$ -sparse. For this case, we develop a novel recovery algorithm that we call Compressive Phase Retrieval with Alternating Minimization, or CoPRAM. Our algorithm is simple and is obtained via a natural combination of the classical alternating minimization approach for phase retrieval with the CoSaMP algorithm for sparse recovery. Despite its simplicity, we prove that our algorithm achieves a sample complexity of $ \mathcal {O}\left ({{s^{2} \log n}}\right)$ with Gaussian measurements $ { \mathbf {a}_{i}}$ , which matches the best known existing results; moreover, it also demonstrates linear convergence in theory and practice. An appealing feature of our algorithm is that it requires no extra tuning parameters other than the signal sparsity level $s$. Moreover, we show that our algorithm is robust to noise. The quadratic dependence of sample complexity on the sparsity level is sub-optimal, and we demonstrate how to alleviate this via additional assumptions beyond sparsity. First, we study the (practically) relevant case where the sorted coefficients of the underlying sparse signal exhibit a power law decay. In this scenario, we show that the CoPRAM algorithm achieves a sample complexity of $ \mathcal {O}\left ({{s \log n}}\right)$ , which is close to the information-theoretic limit. We then consider the case where the underlying signal $ \mathbf {x^{*}}$ arises from structured sparsity models. We specifically examine the case of block-sparse signals with uniform block size of $b$ and block sparsity $k=s/b$. For this problem, we design a recovery algorithm that we call Block CoPRAM that further reduces the sample complexity to $ \mathcal {O}\left ({{ks \log n}}\right)$. For sufficiently large block lengths of $b=\Theta (s)$ , this bound equates to $ \mathcal {O}\left ({{s \log n}}\right)$. To our knowledge, our approach constitutes the first family of linearly convergent algorithms for signal recovery from magnitude-only Gaussian measurements that exhibit a sub-quadratic dependence on the signal sparsity level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]