13,489 research outputs found
A Two-step Statistical Approach for Inferring Network Traffic Demands (Revises Technical Report BUCS-2003-003)
Accurate knowledge of traffic demands in a communication network enables or enhances a variety of traffic engineering and network management tasks of paramount importance for operational networks. Directly measuring a complete set of these demands is prohibitively expensive because of the huge amounts of data that must be collected and the performance impact that such measurements would impose on the regular behavior of the network. As a consequence, we must rely on statistical techniques to produce estimates of actual traffic demands from partial information. The performance of such techniques is however limited due to their reliance on limited information and the high amount of computations they incur, which limits their convergence behavior. In this paper we study a two-step approach for inferring network traffic demands. First we elaborate and evaluate a modeling approach for generating good starting points to be fed to iterative statistical inference techniques. We call these starting points informed priors since they are obtained using actual network information such as packet traces and SNMP link counts. Second we provide a very fast variant of the EM algorithm which extends its computation range, increasing its accuracy and decreasing its dependence on the quality of the starting point. Finally, we evaluate and compare alternative mechanisms for generating starting points and the convergence characteristics of our EM algorithm against a recently proposed Weighted Least Squares approach.National Science Foundation (ANI-0095988, EIA-0202067, ITR ANI-0205294
Nonparametric Feature Extraction from Dendrograms
We propose feature extraction from dendrograms in a nonparametric way. The
Minimax distance measures correspond to building a dendrogram with single
linkage criterion, with defining specific forms of a level function and a
distance function over that. Therefore, we extend this method to arbitrary
dendrograms. We develop a generalized framework wherein different distance
measures can be inferred from different types of dendrograms, level functions
and distance functions. Via an appropriate embedding, we compute a vector-based
representation of the inferred distances, in order to enable many numerical
machine learning algorithms to employ such distances. Then, to address the
model selection problem, we study the aggregation of different dendrogram-based
distances respectively in solution space and in representation space in the
spirit of deep representations. In the first approach, for example for the
clustering problem, we build a graph with positive and negative edge weights
according to the consistency of the clustering labels of different objects
among different solutions, in the context of ensemble methods. Then, we use an
efficient variant of correlation clustering to produce the final clusters. In
the second approach, we investigate the sequential combination of different
distances and features sequentially in the spirit of multi-layered
architectures to obtain the final features. Finally, we demonstrate the
effectiveness of our approach via several numerical studies
ACCAMS: Additive Co-Clustering to Approximate Matrices Succinctly
Matrix completion and approximation are popular tools to capture a user's
preferences for recommendation and to approximate missing data. Instead of
using low-rank factorization we take a drastically different approach, based on
the simple insight that an additive model of co-clusterings allows one to
approximate matrices efficiently. This allows us to build a concise model that,
per bit of model learned, significantly beats all factorization approaches to
matrix approximation. Even more surprisingly, we find that summing over small
co-clusterings is more effective in modeling matrices than classic
co-clustering, which uses just one large partitioning of the matrix.
Following Occam's razor principle suggests that the simple structure induced
by our model better captures the latent preferences and decision making
processes present in the real world than classic co-clustering or matrix
factorization. We provide an iterative minimization algorithm, a collapsed
Gibbs sampler, theoretical guarantees for matrix approximation, and excellent
empirical evidence for the efficacy of our approach. We achieve
state-of-the-art results on the Netflix problem with a fraction of the model
complexity.Comment: 22 pages, under review for conference publicatio
On the Effect of Semantically Enriched Context Models on Software Modularization
Many of the existing approaches for program comprehension rely on the
linguistic information found in source code, such as identifier names and
comments. Semantic clustering is one such technique for modularization of the
system that relies on the informal semantics of the program, encoded in the
vocabulary used in the source code. Treating the source code as a collection of
tokens loses the semantic information embedded within the identifiers. We try
to overcome this problem by introducing context models for source code
identifiers to obtain a semantic kernel, which can be used for both deriving
the topics that run through the system as well as their clustering. In the
first model, we abstract an identifier to its type representation and build on
this notion of context to construct contextual vector representation of the
source code. The second notion of context is defined based on the flow of data
between identifiers to represent a module as a dependency graph where the nodes
correspond to identifiers and the edges represent the data dependencies between
pairs of identifiers. We have applied our approach to 10 medium-sized open
source Java projects, and show that by introducing contexts for identifiers,
the quality of the modularization of the software systems is improved. Both of
the context models give results that are superior to the plain vector
representation of documents. In some cases, the authoritativeness of
decompositions is improved by 67%. Furthermore, a more detailed evaluation of
our approach on JEdit, an open source editor, demonstrates that inferred topics
through performing topic analysis on the contextual representations are more
meaningful compared to the plain representation of the documents. The proposed
approach in introducing a context model for source code identifiers paves the
way for building tools that support developers in program comprehension tasks
such as application and domain concept location, software modularization and
topic analysis
Recommended from our members
Semantic Concept Co-Occurrence Patterns for Image Annotation and Retrieval.
Describing visual image contents by semantic concepts is an effective and straightforward way to facilitate various high level applications. Inferring semantic concepts from low-level pictorial feature analysis is challenging due to the semantic gap problem, while manually labeling concepts is unwise because of a large number of images in both online and offline collections. In this paper, we present a novel approach to automatically generate intermediate image descriptors by exploiting concept co-occurrence patterns in the pre-labeled training set that renders it possible to depict complex scene images semantically. Our work is motivated by the fact that multiple concepts that frequently co-occur across images form patterns which could provide contextual cues for individual concept inference. We discover the co-occurrence patterns as hierarchical communities by graph modularity maximization in a network with nodes and edges representing concepts and co-occurrence relationships separately. A random walk process working on the inferred concept probabilities with the discovered co-occurrence patterns is applied to acquire the refined concept signature representation. Through experiments in automatic image annotation and semantic image retrieval on several challenging datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed concept co-occurrence patterns as well as the concept signature representation in comparison with state-of-the-art approaches
Reconstructing dynamical networks via feature ranking
Empirical data on real complex systems are becoming increasingly available.
Parallel to this is the need for new methods of reconstructing (inferring) the
topology of networks from time-resolved observations of their node-dynamics.
The methods based on physical insights often rely on strong assumptions about
the properties and dynamics of the scrutinized network. Here, we use the
insights from machine learning to design a new method of network reconstruction
that essentially makes no such assumptions. Specifically, we interpret the
available trajectories (data) as features, and use two independent feature
ranking approaches -- Random forest and RReliefF -- to rank the importance of
each node for predicting the value of each other node, which yields the
reconstructed adjacency matrix. We show that our method is fairly robust to
coupling strength, system size, trajectory length and noise. We also find that
the reconstruction quality strongly depends on the dynamical regime
- …