Intercalation properties of context-free languages

Context-freedom of a language implies certain intercalation properties known as pumping or iteration lemmas. Although the question of a converse result for some of the properties has been studied, it is still not entirely clear how these properties are related, which are the stronger ones and which are weaker;Among the intercalation properties for context-free languages the better known are the general pumping conditions (generalized Ogden\u27s, Ogden\u27s and classic pumping conditions), Sokolowski-type conditions (Sokolowski\u27s and Extended Sokolowski\u27s conditions) and the Interchange condition. We present a rather systematic investigation of the relationships among these properties; it turns out that the three types of properties, namely pumping, Sokolowski-type and interchange, above are independent. However, the interchange condition is strictly stronger than the Sokolowski\u27s condition;Intercalation properties of some subclasses of context-free languages are also studied. We prove a pumping lemma and an Ogden\u27s lemma for nonterminal bounded languages and show that none of these two conditions is sufficient. We also investigate three of Igarashi\u27s pumping conditions for real-time deterministic context-free languages and show that these conditions are not sufficient either. Furthermore, we formulate linear analogues of the general pumping and interchange conditions and then compare them to the general context-free case. The results show that these conditions are also independent

On non-recursive trade-offs between finite-turn pushdown automata

It is shown that between one-turn pushdown automata (1-turn PDAs) and deterministic finite automata (DFAs) there will be savings concerning the size of description not bounded by any recursive function, so-called non-recursive tradeoffs. Considering the number of turns of the stack height as a consumable resource of PDAs, we can show the existence of non-recursive trade-offs between PDAs performing k+ 1 turns and k turns for k >= 1. Furthermore, non-recursive trade-offs are shown between arbitrary PDAs and PDAs which perform only a finite number of turns. Finally, several decidability questions are shown to be undecidable and not semidecidable

Accepting splicing systems with permitting and forbidding words

Abstract: In this paper we propose a generalization of the accepting splicingsystems introduced in Mitrana et al. (Theor Comput Sci 411:2414?2422,2010). More precisely, the input word is accepted as soon as a permittingword is obtained provided that no forbidding word has been obtained sofar, otherwise it is rejected. Note that in the new variant of acceptingsplicing system the input word is rejected if either no permitting word isever generated (like in Mitrana et al. in Theor Comput Sci 411:2414?2422,2010) or a forbidding word has been generated and no permitting wordhad been generated before. We investigate the computational power ofthe new variants of accepting splicing systems and the interrelationshipsamong them. We show that the new condition strictly increases thecomputational power of accepting splicing systems. Although there areregular languages that cannot be accepted by any of the splicing systemsconsidered here, the new variants can accept non-regular and even non-context-free languages, a situation that is not very common in the case of(extended) finite splicing systems without additional restrictions. We alsoshow that the smallest class of languages out of the four classes definedby accepting splicing systems is strictly included in the class of context-free languages. Solutions to a few decidability problems are immediatelyderived from the proof of this result

FORMULAE AND ASYMPTOTICS FOR COEFFICIENTS OF ALGEBRAIC FUNCTIONS

International audienc

Sparse selection in Cox models with functional predictors

This thesis investigates sparse selection in the Cox regression models with functional predictors. Interest in sparse selection with functional predictors (Lindquist and McKeague, 2009; McKeague and Sen, 2010) can arise in biomedical studies. A functional predictor is a predictor with a trajectory which is usually indexed by time, location or other factors. When the trajectory of a covariate is observed for each subject, and we need to identify a common "sensitive" point of these trajectories which drives outcome, the problem can be formulated as sparse selection with functional predictors. For example, we may locate a gene that is associated to cancer risk along a chromosome. The functional linear regression method is widely used for the analysis of functional covariates. However, it could lack interpretability. The method we develop in this thesis has straightforward interpretation since it relates the hazard to some sensitive components of functional covariates. The Cox regression model has been extensively studied in the analysis of time-to-event data. In this thesis, we extend it to allow for sparse selection with functional predictors. Using the partial likelihood as the criterion function, and following the 3-step procedure for M-estimators established in van der Vaart and Wellner (1996), the consistency, rate of convergence and asymptotic distribution are obtained for M-estimators of the sensitive point and the regression coefficients. In this thesis, to study these large sample properties of the estimators, the fractional Brownian motion assumption is posed for the trajectories for mathematical tractability. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the finite sample performance of the methods, and a way to construct the confidence interval for the location parameter, i.e., the sensitive point, is proposed. The proposed method is applied to an adult brain cancer study and a breast cancer study to find the sensitive point, here the locus of a chromosome, which is closely related to cancer mortality. Since the breast cancer data set has missing values, we investigate the impact of varying proportions of missingness in the data on the accuracy of our estimator as well