118,215 research outputs found
High-Dimensional Bayesian Geostatistics
With the growing capabilities of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and
user-friendly software, statisticians today routinely encounter geographically
referenced data containing observations from a large number of spatial
locations and time points. Over the last decade, hierarchical spatiotemporal
process models have become widely deployed statistical tools for researchers to
better understand the complex nature of spatial and temporal variability.
However, fitting hierarchical spatiotemporal models often involves expensive
matrix computations with complexity increasing in cubic order for the number of
spatial locations and temporal points. This renders such models unfeasible for
large data sets. This article offers a focused review of two methods for
constructing well-defined highly scalable spatiotemporal stochastic processes.
Both these processes can be used as "priors" for spatiotemporal random fields.
The first approach constructs a low-rank process operating on a
lower-dimensional subspace. The second approach constructs a Nearest-Neighbor
Gaussian Process (NNGP) that ensures sparse precision matrices for its finite
realizations. Both processes can be exploited as a scalable prior embedded
within a rich hierarchical modeling framework to deliver full Bayesian
inference. These approaches can be described as model-based solutions for big
spatiotemporal datasets. The models ensure that the algorithmic complexity has
floating point operations (flops), where the number of spatial
locations (per iteration). We compare these methods and provide some insight
into their methodological underpinnings
Development of Distributed Research Center for analysis of regional climatic and environmental changes
We present an approach and first results of a collaborative project being carried out by a joint team of researchers from the Institute of Monitoring of Climatic and Ecological Systems, Russia and Earth Systems Research Center UNH, USA. Its main objective is development of a hardware and software platform prototype of a Distributed Research Center (DRC) for monitoring and projecting of regional climatic and environmental changes in the Northern extratropical areas. The DRC should provide the specialists working in climate related sciences and decision-makers with accurate and detailed climatic characteristics for the selected area and reliable and affordable tools for their in-depth statistical analysis and studies of the effects of climate change. Within the framework of the project, new approaches to cloud processing and analysis of large geospatial datasets (big geospatial data) inherent to climate change studies are developed and deployed on technical platforms of both institutions. We discuss here the state of the art in this domain, describe web based information-computational systems developed by the partners, justify the methods chosen to reach the project goal, and briefly list the results obtained so far
A Deep-structured Conditional Random Field Model for Object Silhouette Tracking
In this work, we introduce a deep-structured conditional random field
(DS-CRF) model for the purpose of state-based object silhouette tracking. The
proposed DS-CRF model consists of a series of state layers, where each state
layer spatially characterizes the object silhouette at a particular point in
time. The interactions between adjacent state layers are established by
inter-layer connectivity dynamically determined based on inter-frame optical
flow. By incorporate both spatial and temporal context in a dynamic fashion
within such a deep-structured probabilistic graphical model, the proposed
DS-CRF model allows us to develop a framework that can accurately and
efficiently track object silhouettes that can change greatly over time, as well
as under different situations such as occlusion and multiple targets within the
scene. Experiment results using video surveillance datasets containing
different scenarios such as occlusion and multiple targets showed that the
proposed DS-CRF approach provides strong object silhouette tracking performance
when compared to baseline methods such as mean-shift tracking, as well as
state-of-the-art methods such as context tracking and boosted particle
filtering.Comment: 17 page
Algorithms of causal inference for the analysis of effective connectivity among brain regions
In recent years, powerful general algorithms of causal inference have been developed. In particular, in the framework of Pearl’s causality, algorithms of inductive causation (IC and IC*) provide a procedure to determine which causal connections among nodes in a network can be inferred from empirical observations even in the presence of latent variables, indicating the limits of what can be learned without active manipulation of the system. These algorithms can in principle become important complements to established techniques such as Granger causality and Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) to analyze causal influences (effective connectivity) among brain regions. However, their application to dynamic processes has not been yet examined. Here we study how to apply these algorithms to time-varying signals such as electrophysiological or neuroimaging signals. We propose a new algorithm which combines the basic principles of the previous algorithms with Granger causality to obtain a representation of the causal relations suited to dynamic processes. Furthermore, we use graphical criteria to predict dynamic statistical dependencies between the signals from the causal structure. We show how some problems for causal inference from neural signals (e.g., measurement noise, hemodynamic responses, and time aggregation) can be understood in a general graphical approach. Focusing on the effect of spatial aggregation, we show that when causal inference is performed at a coarser scale than the one at which the neural sources interact, results strongly depend on the degree of integration of the neural sources aggregated in the signals, and thus characterize more the intra-areal properties than the interactions among regions. We finally discuss how the explicit consideration of latent processes contributes to understand Granger causality and DCM as well as to distinguish functional and effective connectivity
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