15,512 research outputs found
Causal modeling and prediction over event streams
In recent years, there has been a growing need for causal analysis in many modern stream applications such as web page click monitoring, patient health care monitoring, stock market prediction, electric grid monitoring, and network intrusion detection systems. The detection and prediction of causal relationships help in monitoring, planning, decision making, and prevention of unwanted consequences.
An event stream is a continuous unbounded sequence of event instances. The availability of a large amount of continuous data along with high data throughput poses new challenges related to causal modeling over event streams, such as (1) the need for incremental causal inference for the unbounded data, (2) the need for fast causal inference for the high throughput data, and (3) the need for real-time prediction of effects from the events seen so far in the continuous event streams.
This dissertation research addresses these three problems by focusing on utilizing temporal precedence information which is readily available in event streams: (1) an incremental causal model to update the causal network incrementally with the arrival of a new batch of events instead of storing the complete set of events seen so far and building the causal network from scratch with those stored events, (2) a fast causal model to speed up the causal network inference time, and (3) a real-time top-k predictive query processing mechanism to find the most probable k effects with the highest scores by proposing a run-time causal inference mechanism which addresses cyclic causal relationships.
In this dissertation, the motivation, related work, proposed approaches, and the results are presented in each of the three problems
Supervised Learning in Spiking Neural Networks with Phase-Change Memory Synapses
Spiking neural networks (SNN) are artificial computational models that have
been inspired by the brain's ability to naturally encode and process
information in the time domain. The added temporal dimension is believed to
render them more computationally efficient than the conventional artificial
neural networks, though their full computational capabilities are yet to be
explored. Recently, computational memory architectures based on non-volatile
memory crossbar arrays have shown great promise to implement parallel
computations in artificial and spiking neural networks. In this work, we
experimentally demonstrate for the first time, the feasibility to realize
high-performance event-driven in-situ supervised learning systems using
nanoscale and stochastic phase-change synapses. Our SNN is trained to recognize
audio signals of alphabets encoded using spikes in the time domain and to
generate spike trains at precise time instances to represent the pixel
intensities of their corresponding images. Moreover, with a statistical model
capturing the experimental behavior of the devices, we investigate
architectural and systems-level solutions for improving the training and
inference performance of our computational memory-based system. Combining the
computational potential of supervised SNNs with the parallel compute power of
computational memory, the work paves the way for next-generation of efficient
brain-inspired systems
Detecting and Explaining Causes From Text For a Time Series Event
Explaining underlying causes or effects about events is a challenging but
valuable task. We define a novel problem of generating explanations of a time
series event by (1) searching cause and effect relationships of the time series
with textual data and (2) constructing a connecting chain between them to
generate an explanation. To detect causal features from text, we propose a
novel method based on the Granger causality of time series between features
extracted from text such as N-grams, topics, sentiments, and their composition.
The generation of the sequence of causal entities requires a commonsense
causative knowledge base with efficient reasoning. To ensure good
interpretability and appropriate lexical usage we combine symbolic and neural
representations, using a neural reasoning algorithm trained on commonsense
causal tuples to predict the next cause step. Our quantitative and human
analysis show empirical evidence that our method successfully extracts
meaningful causality relationships between time series with textual features
and generates appropriate explanation between them.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 201
A Causal And-Or Graph Model for Visibility Fluent Reasoning in Tracking Interacting Objects
Tracking humans that are interacting with the other subjects or environment
remains unsolved in visual tracking, because the visibility of the human of
interests in videos is unknown and might vary over time. In particular, it is
still difficult for state-of-the-art human trackers to recover complete human
trajectories in crowded scenes with frequent human interactions. In this work,
we consider the visibility status of a subject as a fluent variable, whose
change is mostly attributed to the subject's interaction with the surrounding,
e.g., crossing behind another object, entering a building, or getting into a
vehicle, etc. We introduce a Causal And-Or Graph (C-AOG) to represent the
causal-effect relations between an object's visibility fluent and its
activities, and develop a probabilistic graph model to jointly reason the
visibility fluent change (e.g., from visible to invisible) and track humans in
videos. We formulate this joint task as an iterative search of a feasible
causal graph structure that enables fast search algorithm, e.g., dynamic
programming method. We apply the proposed method on challenging video sequences
to evaluate its capabilities of estimating visibility fluent changes of
subjects and tracking subjects of interests over time. Results with comparisons
demonstrate that our method outperforms the alternative trackers and can
recover complete trajectories of humans in complicated scenarios with frequent
human interactions.Comment: accepted by CVPR 201
DxNAT - Deep Neural Networks for Explaining Non-Recurring Traffic Congestion
Non-recurring traffic congestion is caused by temporary disruptions, such as
accidents, sports games, adverse weather, etc. We use data related to real-time
traffic speed, jam factors (a traffic congestion indicator), and events
collected over a year from Nashville, TN to train a multi-layered deep neural
network. The traffic dataset contains over 900 million data records. The
network is thereafter used to classify the real-time data and identify
anomalous operations. Compared with traditional approaches of using statistical
or machine learning techniques, our model reaches an accuracy of 98.73 percent
when identifying traffic congestion caused by football games. Our approach
first encodes the traffic across a region as a scaled image. After that the
image data from different timestamps is fused with event- and time-related
data. Then a crossover operator is used as a data augmentation method to
generate training datasets with more balanced classes. Finally, we use the
receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis to tune the sensitivity of the
classifier. We present the analysis of the training time and the inference time
separately
Local Tomography of Large Networks under the Low-Observability Regime
This article studies the problem of reconstructing the topology of a network
of interacting agents via observations of the state-evolution of the agents. We
focus on the large-scale network setting with the additional constraint of
observations, where only a small fraction of the agents can be
feasibly observed. The goal is to infer the underlying subnetwork of
interactions and we refer to this problem as . In order to
study the large-scale setting, we adopt a proper stochastic formulation where
the unobserved part of the network is modeled as an Erd\"{o}s-R\'enyi random
graph, while the observable subnetwork is left arbitrary. The main result of
this work is establishing that, under this setting, local tomography is
actually possible with high probability, provided that certain conditions on
the network model are met (such as stability and symmetry of the network
combination matrix). Remarkably, such conclusion is established under the
- , where the cardinality of the observable
subnetwork is fixed, while the size of the overall network scales to infinity.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor
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