Codes, orderings, and partial words

Codes play an important role in the study of the combinatorics of words. In this paper, we introduce pcodes that play a role in the study of combinatorics ofpartial words. Partial words are strings over a finite alphabet that may contain a number of “do not know” symbols. Pcodes are defined in terms of the compatibility relation that considers two strings over the same alphabet that are equal except for a number of insertions and/or deletions of symbols. We describe various ways of defining and analyzing pcodes. In particular, many pcodes can be obtained as antichains with respect to certain partial orderings. Using a technique related to dominoes, we show that the pcode property is decidable

Advances in Learning Bayesian Networks of Bounded Treewidth

This work presents novel algorithms for learning Bayesian network structures with bounded treewidth. Both exact and approximate methods are developed. The exact method combines mixed-integer linear programming formulations for structure learning and treewidth computation. The approximate method consists in uniformly sampling $k$-trees (maximal graphs of treewidth $k$), and subsequently selecting, exactly or approximately, the best structure whose moral graph is a subgraph of that $k$-tree. Some properties of these methods are discussed and proven. The approaches are empirically compared to each other and to a state-of-the-art method for learning bounded treewidth structures on a collection of public data sets with up to 100 variables. The experiments show that our exact algorithm outperforms the state of the art, and that the approximate approach is fairly accurate.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figures, 3 table

A scattering of orders

A linear ordering is scattered if it does not contain a copy of the rationals. Hausdorff characterised the class of scattered linear orderings as the least family of linear orderings that includes the class $\mathcal B$ of well-orderings and reversed well-orderings, and is closed under lexicographic sums with index set in $\mathcal B$. More generally, we say that a partial ordering is $\kappa$-scattered if it does not contain a copy of any $\kappa$-dense linear ordering. We prove analogues of Hausdorff's result for $\kappa$-scattered linear orderings, and for $\kappa$-scattered partial orderings satisfying the finite antichain condition. We also study the $\mathbb{Q}_\kappa$-scattered partial orderings, where $\mathbb{Q}_\kappa$ is the saturated linear ordering of cardinality $\kappa$, and a partial ordering is $\mathbb{Q}_\kappa$-scattered when it embeds no copy of $\mathbb{Q}_\kappa$. We classify the $\mathbb{Q}_\kappa$-scattered partial orderings with the finite antichain condition relative to the $\mathbb{Q}_\kappa$-scattered linear orderings. We show that in general the property of being a $\mathbb{Q}_\kappa$-scattered linear ordering is not absolute, and argue that this makes a classification theorem for such orderings hard to achieve without extra set-theoretic assumptions

Re-proving Channel Polarization Theorems: An Extremality and Robustness Analysis

The general subject considered in this thesis is a recently discovered coding technique, polar coding, which is used to construct a class of error correction codes with unique properties. In his ground-breaking work, Ar{\i}kan proved that this class of codes, called polar codes, achieve the symmetric capacity --- the mutual information evaluated at the uniform input distribution ---of any stationary binary discrete memoryless channel with low complexity encoders and decoders requiring in the order of $O(N\log N)$ operations in the block-length $N$. This discovery settled the long standing open problem left by Shannon of finding low complexity codes achieving the channel capacity. Polar coding settled an open problem in information theory, yet opened plenty of challenging problems that need to be addressed. A significant part of this thesis is dedicated to advancing the knowledge about this technique in two directions. The first one provides a better understanding of polar coding by generalizing some of the existing results and discussing their implications, and the second one studies the robustness of the theory over communication models introducing various forms of uncertainty or variations into the probabilistic model of the channel.Comment: Preview of my PhD Thesis, EPFL, Lausanne, 2014. For the full version, see http://people.epfl.ch/mine.alsan/publication