28,684 research outputs found
Multisource Self-calibration for Sensor Arrays
Calibration of a sensor array is more involved if the antennas have direction
dependent gains and multiple calibrator sources are simultaneously present. We
study this case for a sensor array with arbitrary geometry but identical
elements, i.e. elements with the same direction dependent gain pattern. A
weighted alternating least squares (WALS) algorithm is derived that iteratively
solves for the direction independent complex gains of the array elements, their
noise powers and their gains in the direction of the calibrator sources. An
extension of the problem is the case where the apparent calibrator source
locations are unknown, e.g., due to refractive propagation paths. For this
case, the WALS method is supplemented with weighted subspace fitting (WSF)
direction finding techniques. Using Monte Carlo simulations we demonstrate that
both methods are asymptotically statistically efficient and converge within two
iterations even in cases of low SNR.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure
Trajectory Synthesis for Fisher Information Maximization
Estimation of model parameters in a dynamic system can be significantly
improved with the choice of experimental trajectory. For general, nonlinear
dynamic systems, finding globally "best" trajectories is typically not
feasible; however, given an initial estimate of the model parameters and an
initial trajectory, we present a continuous-time optimization method that
produces a locally optimal trajectory for parameter estimation in the presence
of measurement noise. The optimization algorithm is formulated to find system
trajectories that improve a norm on the Fisher information matrix. A
double-pendulum cart apparatus is used to numerically and experimentally
validate this technique. In simulation, the optimized trajectory increases the
minimum eigenvalue of the Fisher information matrix by three orders of
magnitude compared to the initial trajectory. Experimental results show that
this optimized trajectory translates to an order of magnitude improvement in
the parameter estimate error in practice.Comment: 12 page
Crowdsourcing with Sparsely Interacting Workers
We consider estimation of worker skills from worker-task interaction data
(with unknown labels) for the single-coin crowd-sourcing binary classification
model in symmetric noise. We define the (worker) interaction graph whose nodes
are workers and an edge between two nodes indicates whether or not the two
workers participated in a common task. We show that skills are asymptotically
identifiable if and only if an appropriate limiting version of the interaction
graph is irreducible and has odd-cycles. We then formulate a weighted rank-one
optimization problem to estimate skills based on observations on an
irreducible, aperiodic interaction graph. We propose a gradient descent scheme
and show that for such interaction graphs estimates converge asymptotically to
the global minimum. We characterize noise robustness of the gradient scheme in
terms of spectral properties of signless Laplacians of the interaction graph.
We then demonstrate that a plug-in estimator based on the estimated skills
achieves state-of-art performance on a number of real-world datasets. Our
results have implications for rank-one matrix completion problem in that
gradient descent can provably recover rank-one matrices based on
off-diagonal observations of a connected graph with a single odd-cycle
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