4,175 research outputs found
Inference in particle tracking experiments by passing messages between images
Methods to extract information from the tracking of mobile objects/particles
have broad interest in biological and physical sciences. Techniques based on
simple criteria of proximity in time-consecutive snapshots are useful to
identify the trajectories of the particles. However, they become problematic as
the motility and/or the density of the particles increases due to uncertainties
on the trajectories that particles followed during the images' acquisition
time. Here, we report an efficient method for learning parameters of the
dynamics of the particles from their positions in time-consecutive images. Our
algorithm belongs to the class of message-passing algorithms, known in computer
science, information theory and statistical physics as Belief Propagation (BP).
The algorithm is distributed, thus allowing parallel implementation suitable
for computations on multiple machines without significant inter-machine
overhead. We test our method on the model example of particle tracking in
turbulent flows, which is particularly challenging due to the strong transport
that those flows produce. Our numerical experiments show that the BP algorithm
compares in quality with exact Markov Chain Monte-Carlo algorithms, yet BP is
far superior in speed. We also suggest and analyze a random-distance model that
provides theoretical justification for BP accuracy. Methods developed here
systematically formulate the problem of particle tracking and provide fast and
reliable tools for its extensive range of applications.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figure
Attacking Shortest Paths by Cutting Edges
Identifying shortest paths between nodes in a network is a common graph
analysis problem that is important for many applications involving routing of
resources. An adversary that can manipulate the graph structure could alter
traffic patterns to gain some benefit (e.g., make more money by directing
traffic to a toll road). This paper presents the Force Path Cut problem, in
which an adversary removes edges from a graph to make a particular path the
shortest between its terminal nodes. We prove that this problem is APX-hard,
but introduce PATHATTACK, a polynomial-time approximation algorithm that
guarantees a solution within a logarithmic factor of the optimal value. In
addition, we introduce the Force Edge Cut and Force Node Cut problems, in which
the adversary targets a particular edge or node, respectively, rather than an
entire path. We derive a nonconvex optimization formulation for these problems,
and derive a heuristic algorithm that uses PATHATTACK as a subroutine. We
demonstrate all of these algorithms on a diverse set of real and synthetic
networks, illustrating the network types that benefit most from the proposed
algorithms.Comment: 37 pages, 11 figures; Extended version of arXiv:2104.0376
Penalized Likelihood Methods for Estimation of Sparse High Dimensional Directed Acyclic Graphs
Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are commonly used to represent causal
relationships among random variables in graphical models. Applications of these
models arise in the study of physical, as well as biological systems, where
directed edges between nodes represent the influence of components of the
system on each other. The general problem of estimating DAGs from observed data
is computationally NP-hard, Moreover two directed graphs may be observationally
equivalent. When the nodes exhibit a natural ordering, the problem of
estimating directed graphs reduces to the problem of estimating the structure
of the network. In this paper, we propose a penalized likelihood approach that
directly estimates the adjacency matrix of DAGs. Both lasso and adaptive lasso
penalties are considered and an efficient algorithm is proposed for estimation
of high dimensional DAGs. We study variable selection consistency of the two
penalties when the number of variables grows to infinity with the sample size.
We show that although lasso can only consistently estimate the true network
under stringent assumptions, adaptive lasso achieves this task under mild
regularity conditions. The performance of the proposed methods is compared to
alternative methods in simulated, as well as real, data examples.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figure
The Inverse 1-Median Problem on Tree Networks with Variable Real Edge Lengths
Location problems exist in the real world and they mainly deal with finding optimal locations for facilities in a network, such as net servers, hospitals, and shopping centers. The inverse location problem is also often met in practice and has been intensively investigated in the literature. As a typical inverse location problem, the inverse 1-median problem on tree networks with variable real edge lengths is discussed in this paper, which is to modify the edge lengths at minimum total cost such that a given vertex becomes a 1-median of the tree network with respect to the new edge lengths. First, this problem is shown to be solvable in linear time with variable nonnegative edge lengths. For the case when negative edge lengths are allowable, the NP-hardness is proved under Hamming distance, and strongly polynomial time algorithms are presented under l1 and l∞ norms, respectively
A New Measure for Analyzing and Fusing Sequences of Objects
This work is related to the combinatorial data analysis problem of seriation used for data visualization and exploratory analysis. Seriation re-sequences the data, so that more similar samples or objects appear closer together, whereas dissimilar ones are further apart. Despite the large number of current algorithms to realize such re-sequencing, there has not been a systematic way for analyzing the resulting sequences, comparing them, or fusing them to obtain a single unifying one. We propose a new positional proximity measure that evaluates the similarity of two arbitrary sequences based on their agreement on pairwise positional information of the sequenced objects. Furthermore, we present various statistical properties of this measure as well as its normalized version modeled as an instance of the generalized correlation coefficient. Based on this measure, we define a new procedure for consensus seriation that fuses multiple arbitrary sequences based on a quadratic assignment problem formulation and an efficient way of approximating its solution. We also derive theoretical links with other permutation distance functions and present their associated combinatorial optimization forms for consensus tasks. The utility of the proposed contributions is demonstrated through the comparison and fusion of multiple seriation algorithms we have implemented, using many real-world datasets from different application domains
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