15,411 research outputs found
Detecting Communities under Differential Privacy
Complex networks usually expose community structure with groups of nodes
sharing many links with the other nodes in the same group and relatively few
with the nodes of the rest. This feature captures valuable information about
the organization and even the evolution of the network. Over the last decade, a
great number of algorithms for community detection have been proposed to deal
with the increasingly complex networks. However, the problem of doing this in a
private manner is rarely considered. In this paper, we solve this problem under
differential privacy, a prominent privacy concept for releasing private data.
We analyze the major challenges behind the problem and propose several schemes
to tackle them from two perspectives: input perturbation and algorithm
perturbation. We choose Louvain method as the back-end community detection for
input perturbation schemes and propose the method LouvainDP which runs Louvain
algorithm on a noisy super-graph. For algorithm perturbation, we design
ModDivisive using exponential mechanism with the modularity as the score. We
have thoroughly evaluated our techniques on real graphs of different sizes and
verified their outperformance over the state-of-the-art
Efficient Computation of Multiple Density-Based Clustering Hierarchies
HDBSCAN*, a state-of-the-art density-based hierarchical clustering method,
produces a hierarchical organization of clusters in a dataset w.r.t. a
parameter mpts. While the performance of HDBSCAN* is robust w.r.t. mpts in the
sense that a small change in mpts typically leads to only a small or no change
in the clustering structure, choosing a "good" mpts value can be challenging:
depending on the data distribution, a high or low value for mpts may be more
appropriate, and certain data clusters may reveal themselves at different
values of mpts. To explore results for a range of mpts values, however, one has
to run HDBSCAN* for each value in the range independently, which is
computationally inefficient. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach to
compute all HDBSCAN* hierarchies for a range of mpts values by replacing the
graph used by HDBSCAN* with a much smaller graph that is guaranteed to contain
the required information. An extensive experimental evaluation shows that with
our approach one can obtain over one hundred hierarchies for the computational
cost equivalent to running HDBSCAN* about 2 times.Comment: A short version of this paper appears at IEEE ICDM 2017. Corrected
typos. Revised abstrac
Localization in Unstructured Environments: Towards Autonomous Robots in Forests with Delaunay Triangulation
Autonomous harvesting and transportation is a long-term goal of the forest
industry. One of the main challenges is the accurate localization of both
vehicles and trees in a forest. Forests are unstructured environments where it
is difficult to find a group of significant landmarks for current fast
feature-based place recognition algorithms. This paper proposes a novel
approach where local observations are matched to a general tree map using the
Delaunay triangularization as the representation format. Instead of point cloud
based matching methods, we utilize a topology-based method. First, tree trunk
positions are registered at a prior run done by a forest harvester. Second, the
resulting map is Delaunay triangularized. Third, a local submap of the
autonomous robot is registered, triangularized and matched using triangular
similarity maximization to estimate the position of the robot. We test our
method on a dataset accumulated from a forestry site at Lieksa, Finland. A
total length of 2100\,m of harvester path was recorded by an industrial
harvester with a 3D laser scanner and a geolocation unit fixed to the frame.
Our experiments show a 12\,cm s.t.d. in the location accuracy and with
real-time data processing for speeds not exceeding 0.5\,m/s. The accuracy and
speed limit is realistic during forest operations
Training Gaussian Mixture Models at Scale via Coresets
How can we train a statistical mixture model on a massive data set? In this
work we show how to construct coresets for mixtures of Gaussians. A coreset is
a weighted subset of the data, which guarantees that models fitting the coreset
also provide a good fit for the original data set. We show that, perhaps
surprisingly, Gaussian mixtures admit coresets of size polynomial in dimension
and the number of mixture components, while being independent of the data set
size. Hence, one can harness computationally intensive algorithms to compute a
good approximation on a significantly smaller data set. More importantly, such
coresets can be efficiently constructed both in distributed and streaming
settings and do not impose restrictions on the data generating process. Our
results rely on a novel reduction of statistical estimation to problems in
computational geometry and new combinatorial complexity results for mixtures of
Gaussians. Empirical evaluation on several real-world datasets suggests that
our coreset-based approach enables significant reduction in training-time with
negligible approximation error
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