35,580 research outputs found
Network Inference from Co-Occurrences
The recovery of network structure from experimental data is a basic and
fundamental problem. Unfortunately, experimental data often do not directly
reveal structure due to inherent limitations such as imprecision in timing or
other observation mechanisms. We consider the problem of inferring network
structure in the form of a directed graph from co-occurrence observations. Each
observation arises from a transmission made over the network and indicates
which vertices carry the transmission without explicitly conveying their order
in the path. Without order information, there are an exponential number of
feasible graphs which agree with the observed data equally well. Yet, the basic
physical principles underlying most networks strongly suggest that all feasible
graphs are not equally likely. In particular, vertices that co-occur in many
observations are probably closely connected. Previous approaches to this
problem are based on ad hoc heuristics. We model the experimental observations
as independent realizations of a random walk on the underlying graph, subjected
to a random permutation which accounts for the lack of order information.
Treating the permutations as missing data, we derive an exact
expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for estimating the random walk
parameters. For long transmission paths the exact E-step may be computationally
intractable, so we also describe an efficient Monte Carlo EM (MCEM) algorithm
and derive conditions which ensure convergence of the MCEM algorithm with high
probability. Simulations and experiments with Internet measurements demonstrate
the promise of this approach.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. An extended
version is available as University of Wisconsin Technical Report ECE-06-
Active Learning of Multiple Source Multiple Destination Topologies
We consider the problem of inferring the topology of a network with
sources and receivers (hereafter referred to as an -by- network), by
sending probes between the sources and receivers. Prior work has shown that
this problem can be decomposed into two parts: first, infer smaller subnetwork
components (i.e., -by-'s or -by-'s) and then merge these components
to identify the -by- topology. In this paper, we focus on the second
part, which had previously received less attention in the literature. In
particular, we assume that a -by- topology is given and that all
-by- components can be queried and learned using end-to-end probes. The
problem is which -by-'s to query and how to merge them with the given
-by-, so as to exactly identify the -by- topology, and optimize a
number of performance metrics, including the number of queries (which directly
translates into measurement bandwidth), time complexity, and memory usage. We
provide a lower bound, , on the number of
-by-'s required by any active learning algorithm and propose two greedy
algorithms. The first algorithm follows the framework of multiple hypothesis
testing, in particular Generalized Binary Search (GBS), since our problem is
one of active learning, from -by- queries. The second algorithm is called
the Receiver Elimination Algorithm (REA) and follows a bottom-up approach: at
every step, it selects two receivers, queries the corresponding -by-, and
merges it with the given -by-; it requires exactly steps, which is
much less than all possible -by-'s. Simulation results
over synthetic and realistic topologies demonstrate that both algorithms
correctly identify the -by- topology and are near-optimal, but REA is
more efficient in practice
Marginal integration for nonparametric causal inference
We consider the problem of inferring the total causal effect of a single
variable intervention on a (response) variable of interest. We propose a
certain marginal integration regression technique for a very general class of
potentially nonlinear structural equation models (SEMs) with known structure,
or at least known superset of adjustment variables: we call the procedure
S-mint regression. We easily derive that it achieves the convergence rate as
for nonparametric regression: for example, single variable intervention effects
can be estimated with convergence rate assuming smoothness with
twice differentiable functions. Our result can also be seen as a major
robustness property with respect to model misspecification which goes much
beyond the notion of double robustness. Furthermore, when the structure of the
SEM is not known, we can estimate (the equivalence class of) the directed
acyclic graph corresponding to the SEM, and then proceed by using S-mint based
on these estimates. We empirically compare the S-mint regression method with
more classical approaches and argue that the former is indeed more robust, more
reliable and substantially simpler.Comment: 40 pages, 14 figure
Active Topology Inference using Network Coding
Our goal is to infer the topology of a network when (i) we can send probes
between sources and receivers at the edge of the network and (ii) intermediate
nodes can perform simple network coding operations, i.e., additions. Our key
intuition is that network coding introduces topology-dependent correlation in
the observations at the receivers, which can be exploited to infer the
topology. For undirected tree topologies, we design hierarchical clustering
algorithms, building on our prior work. For directed acyclic graphs (DAGs),
first we decompose the topology into a number of two-source, two-receiver
(2-by-2) subnetwork components and then we merge these components to
reconstruct the topology. Our approach for DAGs builds on prior work on
tomography, and improves upon it by employing network coding to accurately
distinguish among all different 2-by-2 components. We evaluate our algorithms
through simulation of a number of realistic topologies and compare them to
active tomographic techniques without network coding. We also make connections
between our approach and alternatives, including passive inference, traceroute,
and packet marking
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