8,437 research outputs found
New results about multi-band uncertainty in Robust Optimization
"The Price of Robustness" by Bertsimas and Sim represented a breakthrough in
the development of a tractable robust counterpart of Linear Programming
Problems. However, the central modeling assumption that the deviation band of
each uncertain parameter is single may be too limitative in practice:
experience indeed suggests that the deviations distribute also internally to
the single band, so that getting a higher resolution by partitioning the band
into multiple sub-bands seems advisable. The critical aim of our work is to
close the knowledge gap about the adoption of a multi-band uncertainty set in
Robust Optimization: a general definition and intensive theoretical study of a
multi-band model are actually still missing. Our new developments have been
also strongly inspired and encouraged by our industrial partners, which have
been interested in getting a better modeling of arbitrary distributions, built
on historical data of the uncertainty affecting the considered real-world
problems. In this paper, we study the robust counterpart of a Linear
Programming Problem with uncertain coefficient matrix, when a multi-band
uncertainty set is considered. We first show that the robust counterpart
corresponds to a compact LP formulation. Then we investigate the problem of
separating cuts imposing robustness and we show that the separation can be
efficiently operated by solving a min-cost flow problem. Finally, we test the
performance of our new approach to Robust Optimization on realistic instances
of a Wireless Network Design Problem subject to uncertainty.Comment: 15 pages. The present paper is a revised version of the one appeared
in the Proceedings of SEA 201
Constructing a no-reference H.264/AVC bitstream-based video quality metric using genetic programming-based symbolic regression
In order to ensure optimal quality of experience toward end users during video streaming, automatic video quality assessment becomes an important field-of-interest to video service providers. Objective video quality metrics try to estimate perceived quality with high accuracy and in an automated manner. In traditional approaches, these metrics model the complex properties of the human visual system. More recently, however, it has been shown that machine learning approaches can also yield competitive results. In this paper, we present a novel no-reference bitstream-based objective video quality metric that is constructed by genetic programming-based symbolic regression. A key benefit of this approach is that it calculates reliable white-box models that allow us to determine the importance of the parameters. Additionally, these models can provide human insight into the underlying principles of subjective video quality assessment. Numerical results show that perceived quality can be modeled with high accuracy using only parameters extracted from the received video bitstream
Community detection and stochastic block models: recent developments
The stochastic block model (SBM) is a random graph model with planted
clusters. It is widely employed as a canonical model to study clustering and
community detection, and provides generally a fertile ground to study the
statistical and computational tradeoffs that arise in network and data
sciences.
This note surveys the recent developments that establish the fundamental
limits for community detection in the SBM, both with respect to
information-theoretic and computational thresholds, and for various recovery
requirements such as exact, partial and weak recovery (a.k.a., detection). The
main results discussed are the phase transitions for exact recovery at the
Chernoff-Hellinger threshold, the phase transition for weak recovery at the
Kesten-Stigum threshold, the optimal distortion-SNR tradeoff for partial
recovery, the learning of the SBM parameters and the gap between
information-theoretic and computational thresholds.
The note also covers some of the algorithms developed in the quest of
achieving the limits, in particular two-round algorithms via graph-splitting,
semi-definite programming, linearized belief propagation, classical and
nonbacktracking spectral methods. A few open problems are also discussed
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