57,842 research outputs found
Causal Inference in Disease Spread across a Heterogeneous Social System
Diffusion processes are governed by external triggers and internal dynamics
in complex systems. Timely and cost-effective control of infectious disease
spread critically relies on uncovering the underlying diffusion mechanisms,
which is challenging due to invisible causality between events and their
time-evolving intensity. We infer causal relationships between infections and
quantify the reflexivity of a meta-population, the level of feedback on event
occurrences by its internal dynamics (likelihood of a regional outbreak
triggered by previous cases). These are enabled by our new proposed model, the
Latent Influence Point Process (LIPP) which models disease spread by
incorporating macro-level internal dynamics of meta-populations based on human
mobility. We analyse 15-year dengue cases in Queensland, Australia. From our
causal inference, outbreaks are more likely driven by statewide global
diffusion over time, leading to complex behavior of disease spread. In terms of
reflexivity, precursory growth and symmetric decline in populous regions is
attributed to slow but persistent feedback on preceding outbreaks via
inter-group dynamics, while abrupt growth but sharp decline in peripheral areas
is led by rapid but inconstant feedback via intra-group dynamics. Our proposed
model reveals probabilistic causal relationships between discrete events based
on intra- and inter-group dynamics and also covers direct and indirect
diffusion processes (contact-based and vector-borne disease transmissions).Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1711.0635
Value of Information in Feedback Control
In this article, we investigate the impact of information on networked
control systems, and illustrate how to quantify a fundamental property of
stochastic processes that can enrich our understanding about such systems. To
that end, we develop a theoretical framework for the joint design of an event
trigger and a controller in optimal event-triggered control. We cover two
distinct information patterns: perfect information and imperfect information.
In both cases, observations are available at the event trigger instantly, but
are transmitted to the controller sporadically with one-step delay. For each
information pattern, we characterize the optimal triggering policy and optimal
control policy such that the corresponding policy profile represents a Nash
equilibrium. Accordingly, we quantify the value of information
as the variation in the cost-to-go of the system given
an observation at time . Finally, we provide an algorithm for approximation
of the value of information, and synthesize a closed-form suboptimal triggering
policy with a performance guarantee that can readily be implemented
Recurrent Poisson Factorization for Temporal Recommendation
Poisson factorization is a probabilistic model of users and items for
recommendation systems, where the so-called implicit consumer data is modeled
by a factorized Poisson distribution. There are many variants of Poisson
factorization methods who show state-of-the-art performance on real-world
recommendation tasks. However, most of them do not explicitly take into account
the temporal behavior and the recurrent activities of users which is essential
to recommend the right item to the right user at the right time. In this paper,
we introduce Recurrent Poisson Factorization (RPF) framework that generalizes
the classical PF methods by utilizing a Poisson process for modeling the
implicit feedback. RPF treats time as a natural constituent of the model and
brings to the table a rich family of time-sensitive factorization models. To
elaborate, we instantiate several variants of RPF who are capable of handling
dynamic user preferences and item specification (DRPF), modeling the
social-aspect of product adoption (SRPF), and capturing the consumption
heterogeneity among users and items (HRPF). We also develop a variational
algorithm for approximate posterior inference that scales up to massive data
sets. Furthermore, we demonstrate RPF's superior performance over many
state-of-the-art methods on synthetic dataset, and large scale real-world
datasets on music streaming logs, and user-item interactions in M-Commerce
platforms.Comment: Submitted to KDD 2017 | Halifax, Nova Scotia - Canada - sigkdd, Codes
are available at https://github.com/AHosseini/RP
- …