32,935 research outputs found
The Multiscale Morphology Filter: Identifying and Extracting Spatial Patterns in the Galaxy Distribution
We present here a new method, MMF, for automatically segmenting cosmic
structure into its basic components: clusters, filaments, and walls.
Importantly, the segmentation is scale independent, so all structures are
identified without prejudice as to their size or shape. The method is ideally
suited for extracting catalogues of clusters, walls, and filaments from samples
of galaxies in redshift surveys or from particles in cosmological N-body
simulations: it makes no prior assumptions about the scale or shape of the
structures.}Comment: Replacement with higher resolution figures. 28 pages, 17 figures. For
Full Resolution Version see:
http://www.astro.rug.nl/~weygaert/tim1publication/miguelmmf.pd
Data Assimilation: A Mathematical Introduction
These notes provide a systematic mathematical treatment of the subject of
data assimilation
Implicit particle methods and their connection with variational data assimilation
The implicit particle filter is a sequential Monte Carlo method for data
assimilation that guides the particles to the high-probability regions via a
sequence of steps that includes minimizations. We present a new and more
general derivation of this approach and extend the method to particle smoothing
as well as to data assimilation for perfect models. We show that the
minimizations required by implicit particle methods are similar to the ones one
encounters in variational data assimilation and explore the connection of
implicit particle methods with variational data assimilation. In particular, we
argue that existing variational codes can be converted into implicit particle
methods at a low cost, often yielding better estimates, that are also equipped
with quantitative measures of the uncertainty. A detailed example is presented
Parameter estimation by implicit sampling
Implicit sampling is a weighted sampling method that is used in data
assimilation, where one sequentially updates estimates of the state of a
stochastic model based on a stream of noisy or incomplete data. Here we
describe how to use implicit sampling in parameter estimation problems, where
the goal is to find parameters of a numerical model, e.g.~a partial
differential equation (PDE), such that the output of the numerical model is
compatible with (noisy) data. We use the Bayesian approach to parameter
estimation, in which a posterior probability density describes the probability
of the parameter conditioned on data and compute an empirical estimate of this
posterior with implicit sampling. Our approach generates independent samples,
so that some of the practical difficulties one encounters with Markov Chain
Monte Carlo methods, e.g.~burn-in time or correlations among dependent samples,
are avoided. We describe a new implementation of implicit sampling for
parameter estimation problems that makes use of multiple grids (coarse to fine)
and BFGS optimization coupled to adjoint equations for the required gradient
calculations. The implementation is "dimension independent", in the sense that
a well-defined finite dimensional subspace is sampled as the mesh used for
discretization of the PDE is refined. We illustrate the algorithm with an
example where we estimate a diffusion coefficient in an elliptic equation from
sparse and noisy pressure measurements. In the example, dimension\slash
mesh-independence is achieved via Karhunen-Lo\`{e}ve expansions
Stochastic filtering via L2 projection on mixture manifolds with computer algorithms and numerical examples
We examine some differential geometric approaches to finding approximate
solutions to the continuous time nonlinear filtering problem. Our primary focus
is a new projection method for the optimal filter infinite dimensional
Stochastic Partial Differential Equation (SPDE), based on the direct L2 metric
and on a family of normal mixtures. We compare this method to earlier
projection methods based on the Hellinger distance/Fisher metric and
exponential families, and we compare the L2 mixture projection filter with a
particle method with the same number of parameters, using the Levy metric. We
prove that for a simple choice of the mixture manifold the L2 mixture
projection filter coincides with a Galerkin method, whereas for more general
mixture manifolds the equivalence does not hold and the L2 mixture filter is
more general. We study particular systems that may illustrate the advantages of
this new filter over other algorithms when comparing outputs with the optimal
filter. We finally consider a specific software design that is suited for a
numerically efficient implementation of this filter and provide numerical
examples.Comment: Updated and expanded version published in the Journal reference
below. Preprint updates: January 2016 (v3) added projection of Zakai Equation
and difference with projection of Kushner-Stratonovich (section 4.1). August
2014 (v2) added Galerkin equivalence proof (Section 5) to the March 2013 (v1)
versio
Real-time, long-term hand tracking with unsupervised initialization
This paper proposes a complete tracking system that is capable of long-term, real-time hand tracking with unsupervised initialization and error recovery. Initialization is steered by a three-stage hand detector, combining spatial and temporal information. Hand hypotheses are generated by a random forest detector in the first stage, whereas a simple linear classifier eliminates false positive detections. Resulting detections are tracked by particle filters that gather temporal statistics in order to make a final decision. The detector is scale and rotation invariant, and can detect hands in any pose in unconstrained environments. The resulting discriminative confidence map is combined with a generative particle filter based observation model to enable robust, long-term hand tracking in real-time. The proposed solution is evaluated using several challenging, publicly available datasets, and is shown to clearly outperform other state of the art object tracking methods
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