30,385 research outputs found
Intuitive Analyses via Drift Theory
Humans are bad with probabilities, and the analysis of randomized algorithms
offers many pitfalls for the human mind. Drift theory is an intuitive tool for
reasoning about random processes. It allows turning expected stepwise changes
into expected first-hitting times. While drift theory is used extensively by
the community studying randomized search heuristics, it has seen hardly any
applications outside of this field, in spite of many research questions which
can be formulated as first-hitting times.
We state the most useful drift theorems and demonstrate their use for various
randomized processes, including approximating vertex cover, the coupon
collector process, a random sorting algorithm, and the Moran process. Finally,
we consider processes without expected stepwise change and give a lemma based
on drift theory applicable in such scenarios without drift. We use this tool
for the analysis of the gambler's ruin process, for a coloring algorithm, for
an algorithm for 2-SAT, and for a version of the Moran process without bias
Can we identify non-stationary dynamics of trial-to-trial variability?"
Identifying sources of the apparent variability in non-stationary scenarios is a fundamental problem in many biological data analysis settings. For instance, neurophysiological responses to the same task often vary from each repetition of the same experiment (trial) to the next. The origin and functional role of this observed variability is one of the fundamental questions in neuroscience. The nature of such trial-to-trial dynamics however remains largely elusive to current data analysis approaches. A range of strategies have been proposed in modalities such as electro-encephalography but gaining a fundamental insight into latent sources of trial-to-trial variability in neural recordings is still a major challenge. In this paper, we present a proof-of-concept study to the analysis of trial-to-trial variability dynamics founded on non-autonomous dynamical systems. At this initial stage, we evaluate the capacity of a simple statistic based on the behaviour of trajectories in classification settings, the trajectory coherence, in order to identify trial-to-trial dynamics. First, we derive the conditions leading to observable changes in datasets generated by a compact dynamical system (the Duffing equation). This canonical system plays the role of a ubiquitous model of non-stationary supervised classification problems. Second, we estimate the coherence of class-trajectories in empirically reconstructed space of system states. We show how this analysis can discern variations attributable to non-autonomous deterministic processes from stochastic fluctuations. The analyses are benchmarked using simulated and two different real datasets which have been shown to exhibit attractor dynamics. As an illustrative example, we focused on the analysis of the rat's frontal cortex ensemble dynamics during a decision-making task. Results suggest that, in line with recent hypotheses, rather than internal noise, it is the deterministic trend which most likely underlies the observed trial-to-trial variability. Thus, the empirical tool developed within this study potentially allows us to infer the source of variability in in-vivo neural recordings
Information Rates of ASK-Based Molecular Communication in Fluid Media
This paper studies the capacity of molecular communications in fluid media,
where the information is encoded in the number of transmitted molecules in a
time-slot (amplitude shift keying). The propagation of molecules is governed by
random Brownian motion and the communication is in general subject to
inter-symbol interference (ISI). We first consider the case where ISI is
negligible and analyze the capacity and the capacity per unit cost of the
resulting discrete memoryless molecular channel and the effect of possible
practical constraints, such as limitations on peak and/or average number of
transmitted molecules per transmission. In the case with a constrained peak
molecular emission, we show that as the time-slot duration increases, the input
distribution achieving the capacity per channel use transitions from binary
inputs to a discrete uniform distribution. In this paper, we also analyze the
impact of ISI. Crucially, we account for the correlation that ISI induces
between channel output symbols. We derive an upper bound and two lower bounds
on the capacity in this setting. Using the input distribution obtained by an
extended Blahut-Arimoto algorithm, we maximize the lower bounds. Our results
show that, over a wide range of parameter values, the bounds are close.Comment: 31 pages, 8 figures, Accepted for publication on IEEE Transactions on
Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communication
The Right Mutation Strength for Multi-Valued Decision Variables
The most common representation in evolutionary computation are bit strings.
This is ideal to model binary decision variables, but less useful for variables
taking more values. With very little theoretical work existing on how to use
evolutionary algorithms for such optimization problems, we study the run time
of simple evolutionary algorithms on some OneMax-like functions defined over
. More precisely, we regard a variety of
problem classes requesting the component-wise minimization of the distance to
an unknown target vector . For such problems we see a crucial
difference in how we extend the standard-bit mutation operator to these
multi-valued domains. While it is natural to select each position of the
solution vector to be changed independently with probability , there are
various ways to then change such a position. If we change each selected
position to a random value different from the original one, we obtain an
expected run time of . If we change each selected position
by either or (random choice), the optimization time reduces to
. If we use a random mutation strength with probability inversely proportional to and change
the selected position by either or (random choice), then the
optimization time becomes , bringing down
the dependence on from linear to polylogarithmic. One of our results
depends on a new variant of the lower bounding multiplicative drift theorem.Comment: an extended abstract of this work is to appear at GECCO 201
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