4,112 research outputs found
The Spine of the Cosmic Web
We present the SpineWeb framework for the topological analysis of the Cosmic
Web and the identification of its walls, filaments and cluster nodes. Based on
the watershed segmentation of the cosmic density field, the SpineWeb method
invokes the local adjacency properties of the boundaries between the watershed
basins to trace the critical points in the density field and the separatrices
defined by them. The separatrices are classified into walls and the spine, the
network of filaments and nodes in the matter distribution. Testing the method
with a heuristic Voronoi model yields outstanding results. Following the
discussion of the test results, we apply the SpineWeb method to a set of
cosmological N-body simulations. The latter illustrates the potential for
studying the structure and dynamics of the Cosmic Web.Comment: Accepted for publication HIGH-RES version:
http://skysrv.pha.jhu.edu/~miguel/SpineWeb
Networking - A Statistical Physics Perspective
Efficient networking has a substantial economic and societal impact in a
broad range of areas including transportation systems, wired and wireless
communications and a range of Internet applications. As transportation and
communication networks become increasingly more complex, the ever increasing
demand for congestion control, higher traffic capacity, quality of service,
robustness and reduced energy consumption require new tools and methods to meet
these conflicting requirements. The new methodology should serve for gaining
better understanding of the properties of networking systems at the macroscopic
level, as well as for the development of new principled optimization and
management algorithms at the microscopic level. Methods of statistical physics
seem best placed to provide new approaches as they have been developed
specifically to deal with non-linear large scale systems. This paper aims at
presenting an overview of tools and methods that have been developed within the
statistical physics community and that can be readily applied to address the
emerging problems in networking. These include diffusion processes, methods
from disordered systems and polymer physics, probabilistic inference, which
have direct relevance to network routing, file and frequency distribution, the
exploration of network structures and vulnerability, and various other
practical networking applications.Comment: (Review article) 71 pages, 14 figure
Algorithmic and Statistical Perspectives on Large-Scale Data Analysis
In recent years, ideas from statistics and scientific computing have begun to
interact in increasingly sophisticated and fruitful ways with ideas from
computer science and the theory of algorithms to aid in the development of
improved worst-case algorithms that are useful for large-scale scientific and
Internet data analysis problems. In this chapter, I will describe two recent
examples---one having to do with selecting good columns or features from a (DNA
Single Nucleotide Polymorphism) data matrix, and the other having to do with
selecting good clusters or communities from a data graph (representing a social
or information network)---that drew on ideas from both areas and that may serve
as a model for exploiting complementary algorithmic and statistical
perspectives in order to solve applied large-scale data analysis problems.Comment: 33 pages. To appear in Uwe Naumann and Olaf Schenk, editors,
"Combinatorial Scientific Computing," Chapman and Hall/CRC Press, 201
Flow-based Influence Graph Visual Summarization
Visually mining a large influence graph is appealing yet challenging. People
are amazed by pictures of newscasting graph on Twitter, engaged by hidden
citation networks in academics, nevertheless often troubled by the unpleasant
readability of the underlying visualization. Existing summarization methods
enhance the graph visualization with blocked views, but have adverse effect on
the latent influence structure. How can we visually summarize a large graph to
maximize influence flows? In particular, how can we illustrate the impact of an
individual node through the summarization? Can we maintain the appealing graph
metaphor while preserving both the overall influence pattern and fine
readability?
To answer these questions, we first formally define the influence graph
summarization problem. Second, we propose an end-to-end framework to solve the
new problem. Our method can not only highlight the flow-based influence
patterns in the visual summarization, but also inherently support rich graph
attributes. Last, we present a theoretic analysis and report our experiment
results. Both evidences demonstrate that our framework can effectively
approximate the proposed influence graph summarization objective while
outperforming previous methods in a typical scenario of visually mining
academic citation networks.Comment: to appear in IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM),
Shen Zhen, China, December 201
Identifying Infection Sources and Regions in Large Networks
Identifying the infection sources in a network, including the index cases
that introduce a contagious disease into a population network, the servers that
inject a computer virus into a computer network, or the individuals who started
a rumor in a social network, plays a critical role in limiting the damage
caused by the infection through timely quarantine of the sources. We consider
the problem of estimating the infection sources and the infection regions
(subsets of nodes infected by each source) in a network, based only on
knowledge of which nodes are infected and their connections, and when the
number of sources is unknown a priori. We derive estimators for the infection
sources and their infection regions based on approximations of the infection
sequences count. We prove that if there are at most two infection sources in a
geometric tree, our estimator identifies the true source or sources with
probability going to one as the number of infected nodes increases. When there
are more than two infection sources, and when the maximum possible number of
infection sources is known, we propose an algorithm with quadratic complexity
to estimate the actual number and identities of the infection sources.
Simulations on various kinds of networks, including tree networks, small-world
networks and real world power grid networks, and tests on two real data sets
are provided to verify the performance of our estimators
Orthogonal Graph Drawing with Inflexible Edges
We consider the problem of creating plane orthogonal drawings of 4-planar
graphs (planar graphs with maximum degree 4) with constraints on the number of
bends per edge. More precisely, we have a flexibility function assigning to
each edge a natural number , its flexibility. The problem
FlexDraw asks whether there exists an orthogonal drawing such that each edge
has at most bends. It is known that FlexDraw is NP-hard
if for every edge . On the other hand, FlexDraw can
be solved efficiently if and is trivial if
for every edge .
To close the gap between the NP-hardness for and the
efficient algorithm for , we investigate the
computational complexity of FlexDraw in case only few edges are inflexible
(i.e., have flexibility~). We show that for any FlexDraw
is NP-complete for instances with inflexible edges with
pairwise distance (including the case where they
induce a matching). On the other hand, we give an FPT-algorithm with running
time , where
is the time necessary to compute a maximum flow in a planar flow network with
multiple sources and sinks, and is the number of inflexible edges having at
least one endpoint of degree 4.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figure
Spatial optimization for land use allocation: accounting for sustainability concerns
Land-use allocation has long been an important area of research in regional science. Land-use patterns are fundamental to the functions of the biosphere, creating interactions that have substantial impacts on the environment. The spatial arrangement of land uses therefore has implications for activity and travel within a region. Balancing development, economic growth, social interaction, and the protection of the natural environment is at the heart of long-term sustainability. Since land-use patterns are spatially explicit in nature, planning and management necessarily must integrate geographical information system and spatial optimization in meaningful ways if efficiency goals and objectives are to be achieved. This article reviews spatial optimization approaches that have been relied upon to support land-use planning. Characteristics of sustainable land use, particularly compactness, contiguity, and compatibility, are discussed and how spatial optimization techniques have addressed these characteristics are detailed. In particular, objectives and constraints in spatial optimization approaches are examined
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