46,816 research outputs found
Polca SARA - Full polarization, direction-dependent calibration and sparse imaging for radio interferometry
New generation of radio interferometers are envisaged to produce high
quality, high dynamic range Stokes images of the observed sky from the
corresponding under-sampled Fourier domain measurements. In practice, these
measurements are contaminated by the instrumental and atmospheric effects that
are well represented by Jones matrices, and are most often varying with
observation direction and time. These effects, usually unknown, act as a
limiting factor in achieving the required imaging performance and thus, their
calibration is crucial. To address this issue, we develop a global algorithm,
named Polca SARA, aiming to perform full polarization, direction-dependent
calibration and sparse imaging by employing a non-convex optimization
technique. In contrast with the existing approaches, the proposed method offers
global convergence guarantees and flexibility to incorporate sophisticated
priors to regularize the imaging as well as the calibration problem. Thus, we
adapt a polarimetric imaging specific method, enforcing the physical
polarization constraint along with a sparsity prior for the sought images. We
perform extensive simulation studies of the proposed algorithm. While
indicating the superior performance of polarization constraint based imaging,
the obtained results also highlight the importance of calibrating for
direction-dependent effects as well as for off-diagonal terms (denoting
polarization leakage) in the associated Jones matrices, without inclusion of
which the imaging quality deteriorates
Learning DNF Expressions from Fourier Spectrum
Since its introduction by Valiant in 1984, PAC learning of DNF expressions
remains one of the central problems in learning theory. We consider this
problem in the setting where the underlying distribution is uniform, or more
generally, a product distribution. Kalai, Samorodnitsky and Teng (2009) showed
that in this setting a DNF expression can be efficiently approximated from its
"heavy" low-degree Fourier coefficients alone. This is in contrast to previous
approaches where boosting was used and thus Fourier coefficients of the target
function modified by various distributions were needed. This property is
crucial for learning of DNF expressions over smoothed product distributions, a
learning model introduced by Kalai et al. (2009) and inspired by the seminal
smoothed analysis model of Spielman and Teng (2001).
We introduce a new approach to learning (or approximating) a polynomial
threshold functions which is based on creating a function with range [-1,1]
that approximately agrees with the unknown function on low-degree Fourier
coefficients. We then describe conditions under which this is sufficient for
learning polynomial threshold functions. Our approach yields a new, simple
algorithm for approximating any polynomial-size DNF expression from its "heavy"
low-degree Fourier coefficients alone. Our algorithm greatly simplifies the
proof of learnability of DNF expressions over smoothed product distributions.
We also describe an application of our algorithm to learning monotone DNF
expressions over product distributions. Building on the work of Servedio
(2001), we give an algorithm that runs in time \poly((s \cdot
\log{(s/\eps)})^{\log{(s/\eps)}}, n), where is the size of the target DNF
expression and \eps is the accuracy. This improves on \poly((s \cdot
\log{(ns/\eps)})^{\log{(s/\eps)} \cdot \log{(1/\eps)}}, n) bound of Servedio
(2001).Comment: Appears in Conference on Learning Theory (COLT) 201
Automatic Kalman-filter-based wavelet shrinkage denoising of 1D stellar spectra
We propose a non-parametric method to denoise 1D stellar spectra based on wavelet shrinkage followed by adaptive Kalman thresholding. Wavelet shrinkage denoising involves applying the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to the input signal, 'shrinking' certain frequency components in the transform domain, and then applying inverse DWT to the reduced components. The performance of this procedure is influenced by the choice of base wavelet, the number of decomposition levels, and the thresholding function. Typically, these parameters are chosen by 'trial and error', which can be strongly dependent on the properties of the data being denoised. We here introduce an adaptive Kalman-filter-based thresholding method that eliminates the need for choosing the number of decomposition levels. We use the 'Haar' wavelet basis, which we found to provide excellent filtering for 1D stellar spectra, at a low computational cost. We introduce various levels of Poisson noise into synthetic PHOENIX spectra, and test the performance of several common denoising methods against our own. It proves superior in terms of noise suppression and peak shape preservation. We expect it may also be of use in automatically and accurately filtering low signal-to-noise galaxy and quasar spectra obtained from surveys such as SDSS, Gaia, LSST, PESSTO, VANDELS, LEGA-C, and DESI
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