5,009 research outputs found
Modelling galactic spectra: I - A dynamical model for NGC3258
In this paper we present a method to analyse absorption line spectra of a
galaxy designed to determine the stellar dynamics and the stellar populations
by a direct fit to the spectra. This paper is the first one to report on the
application of the method to data. The modelling results in the knowledge of
distribution functions that are sums of basis functions. The practical
implementation of the method is discussed and a new type of basis functions is
introduced.
With this method, a dynamical model for NGC 3258 is constructed. This galaxy
can be successfully modelled with a potential containing 30% dark matter within
1r_e with a mass of 1.6x10^11 M_o. The total mass within 2r_e is estimated as
5x10^11 M_o, containing 63% dark matter. The model is isotropic in the centre,
is radially anisotropic between 0.2 and 2 kpc (0.88 r_e) and becomes
tangentially anisotropic further on. The photometry reveals the presence of a
dust disk near the centre
A possibilistic approach to latent structure analysis for symmetric fuzzy data.
In many situations the available amount of data is huge and can be intractable. When the data set is single valued, latent structure models are recognized techniques, which provide a useful compression of the information. This is done by considering a regression model between observed and unobserved (latent) fuzzy variables. In this paper, an extension of latent structure analysis to deal with fuzzy data is proposed. Our extension follows the possibilistic approach, widely used both in the cluster and regression frameworks. In this case, the possibilistic approach involves the formulation of a latent structure analysis for fuzzy data by optimization. Specifically, a non-linear programming problem in which the fuzziness of the model is minimized is introduced. In order to show how our model works, the results of two applications are given.Latent structure analysis, symmetric fuzzy data set, possibilistic approach.
Linear system identification using stable spline kernels and PLQ penalties
The classical approach to linear system identification is given by parametric
Prediction Error Methods (PEM). In this context, model complexity is often
unknown so that a model order selection step is needed to suitably trade-off
bias and variance. Recently, a different approach to linear system
identification has been introduced, where model order determination is avoided
by using a regularized least squares framework. In particular, the penalty term
on the impulse response is defined by so called stable spline kernels. They
embed information on regularity and BIBO stability, and depend on a small
number of parameters which can be estimated from data. In this paper, we
provide new nonsmooth formulations of the stable spline estimator. In
particular, we consider linear system identification problems in a very broad
context, where regularization functionals and data misfits can come from a rich
set of piecewise linear quadratic functions. Moreover, our anal- ysis includes
polyhedral inequality constraints on the unknown impulse response. For any
formulation in this class, we show that interior point methods can be used to
solve the system identification problem, with complexity O(n3)+O(mn2) in each
iteration, where n and m are the number of impulse response coefficients and
measurements, respectively. The usefulness of the framework is illustrated via
a numerical experiment where output measurements are contaminated by outliers.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure
Local likelihood estimation of truncated regression and its partial derivatives: theory and application
In this paper we propose a very flexible estimator in the context of truncated regression that does not require parametric assumptions. To do this, we adapt the theory of local maximum likelihood estimation. We provide the asymptotic results and illustrate the performance of our estimator on simulated and real data sets. Our estimator performs as good as the fully parametric estimator when the assumptions for the latter hold, but as expected, much better when they do not (provided that the curse of dimensionality problem is not the issue). Overall, our estimator exhibits a fair degree of robustness to various deviations from linearity in the regression equation and also to deviations from the specification of the error term. So the approach shall prove to be very useful in practical applications, where the parametric form of the regression or of the distribution is rarely known.
Simple Approximations of Semialgebraic Sets and their Applications to Control
Many uncertainty sets encountered in control systems analysis and design can
be expressed in terms of semialgebraic sets, that is as the intersection of
sets described by means of polynomial inequalities. Important examples are for
instance the solution set of linear matrix inequalities or the Schur/Hurwitz
stability domains. These sets often have very complicated shapes (non-convex,
and even non-connected), which renders very difficult their manipulation. It is
therefore of considerable importance to find simple-enough approximations of
these sets, able to capture their main characteristics while maintaining a low
level of complexity. For these reasons, in the past years several convex
approximations, based for instance on hyperrect-angles, polytopes, or
ellipsoids have been proposed. In this work, we move a step further, and
propose possibly non-convex approximations , based on a small volume polynomial
superlevel set of a single positive polynomial of given degree. We show how
these sets can be easily approximated by minimizing the L1 norm of the
polynomial over the semialgebraic set, subject to positivity constraints.
Intuitively, this corresponds to the trace minimization heuristic commonly
encounter in minimum volume ellipsoid problems. From a computational viewpoint,
we design a hierarchy of linear matrix inequality problems to generate these
approximations, and we provide theoretically rigorous convergence results, in
the sense that the hierarchy of outer approximations converges in volume (or,
equivalently, almost everywhere and almost uniformly) to the original set. Two
main applications of the proposed approach are considered. The first one aims
at reconstruction/approximation of sets from a finite number of samples. In the
second one, we show how the concept of polynomial superlevel set can be used to
generate samples uniformly distributed on a given semialgebraic set. The
efficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated by different numerical
examples
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