40,432 research outputs found
Asymptotic geometry of Banach spaces and uniform quotient maps
Recently, Lima and Randrianarivony pointed out the role of the property
of Rolewicz in nonlinear quotient problems, and answered a
ten-year-old question of Bates, Johnson, Lindenstrauss, Preiss and Schechtman.
In the present paper, we prove that the modulus of asymptotic uniform
smoothness of the range space of a uniform quotient map can be compared with
the modulus of of the domain space. We also provide conditions under
which this comparison can be improved
Exploiting Metric Structure for Efficient Private Query Release
We consider the problem of privately answering queries defined on databases
which are collections of points belonging to some metric space. We give simple,
computationally efficient algorithms for answering distance queries defined
over an arbitrary metric. Distance queries are specified by points in the
metric space, and ask for the average distance from the query point to the
points contained in the database, according to the specified metric. Our
algorithms run efficiently in the database size and the dimension of the space,
and operate in both the online query release setting, and the offline setting
in which they must in polynomial time generate a fixed data structure which can
answer all queries of interest. This represents one of the first subclasses of
linear queries for which efficient algorithms are known for the private query
release problem, circumventing known hardness results for generic linear
queries
Off the Beaten Path: Let's Replace Term-Based Retrieval with k-NN Search
Retrieval pipelines commonly rely on a term-based search to obtain candidate
records, which are subsequently re-ranked. Some candidates are missed by this
approach, e.g., due to a vocabulary mismatch. We address this issue by
replacing the term-based search with a generic k-NN retrieval algorithm, where
a similarity function can take into account subtle term associations. While an
exact brute-force k-NN search using this similarity function is slow, we
demonstrate that an approximate algorithm can be nearly two orders of magnitude
faster at the expense of only a small loss in accuracy. A retrieval pipeline
using an approximate k-NN search can be more effective and efficient than the
term-based pipeline. This opens up new possibilities for designing effective
retrieval pipelines. Our software (including data-generating code) and
derivative data based on the Stack Overflow collection is available online
Exact Computation of a Manifold Metric, via Lipschitz Embeddings and Shortest Paths on a Graph
Data-sensitive metrics adapt distances locally based the density of data
points with the goal of aligning distances and some notion of similarity. In
this paper, we give the first exact algorithm for computing a data-sensitive
metric called the nearest neighbor metric. In fact, we prove the surprising
result that a previously published -approximation is an exact algorithm.
The nearest neighbor metric can be viewed as a special case of a
density-based distance used in machine learning, or it can be seen as an
example of a manifold metric. Previous computational research on such metrics
despaired of computing exact distances on account of the apparent difficulty of
minimizing over all continuous paths between a pair of points. We leverage the
exact computation of the nearest neighbor metric to compute sparse spanners and
persistent homology. We also explore the behavior of the metric built from
point sets drawn from an underlying distribution and consider the more general
case of inputs that are finite collections of path-connected compact sets.
The main results connect several classical theories such as the conformal
change of Riemannian metrics, the theory of positive definite functions of
Schoenberg, and screw function theory of Schoenberg and Von Neumann. We develop
novel proof techniques based on the combination of screw functions and
Lipschitz extensions that may be of independent interest.Comment: 15 page
Simplicial Nonlinear Principal Component Analysis
We present a new manifold learning algorithm that takes a set of data points
lying on or near a lower dimensional manifold as input, possibly with noise,
and outputs a simplicial complex that fits the data and the manifold. We have
implemented the algorithm in the case where the input data can be triangulated.
We provide triangulations of data sets that fall on the surface of a torus,
sphere, swiss roll, and creased sheet embedded in a fifty dimensional space. We
also discuss the theoretical justification of our algorithm.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figure
Studying cities to learn about minds: some possible implications of space syntax for spatial cognition
What can we learn of the human mind by examining its products? The city is a case in point. Since the beginning of cities human ideas about them have been dominated by geometric ideas, and the real history of cities has always oscillated between the geometric and the âorganicâ. Set in the context of the suggestion from cognitive neuroscience that we impose more geometric order on the world than it actually possesses, and intriguing question arises: what is the role of the geometric intuition in how we understand cities and how we create them? Here I argue, drawing on space syntax research which has sought to link the detailed spatial morphology of cities to observable functional regularities, that all cities, the organic as well as the geometric, are pervasively ordered by geometric intuition, so that neither the forms of the cities nor their functioning can be understood without insight into their distinctive and pervasive emergent geometrical forms. The city is often said to be the creation of economic and social processes, but here it is argued that these processes operate within an envelope of geometric possibility defined by the human mind in its interaction with spatial laws that govern the relations between objects and spaces in the ambient world
Monotone Maps, Sphericity and Bounded Second Eigenvalue
We consider {\em monotone} embeddings of a finite metric space into low
dimensional normed space. That is, embeddings that respect the order among the
distances in the original space. Our main interest is in embeddings into
Euclidean spaces. We observe that any metric on points can be embedded into
, while, (in a sense to be made precise later), for almost every
-point metric space, every monotone map must be into a space of dimension
.
It becomes natural, then, to seek explicit constructions of metric spaces
that cannot be monotonically embedded into spaces of sublinear dimension. To
this end, we employ known results on {\em sphericity} of graphs, which suggest
one example of such a metric space - that defined by a complete bipartitegraph.
We prove that an -regular graph of order , with bounded diameter
has sphericity , where is the second
largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix of the graph, and 0 < \delta \leq
\half is constant. We also show that while random graphs have linear
sphericity, there are {\em quasi-random} graphs of logarithmic sphericity.
For the above bound to be linear, must be constant. We show that
if the second eigenvalue of an -regular graph is bounded by a constant,
then the graph is close to being complete bipartite. Namely, its adjacency
matrix differs from that of a complete bipartite graph in only
entries. Furthermore, for any 0 < \delta < \half, and , there are
only finitely many -regular graphs with second eigenvalue at most
Average Distance Queries through Weighted Samples in Graphs and Metric Spaces: High Scalability with Tight Statistical Guarantees
The average distance from a node to all other nodes in a graph, or from a
query point in a metric space to a set of points, is a fundamental quantity in
data analysis. The inverse of the average distance, known as the (classic)
closeness centrality of a node, is a popular importance measure in the study of
social networks. We develop novel structural insights on the sparsifiability of
the distance relation via weighted sampling. Based on that, we present highly
practical algorithms with strong statistical guarantees for fundamental
problems. We show that the average distance (and hence the centrality) for all
nodes in a graph can be estimated using single-source
distance computations. For a set of points in a metric space, we show
that after preprocessing which uses distance computations we can compute
a weighted sample of size such that the average
distance from any query point to can be estimated from the distances
from to . Finally, we show that for a set of points in a metric
space, we can estimate the average pairwise distance using
distance computations. The estimate is based on a weighted sample of
pairs of points, which is computed using distance
computations. Our estimates are unbiased with normalized mean square error
(NRMSE) of at most . Increasing the sample size by a
factor ensures that the probability that the relative error exceeds
is polynomially small.Comment: 21 pages, will appear in the Proceedings of RANDOM 201
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