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Cancer Screening has been widely recognized as an effective strategy for preventing the disease. Despite its effectiveness, determining when to start screening is complicated, because starting too early increases the number of screenings over lifetime and thus costs but starting too late may miss the cancer that could have been prevented. Therefore, to make an informed recommendation on the age to start screening, it is necessary to conduct cost-effectiveness analysis to assess the gain in life years relative to the cost of screenings. As more large-scale observational studies become accessible, there is growing interest in evaluating cost-effectiveness based on empirical evidence. In this paper, we propose a unified measure for evaluating cost-effectiveness and a causal analysis for the continuous intervention of screening initiation age, under the multi-state modeling with semi-competing risks. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed estimators perform well in realistic scenarios. We perform a cost-effectiveness analysis of the colorectal cancer screening, utilizing data from the large-scale Women's Health Initiative. Our analysis reveals that initiating screening at age 50 years yields the highest quality-adjusted life years with an acceptable incremental cost-effectiveness ratio compared to no screening, providing real-world evidence in support of screening recommendation for colorectal cancer., Comment: 37 pages, 2 figures, 8 tables

We present a generalization of the tilted Bell inequality for quantum [[n,k,d]] error-correcting codes and explicitly utilize the simplest perfect code, the [[5,1,3]] code, the Steane [[7,1,3]] code, and Shor's [[9,1,3]] code, to demonstrate the self-testing property of their respective codespaces. Additionally, we establish a framework for the proof of self-testing, as detailed in \cite{baccari2020device}, which can be generalized to the codespace of CSS stabilizers. Our method provides a self-testing scheme for $\cos\theta \lvert \bar{0} \rangle + \sin\theta \lvert \bar{1} \rangle$, where $\theta \in [0, \frac{\pi}{2}]$, and also discusses its experimental application. We also investigate whether such property can be generalized to qudit and show one no-go theorem. We then define a computational problem called ISSELFTEST and describe how this problem formulation can be interpreted as a statement that maximal violation of a specific Bell-type inequality can self-test a particular entanglement subspace. We also discuss the computational complexity of ISSELFTEST in comparison to other classical complexity challenges and some related open problems.

Accurate positioning technology is the foundation for industry and business applications. Although indoor and outdoor positioning techniques have been well studied separately, positioning performance in the intermediate period of changing the positioning environment is still challenging. This paper proposed a digital twin-aided positioning correction method for seamless positioning focusing on improving the receiver's outdoor positioning performance in urban areas, where the change of the positioning environment usually happens. The proposed algorithm will simulate the positioning solution for virtual receivers in a grid-based digital twin. Based on the simulated positioning solutions, a statistical model will be used to study the positioning characteristics and generate a correction information database for real receivers to improve their positioning performance. This algorithm has a low computation load on the receiver side and does not require a specially designed antenna, making it implementable for small-sized devices., Comment: 7 pages conference paper in indoor positioning and indoor navigation 2024

We propose a feasibility study for real-time automated data standardization leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance seamless positioning systems in IoT environments. By integrating and standardizing heterogeneous sensor data from smartphones, IoT devices, and dedicated systems such as Ultra-Wideband (UWB), our study ensures data compatibility and improves positioning accuracy using the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). The core components include the Intelligent Data Standardization Module (IDSM), which employs a fine-tuned LLM to convert varied sensor data into a standardized format, and the Transformation Rule Generation Module (TRGM), which automates the creation of transformation rules and scripts for ongoing data standardization. Evaluated in real-time environments, our study demonstrates adaptability and scalability, enhancing operational efficiency and accuracy in seamless navigation. This study underscores the potential of advanced LLMs in overcoming sensor data integration complexities, paving the way for more scalable and precise IoT navigation solutions., Comment: Accepted at IPIN 2024. To be published in IEEE Xplore

The execution of flight missions by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) primarily relies on navigation. In particular, the navigation pipeline has traditionally been divided into positioning and control, operating in a sequential loop. However, the existing navigation pipeline, where the positioning and control are decoupled, struggles to adapt to ubiquitous uncertainties arising from measurement noise, abrupt disturbances, and nonlinear dynamics. As a result, the navigation reliability of the UAV is significantly challenged in complex dynamic areas. For example, the ubiquitous global navigation satellite system (GNSS) positioning can be degraded by the signal reflections from surrounding high-rising buildings in complex urban areas, leading to significantly increased positioning uncertainty. An additional challenge is introduced to the control algorithm due to the complex wind disturbances in urban canyons. Given the fact that the system positioning and control are highly correlated with each other, this research proposes a **tightly joined positioning and control model (JPCM) based on factor graph optimization (FGO)**. In particular, the proposed JPCM combines sensor measurements from positioning and control constraints into a unified probabilistic factor graph. Specifically, the positioning measurements are formulated as the factors in the factor graph. In addition, the model predictive control (MPC) is also formulated as the additional factors in the factor graph. By solving the factor graph contributed by both the positioning-related factors and the MPC-based factors, the complementariness of positioning and control can be deeply exploited. Finally, we validate the effectiveness and resilience of the proposed method using a simulated quadrotor system which shows significantly improved trajectory following performance.

Leveraging multiple sensors enhances complex environmental perception and increases resilience to varying luminance conditions and high-speed motion patterns, achieving precise localization and mapping. This paper proposes, ECMD, an event-centric multisensory dataset containing 81 sequences and covering over 200 km of various challenging driving scenarios including high-speed motion, repetitive scenarios, dynamic objects, etc. ECMD provides data from two sets of stereo event cameras with different resolutions (640*480, 346*260), stereo industrial cameras, an infrared camera, a top-installed mechanical LiDAR with two slanted LiDARs, two consumer-level GNSS receivers, and an onboard IMU. Meanwhile, the ground-truth of the vehicle was obtained using a centimeter-level high-accuracy GNSS-RTK/INS navigation system. All sensors are well-calibrated and temporally synchronized at the hardware level, with recording data simultaneously. We additionally evaluate several state-of-the-art SLAM algorithms for benchmarking visual and LiDAR SLAM and identifying their limitations. The dataset is available at https://arclab-hku.github.io/ecmd/.

Many diseases and traits involve a complex interplay between genes and environment, generating significant interest in studying gene-environment interaction through observational data. However, for lifestyle and environmental risk factors, they are often susceptible to unmeasured confounding factors and as a result, may bias the assessment of the joint effect of gene and environment. Recently, Mendelian randomization (MR) has evolved into a versatile method for assessing causal relationships based on observational data to account for unmeasured confounders. This approach utilizes genetic variants as instrumental variables (IVs) and aims to offer a reliable statistical test and estimation of causal effects. MR has gained substantial popularity in recent years largely due to the success of large-scale genome-wide association studies in identifying genetic variants associated with lifestyle and environmental factors. Many methods have been developed for MR; however, little work has been done for evaluating gene-environment interaction. In this paper, we focus on two primary IV approaches: the 2-stage predictor substitution (2SPS) and the 2-stage residual inclusion (2SRI), and extend them to accommodate gene-environment interaction under both the linear and logistic regression models for the continuous and binary outcomes, respectively. Extensive simulation and analytical derivations show that finding solutions in the linear regression model setting is relatively straightforward; however, the logistic regression model is significantly more complex and demands additional effort.

Ancestry-specific proteome-wide association studies (PWAS) based on genetically predicted protein expression can reveal complex disease etiology specific to certain ancestral groups. These studies require ancestry-specific models for protein expression as a function of SNP genotypes. In order to improve protein expression prediction in ancestral populations historically underrepresented in genomic studies, we propose a new penalized maximum likelihood estimator for fitting ancestry-specific joint protein quantitative trait loci models. Our estimator borrows information across ancestral groups, while simultaneously allowing for heterogeneous error variances and regression coefficients. We propose an alternative parameterization of our model which makes the objective function convex and the penalty scale invariant. To improve computational efficiency, we propose an approximate version of our method and study its theoretical properties. Our method provides a substantial improvement in protein expression prediction accuracy in individuals of African ancestry, and in a downstream PWAS analysis, leads to the discovery of multiple associations between protein expression and blood lipid traits in the African ancestry population.

Bell nonlocality and uncertainty relations are distinct features of quantum theory from classical physics. Bell nonlocality concerns the correlation strength among local observables on different quantum particles, whereas the uncertainty relations set the lower bound of the sum or product of the variance square of observables. Here we establish the statistical link between these two quantum characters using the Aharonov-Vaidman identity. Therein, the upper bounds of Bell-type inequalities are expressed in terms of the product of the local sum of the variance square. On the other hand, instead of evaluating local uncertainty relations, the uncertainty relations on two or more quantum systems are upper-bounded by the amount of Bell nonlocality therein., Comment: 13 pages

Many multi-sensor navigation systems urgently demand accurate positioning initialization from global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs) in challenging static scenarios. However, ground blockages against line-of-sight (LOS) signal reception make it difficult for GNSS users. Steering local codes in GNSS basebands is a desiring way to correct instantaneous signal phase misalignment, efficiently gathering useful signal power and increasing positioning accuracy. Besides, inertial navigation systems (INSs) have been used as a well-complementary dead reckoning (DR) sensor for GNSS receivers in kinematic scenarios resisting various interferences since early. But little work focuses on the case of whether the INS can improve GNSS receivers in static scenarios. Thus, this paper proposes an enhanced navigation system deeply integrated with low-cost INS solutions and GNSS high-accuracy carrier-based positioning. First, an absolute code phase is predicted from base station information, and integrated solution of the INS DR and real-time kinematic (RTK) results through an extended Kalman filter (EKF). Then, a numerically controlled oscillator (NCO) leverages the predicted code phase to improve the alignment between instantaneous local code phases and received ones. The proposed algorithm is realized in a vector-tracking GNSS software-defined radio (SDR). Real-world experiments demonstrate the proposed SDR regarding estimating time-of-arrival (TOA) and positioning accuracy., Comment: 27 pages, 18 figures

Accurate and smooth global navigation satellite system (GNSS) positioning for pedestrians in urban canyons is still a challenge due to the multipath effects and the non-light-of-sight (NLOS) receptions caused by the reflections from surrounding buildings. The recently developed factor graph optimization (FGO) based GNSS positioning method opened a new window for improving urban GNSS positioning by effectively exploiting the measurement redundancy from the historical information to resist the outlier measurements. Unfortunately, the FGO-based GNSS standalone positioning is still challenged in highly urbanized areas. As an extension of the previous FGO-based GNSS positioning method, this paper exploits the potential of the pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) model in FGO to improve the GNSS standalone positioning performance in urban canyons. Specifically, the relative motion of the pedestrian is estimated based on the raw acceleration measurements from the onboard smartphone inertial measurement unit (IMU) via the PDR algorithm. Then the raw GNSS pseudorange, Doppler measurements, and relative motion from PDR are integrated using the FGO. Given the context of pedestrian navigation with a small acceleration most of the time, a novel soft motion model is proposed to smooth the states involved in the factor graph model. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified step-by-step through two datasets collected in dense urban canyons of Hong Kong using smartphone-level GNSS receivers. The comparison between the conventional extended Kalman filter, several existing methods, and FGO-based integration is presented. The results reveal that the existing FGO-based GNSS standalone positioning is highly complementary to the PDR's relative motion estimation. Both improved positioning accuracy and trajectory smoothness are obtained with the help of the proposed method., Comment: 11 pages, 14 figures

GNSS and LiDAR odometry are complementary as they provide absolute and relative positioning, respectively. Their integration in a loosely-coupled manner is straightforward but is challenged in urban canyons due to the GNSS signal reflections. Recent proposed 3D LiDAR-aided (3DLA) GNSS methods employ the point cloud map to identify the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) reception of GNSS signals. This facilitates the GNSS receiver to obtain improved urban positioning but not achieve a sub-meter level. GNSS real-time kinematics (RTK) uses carrier phase measurements to obtain decimeter-level positioning. In urban areas, the GNSS RTK is not only challenged by multipath and NLOS-affected measurement but also suffers from signal blockage by the building. The latter will impose a challenge in solving the ambiguity within the carrier phase measurements. In the other words, the model observability of the ambiguity resolution (AR) is greatly decreased. This paper proposes to generate virtual satellite (VS) measurements using the selected LiDAR landmarks from the accumulated 3D point cloud maps (PCM). These LiDAR-PCM-made VS measurements are tightly-coupled with GNSS pseudorange and carrier phase measurements. Thus, the VS measurements can provide complementary constraints, meaning providing low-elevation-angle measurements in the across-street directions. The implementation is done using factor graph optimization to solve an accurate float solution of the ambiguity before it is fed into LAMBDA. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been validated by the evaluation conducted on our recently open-sourced challenging dataset, UrbanNav. The result shows the fix rate of the proposed 3DLA GNSS RTK is about 30% while the conventional GNSS-RTK only achieves about 14%. In addition, the proposed method achieves sub-meter positioning accuracy in most of the data collected in challenging urban areas.

Accurate and safety-quantifiable localization is of great significance for safety-critical autonomous systems, such as unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The visual odometry-based method can provide accurate positioning in a short period but is subjected to drift over time. Moreover, the quantification of the safety of the localization solution (the error is bounded by a certain value) is still a challenge. To fill the gaps, this paper proposes a safety-quantifiable line feature-based visual localization method with a prior map. The visual-inertial odometry provides a high-frequency local pose estimation which serves as the initial guess for the visual localization. By obtaining a visual line feature pair association, a foot point-based constraint is proposed to construct the cost function between the 2D lines extracted from the real-time image and the 3D lines extracted from the high-precision prior 3D point cloud map. Moreover, a global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) receiver autonomous integrity monitoring (RAIM) inspired method is employed to quantify the safety of the derived localization solution. Among that, an outlier rejection (also well-known as fault detection and exclusion) strategy is employed via the weighted sum of squares residual with a Chi-squared probability distribution. A protection level (PL) scheme considering multiple outliers is derived and utilized to quantify the potential error bound of the localization solution in both position and rotation domains. The effectiveness of the proposed safety-quantifiable localization system is verified using the datasets collected in the UAV indoor and UGV outdoor environments.

Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) usually suffers from drifting over long-time runs, the accuracy is easily affected by dynamic objects. We propose DynaVIG, a navigation and object tracking system based on the integration of Monocular Vision, Inertial Navigation System (INS), and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). Our system aims to provide an accurate global estimation of the navigation states and object poses for the automated ground vehicle (AGV) in dynamic scenes. Due to the scale ambiguity of the object, a prior height model is proposed to initialize the object pose, and the scale is continuously estimated with the aid of GNSS and INS. To precisely track the object with complex moving, we establish an accurate dynamics model according to its motion state. Then the multi-sensor observations are optimized in a unified framework. Experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that the multisensor fusion can effectively improve the accuracy of navigation and object tracking, compared to state-of-the-art methods. In addition, the proposed system achieves good estimation of the objects that change speed or direction.

In the literature on $K$-locality ($K\geq2$) networks, the local hidden variables are strictly distributed in the specific observers rather than the whole ones. Regarding genuine Bell locality, all local hidden variables, as classical objects that allow for perfect cloning in classical physics, should be cloned and then spread throughout the networks. More correlators are involved in the proposed linear and non-linear Bell-type inequalities, where their upper bounds are specified by the pre-determined output probability distribution. As for the quantum version, the no-clone theorem limits the broadcast of quantum correlations. To explore genuine Bell nonlocality in variant particle distributions in the networks, the Pauli operators stabilizing the two-qubit Bell states or multi-qubit Greenberger--Horne--Zeilinger states (GHZ states) play an essential role in designing the proposed linear and non-linear Bell tests and assigning the local incompatible measurements for the spatially separated observers. We prove the maximal violations of the proposed Bell-type inequalities quantum networks. In the end, how entanglement swapping replaces the joint measurements in the Bell tests is demonstrated., Comment: 20 pages, titled changed and new results added in the revised version

In quantum state discrimination, the observers are given a quantum system and aim to verify its state from the two or more possible target states. In the local quantum state marking as an extension of quantum state discrimination, there are N composite quantum systems and N possible orthogonal target quantum states. Distant Alice and Bob are asked to correctly mark the states of the given quantum systems via local operations and classical communication. Here we investigate the local state marking with N 4 ${\otimes}$ 4 systems, N=4, 5, 6, and 7. Therein, Alice and Bob allow for three local operations: measuring the local observable either ${\sigma}_{z}$ or ${\sigma}_{x}$ simultaneously, and entanglement swapping. It shows that, given arbitrary four 4 ${\otimes}$ 4 systems, Alice and Bob can perform the perfect local quantum state marking. In the N=5, 6 cases, they can perform perfect local state marking with specific target states. We conjecture the impossibility of the local quantum state marking given any seven target states since Alice and Bob cannot fulfill the task in the simplest case., Comment: 20 pages

In this paper, we propose a 3D LiDAR aided global navigation satellite system (GNSS) non-line-of-sight (NLOS) mitigation method caused by both static buildings and dynamic objects. A sliding window map describing the surrounding of the ego-vehicle is first generated, based on real-time 3D point clouds from a 3D LiDAR sensor. Then, NLOS receptions are detected based on the sliding window map using a proposed fast searching method which is free of the initial guess of the position of the GNSS receiver. Instead of directly excluding the detected NLOS satellites from further positioning estimation, this paper rectifies the pseudorange measurement model by (1) correcting the pseudorange measurements if the reflecting point of NLOS signals is detected inside the sliding window map, and (2) remodeling the uncertainty of the NLOS pseudorange measurement using a novel weighting scheme. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method in several typical urban canyons in Hong Kong using an automobile-level GNSS receiver. Moreover, we also evaluate the potential of the proposed NLOS mitigation method in GNSS and inertial navigation systems integration via factor graph optimization., Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures

This paper proposes an improved global navigation satellite system (GNSS) positioning method that explores the time correlation between consecutive epochs of the code and carrier phase measurements which significantly increases the robustness against outlier measurements. Instead of relying on the time difference carrier phase (TDCP) which only considers two neighboring epochs using an extended Kalman filter (EKF) estimator, this paper proposed to employ the carrier-phase measurements inside a window, the so-called window carrier-phase (WCP), to constrain the states inside a factor graph. A left null space matrix is employed to eliminate the shared unknown ambiguity variables and therefore, correlated the associated states inside the WCP. Then the pseudorange, Doppler, and the constructed WCP measurements are integrated simultaneously using factor graph optimization (FGO) to estimate the state of the GNSS receiver. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method in two typical urban canyons in Hong Kong, achieving the mean positioning error of 1.76 meters and 2.96 meters, respectively, using the automobile-level GNSS receiver. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of the proposed method is further evaluated using a low-cost smartphone level GNSS receiver and similar improvement is also obtained, compared with several existing GNSS positioning methods.

Accurate and globally referenced global navigation satellite system (GNSS) based vehicular positioning can be achieved in outlier-free open areas. However, the performance of GNSS can be significantly degraded by outlier measurements, such as multipath effects and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) receptions arising from signal reflections of buildings. Inspired by the advantage of batch historical data in resisting outlier measurements, in this paper, we propose a graduated non-convexity factor graph optimization (FGO-GNC) to improve the GNSS positioning performance, where the impact of GNSS outliers is mitigated by estimating the optimal weightings of GNSS measurements. Different from the existing local solutions, the proposed FGO-GNC employs the non-convex Geman McClure (GM) function to globally estimate the weightings of GNSS measurements via a coarse-to-fine relaxation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through several challenging datasets collected in urban canyons of Hong Kong using automobile level and low-cost smartphone level GNSS receivers.