Income Distributions and Decomposable Divergence Measures

Inequality indices (i) evaluate the divergence between the income distribution and the hypothetical situation where all individuals have the mean income and (ii) are unambiguously reduced by a Pigou-Dalton progressive transfer. This paper proposes a new approach to evaluate the divergence between any two income distributions, where the second one can be a reference distribution for the first. In the case where the reference distribution is perfectly egalitarian, and uniquely in this case, we assume (i) that any progressive transfer reduces the divergence and (ii) that the divergence can be additively separated between inequality and efficiency loss. We characterize the unique class of decomposable divergence measures consistent with these views, and we derive the associated relative (resp. absolute) subclasses, which express constant relative (resp. absolute) inequality aversion. This approach extends the generalized entropy studied in inequality measurement.Inequality measures, progressive transfers, generalized entropy, information theory, Bregman divergences

Fake View Analytics in Online Video Services

Online video-on-demand(VoD) services invariably maintain a view count for each video they serve, and it has become an important currency for various stakeholders, from viewers, to content owners, advertizers, and the online service providers themselves. There is often significant financial incentive to use a robot (or a botnet) to artificially create fake views. How can we detect the fake views? Can we detect them (and stop them) using online algorithms as they occur? What is the extent of fake views with current VoD service providers? These are the questions we study in the paper. We develop some algorithms and show that they are quite effective for this problem.Comment: 25 pages, 15 figure

The Design of Arbitrage-Free Data Pricing Schemes

Motivated by a growing market that involves buying and selling data over the web, we study pricing schemes that assign value to queries issued over a database. Previous work studied pricing mechanisms that compute the price of a query by extending a data seller's explicit prices on certain queries, or investigated the properties that a pricing function should exhibit without detailing a generic construction. In this work, we present a formal framework for pricing queries over data that allows the construction of general families of pricing functions, with the main goal of avoiding arbitrage. We consider two types of pricing schemes: instance-independent schemes, where the price depends only on the structure of the query, and answer-dependent schemes, where the price also depends on the query output. Our main result is a complete characterization of the structure of pricing functions in both settings, by relating it to properties of a function over a lattice. We use our characterization, together with information-theoretic methods, to construct a variety of arbitrage-free pricing functions. Finally, we discuss various tradeoffs in the design space and present techniques for efficient computation of the proposed pricing functions.Comment: full pape

Collaborative OLAP with Tag Clouds: Web 2.0 OLAP Formalism and Experimental Evaluation

Increasingly, business projects are ephemeral. New Business Intelligence tools must support ad-lib data sources and quick perusal. Meanwhile, tag clouds are a popular community-driven visualization technique. Hence, we investigate tag-cloud views with support for OLAP operations such as roll-ups, slices, dices, clustering, and drill-downs. As a case study, we implemented an application where users can upload data and immediately navigate through its ad hoc dimensions. To support social networking, views can be easily shared and embedded in other Web sites. Algorithmically, our tag-cloud views are approximate range top-k queries over spontaneous data cubes. We present experimental evidence that iceberg cuboids provide adequate online approximations. We benchmark several browser-oblivious tag-cloud layout optimizations.Comment: Software at https://github.com/lemire/OLAPTagClou

Events and Controversies: Influences of a Shocking News Event on Information Seeking

It has been suggested that online search and retrieval contributes to the intellectual isolation of users within their preexisting ideologies, where people's prior views are strengthened and alternative viewpoints are infrequently encountered. This so-called "filter bubble" phenomenon has been called out as especially detrimental when it comes to dialog among people on controversial, emotionally charged topics, such as the labeling of genetically modified food, the right to bear arms, the death penalty, and online privacy. We seek to identify and study information-seeking behavior and access to alternative versus reinforcing viewpoints following shocking, emotional, and large-scale news events. We choose for a case study to analyze search and browsing on gun control/rights, a strongly polarizing topic for both citizens and leaders of the United States. We study the period of time preceding and following a mass shooting to understand how its occurrence, follow-on discussions, and debate may have been linked to changes in the patterns of searching and browsing. We employ information-theoretic measures to quantify the diversity of Web domains of interest to users and understand the browsing patterns of users. We use these measures to characterize the influence of news events on these web search and browsing patterns

Entropy-difference based stereo error detection

Stereo depth estimation is error-prone; hence, effective error detection methods are desirable. Most such existing methods depend on characteristics of the stereo matching cost curve, making them unduly dependent on functional details of the matching algorithm. As a remedy, we propose a novel error detection approach based solely on the input image and its depth map. Our assumption is that, entropy of any point on an image will be significantly higher than the entropy of its corresponding point on the image's depth map. In this paper, we propose a confidence measure, Entropy-Difference (ED) for stereo depth estimates and a binary classification method to identify incorrect depths. Experiments on the Middlebury dataset show the effectiveness of our method. Our proposed stereo confidence measure outperforms 17 existing measures in all aspects except occlusion detection. Established metrics such as precision, accuracy, recall, and area-under-curve are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method