52,950 research outputs found
Estimator Selection: End-Performance Metric Aspects
Recently, a framework for application-oriented optimal experiment design has
been introduced. In this context, the distance of the estimated system from the
true one is measured in terms of a particular end-performance metric. This
treatment leads to superior unknown system estimates to classical experiment
designs based on usual pointwise functional distances of the estimated system
from the true one. The separation of the system estimator from the experiment
design is done within this new framework by choosing and fixing the estimation
method to either a maximum likelihood (ML) approach or a Bayesian estimator
such as the minimum mean square error (MMSE). Since the MMSE estimator delivers
a system estimate with lower mean square error (MSE) than the ML estimator for
finite-length experiments, it is usually considered the best choice in practice
in signal processing and control applications. Within the application-oriented
framework a related meaningful question is: Are there end-performance metrics
for which the ML estimator outperforms the MMSE when the experiment is
finite-length? In this paper, we affirmatively answer this question based on a
simple linear Gaussian regression example.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1303.428
Control speculation for energy-efficient next-generation superscalar processors
Conventional front-end designs attempt to maximize the number of "in-flight" instructions in the pipeline. However, branch mispredictions cause the processor to fetch useless instructions that are eventually squashed, increasing front-end energy and issue queue utilization and, thus, wasting around 30 percent of the power dissipated by a processor. Furthermore, processor design trends lead to increasing clock frequencies by lengthening the pipeline, which puts more pressure on the branch prediction engine since branches take longer to be resolved. As next-generation high-performance processors become deeply pipelined, the amount of wasted energy due to misspeculated instructions will go up. The aim of this work is to reduce the energy consumption of misspeculated instructions. We propose selective throttling, which triggers different power-aware techniques (fetch throttling, decode throttling, or disabling the selection logic) depending on the branch prediction confidence level. Results show that combining fetch-bandwidth reduction along with select-logic disabling provides the best performance in terms of overall energy reduction and energy-delay product improvement (14 percent and 10 percent, respectively, for a processor with a 22-stage pipeline and 16 percent and 13 percent, respectively, for a processor with a 42-stage pipeline).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Budget-Constrained Item Cold-Start Handling in Collaborative Filtering Recommenders via Optimal Design
It is well known that collaborative filtering (CF) based recommender systems
provide better modeling of users and items associated with considerable rating
history. The lack of historical ratings results in the user and the item
cold-start problems. The latter is the main focus of this work. Most of the
current literature addresses this problem by integrating content-based
recommendation techniques to model the new item. However, in many cases such
content is not available, and the question arises is whether this problem can
be mitigated using CF techniques only. We formalize this problem as an
optimization problem: given a new item, a pool of available users, and a budget
constraint, select which users to assign with the task of rating the new item
in order to minimize the prediction error of our model. We show that the
objective function is monotone-supermodular, and propose efficient optimal
design based algorithms that attain an approximation to its optimum. Our
findings are verified by an empirical study using the Netflix dataset, where
the proposed algorithms outperform several baselines for the problem at hand.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure
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