40,775 research outputs found
Concatenated Polar Codes
Polar codes have attracted much recent attention as the first codes with low
computational complexity that provably achieve optimal rate-regions for a large
class of information-theoretic problems. One significant drawback, however, is
that for current constructions the probability of error decays
sub-exponentially in the block-length (more detailed designs improve the
probability of error at the cost of significantly increased computational
complexity \cite{KorUS09}). In this work we show how the the classical idea of
code concatenation -- using "short" polar codes as inner codes and a
"high-rate" Reed-Solomon code as the outer code -- results in substantially
improved performance. In particular, code concatenation with a careful choice
of parameters boosts the rate of decay of the probability of error to almost
exponential in the block-length with essentially no loss in computational
complexity. We demonstrate such performance improvements for three sets of
information-theoretic problems -- a classical point-to-point channel coding
problem, a class of multiple-input multiple output channel coding problems, and
some network source coding problems
Code Construction and Decoding Algorithms for Semi-Quantitative Group Testing with Nonuniform Thresholds
We analyze a new group testing scheme, termed semi-quantitative group
testing, which may be viewed as a concatenation of an adder channel and a
discrete quantizer. Our focus is on non-uniform quantizers with arbitrary
thresholds. For the most general semi-quantitative group testing model, we
define three new families of sequences capturing the constraints on the code
design imposed by the choice of the thresholds. The sequences represent
extensions and generalizations of Bh and certain types of super-increasing and
lexicographically ordered sequences, and they lead to code structures amenable
for efficient recursive decoding. We describe the decoding methods and provide
an accompanying computational complexity and performance analysis
Some Applications of Coding Theory in Computational Complexity
Error-correcting codes and related combinatorial constructs play an important
role in several recent (and old) results in computational complexity theory. In
this paper we survey results on locally-testable and locally-decodable
error-correcting codes, and their applications to complexity theory and to
cryptography.
Locally decodable codes are error-correcting codes with sub-linear time
error-correcting algorithms. They are related to private information retrieval
(a type of cryptographic protocol), and they are used in average-case
complexity and to construct ``hard-core predicates'' for one-way permutations.
Locally testable codes are error-correcting codes with sub-linear time
error-detection algorithms, and they are the combinatorial core of
probabilistically checkable proofs
Communication Complexity and Secure Function Evaluation
We suggest two new methodologies for the design of efficient secure
protocols, that differ with respect to their underlying computational models.
In one methodology we utilize the communication complexity tree (or branching
for f and transform it into a secure protocol. In other words, "any function f
that can be computed using communication complexity c can be can be computed
securely using communication complexity that is polynomial in c and a security
parameter". The second methodology uses the circuit computing f, enhanced with
look-up tables as its underlying computational model. It is possible to
simulate any RAM machine in this model with polylogarithmic blowup. Hence it is
possible to start with a computation of f on a RAM machine and transform it
into a secure protocol.
We show many applications of these new methodologies resulting in protocols
efficient either in communication or in computation. In particular, we
exemplify a protocol for the "millionaires problem", where two participants
want to compare their values but reveal no other information. Our protocol is
more efficient than previously known ones in either communication or
computation
Scalable k-Means Clustering via Lightweight Coresets
Coresets are compact representations of data sets such that models trained on
a coreset are provably competitive with models trained on the full data set. As
such, they have been successfully used to scale up clustering models to massive
data sets. While existing approaches generally only allow for multiplicative
approximation errors, we propose a novel notion of lightweight coresets that
allows for both multiplicative and additive errors. We provide a single
algorithm to construct lightweight coresets for k-means clustering as well as
soft and hard Bregman clustering. The algorithm is substantially faster than
existing constructions, embarrassingly parallel, and the resulting coresets are
smaller. We further show that the proposed approach naturally generalizes to
statistical k-means clustering and that, compared to existing results, it can
be used to compute smaller summaries for empirical risk minimization. In
extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms
existing data summarization strategies in practice.Comment: To appear in the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on
Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD
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