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Constrained partially observable Markov decision processes (CPOMDPs) have been used to model various real-world phenomena. However, they are notoriously difficult to solve to optimality, and there exist only a few approximation methods for obtaining high-quality solutions. In this study, grid-based approximations are used in combination with linear programming (LP) models to generate approximate policies for CPOMDPs. A detailed numerical study is conducted with six CPOMDP problem instances considering both their finite and infinite horizon formulations. The quality of approximation algorithms for solving unconstrained POMDP problems is established through a comparative analysis with exact solution methods. Then, the performance of the LP-based CPOMDP solution approaches for varying budget levels is evaluated. Finally, the flexibility of LP-based approaches is demonstrated by applying deterministic policy constraints, and a detailed investigation into their impact on rewards and CPU run time is provided. For most of the finite horizon problems, deterministic policy constraints are found to have little impact on expected reward, but they introduce a significant increase to CPU run time. For infinite horizon problems, the reverse is observed: deterministic policies tend to yield lower expected total rewards than their stochastic counterparts, but the impact of deterministic constraints on CPU run time is negligible in this case. Overall, these results demonstrate that LP models can effectively generate approximate policies for both finite and infinite horizon problems while providing the flexibility to incorporate various additional constraints into the underlying model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graph matching, the problem of aligning a pair of graphs so as to minimize their edge disagreements, has received widespread attention owing to its broad spectrum of applications in data science. As the problem is NP–hard in the worst-case, a variety of approximation algorithms have been proposed for obtaining high quality, suboptimal solutions. In this article, we approach the task of designing an efficient polynomial-time approximation algorithm for graph matching from a previously unconsidered perspective. Our key result is that graph matching can be formulated as maximizing a monotone, supermodular set function subject to matroid intersection constraints. We leverage this fact to apply a discrete optimization variant of the minorization-maximization algorithm which exploits supermodularity of the objective function to iteratively construct and maximize a sequence of global lower bounds on the objective. At each step, we solve a maximum weight matching problem in a bipartite graph. Differing from prior approaches, the algorithm exploits the combinatorial structure inherent in the problem to generate a sequence of iterates featuring monotonically non-decreasing objective value while always adhering to the combinatorial matching constraints. Experiments on real-world data demonstrate the empirical effectiveness of the algorithm relative to the prevailing state-of-the-art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multistate series-parallel system (MSSPS) is a widely used model for representing engineering systems, whose reliability has been extensively analyzed. Universal generating function (UGF) is an efficient method for evaluating the reliability of MSSPS. However, when facing the large-scale MSSPS, where the number of system components and possible states are enormous, calclating the exact system reliability can be rather time-consuming. To evaluate the reliability of large-scale MSSPS more efficiently, this paper proposes an approximation method, named continuization discretization approximation (CDA) method. The CDA approach consists of continuization and discretization processes. The continuization process applies Gaussian approximation method based on the central limit theory and the UGF technique to evaluate parallel subsystems. While the discretization process discretizes the continuous distribution to a discrete one, and proposes an algorithm to evaluate the series subsystems efficiently. The efficiency and accuracy performance of the CDA method can be adjusted by parameters according to the computational resource and the system scale. The newly proposed method is compared to the existing methods in evaluating the large-scale MSSPS. Numerical examples show that the CDA method has evident advantage in computational efficiency with satisfactory accuracy performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an algorithm for evaluating the performance of a closed-loop spare machines supply system when the time between failures as well as the repair times is generally distributed. The closed-loop system with finite number of machines and the generic time distribution assumption well represents real-life spare machines supply systems but at the cost of higher complexity. The increased complexity prohibits the use of existing models, which evaluate the performance of closed-loop systems assuming exponentially distributed failure and repair times. The Extended Bottleneck (EBOTT) algorithm in the literature estimates the performance measures of a closed-loop system with generally distributed repair service times. However, as our analysis indicates, the EBOTT algorithm may fall into an infinite loop even in assessing the performance of a simple spare machines supply system. The Modified EBOTT algorithm presented in this paper overcomes the shortcomings of the EBOTT algorithm and exhibits superior performance. Finally, through tradeoff analysis between spare machines inventory level and repair shop capacities, insights into the performance of such systems are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approximation algorithms with linear complexities are required in the treatments of big data, however, present algorithms cannot output the diameter of a set of points with arbitrary accuracy and near-linear complexity. By introducing the partition technique, we introduce a very simple approximation algorithm with arbitrary accuracy ε and a complexity of O(N + ε−1 log ε−1) for the cases that all points are located in an Euclidean plane. The error bounds are proved strictly, and are verified by numerical tests. This complexity is better than existing algorithms, and the present algorithm is also very simple to be implemented in applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In this paper, we propose an approximation method to study the regularity of solutions to the Isaacs equation. This class of problems plays a paramount role in the regularity theory for fully nonlinear elliptic equations. First, it is a model-problem of a non-convex operator. In addition, the usual mechanisms to access regularity of solutions fall short in addressing these equations. We approximate an Isaacs equation by a Bellman one, and make assumptions on the latter to recover information for the former. Our techniques produce results in Sobolev and Hölder spaces; we also examine a few consequences of our main findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a new low-complexity iterative joint phase estimation and decoding algorithm which can be applied to low-density-parity-check (or turbo) codes for channels affected by strong phase noise. The algorithm exhibits a very good performance and a very low complexity even in strong phase noise, high code rate, and high-order constellations. The proposed algorithm works by first obtaining a preliminary pilots-aided phase estimation. Next, the expressions for the belief propagation messages are approximated around that reference and reduced to a Gaussian canonical form. This results in a simple closed form of a recursive update. Simulations results for phase-shift-keying modulation of size 8 and quadrature-amplitude modulation of size 64 are presented and compared with other algorithms in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social awareness and social ties are becoming increasingly popular with emerging mobile and handheld devices. Social trust degree describing the strength of the social ties has drawn lots of research interests in many fields in wireless communications, such as resource sharing, cooperative communication, and so on. In this paper, we propose a social ties based hybrid cooperative beamforming and jamming scheme to secure wireless transmissions under a stochastic geometry framework, where the friendly nodes are categorized into relays and jammers according to their locations and social trust degrees with the source node. Connection outage probability (COP) and secrecy outage probability (SOP) of such a scheme in a random network have been analyzed. To facilitate a more convenient performance evaluation, we propose a double Gamma ratio approach through the Gamma approximation method. Based on this, the COP and SOP are tractably obtained in closed-forms. We further consider the SOP in the presence of Poisson point process distributed eavesdroppers and derive an upper bound. The simulation results verify our theoretical findings, and validate that the social trust degree has dramatic influences on the security performance in the networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Best investment in the road infrastructure or the network design is perceived as a fundamental and benchmark problem in transportation. Given a set of candidate road projects with associated costs, finding the best subset with respect to a limited budget is known as a bilevel Discrete Network Design Problem (DNDP) of NP-hard computationally complexity. We engage with the complexity with a hybrid exact-heuristic methodology based on a two-stage relaxation as follows: (i) the bilevel feature is relaxed to a single-level problem by taking the network performance function of the upper level into the user equilibrium traffic assignment problem (UE-TAP) in the lower level as a constraint. It results in a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem which is then solved using the Outer Approximation (OA) algorithm (ii) we further relax the multi-commodity UE-TAP to a single-commodity MILP problem, that is, the multiple OD pairs are aggregated to a single OD pair. This methodology has two main advantages: (i) the method is proven to be highly efficient to solve the DNDP for a large-sized network of Winnipeg, Canada. The results suggest that within a limited number of iterations (as termination criterion), global optimum solutions are quickly reached in most of the cases; otherwise, good solutions (close to global optimum solutions) are found in early iterations. Comparative analysis of the networks of Gao and Sioux-Falls shows that for such a non-exact method the global optimum solutions are found in fewer iterations than those found in some analytically exact algorithms in the literature. (ii) Integration of the objective function among the constraints provides a commensurate capability to tackle the multi-objective (or multi-criteria) DNDP as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The low-rank approximation method is one of the most effective approaches recently proposed for attenuating random noise in seismic data. However, the low-rank approximation approach assumes that the seismic data has low rank for its $f-x$ domain Hankel matrix. This assumption is seldom satisfied for the complicated seismic data. Besides, the low-rank approximation approach is usually implemented in local windows in order to satisfy the principal assumption required by the algorithm itself. When implemented in local windows, the rank is even more difficult to choose because the seismic data is highly nonstationary in both time and spatial dimensions and the optimal rank for different local windows is not consistent with each other. In order to preserve enough useful energy, one needs to set a relatively large rank when implementing the low-rank approximation method, which makes the traditional method incapable of attenuating enough noise. Considering such difficulties described above, we propose an empirical low-rank approximation approach. We adaptively decompose the input data into several components that have truly low ranks via empirical mode decomposition. An interpretation of the proposed empirical low-rank approximation method is that we empirically decompose a multi-dip seismic image that is not of low rank into multiple single-dip seismic images that are low-rank individually. We use both synthetic and field data examples to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach over traditional alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The usage of linear transformations has great relevance for data decorrelation applications, like image and video compression. In that sense, the discrete Tchebichef transform (DTT) possesses useful coding and decorrelation properties. The DTT transform kernel does not depend on the input data and fast algorithms can be developed to real-time applications. However, the DTT fast algorithm presented in literature possess high computational complexity. In this paper, we introduce a new low-complexity approximation for the DTT. The fast algorithm of the proposed transform is multiplication free and requires a reduced number of additions and bit-shifting operations. Image and video compression simulations in popular standards show good performance of the proposed transform. Regarding hardware resource consumption for FPGA shows a 43.1% reduction in configurable logic blocks and ASIC place and route realization shows a 57.7% reduction in the area-time figure compared with the 2D version of the exact DTT. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies the estimation of Dirichlet process mixtures over discrete incomplete rankings. The generative model for each mixture component is the generalized Mallows (GM) model, an exponential family model for permutations which extends seamlessly to top-$t$   rankings. While the GM  is remarkably tractable in comparison with other permutation models, its conjugate prior is not. Our main contribution is to derive the theory and algorithms for sampling from the desired posterior distributions under this DPM. We introduce a family of partially collapsed Gibbs samplers, containing as one extreme point an exact algorithm based on slice-sampling, and at the other a fast approximate sampler with superior mixing that is still very accurate in all but the lowest ranks. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the approximation in reducing mixing time, the benefits of the Dirichlet process approach over alternative clustering techniques, and the applicability of the approach to exploring large real-world ranking datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recently, Shabtay considered a scheduling problem on a single serial-batching machine with rejection to minimize the dual criteria of total completion time and total rejection cost, where the number of jobs to be included in each batch is not restricted. He studied four variants of the problem: the first is to minimize the sum of the two criteria; the second and third are to minimize one criterion, subject to the other criterion not exceeding a given value; and the last is to find the Pareto-optimal solutions for the bicriterion problem. Shabtay provided an O ( \textitn^\mathbf 5 ) algorithm for the first variant and an O ( n ^\mathbf 6/\boldsymbol \varepsilon ^\mathbf 2 ) fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for the fourth variant. In this paper, we provide an alternative O ( n ^\mathbf 4 ) algorithm to solve the first variant and an O ( n ^\mathbf 5/\boldsymbol \varepsilon ) FPTAS for the fourth variant, which are more efficient than those developed by Shabtay from a theoretical perspective. However, when the size of each batch is bounded by a given number b~\boldsymbol >1 , the corresponding time complexities of our algorithms for the first and fourth variants reduce to O (bn ^\mathbf 3 ) and O (bn ^\mathbf 4/\boldsymbol \varepsilon ), respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Channel rendezvous is a vital step to form a cognitive radio network (CRN). It is intractable to guarantee rendezvous for secondary users (SUs) within a short finite time in asynchronous, heterogeneous, and anonymous CRNs. However, most previous heterogeneous algorithms rely on explicit SUs' identifiers (IDs) to guide rendezvous, which is not fully distributed. In this paper, we exploit the mathematical construction of sunflower sets to develop a single-radio sunflower set (SSS)-based pairwise rendezvous algorithm. We propose an approximation algorithm to construct disjoint sunflower sets. Then, the SSS leverages the variant permutations of elements in sunflower sets to adjust the order of accessing channels instead of SUs' IDs, which is more favorable for anonymous SUs in distributed environments. We also propose a multiradio-sunflower-set-based pairwise rendezvous algorithm to bring additional rendezvous diversity and accelerate the rendezvous process. Moreover, for the case with more than two SUs, we propose a multiuser collaborative scheme in which SUs cooperatively exchange and update their channel-hopping sequences until rendezvous. We derive the theoretical upper and lower bounds of rendezvous latency of the proposed algorithms. Extensive simulation comparisons with the state-of-the-art blind-rendezvous algorithms are conducted, incorporating the metrics of maximum and expected time-to-rendezvous. The simulation results show that our algorithms can achieve rendezvous faster than previous works. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In many applications, it is a basic operation for the sink to periodically collect reports from all sensors. Since the data gathering process usually proceeds for many rounds, it is important to collect these data efficiently, that is, to reduce the energy cost of data transmission. Under such applications, a tree is usually adopted as the routing structure to save the computation costs for maintaining the routing tables of sensors. In this paper, we work on the problem of constructing a data aggregation tree that minimizes the total energy cost of data transmission in a wireless sensor network. In addition, we also address such a problem in the wireless sensor network where relay nodes exist and consider the cases where the link quality is not perfect. We show that these problems are NP-complete and propose O(1) -approximation algorithms for each of them. Simulations show that the proposed algorithms have good performance in terms of energy cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile cloud computing is emerging as a main ubiquitous computing platform to provide rich cloud resources for various applications of mobile devices. Although most existing studies in mobile cloud computing focus on energy savings of mobile devices by offloading computing-intensive jobs from mobile devices to remote clouds, the access delays between mobile users and remote clouds usually are long and sometimes unbearable. Cloudlet as a new technology is capable to bridge this gap, and can enhance the performance of mobile devices significantly while meeting the crisp response time requirements of mobile users. In this paper, we study the cloudlet placement problem in a large-scale Wireless Metropolitan Area Network (WMAN) consisting of many wireless Access Points (APs). We first formulate the problem as a novel capacitated cloudlet placement problem that places $K$ cloudlets to some strategic locations in the WMAN with the objective to minimize the average access delay between mobile users and the cloudlets serving the users. We then propose an exact solution to the problem by formulating it as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP). Due to the poor scalability of the ILP, we instead propose an efficient heuristic for the problem. For a special case of the problem where all cloudlets have identical computing capacities, we devise novel approximation algorithms with guaranteed approximation ratios. We also devise an online algorithm for dynamically allocating user requests to different cloudlets, if the $K$ cloudlets have already been placed. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms through experimental simulations. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are promising and scalable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graph matching (GM) is a fundamental problem in computer science, and it plays a central role to solve correspondence problems in computer vision. GM problems that incorporate pairwise constraints can be formulated as a quadratic assignment problem (QAP). Although widely used, solving the correspondence problem through GM has two main limitations: (1) the QAP is NP-hard and difficult to approximate; (2) GM algorithms do not incorporate geometric constraints between nodes that are natural in computer vision problems. To address aforementioned problems, this paper proposes factorized graph matching (FGM). FGM factorizes the large pairwise affinity matrix into smaller matrices that encode the local structure of each graph and the pairwise affinity between edges. Four are the benefits that follow from this factorization: (1) There is no need to compute the costly (in space and time) pairwise affinity matrix; (2) The factorization allows the use of a path-following optimization algorithm, that leads to improved optimization strategies and matching performance; (3) Given the factorization, it becomes straight-forward to incorporate geometric transformations (rigid and non-rigid) to the GM problem. (4) Using a matrix formulation for the GM problem and the factorization, it is easy to reveal commonalities and differences between different GM methods. The factorization also provides a clean connection with other matching algorithms such as iterative closest point; Experimental results on synthetic and real databases illustrate how FGM outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for GM. The code is available at http://humansensing.cs.cmu.edu/fgm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the problem of minimum-number full-view area coverage in camera sensor networks, i.e., how to select the minimum number of camera sensors to guarantee the full-view coverage of a given region. Full-view area coverage is challenging because the full-view coverage of a 2-D continuous domain has to be considered. To tackle this challenge, we first study the intrinsic geometric relationship between the full-view area coverage and the full-view point coverage and prove that the full-view area coverage can be guaranteed, as long as a selected full-view ensuring set of points is full-view covered. This leads to a significant dimension reduction for the full-view area coverage problem. Next, we prove that the minimum-number full-view point coverage is NP-hard and propose two approximation algorithms to solve it from two different perspectives, respectively: 1) By introducing a full-view coverage ratio function, we quantify the “contribution” of each camera sensor to the full-view coverage through which we transform the full-view point coverage into a submodular set cover problem and propose a greedy algorithm (GA); and 2) by studying the geometric relationship between the full-view coverage and the traditional coverage, we propose a set-cover-based algorithm (SCA). We analyze the performance of these two approximation algorithms and characterize their approximation ratios. Furthermore, we devise two distributed algorithms that obtain the same approximation ratios as GA and SCA, respectively. Finally, we provide extensive simulation results to validate our analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mobile crowdsensing has shown elegant capacity in data collection and has given rise to numerous applications. In the sense of coverage quality, marginal works have considered the efficient (less cost) and effective (considerable coverage) design for mobile crowdsensing networks. We investigate the optimal quality-aware coverage in mobile crowdsensing networks. The difference between ours and the conventional coverage problem is that we only select a subset of mobile users so that the coverage quality is maximized with constrained budget. To address this new problem, which is proved to be NP-hard, we first prove that the set function of coverage quality is nondecreasing submodular. By leveraging the favorable property in submodular optimization, we then propose an (\text1-(\text1/e)) approximation algorithm with O(n^k+2) time complexity, where $k$ is an integer that is greater than or equal to 3. Finally, we conduct extensive simulations for the proposed scheme, and the results demonstrate that ours outperforms the random selection scheme and one of the state of the art in terms of total coverage quality by, at most, 2.4× and 1.5× and by, on average, 1.4× and 1.3×, respectively. Additionally, ours achieves a near-optimal solution, compared with the brute-force search results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In heterogeneous networks (HetNets), the load between macrocell base stations (MBSs) and small-cell base stations (SBSs) is imbalanced due to their different transmission powers and locations. This load imbalance significantly impacts system performance and affects the experience of mobile users (MUs) with different priorities. In this paper, we aim to distributively optimize the user association in HetNets with various user priorities to solve the load balancing problem. Since the user association is a binary matching problem, which is NP-hard, we propose a distributed belief propagation (BP) algorithm to approach the optimal solution. We first develop a factor graph model, using the network topology, to represent this user association problem. With this factor graph, we propose a novel distributed BP algorithm by adopting the proportional fairness as the objective. Next, we theoretically prove the existence of the fixed point in our BP algorithm. To be more practical, we develop an approximation method to significantly reduce the computational and communication complexity of the BP algorithm. Furthermore, we analyze some properties of the factor graph relevant to the performance of the BP algorithm using the stochastic geometry. Simulation results show that 1) the proposed BP algorithm well approaches the optimal system performance and achieves a much better performance compared with other association schemes and that 2) the analytical results on the average degree distribution and sparsity of the factor graph match with those obtained from the Monte Carlo simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Apart from spectral efficiency (SE), energy efficiency (EE) has become an important metric for future wireless communication systems. However, how to achieve balance between SE and EE for a multicell multiuser coordinated beamforming system remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for EE–SE balancing, namely, using a new metric called resource efficiency (RE) as the objective function to achieve a reasonable tradeoff between SE and EE. The considered optimization problem is more complex than traditional problems and, in general, is NP-hard for finding the globally optimal solution. To obtain insight into the problem, we first equivalently transform the original problem into a parameterized subtractive form optimization problem with some auxiliary variables by using the fraction programming theory. Then, a successive convex approximation method and the classical second-order cone programming method are jointly used to solve the equivalent problem. Finally, an effective algorithm with proven convergence is proposed to obtain the solution to the considered RE optimization. In addition, the algorithm is further extended to consider imperfect channel state information (CSI) using the worst-case design. Extensive numerical simulations are given to validate the effectiveness of our algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Booth multiplier has been widely used for high performance signed multiplication by encoding and thereby reducing the number of partial products. A multiplier using the radix-4 (or modified Booth) algorithm is very efficient due to the ease of partial product generation, whereas the radix-8 Booth multiplier is slow due to the complexity of generating the odd multiples of the multiplicand. In this paper, this issue is alleviated by the application of approximate designs. An approximate 2-bit adder is deliberately designed for calculating the sum of 1× and 2× of a binary number. This adder requires a small area, a low power and a short critical path delay. Subsequently, the 2-bit adder is employed to implement the less significant section of a recoding adder for generating the triple multiplicand with no carry propagation. In the pursuit of a trade-off between accuracy and power consumption, two signed 16 × 16 bit approximate radix-8 Booth multipliers are designed using the approximate recoding adder with and without the truncation of a number of less significant bits in the partial products. The proposed approximate multipliers are faster and more power efficient than the accurate Booth multiplier. The multiplier with 15-bit truncation achieves the best overall performance in terms of hardware and accuracy when compared to other approximate Booth multiplier designs. Finally, the approximate multipliers are applied to the design of a low-pass FIR filter and they show better performance than other approximate Booth multipliers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In high-end data processing systems, such as databases, the execution concurrency level rises continuously since the introduction of multicore processors. This happens both on premises and in the cloud. For these systems, a buffer pool management of high scalability plays an important role on overall system performance. The scalability of buffer pool management is largely determined by its data replacement algorithm, which is a major component in the buffer pool management. It can seriously degrade the scalability if not designed and implemented properly. The root cause is its use of lock-protected data structures that incurs high contention with concurrent accesses. A common practice is to modify the replacement algorithm to reduce the contention on the lock(s), such as approximating the LRU replacement with the CLOCK algorithm or partitioning the data structures and using distributed locks. Unfortunately, the modification usually compromises the algorithm's hit ratio, a major performance goal. It may also involve significant effort on overhauling the original algorithm design and implementation. This paper provides a general solution to improve the scalability of a buffer pool management using any replacement algorithms for the data processing systems on physical on-premises machines and virtual machines in the cloud. Instead of making a difficult trade-off between the high hit ratio of a replacement algorithm and the low lock contention of its approximation, we design a system framework, called BP-Wrapper, that eliminates almost all lock contention without requiring any changes to an existing algorithm. In BP-Wrapper, we use a dynamic batching technique and a prefetching technique to reduce lock contention and to retain high hit ratio. The implementation of BP-Wrapper in PostgreSQL adds only about 300 lines of C code. It can increase the throughput by up to two folds compared with the replacement algorithms with lock contention when running TPC-C-like and TPC-W-like workloads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonlinear dimensionality reduction methods have demonstrated top-notch performance in many pattern recognition and image classification tasks. Despite their popularity, they suffer from highly expensive time and memory requirements, which render them inapplicable to large-scale datasets. To leverage such cases we propose a new method called “Path-Based Isomap”. Similar to Isomap, we exploit geodesic paths to find the low-dimensional embedding. However, instead of preserving pairwise geodesic distances, the low-dimensional embedding is computed via a path-mapping algorithm. Due to the much fewer number of paths compared to number of data points, a significant improvement in time and memory complexity with a comparable performance is achieved. The method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on well-known synthetic and real-world datasets, as well as in the presence of noise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We study constrained general-sum stochastic games with unknown Markovian dynamics. A distributed constrained no-regret Q -learning scheme (CNR Q ) is presented to guarantee convergence to the set of stationary correlated equilibria of the game. Prior art addresses the unconstrained case only, is structured with nested control loops, and has no convergence result. CNR Q is cast as a single-loop three-timescale asynchronous stochastic approximation algorithm with set-valued update increments. A rigorous convergence analysis with differential inclusion arguments is given which draws on recent extensions of the theory of stochastic approximation to the case of asynchronous recursive inclusions with set-valued mean fields. Numerical results are given for the exemplary application of CNR Q to decentralized resource control in heterogeneous wireless networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we address the problem of distributed adaptive estimation of node-specific signals for signal enhancement or noise reduction in wireless sensor networks with multi-sensor nodes. The estimation is performed by a multi-channel Wiener filter (MWF) in which a low-rank approximation based on a generalized eigenvalue decomposition (GEVD) is incorporated. In non-stationary or low-SNR conditions, this GEVD-based MWF has been demonstrated to be more robust than the original MWF. In a centralized realization where a fusion center has access to all the nodes’ sensor signal observations, the network-wide sensor signal correlation matrices and the low-rank approximation can be directly estimated and used to compute the network-wide GEVD-based MWF. However, in this paper, we aim to avoid centralizing the sensor signal observations, in which case the network-wide sensor signal correlation matrices cannot be estimated. To this end, we start from the so-called distributed adaptive node-specific signal estimation (DANSE) algorithm, and include GEVD-based low-rank approximations in the per-node local computations. Remarkably, the new algorithm is able to significantly compress the signal observations transmitted between the nodes, while still converging to the network-wide GEVD-based MWF as if each node would have access to all sensor signal observations, even though the low-rank approximations are applied locally at each node. We provide a theoretical convergence analysis, which shows that the algorithm converges to the network-wide GEVD-based MWF under conditions that are less strict than in the original DANSE algorithm. The convergence and performance of the algorithm are further investigated via numerical simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Travel planning and recommendation are important aspects of transportation. We propose and investigate a novel Collective Travel Planning (CTP) query that finds the lowest-cost route connecting multiple sources and a destination, via at most $k$ meeting points. When multiple travelers target the same destination (e.g., a stadium or a theater), they may want to assemble at meeting points and then go together to the destination by public transport to reduce their global travel cost (e.g., energy, money, or greenhouse-gas emissions). This type of functionality holds the potential to bring significant benefits to society and the environment, such as reducing energy consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions, enabling smarter and greener transportation, and reducing traffic congestions. The CTP query is Max SNP-hard. To compute the query efficiently, we develop two algorithms, including an exact algorithm and an approximation algorithm. The exact algorithm is capable finding the optimal result for small values of $k$ (e.g., $k = 2$ ) in interactive time, while the approximation algorithm, which has a $5$ -approximation ratio, is suitable for other situations. The performance of the CTP query is studied experimentally with real and synthetic spatial data. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we develop and analyze three limited-feedback resource allocation algorithms suitable for uplink transmission in heterogeneous wireless networks (HetNets). In this setup, one macro-cell shares the spectrum with a set of underlay cognitive small-cells via the orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA), where the interference from small-cells to the macro-cell should be kept below a predefined threshold. The resource allocation algorithms aim to maximize the weighted sum of instantaneous rates of all users over all cells by jointly optimizing power and subcarrier allocation under power constraints. Since in practice, the HetNet backhaul capacity is limited, reducing the amount of channel state information (CSI) feedback signaling passed over the backhaul links is highly desirable. To reach this goal, we apply the Lloyd algorithm to develop the limited-feedback two-phase resource allocation scheme. In the first offline phase, an optimal codebook for power and subcarrier allocation is designed and sent to all nodes. In the second online phase, based on channel realizations, the appropriate codeword of the designed codebook is chosen for transmission parameters, and the macro-cell only sends the codeword index represented by a limited number of bits for subcarrier and power allocation to its own users and small-cells. Then, each small-cell informs its own users by their related codewords. The offline phase involves a mixed-integer nonconvex resource allocation problem encountering high computational complexity. To solve it efficiently, we apply the general iterative successive convex approximation (SCA) approach, where the nonconvex optimization problem is transformed into the approximated convex optimization problem in each iteration. The simulation results reveal that the Lloyd algorithm can offer a performance close to the perfect-CSI case (without a limited number of feedback bits). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diagnosis of lower urinary tract dysfunction with urodynamics has historically relied on data acquired from multiple sensors using nonphysiologically fast cystometric filling. In addition, state-of-the-art neuromodulation approaches to restore bladder function could benefit from a bladder sensor for closed-loop control, but a practical sensor and automated data analysis are not available. We have developed an algorithm for real-time bladder event detection based on a single in situ sensor, making it attractive for both extended ambulatory bladder monitoring and closed-loop control of stimulation systems for diagnosis and treatment of bladder overactivity. Using bladder pressure data acquired from 14 human subjects with neurogenic bladder, we developed context-aware thresholding, a novel, parameterized, user-tunable algorithmic framework capable of real-time classification of bladder events, such as detrusor contractions, from single-sensor bladder pressure data. We compare six event detection algorithms with both single-sensor and two-sensor systems using a metric termed Conditional Stimulation Score, which ranks algorithms based on projected stimulation efficacy and efficiency. We demonstrate that adaptive methods are more robust against day-to-day variations than static thresholding, improving sensitivity and specificity without parameter modifications. Relative to other methods, context-aware thresholding is fast, robust, highly accurate, noise-tolerant, and amenable to energy-efficient hardware implementation, which is important for mapping to an implant device. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sparse approximation addresses the problem of approximately fitting a linear model with a solution having as few non-zero components as possible. While most sparse estimation algorithms rely on suboptimal formulations, this work studies the performance of exact optimization of \ell_0-norm-based problems through Mixed-Integer Programs (MIPs). Nine different sparse optimization problems are formulated based on \ell_1, \ell_2 or \ell_\infty data misfit measures, and involving whether constrained or penalized formulations. For each problem, MIP reformulations allow exact optimization, with optimality proof, for moderate-size yet difficult sparse estimation problems. Algorithmic efficiency of all formulations is evaluated on sparse deconvolution problems. This study promotes error-constrained minimization of the \ell_0 norm as the most efficient choice when associated with \ell_1 and \ell_\infty misfits, while the \ell_2 misfit is more efficiently optimized with sparsity-constrained and sparsity-penalized problems. Exact \ell_0-norm optimization is shown to outperform classical methods in terms of solution quality, both for over- and underdetermined problems. Numerical simulations emphasize the relevance of the different \ell_p fitting possibilities as a function of the noise statistical distribution. Such exact approaches are shown to be an efficient alternative, in moderate dimension, to classical (suboptimal) sparse approximation algorithms with \ell_2 data misfit. They also provide an algorithmic solution to less common sparse optimization problems based on \ell_1 and \ell_\infty misfits. For each formulation, simulated test problems are proposed where optima have been successfully computed. Data and optimal solutions are made available as potential benchmarks for evaluating other sparse approximation methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The standard Gaussian Process regression (GP) is usually formulated under stationary hypotheses: The noise power is considered constant throughout the input space and the covariance of the prior distribution is typically modeled as depending only on the difference between input samples. These assumptions can be too restrictive and unrealistic for many real-world problems. Although nonstationarity can be achieved using specific covariance functions, they require a prior knowledge of the kind of nonstationarity, not available for most applications. In this paper we propose to use the Laplace approximation to make inference in a divisive GP model to perform nonstationary regression, including heteroscedastic noise cases. The log-concavity of the likelihood ensures a unimodal posterior and makes that the Laplace approximation converges to a unique maximum. The characteristics of the likelihood also allow to obtain accurate posterior approximations when compared to the Expectation Propagation (EP) approximations and the asymptotically exact posterior provided by a Markov Chain Monte Carlo implementation with Elliptical Slice Sampling (ESS), but at a reduced computational load with respect to both, EP and ESS. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the performances of secure communications over non-small-scale fading channels. Specifically, considering three different cases when the main and eavesdropper channels experience independent lognormal fading, correlated lognormal fading, or independent composite fading, we study the average secrecy capacity and secrecy outage [including the probability of nonzero secrecy capacity (PNSC) and secure outage probability (SOP)] for these channel conditions. The approximated closed-form expressions for the average secrecy capacity, PNSC, and SOP are derived for these three different types of non-small fading channels. The accuracy of our performance analysis is verified by simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keyword-based search in text-rich multi-dimensional datasets facilitates many novel applications and tools. In this paper, we consider objects that are tagged with keywords and are embedded in a vector space. For these datasets, we study queries that ask for the tightest groups of points satisfying a given set of keywords. We propose a novel method called ProMiSH (Projection and Multi Scale Hashing) that uses random projection and hash-based index structures, and achieves high scalability and speedup. We present an exact and an approximate version of the algorithm. Our experimental results on real and synthetic datasets show that ProMiSH has up to 60 times of speedup over state-of-the-art tree-based techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses Krylov subspace methods to solve a linear system whose coefficient matrix is represented by a hierarchical matrix. We propose a preconditioning technique using a part of the original hierarchical matrix to accelerate the convergence of the Krylov subspace methods. The proposed preconditioning technique is based on the assumption that the submatrices on the original hierarchical matrix are approximated using the adaptive cross approximation or variants thereof. The performance of Krylov subspace methods with the proposed preconditioning technique is examined through numerical experiments on an electrostatic field analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aimed at the tremendous challenge of attribute reduction for big data mining and knowledge discovery, we propose a new attribute equilibrium dominance reduction accelerator (DCCAEDR) based on the distributed coevolutionary cloud model. First, the framework of N -populations distributed coevolutionary MapReduce model is designed to divide the entire population into N subpopulations, sharing the reward of different subpopulations’ solutions under a MapReduce cloud mechanism. Because the adaptive balancing between exploration and exploitation can be achieved in a better way, the reduction performance is guaranteed to be the same as those using the whole independent data set. Second, a novel Nash equilibrium dominance strategy of elitists under the N bounded rationality regions is adopted to assist the subpopulations necessary to attain the stable status of Nash equilibrium dominance. This further enhances the accelerator’s robustness against complex noise on big data. Third, the approximation parallelism mechanism based on MapReduce is constructed to implement rule reduction by accelerating the computation of attribute equivalence classes. Consequently, the entire attribute reduction set with the equilibrium dominance solution can be achieved. Extensive simulation results have been used to illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed DCCAEDR accelerator for attribute reduction on big data. Furthermore, the DCCAEDR is applied to solve attribute reduction for traditional Chinese medical records and to segment cortical surfaces of the neonatal brain 3-D-MRI records, and the DCCAEDR shows the superior competitive results, when compared with the representative algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an approximate online equilibrium solution is developed for an N -player nonzero-sum (NZS) game systems with completely unknown dynamics. First, a model identifier based on a three-layer neural network (NN) is established to reconstruct the unknown NZS games systems. Moreover, the identifier weight vector is updated based on experience replay technique which can relax the traditional persistence of excitation condition to a simplified condition on recorded data. Then, the single-network adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) with experience replay algorithm is proposed for each player to solve the coupled nonlinear Hamilton– (HJ) equations, where only the critic NN weight vectors are required to tune for each player. The feedback Nash equilibrium is provided by the solution of the coupled HJ equations. Based on the experience replay technique, a novel critic NN weights tuning law is proposed to guarantee the stability of the closed-loop system and the convergence of the value functions. Furthermore, a Lyapunov-based stability analysis shows that the uniform ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop system is achieved. Finally, two simulation examples are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we study a spectrum sharing based cognitive radio network (CRN) where secondary users (SUs) share the same spectrum with a primary user (PU) over block fading channels. We assume complete perfect channel state information (CSI) at the SUs while only local instantaneous CSI is assumed at the PU. The PU is assumed to adopt an ON/OFF power allocation based on truncated channel inversion and convey this one-bit side information to all SUs. Based on these assumptions, we investigate the optimal probabilistic power allocation that seeks to maximize the system utilities for SUs subject to the primary interference power constraint, and the secondary rate outage constraints and the peak power constraints. The probabilistic power allocation problem was first reformulated as a non-convex deterministic power allocation problem. To handle the non-convex constraints, we proposed a successive convex approximation (SCA) algorithm that provides high-quality approximate solutions. Convergence analysis on the algorithm was also provided. To further reduce complexity, a decentralized version of the SCA algorithm was proposed. Extensive simulations validated our analyses and demonstrated that superior performance is indeed achieved by our proposed algorithms where the achieved utilities are close to the optimal values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Answering queries using views has proven effective for querying relational and semistructured data. This paper investigates this issue for graph pattern queries based on graph simulation. We propose a notion of pattern containment to characterize graph pattern matching using graph pattern views. We show that a pattern query can be answered using a set of views if and only if it is contained in the views. Based on this characterization, we develop efficient algorithms to answer graph pattern queries. We also study problems for determining (minimal, minimum) containment of pattern queries. We establish their complexity (from cubic-time to NP-complete) and provide efficient checking algorithms (approximation when the problem is intractable). In addition, when a pattern query is not contained in the views, we study maximally contained rewriting to find approximate answers; we show that it is in cubic-time to compute such rewriting, and present a rewriting algorithm. We experimentally verify that these methods are able to efficiently answer pattern queries on large real-world graphs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Greedy pursuit, which includes matching pursuit (MP) and orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP), is an efficient approach for sparse approximation. However, conventional greedy pursuit algorithms designed for inner product space are not robust against outliers. In this paper, we devise a new definition of correlation in \ell p-space with p>0, called \ell p-correlation, and introduce the concept of orthogonality in \ell p-space. Based on the \ell p-correlation and \ell p-orthogonality, which are generalizations of the absolute inner product and orthogonality of inner product space, respectively, we develop three greedy pursuit algorithms, namely, \ell p-MP, \ell p-OMP, and weak \ell p-MP, for robust sparse approximation in the presence of outliers. The convergence of the three algorithms is proved. In particular, the \ell p-norm of the residual of each algorithm decays exponentially. It is revealed that the exponential decay factor in the worst case is related to the minimal \ell p-correlation of the residual and the dictionary. Numerical examples on sparse signal recovery and harmonic retrieval in impulsive noise demonstrate that the \ell p-greedy pursuit algorithms with 0< p< 2 are more outlier-resistant than their counterparts in inner product space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Studies show that a person is willing to join a social group activity if the activity is interesting, and if some close friends also join the activity as companions. The literature has demonstrated that the interests of a person and the social tightness among friends can be effectively derived and mined from social networking websites. However, even with the above two kinds of information widely available, social group activities still need to be coordinated manually, and the process is tedious and time-consuming for users, especially for a large social group activity, due to complications of social connectivity and the diversity of possible interests among friends. To address the above important need, this paper proposes to automatically select and recommend potential attendees of a social group activity, which could be very useful for social networking websites as a value-added service. We first formulate a new problem, named Willingness mAximization for Social grOup (WASO). This paper points out that the solution obtained by a greedy algorithm is likely to be trapped in a local optimal solution. Thus, we design a new randomized algorithm to effectively and efficiently solve the problem. Given the available computational budgets, the proposed algorithm is able to optimally allocate the resources and find a solution with an approximation ratio. We implement the proposed algorithm in Facebook, and the user study demonstrates that social groups obtained by the proposed algorithm significantly outperform the solutions manually configured by users. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An error bound of the multilevel adaptive cross approximation (MLACA), which is a multilevel version of the adaptive cross approximation-singular value decomposition (ACA-SVD), is rigorously derived. For compressing an off-diagonal submatrix of the method of moments (MoM) impedance matrix with a binary tree, the $L$-level MLACA includes L+1$ steps, and each step includes 2^L$ ACA-SVD decompositions. If the relative Frobenius norm error of the ACA-SVD used in the MLACA is smaller than \varepsilon $, the rigorous proof in this communication shows that the relative Frobenius norm error of the L. In practical applications, the error bound of the MLACA can be approximated as \varepsilon (L + 1)$, because \varepsilon $ is always \ll 1$. The error upper bound can be used to control the accuracy of the MLACA. To ensure an error of the L$-level MLACA smaller than \varepsilon , which approximately equals {\varepsilon/{(L + 1)}} for practical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile crowdsensing leverages mobile devices (e.g., smart phones) and human mobility for pervasive information exploration and collection; it has been deemed as a promising paradigm that will revolutionize various research and application domains. Unfortunately, the practicality of mobile crowdsensing can be crippled due to the lack of incentive mechanisms that stimulate human participation. In this paper, we study incentive mechanisms for a novel Mobile Crowdsensing Scheduling (MCS) problem, where a mobile crowdsensing application owner announces a set of sensing tasks, then human users (carrying mobile devices) compete for the tasks based on their respective sensing costs and available time periods, and finally the owner schedules as well as pays the users to maximize its own sensing revenue under a certain budget. We prove that the MCS problem is NP-hard and propose polynomial-time approximation mechanisms for it. We also show that our approximation mechanisms (including both offline and online versions) achieve desirable game-theoretic properties, namely truthfulness and individual rationality, as well as \mathcal O(1) performance ratios. Finally, we conduct extensive simulations to demonstrate the correctness and effectiveness of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an algorithm, along with its implementation that finds T-optimal approximations of single-qubit Z-rotations using quantum circuits consisting of Clifford and T gates. Our algorithm is capable of handling errors in approximation down to size 10^-15 , resulting in the optimal single-qubit circuit designs required for implementation of scalable quantum algorithms. Our implementation along with the experimental results are available in the public domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the server provisioning problem for continuous Distributed Interactive Applications (DIAs) whose application states not only change because of the operations performed by participants, but also evolve along with the passing of time. We focus on finding the locations of servers for hosting continuous DIAs, with the goals of optimizing the interactivity performance while fulfilling the consistency and fairness requirements. We show that the server provisioning problem is challenging by presenting its NP-hardness and non-approximability results under several conditions. We propose two efficient server placement algorithms and analyze their approximation ratios. The approximation ratio of the proposed M-Better algorithm is quite close to a lower bound for any polynomial-time algorithm. We also conduct experimental evaluations to compare the proposed algorithms with several baseline server placements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A convolved two-level hidden Markov model is defined, with convolved observations as the top layer, continuous responses as the hidden middle layer, and categorical variables following a Markov chain as the hidden bottom layer. The model parameters include the transition probabilities of the Markov chain, response means and variances, and the convolution kernel and error variance. The focus of this study is on categorical deconvolution of the observations into the hidden bottom categorical layer when the transition probability parameters defining the Markov chain transition matrix are unknown. The inversion is cast in a Bayesian setting where the solution is represented by an approximate posterior model. Three algorithms, all of them based on the approximate model, for inference on the unknown parameters are defined and discussed. The inference techniques are compared in two empirical studies and in a seismic case study from a petroleum reservoir offshore Norway. We conclude that an approximate expectation-maximization algorithm, appearing as a generalized Baum–Welch algorithm, is preferable if point parameter estimates and marginal maximum a posterior class predictions are required. If uncertainty quantifications are also required, a more computationally demanding Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm must be used. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We propose an efficient optimization algorithm to select a subset of training data as the inducing set for sparse Gaussian process regression. Previous methods either use different objective functions for inducing set and hyperparameter selection, or else optimize the inducing set by gradient-based continuous optimization. The former approaches are harder to interpret and suboptimal, whereas the latter cannot be applied to discrete input domains or to kernel functions that are not differentiable with respect to the input. The algorithm proposed in this work estimates an inducing set and the hyperparameters using a single objective. It can be used to optimize either the marginal likelihood or a variational free energy. Space and time complexity are linear in training set size, and the algorithm can be applied to large regression problems on discrete or continuous domains. Empirical evaluation shows state-of-art performance in discrete cases, competitive prediction results as well as a favorable trade-off between training and test time in continuous cases. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers the problem of identifying all locations of subtrees in a large tree or in a large collection of trees that are similar to a specified pattern tree, where all trees are assumed to be rooted and node-labeled. The tree edit distance is a widely-used measure of tree (dis-)similarity, but is NP-hard to compute for unordered trees. To cope with this issue, we propose a new similarity measure which extends the concept of unordered tree inclusion by taking the costs of insertion and substitution operations on the pattern tree into account, and present an algorithm for computing it. Our algorithm has the same time complexity as the original one for unordered tree inclusion, i.e., it runs in $O(T_1T_2)$ time, where $T_1$ and $T_2$ denote the pattern tree and the text tree, respectively, when the maximum outdegree of $T_1$ is bounded by a constant. Our experimental evaluation using synthetic and real datasets confirms that the proposed algorithm is fast and scalable and very useful for bibliographic matching, which is a typical entity resolution problem for tree-structured data. Furthermore, we extend our algorithm to also allow a constant number of deletion operations on $T_1$ while still running in $O(T_1T_2)$ time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a graphical model for representing networks of stochastic processes, the minimal generative model graph. It is based on reduced factorizations of the joint distribution over time. We show that under appropriate conditions, it is unique and consistent with another type of graphical model, the directed information graph, which is based on a generalization of Granger causality. We demonstrate how directed information quantifies Granger causality in a particular sequential prediction setting. We also develop efficient methods to estimate the topological structure from data that obviate estimating the joint statistics. One algorithm assumes upper bounds on the degrees and uses the minimal dimension statistics necessary. In the event that the upper bounds are not valid, the resulting graph is nonetheless an optimal approximation in terms of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. Another algorithm uses near-minimal dimension statistics when no bounds are known, but the distribution satisfies a certain criterion. Analogous to how structure learning algorithms for undirected graphical models use mutual information estimates, these algorithms use directed information estimates. We characterize the sample-complexity of two plug-in directed information estimators and obtain confidence intervals. For the setting when point estimates are unreliable, we propose an algorithm that uses confidence intervals to identify the best approximation that is robust to estimation error. Last, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms through the analysis of both synthetic data and real data from the Twitter network. In the latter case, we identify which news sources influence users in the network by merely analyzing tweet times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]