48,701 research outputs found
Provable ICA with Unknown Gaussian Noise, and Implications for Gaussian Mixtures and Autoencoders
We present a new algorithm for Independent Component Analysis (ICA) which has
provable performance guarantees. In particular, suppose we are given samples of
the form where is an unknown matrix and is
a random variable whose components are independent and have a fourth moment
strictly less than that of a standard Gaussian random variable and is an
-dimensional Gaussian random variable with unknown covariance : We
give an algorithm that provable recovers and up to an additive
and whose running time and sample complexity are polynomial in
and . To accomplish this, we introduce a novel "quasi-whitening"
step that may be useful in other contexts in which the covariance of Gaussian
noise is not known in advance. We also give a general framework for finding all
local optima of a function (given an oracle for approximately finding just one)
and this is a crucial step in our algorithm, one that has been overlooked in
previous attempts, and allows us to control the accumulation of error when we
find the columns of one by one via local search
An Efficient Linear Programming Algorithm to Generate the Densest Lattice Sphere Packings
Finding the densest sphere packing in -dimensional Euclidean space
is an outstanding fundamental problem with relevance in many
fields, including the ground states of molecular systems, colloidal crystal
structures, coding theory, discrete geometry, number theory, and biological
systems. Numerically generating the densest sphere packings becomes very
challenging in high dimensions due to an exponentially increasing number of
possible sphere contacts and sphere configurations, even for the restricted
problem of finding the densest lattice sphere packings. In this paper, we apply
the Torquato-Jiao packing algorithm, which is a method based on solving a
sequence of linear programs, to robustly reproduce the densest known lattice
sphere packings for dimensions 2 through 19. We show that the TJ algorithm is
appreciably more efficient at solving these problems than previously published
methods. Indeed, in some dimensions, the former procedure can be as much as
three orders of magnitude faster at finding the optimal solutions than earlier
ones. We also study the suboptimal local density-maxima solutions (inherent
structures or "extreme" lattices) to gain insight about the nature of the
topography of the "density" landscape.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figure
Classical Disordered Ground States: Super-Ideal Gases, and Stealth and Equi-Luminous Materials
Using a collective coordinate numerical optimization procedure, we construct
ground-state configurations of interacting particle systems in various space
dimensions so that the scattering of radiation exactly matches a prescribed
pattern for a set of wave vectors. We show that the constructed ground states
are, counterintuitively, disordered (i.e., possess no long-range order) in the
infinite-volume limit. We focus on three classes of configurations with unique
radiation scattering characteristics: (i)``stealth'' materials, which are
transparent to incident radiation at certain wavelengths; (ii)``super-ideal''
gases, which scatter radiation identically to that of an ensemble of ideal gas
configurations for a selected set of wave vectors; and (iii)``equi-luminous''
materials, which scatter radiation equally intensely for a selected set of wave
vectors. We find that ground-state configurations have an increased tendency to
contain clusters of particles as one increases the prescribed luminosity.
Limitations and consequences of this procedure are detailed.Comment: 44 pages, 16 figures, revtek
Detecting spatial patterns with the cumulant function. Part I: The theory
In climate studies, detecting spatial patterns that largely deviate from the
sample mean still remains a statistical challenge. Although a Principal
Component Analysis (PCA), or equivalently a Empirical Orthogonal Functions
(EOF) decomposition, is often applied on this purpose, it can only provide
meaningful results if the underlying multivariate distribution is Gaussian.
Indeed, PCA is based on optimizing second order moments quantities and the
covariance matrix can only capture the full dependence structure for
multivariate Gaussian vectors. Whenever the application at hand can not satisfy
this normality hypothesis (e.g. precipitation data), alternatives and/or
improvements to PCA have to be developed and studied. To go beyond this second
order statistics constraint that limits the applicability of the PCA, we take
advantage of the cumulant function that can produce higher order moments
information. This cumulant function, well-known in the statistical literature,
allows us to propose a new, simple and fast procedure to identify spatial
patterns for non-Gaussian data. Our algorithm consists in maximizing the
cumulant function. To illustrate our approach, its implementation for which
explicit computations are obtained is performed on three family of of
multivariate random vectors. In addition, we show that our algorithm
corresponds to selecting the directions along which projected data display the
largest spread over the marginal probability density tails.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure
Finding antipodal point grasps on irregularly shaped objects
Two-finger antipodal point grasping of arbitrarily shaped smooth 2-D and 3-D objects is considered. An object function is introduced that maps a finger contact space to the object surface. Conditions are developed to identify the feasible grasping region, F, in the finger contact space. A âgrasping energy functionâ, E , is introduced which is proportional to the distance between two grasping points. The antipodal points correspond to critical points of E in F. Optimization and/or continuation techniques are used to find these critical points. In particular, global optimization techniques are applied to find the âmaximalâ or âminimalâ grasp. Further, modeling techniques are introduced for representing 2-D and 3-D objects using B-spline curves and spherical product surfaces
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