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Epidemiologists and social scientists have used the Network Scale-Up Method (NSUM) for over thirty years to estimate the size of a hidden sub-population within a social network. This method involves querying a subset of network nodes about the number of their neighbours belonging to the hidden sub-population. In general, NSUM assumes that the social network topology and the hidden sub-population distribution are well-behaved; hence, the NSUM estimate is close to the actual value. However, bounds on NSUM estimation errors have not been analytically proven. This paper provides analytical bounds on the error incurred by the two most popular NSUM estimators. These bounds assume that the queried nodes accurately provide their degree and the number of neighbors belonging to the hidden population. Our key findings are twofold. First, we show that when an adversary designs the network and places the hidden sub-population, then the estimate can be a factor of $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ off from the real value (in a network with $n$ nodes). Second, we also prove error bounds when the underlying network is randomly generated, showing that a small constant factor can be achieved with high probability using samples of logarithmic size $O(\log{n})$. We present improved analytical bounds for Erdos-Renyi and Scale-Free networks. Our theoretical analysis is supported by an extensive set of numerical experiments designed to determine the effect of the sample size on the accuracy of the estimates in both synthetic and real networks.

In this paper we investigate a power law coupling Higgs inflationary model in which the background geometry is determined by the Palatini's variational principle. The geometrical symmetries of the background geometry determine the invariant form of the action of the model and the background geometry resulted is of the Weyl-integrable type. The invariant action results also invariant under the $U(1)$ group, which in general is not compatible with the Weyl group of invariance of the background geometry. However, we found compatibility conditions between the geometrical and physical symmetries of the action in the strong coupling limit. We found that if we start with a non-minimally coupled to gravity action, when we impose the congruence between the both groups of symmetries we end with an invariant action of the scalar-tensor type. We obtain a nearly scale invariant power spectrum for the inflaton fluctuations for certain values of some parameters of the model. Also we obtain va\-lues for the tensor to scalar ratio in agreement with PLANCK and BICEP observational data: $r<0.032$., Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures

Strong stability, defined by bounds that decay not only over time but also with the number of impulses, has been established as a requirement to ensure robustness properties for impulsive systems with respect to inputs or disturbances. Most existing results, however, only consider weak stability, where the bounds only decay with time. In this paper, we provide a method for calculating the maximum overshoot and the decay rate for strong global uniform exponential stability bounds for nonlinear switched impulsive systems. We consider the scenario of mode-constrained switching where not all transitions between subsystems are allowed, and where subsystems may exhibit unstable dynamics in the flow and/or jump maps. Based on direct and reverse mode-dependent average dwell-time and activation-time constraints, we derive stability bounds that can be improved by considering longer switching sequences for computation. We provide an example that shows how the results can be employed to ensure the stability robustness of nonlinear systems that admit a global state weak linearization., Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures

An example of a time-invariant time-delay system that is uniformly globally attractive and exponentially stable, hence forward complete, but whose reachability sets from bounded initial conditions are not bounded over compact time intervals is provided. This gives a negative answer to two current conjectures by showing that (i) forward completeness is not equivalent to robust forward completeness (i.e. boundedness of reachability sets) and (ii) global asymptotic stability is not equivalent to uniform global asymptotic stability. In addition, a novel characterization of robust forward completeness for systems having a finite number of discrete delays is provided. This characterization relates robust forward completeness of the time-delay system with the forward completeness of an associated nondelayed finite-dimensional system., Comment: Submitted to Automatica. Print ISSN: 0005-1098, Online ISSN: 1873-2836

Indirect surveys, in which respondents provide information about other people they know, have been proposed for estimating (nowcasting) the size of a \emph{hidden population} where privacy is important or the hidden population is hard to reach. Examples include estimating casualties in an earthquake, conditions among female sex workers, and the prevalence of drug use and infectious diseases. The Network Scale-up Method (NSUM) is the classical approach to developing estimates from indirect surveys, but it was designed for one-shot surveys. Further, it requires certain assumptions and asking for or estimating the number of individuals in each respondent's network. In recent years, surveys have been increasingly deployed online and can collect data continuously (e.g., COVID-19 surveys on Facebook during much of the pandemic). Conventional NSUM can be applied to these scenarios by analyzing the data independently at each point in time, but this misses the opportunity of leveraging the temporal dimension. We propose to use the responses from indirect surveys collected over time and develop analytical tools (i) to prove that indirect surveys can provide better estimates for the trends of the hidden population over time, as compared to direct surveys and (ii) to identify appropriate temporal aggregations to improve the estimates. We demonstrate through extensive simulations that our approach outperforms traditional NSUM and direct surveying methods. We also empirically demonstrate the superiority of our approach on a real indirect survey dataset of COVID-19 cases., Comment: Accepted at AAAI 2024

In this paper we investigate tensor fluctuations of the metric at the end of a Higgs inflationary period in the context of a recently introduced complex geometrical scalar-tensor theory of gravity. In our model the Higgs field has a geometrical origin and the affine connection is determined by the Palatini's principle. Additionally, we consider an extra contribution to the tensor-fluctuations equation coming from the vacuum term in the energy momentum tensor associated to the Higgs field. The Higgs potential is rescaled by the non-canonicity function of the kinetic term of the field which is modified by the symmetry group of the background geometry. We obtain a nearly scale invariant spectrum and a scalar to tensor ratio in agreement with PLANCK 2018 cosmological results., Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures

For large classes of infinite-dimensional time-varying control systems, the equivalence between integral input-to-state stability (iISS) and the combination of global uniform asymptotic stability under zero input (0-GUAS) and uniformly bounded-energy input/bounded state (UBEBS) is established under a reasonable assumption of continuity of the trajectories with respect to the input, at the zero input. By particularizing to specific instances of infinite-dimensional systems, such as time-delay, or semilinear over Banach spaces, sufficient conditions are given in terms of the functions defining the dynamics. In addition, it is also shown that for semilinear systems whose nonlinear term satisfies an affine-in-the-state norm bound, it holds that iISS becomes equivalent to just 0-GUAS, a fact known to hold for bilinear systems. An additional important aspect is that the iISS notion considered is more general than the standard one., Comment: Submitted to SIAM J Control and Optimization

In this paper we obtain some cosmological solutions that describe the present period of accelerating expansion of the universe in the framework of a geometrical gauge scalar-tensor theory of gravity. The background geometry in the model is the Weyl integrable and we found a class of power law solutions for the Weyl scalar field when an invariant metric is employed in a power law expanding universe. We obtain a deceleration and an equation of state parameters in agreement with PLANCK 2018 observational data for some specific parameters of the model. The deceleration parameter tends asymptotically to $-1/2$., Comment: 9 pages, no figures

It is shown that impulsive systems of nonlinear, time-varying and/or switched form that allow a stable global state weak linearization are jointly input-to-state stable (ISS) under small inputs and integral ISS (iISS). The system is said to allow a global state weak linearization if its flow and jump equations can be written as a (time-varying, switched) linear part plus a (nonlinear) pertubation satisfying a bound of affine form on the state. This bound reduces to a linear form under zero input but does not force the system to be linear under zero input. The given results generalize and extend previously existing ones in many directions: (a) no (dwell-time or other) constraints are placed on the impulse-time sequence, (b) the system need not be linear under zero input, (c) existence of a (common) Lyapunov function is not required, (d) the perturbation bound need not be linear on the input., Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control