89,839 research outputs found
Large scale probabilistic available bandwidth estimation
The common utilization-based definition of available bandwidth and many of
the existing tools to estimate it suffer from several important weaknesses: i)
most tools report a point estimate of average available bandwidth over a
measurement interval and do not provide a confidence interval; ii) the commonly
adopted models used to relate the available bandwidth metric to the measured
data are invalid in almost all practical scenarios; iii) existing tools do not
scale well and are not suited to the task of multi-path estimation in
large-scale networks; iv) almost all tools use ad-hoc techniques to address
measurement noise; and v) tools do not provide enough flexibility in terms of
accuracy, overhead, latency and reliability to adapt to the requirements of
various applications. In this paper we propose a new definition for available
bandwidth and a novel framework that addresses these issues. We define
probabilistic available bandwidth (PAB) as the largest input rate at which we
can send a traffic flow along a path while achieving, with specified
probability, an output rate that is almost as large as the input rate. PAB is
expressed directly in terms of the measurable output rate and includes
adjustable parameters that allow the user to adapt to different application
requirements. Our probabilistic framework to estimate network-wide
probabilistic available bandwidth is based on packet trains, Bayesian
inference, factor graphs and active sampling. We deploy our tool on the
PlanetLab network and our results show that we can obtain accurate estimates
with a much smaller measurement overhead compared to existing approaches.Comment: Submitted to Computer Network
Physics-guided Residual Learning for Probabilistic Power Flow Analysis
Probabilistic power flow (PPF) analysis is critical to power system operation
and planning. PPF aims at obtaining probabilistic descriptions of the state of
the system with stochastic power injections (e.g., renewable power generation
and load demands). Given power injection samples, numerical methods repeatedly
run classic power flow (PF) solvers to find the voltage phasors. However, the
computational burden is heavy due to many PF simulations. Recently, many
data-driven based PF solvers have been proposed due to the availability of
sufficient measurements. This paper proposes a novel neural network (NN)
framework which can accurately approximate the non-linear AC-PF equations. The
trained NN works as a rapid PF solver, significantly reducing the heavy
computational burden in classic PPF analysis. Inspired by residual learning, we
develop a fully connected linear layer between the input and output in the
multilayer perceptron (MLP). To improve the NN training convergence, we propose
three schemes to initialize the NN weights of the shortcut connection layer
based on the physical characteristics of AC-PF equations. Specifically, two
model-based methods require the knowledge of system topology and line
parameters, while the purely data-driven method can work without power grid
parameters. Numerical tests on five benchmark systems show that our proposed
approaches achieve higher accuracy in estimating voltage phasors than existing
methods. In addition, three meticulously designed initialization schemes help
the NN training process converge faster, which is appealing under limited
training time.Comment: Probabilistic power flow, data-driven, residual learning, neural
network, physics-guided initializatio
Visual Dynamics: Probabilistic Future Frame Synthesis via Cross Convolutional Networks
We study the problem of synthesizing a number of likely future frames from a
single input image. In contrast to traditional methods, which have tackled this
problem in a deterministic or non-parametric way, we propose a novel approach
that models future frames in a probabilistic manner. Our probabilistic model
makes it possible for us to sample and synthesize many possible future frames
from a single input image. Future frame synthesis is challenging, as it
involves low- and high-level image and motion understanding. We propose a novel
network structure, namely a Cross Convolutional Network to aid in synthesizing
future frames; this network structure encodes image and motion information as
feature maps and convolutional kernels, respectively. In experiments, our model
performs well on synthetic data, such as 2D shapes and animated game sprites,
as well as on real-wold videos. We also show that our model can be applied to
tasks such as visual analogy-making, and present an analysis of the learned
network representations.Comment: The first two authors contributed equally to this wor
Multivariate decoding of brain images using ordinal regression.
Neuroimaging data are increasingly being used to predict potential outcomes or groupings, such as clinical severity, drug dose response, and transitional illness states. In these examples, the variable (target) we want to predict is ordinal in nature. Conventional classification schemes assume that the targets are nominal and hence ignore their ranked nature, whereas parametric and/or non-parametric regression models enforce a metric notion of distance between classes. Here, we propose a novel, alternative multivariate approach that overcomes these limitations - whole brain probabilistic ordinal regression using a Gaussian process framework. We applied this technique to two data sets of pharmacological neuroimaging data from healthy volunteers. The first study was designed to investigate the effect of ketamine on brain activity and its subsequent modulation with two compounds - lamotrigine and risperidone. The second study investigates the effect of scopolamine on cerebral blood flow and its modulation using donepezil. We compared ordinal regression to multi-class classification schemes and metric regression. Considering the modulation of ketamine with lamotrigine, we found that ordinal regression significantly outperformed multi-class classification and metric regression in terms of accuracy and mean absolute error. However, for risperidone ordinal regression significantly outperformed metric regression but performed similarly to multi-class classification both in terms of accuracy and mean absolute error. For the scopolamine data set, ordinal regression was found to outperform both multi-class and metric regression techniques considering the regional cerebral blood flow in the anterior cingulate cortex. Ordinal regression was thus the only method that performed well in all cases. Our results indicate the potential of an ordinal regression approach for neuroimaging data while providing a fully probabilistic framework with elegant approaches for model selection
Visual Dynamics: Stochastic Future Generation via Layered Cross Convolutional Networks
We study the problem of synthesizing a number of likely future frames from a
single input image. In contrast to traditional methods that have tackled this
problem in a deterministic or non-parametric way, we propose to model future
frames in a probabilistic manner. Our probabilistic model makes it possible for
us to sample and synthesize many possible future frames from a single input
image. To synthesize realistic movement of objects, we propose a novel network
structure, namely a Cross Convolutional Network; this network encodes image and
motion information as feature maps and convolutional kernels, respectively. In
experiments, our model performs well on synthetic data, such as 2D shapes and
animated game sprites, and on real-world video frames. We present analyses of
the learned network representations, showing it is implicitly learning a
compact encoding of object appearance and motion. We also demonstrate a few of
its applications, including visual analogy-making and video extrapolation.Comment: Journal preprint of arXiv:1607.02586 (IEEE TPAMI, 2019). The first
two authors contributed equally to this work. Project page:
http://visualdynamics.csail.mit.ed
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