5,184 research outputs found
Robust Rotation Synchronization via Low-rank and Sparse Matrix Decomposition
This paper deals with the rotation synchronization problem, which arises in
global registration of 3D point-sets and in structure from motion. The problem
is formulated in an unprecedented way as a "low-rank and sparse" matrix
decomposition that handles both outliers and missing data. A minimization
strategy, dubbed R-GoDec, is also proposed and evaluated experimentally against
state-of-the-art algorithms on simulated and real data. The results show that
R-GoDec is the fastest among the robust algorithms.Comment: The material contained in this paper is part of a manuscript
submitted to CVI
Bayesian Estimation of Mixed Multinomial Logit Models: Advances and Simulation-Based Evaluations
Variational Bayes (VB) methods have emerged as a fast and
computationally-efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)
methods for scalable Bayesian estimation of mixed multinomial logit (MMNL)
models. It has been established that VB is substantially faster than MCMC at
practically no compromises in predictive accuracy. In this paper, we address
two critical gaps concerning the usage and understanding of VB for MMNL. First,
extant VB methods are limited to utility specifications involving only
individual-specific taste parameters. Second, the finite-sample properties of
VB estimators and the relative performance of VB, MCMC and maximum simulated
likelihood estimation (MSLE) are not known. To address the former, this study
extends several VB methods for MMNL to admit utility specifications including
both fixed and random utility parameters. To address the latter, we conduct an
extensive simulation-based evaluation to benchmark the extended VB methods
against MCMC and MSLE in terms of estimation times, parameter recovery and
predictive accuracy. The results suggest that all VB variants with the
exception of the ones relying on an alternative variational lower bound
constructed with the help of the modified Jensen's inequality perform as well
as MCMC and MSLE at prediction and parameter recovery. In particular, VB with
nonconjugate variational message passing and the delta-method (VB-NCVMP-Delta)
is up to 16 times faster than MCMC and MSLE. Thus, VB-NCVMP-Delta can be an
attractive alternative to MCMC and MSLE for fast, scalable and accurate
estimation of MMNL models
Recovering complete and draft population genomes from metagenome datasets.
Assembly of metagenomic sequence data into microbial genomes is of fundamental value to improving our understanding of microbial ecology and metabolism by elucidating the functional potential of hard-to-culture microorganisms. Here, we provide a synthesis of available methods to bin metagenomic contigs into species-level groups and highlight how genetic diversity, sequencing depth, and coverage influence binning success. Despite the computational cost on application to deeply sequenced complex metagenomes (e.g., soil), covarying patterns of contig coverage across multiple datasets significantly improves the binning process. We also discuss and compare current genome validation methods and reveal how these methods tackle the problem of chimeric genome bins i.e., sequences from multiple species. Finally, we explore how population genome assembly can be used to uncover biogeographic trends and to characterize the effect of in situ functional constraints on the genome-wide evolution
Linear Global Translation Estimation with Feature Tracks
This paper derives a novel linear position constraint for cameras seeing a
common scene point, which leads to a direct linear method for global camera
translation estimation. Unlike previous solutions, this method deals with
collinear camera motion and weak image association at the same time. The final
linear formulation does not involve the coordinates of scene points, which
makes it efficient even for large scale data. We solve the linear equation
based on norm, which makes our system more robust to outliers in
essential matrices and feature correspondences. We experiment this method on
both sequentially captured images and unordered Internet images. The
experiments demonstrate its strength in robustness, accuracy, and efficiency.Comment: Changes: 1. Adopt BMVC2015 style; 2. Combine sections 3 and 5; 3.
Move "Evaluation on synthetic data" out to supplementary file; 4. Divide
subsection "Evaluation on general data" to subsections "Experiment on
sequential data" and "Experiment on unordered Internet data"; 5. Change Fig.
1 and Fig.8; 6. Move Fig. 6 and Fig. 7 to supplementary file; 7 Change some
symbols; 8. Correct some typo
Improving Performance of Iterative Methods by Lossy Checkponting
Iterative methods are commonly used approaches to solve large, sparse linear
systems, which are fundamental operations for many modern scientific
simulations. When the large-scale iterative methods are running with a large
number of ranks in parallel, they have to checkpoint the dynamic variables
periodically in case of unavoidable fail-stop errors, requiring fast I/O
systems and large storage space. To this end, significantly reducing the
checkpointing overhead is critical to improving the overall performance of
iterative methods. Our contribution is fourfold. (1) We propose a novel lossy
checkpointing scheme that can significantly improve the checkpointing
performance of iterative methods by leveraging lossy compressors. (2) We
formulate a lossy checkpointing performance model and derive theoretically an
upper bound for the extra number of iterations caused by the distortion of data
in lossy checkpoints, in order to guarantee the performance improvement under
the lossy checkpointing scheme. (3) We analyze the impact of lossy
checkpointing (i.e., extra number of iterations caused by lossy checkpointing
files) for multiple types of iterative methods. (4)We evaluate the lossy
checkpointing scheme with optimal checkpointing intervals on a high-performance
computing environment with 2,048 cores, using a well-known scientific
computation package PETSc and a state-of-the-art checkpoint/restart toolkit.
Experiments show that our optimized lossy checkpointing scheme can
significantly reduce the fault tolerance overhead for iterative methods by
23%~70% compared with traditional checkpointing and 20%~58% compared with
lossless-compressed checkpointing, in the presence of system failures.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, HPDC'1
High precision simulations of weak lensing effect on Cosmic Microwave Background polarization
We study accuracy, robustness and self-consistency of pixel-domain
simulations of the gravitational lensing effect on the primordial CMB
anisotropies due to the large-scale structure of the Universe. In particular,
we investigate dependence of the results precision on some crucial parameters
of such techniques and propose a semi-analytic framework to determine their
values so the required precision is a priori assured and the numerical workload
simultaneously optimized. Our focus is on the B-mode signal but we discuss also
other CMB observables, such as total intensity, T, and E-mode polarization,
emphasizing differences and similarities between all these cases. Our
semi-analytic considerations are backed up by extensive numerical results.
Those are obtained using a code, nicknamed lenS2HAT -- for Lensing using
Scalable Spherical Harmonic Transforms (S2HAT) -- which we have developed in
the course of this work. The code implements a version of the pixel-domain
approach of Lewis (2005) and permits performing the simulations at very high
resolutions and data volumes, thanks to its efficient parallelization provided
by the S2HAT library -- a parallel library for a calculation of the spherical
harmonic transforms. The code is made publicly available.Comment: 20 pages, 14 figures, submitted to A&A, matches version accepted for
publication in A&
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