A Review of Bayesian Methods in Electronic Design Automation

The utilization of Bayesian methods has been widely acknowledged as a viable solution for tackling various challenges in electronic integrated circuit (IC) design under stochastic process variation, including circuit performance modeling, yield/failure rate estimation, and circuit optimization. As the post-Moore era brings about new technologies (such as silicon photonics and quantum circuits), many of the associated issues there are similar to those encountered in electronic IC design and can be addressed using Bayesian methods. Motivated by this observation, we present a comprehensive review of Bayesian methods in electronic design automation (EDA). By doing so, we hope to equip researchers and designers with the ability to apply Bayesian methods in solving stochastic problems in electronic circuits and beyond.Comment: 24 pages, a draft version. We welcome comments and feedback, which can be sent to [email protected]

ISBIS 2016: Meeting on Statistics in Business and Industry

This Book includes the abstracts of the talks presented at the 2016 International Symposium on Business and Industrial Statistics, held at Barcelona, June 8-10, 2016, hosted at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - Barcelona TECH, by the Department of Statistics and Operations Research. The location of the meeting was at ETSEIB Building (Escola Tecnica Superior d'Enginyeria Industrial) at Avda Diagonal 647. The meeting organizers celebrated the continued success of ISBIS and ENBIS society, and the meeting draw together the international community of statisticians, both academics and industry professionals, who share the goal of making statistics the foundation for decision making in business and related applications. The Scientific Program Committee was constituted by: David Banks, Duke University Amílcar Oliveira, DCeT - Universidade Aberta and CEAUL Teresa A. Oliveira, DCeT - Universidade Aberta and CEAUL Nalini Ravishankar, University of Connecticut Xavier Tort Martorell, Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya, Barcelona TECH Martina Vandebroek, KU Leuven Vincenzo Esposito Vinzi, ESSEC Business Schoo

Boosting the concordance index for survival data - a unified framework to derive and evaluate biomarker combinations

The development of molecular signatures for the prediction of time-to-event outcomes is a methodologically challenging task in bioinformatics and biostatistics. Although there are numerous approaches for the derivation of marker combinations and their evaluation, the underlying methodology often suffers from the problem that different optimization criteria are mixed during the feature selection, estimation and evaluation steps. This might result in marker combinations that are only suboptimal regarding the evaluation criterion of interest. To address this issue, we propose a unified framework to derive and evaluate biomarker combinations. Our approach is based on the concordance index for time-to-event data, which is a non-parametric measure to quantify the discrimatory power of a prediction rule. Specifically, we propose a component-wise boosting algorithm that results in linear biomarker combinations that are optimal with respect to a smoothed version of the concordance index. We investigate the performance of our algorithm in a large-scale simulation study and in two molecular data sets for the prediction of survival in breast cancer patients. Our numerical results show that the new approach is not only methodologically sound but can also lead to a higher discriminatory power than traditional approaches for the derivation of gene signatures.Comment: revised manuscript - added simulation study, additional result

Ridge Regression Approach to Color Constancy

This thesis presents the work on color constancy and its application in the field of computer vision. Color constancy is a phenomena of representing (visualizing) the reflectance properties of the scene independent of the illumination spectrum. The motivation behind this work is two folds:The primary motivation is to seek ‘consistency and stability’ in color reproduction and algorithm performance respectively because color is used as one of the important features in many computer vision applications; therefore consistency of the color features is essential for high application success. Second motivation is to reduce ‘computational complexity’ without sacrificing the primary motivation.This work presents machine learning approach to color constancy. An empirical model is developed from the training data. Neural network and support vector machine are two prominent nonlinear learning theories. The work on support vector machine based color constancy shows its superior performance over neural networks based color constancy in terms of stability. But support vector machine is time consuming method. Alternative approach to support vectormachine, is a simple, fast and analytically solvable linear modeling technique known as ‘Ridge regression’. It learns the dependency between the surface reflectance and illumination from a presented training sample of data. Ridge regression provides answer to the two fold motivation behind this work, i.e., stable and computationally simple approach. The proposed algorithms, ‘Support vector machine’ and ‘Ridge regression’ involves three step processes: First, an input matrix constructed from the preprocessed training data set is trained toobtain a trained model. Second, test images are presented to the trained model to obtain the chromaticity estimate of the illuminants present in the testing images. Finally, linear diagonal transformation is performed to obtain the color corrected image. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms on both calibrated and uncalibrated data set in comparison to the methods discussed in literature review. Finally, thesis concludes with a complete discussion and summary on comparison between the proposed approaches and other algorithms

The Fate of Haloacetonitriles in Drinking Waters

The fate of HANs in drinking waters from their precursors in natural waters to their degradation products in consumers’ tap were systematically investigated in this study. Combined amino acids were proved reactive with chlorine to form DCAN under typical drinking water conditions. However, the rate of DCAN formation from bound aspartyl residues was much slower compared to free aspartic acid. The key to DCAN formation from combined amino acids was a chlorine-induced peptide degradation process, which slowly degraded the peptide backbone to continuously produce reactive amine functional groups at the N-terminal end. Particularly, when an N-terminal aspartyl residue is chlorinated, it will form an N-chloroimine, which can undergo C-C cleavage to remove a cyanoacetic acid from the peptide structure. This cyanoacetic acid will then transform to DCAN as an essential intermediate precursor. Simultaneous to their continuous formation, HANs were found to be chemically unstable and can undergo considerable decomposition via several types of degradation reactions. The rate of HAN loss generally increased with increasing pH but varied among different HAN analogues depending on the nature of their halogenated substituents. Additionally, free chlorine was shown to be an important facilitator and HAN degradation was accelerated in its presence. Perhaps most importantly, a mathematical kinetic model was established for seven chlorinated and brominated HAN species and their second-order hydrolysis and chlorination reaction rate constants were estimated using a Bayesian modeling framework, so that their lifetimes under typical sets of drinking water conditions can be quantitatively predicted As HANs degrade, they leave other reaction products in their place. In the absence of chlorine, HANs decomposed to form the corresponding HAMs as reaction intermediates and HAAs as endpoint products. When chlorine was present, a group of previously unreported compounds, the N-Cl-HAMs were proved to be the HAN chlorination intermediates. However, N-Cl-HAMs are often misidentified in chlorinated drinking waters in the form of HAMs because the nitrogen-bound chlorine in N-Cl-HAMs is highly labile and thus can be readily dechlorinated by common reducing agents during sample preservation. N-Cl-HAMs are weakly acidic and they exhibited very high stability in water under a wide range of pH conditions without the presence of chlorine. On the other hand, it can undergo acid-catalyzed chlorination by hypochlorous acid to form the corresponding DCAA. Lastly, an analytical method using ultra performance liquid chromatography (UPLC)-quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (qTOF) was developed for a family of seven N-Cl-HAMs. Combined with solid phase extraction, the occurrence of N-Cl-DCAM and its two brominated analogues (i.e., N-Cl-BCAM and N-Cl-DBAM) in real tap waters was quantitatively determined for the first time

Nonlinear Stochastic Filtering for Online State of Charge and Remaining Useful Life Estimation of Lithium-ion Battery

Battery state monitoring is one of the key techniques in Battery Management System (BMS). Accurate estimation can help to improve the system performance and to prolong the battery lifetime. The main challenges for the state online estimation of Li-ion batteries are the flat characteristic of open circuit voltage (OCV) with the function of the state of charge. Hence, the focus of this thesis study is to estimation of the state of charge (SOC) of Li-ion with high accuracy, more robustness. A 2nd order RC equivalent circuit model is adapted to battery model for simulation, mathematical model analysis, and dynamics characteristic of battery study. Model parameters are identified with MATLAB battery model simulation. Although with more lumped RC loaders, the model is more accurate, high computation with a higher nonlinear function of output will be. So, a discrete state space model for the battery is developed. For a complex battery model with strong nonlinearity, Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method can be utilized to perform the on-line SOC estimation. An SMC integrates the Bayesian learning methods with sequential importance sampling. SMC approximate the posterior density function by a set of particles with associated weights, which is developed in MATLAB environment to estimate on-line SOC. A comparison is presented with Kalman Filtering and Extended Kalman Filtering to validated estimation results with SMC. Finally, the comparison results provide that SMC method is more accurate and robust then KF and EKF. Accurately prediction of Remaining Useful Life of Li-ion batteries is necessary to reliable system operation and monitoring the BMS. An empirical model for capacity degradation has been developed based on experimentally obtained capacity fade data. A nonlinear, non-Gaussian state space model is developed for empirical model. The obtained empirical model used in Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) framework is to update the on-line state and model parameters to make a prediction of remaining useful life of a Li-ion battery at various lifecycle

Construction of Multi-Dimensional Functions for Optimization of Additive-Manufacturing Process Parameters

The authors present a generic framework for parameter optimization of additive manufacturing (AM) processes, one tailored to a high-throughput experimental methodology (HTEM). Given the large number of parameters, which impact the quality of AM-metallic components, the authors advocate for partitioning the AM parameter set into stages (tiers), based on their relative importance, modeling one tier at a time until successful, and then systematically expanding the framework. The authors demonstrate how the construction of multi-dimensional functions, based on neural networks (NN), can be applied to successfully model relative densities and Rockwell hardness obtained from HTEM testing of the Inconel 718 superalloy fabricated, using a powder-bed approach. The authors analyze the input data set, assess its suitability for predictions, and show how to optimize the framework for the multi-dimensional functional construction, such as to obtain the highest degree of fit with the input data. The novelty of the research work entails the versatile and scalable NN framework presented, suitable for use in conjunction with HTEM, for the AM parameter optimization of superalloys, and beyond.Comment: Submitted to the Journal of Additive Manufacturing on November 10, 202