31,401 research outputs found
Complexity of Discrete Energy Minimization Problems
Discrete energy minimization is widely-used in computer vision and machine
learning for problems such as MAP inference in graphical models. The problem,
in general, is notoriously intractable, and finding the global optimal solution
is known to be NP-hard. However, is it possible to approximate this problem
with a reasonable ratio bound on the solution quality in polynomial time? We
show in this paper that the answer is no. Specifically, we show that general
energy minimization, even in the 2-label pairwise case, and planar energy
minimization with three or more labels are exp-APX-complete. This finding rules
out the existence of any approximation algorithm with a sub-exponential
approximation ratio in the input size for these two problems, including
constant factor approximations. Moreover, we collect and review the
computational complexity of several subclass problems and arrange them on a
complexity scale consisting of three major complexity classes -- PO, APX, and
exp-APX, corresponding to problems that are solvable, approximable, and
inapproximable in polynomial time. Problems in the first two complexity classes
can serve as alternative tractable formulations to the inapproximable ones.
This paper can help vision researchers to select an appropriate model for an
application or guide them in designing new algorithms.Comment: ECCV'16 accepte
Contamination source inference in water distribution networks
We study the inference of the origin and the pattern of contamination in
water distribution networks. We assume a simplified model for the dyanmics of
the contamination spread inside a water distribution network, and assume that
at some random location a sensor detects the presence of contaminants. We
transform the source location problem into an optimization problem by
considering discrete times and a binary contaminated/not contaminated state for
the nodes of the network. The resulting problem is solved by Mixed Integer
Linear Programming. We test our results on random networks as well as in the
Modena city network
Learning the structure of Bayesian Networks: A quantitative assessment of the effect of different algorithmic schemes
One of the most challenging tasks when adopting Bayesian Networks (BNs) is
the one of learning their structure from data. This task is complicated by the
huge search space of possible solutions, and by the fact that the problem is
NP-hard. Hence, full enumeration of all the possible solutions is not always
feasible and approximations are often required. However, to the best of our
knowledge, a quantitative analysis of the performance and characteristics of
the different heuristics to solve this problem has never been done before.
For this reason, in this work, we provide a detailed comparison of many
different state-of-the-arts methods for structural learning on simulated data
considering both BNs with discrete and continuous variables, and with different
rates of noise in the data. In particular, we investigate the performance of
different widespread scores and algorithmic approaches proposed for the
inference and the statistical pitfalls within them
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