6,824 research outputs found
A Density-Based Approach to the Retrieval of Top-K Spatial Textual Clusters
Keyword-based web queries with local intent retrieve web content that is
relevant to supplied keywords and that represent points of interest that are
near the query location. Two broad categories of such queries exist. The first
encompasses queries that retrieve single spatial web objects that each satisfy
the query arguments. Most proposals belong to this category. The second
category, to which this paper's proposal belongs, encompasses queries that
support exploratory user behavior and retrieve sets of objects that represent
regions of space that may be of interest to the user. Specifically, the paper
proposes a new type of query, namely the top-k spatial textual clusters (k-STC)
query that returns the top-k clusters that (i) are located the closest to a
given query location, (ii) contain the most relevant objects with regard to
given query keywords, and (iii) have an object density that exceeds a given
threshold. To compute this query, we propose a basic algorithm that relies on
on-line density-based clustering and exploits an early stop condition. To
improve the response time, we design an advanced approach that includes three
techniques: (i) an object skipping rule, (ii) spatially gridded posting lists,
and (iii) a fast range query algorithm. An empirical study on real data
demonstrates that the paper's proposals offer scalability and are capable of
excellent performance
Efficient Data Collection in Multimedia Vehicular Sensing Platforms
Vehicles provide an ideal platform for urban sensing applications, as they
can be equipped with all kinds of sensing devices that can continuously monitor
the environment around the travelling vehicle. In this work we are particularly
concerned with the use of vehicles as building blocks of a multimedia mobile
sensor system able to capture camera snapshots of the streets to support
traffic monitoring and urban surveillance tasks. However, cameras are high
data-rate sensors while wireless infrastructures used for vehicular
communications may face performance constraints. Thus, data redundancy
mitigation is of paramount importance in such systems. To address this issue in
this paper we exploit sub-modular optimisation techniques to design efficient
and robust data collection schemes for multimedia vehicular sensor networks. We
also explore an alternative approach for data collection that operates on
longer time scales and relies only on localised decisions rather than
centralised computations. We use network simulations with realistic vehicular
mobility patterns to verify the performance gains of our proposed schemes
compared to a baseline solution that ignores data redundancy. Simulation
results show that our data collection techniques can ensure a more accurate
coverage of the road network while significantly reducing the amount of
transferred data
The IBMAP approach for Markov networks structure learning
In this work we consider the problem of learning the structure of Markov
networks from data. We present an approach for tackling this problem called
IBMAP, together with an efficient instantiation of the approach: the IBMAP-HC
algorithm, designed for avoiding important limitations of existing
independence-based algorithms. These algorithms proceed by performing
statistical independence tests on data, trusting completely the outcome of each
test. In practice tests may be incorrect, resulting in potential cascading
errors and the consequent reduction in the quality of the structures learned.
IBMAP contemplates this uncertainty in the outcome of the tests through a
probabilistic maximum-a-posteriori approach. The approach is instantiated in
the IBMAP-HC algorithm, a structure selection strategy that performs a
polynomial heuristic local search in the space of possible structures. We
present an extensive empirical evaluation on synthetic and real data, showing
that our algorithm outperforms significantly the current independence-based
algorithms, in terms of data efficiency and quality of learned structures, with
equivalent computational complexities. We also show the performance of IBMAP-HC
in a real-world application of knowledge discovery: EDAs, which are
evolutionary algorithms that use structure learning on each generation for
modeling the distribution of populations. The experiments show that when
IBMAP-HC is used to learn the structure, EDAs improve the convergence to the
optimum
Arriving on time: estimating travel time distributions on large-scale road networks
Most optimal routing problems focus on minimizing travel time or distance
traveled. Oftentimes, a more useful objective is to maximize the probability of
on-time arrival, which requires statistical distributions of travel times,
rather than just mean values. We propose a method to estimate travel time
distributions on large-scale road networks, using probe vehicle data collected
from GPS. We present a framework that works with large input of data, and
scales linearly with the size of the network. Leveraging the planar topology of
the graph, the method computes efficiently the time correlations between
neighboring streets. First, raw probe vehicle traces are compressed into pairs
of travel times and number of stops for each traversed road segment using a
`stop-and-go' algorithm developed for this work. The compressed data is then
used as input for training a path travel time model, which couples a Markov
model along with a Gaussian Markov random field. Finally, scalable inference
algorithms are developed for obtaining path travel time distributions from the
composite MM-GMRF model. We illustrate the accuracy and scalability of our
model on a 505,000 road link network spanning the San Francisco Bay Area
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