233,811 research outputs found
Scalable Solutions for Automated Single Pulse Identification and Classification in Radio Astronomy
Data collection for scientific applications is increasing exponentially and
is forecasted to soon reach peta- and exabyte scales. Applications which
process and analyze scientific data must be scalable and focus on execution
performance to keep pace. In the field of radio astronomy, in addition to
increasingly large datasets, tasks such as the identification of transient
radio signals from extrasolar sources are computationally expensive. We present
a scalable approach to radio pulsar detection written in Scala that
parallelizes candidate identification to take advantage of in-memory task
processing using Apache Spark on a YARN distributed system. Furthermore, we
introduce a novel automated multiclass supervised machine learning technique
that we combine with feature selection to reduce the time required for
candidate classification. Experimental testing on a Beowulf cluster with 15
data nodes shows that the parallel implementation of the identification
algorithm offers a speedup of up to 5X that of a similar multithreaded
implementation. Further, we show that the combination of automated multiclass
classification and feature selection speeds up the execution performance of the
RandomForest machine learning algorithm by an average of 54% with less than a
2% average reduction in the algorithm's ability to correctly classify pulsars.
The generalizability of these results is demonstrated by using two real-world
radio astronomy data sets.Comment: In Proceedings of the 47th International Conference on Parallel
Processing (ICPP 2018). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 11, 11 page
Distributed multinomial regression
This article introduces a model-based approach to distributed computing for
multinomial logistic (softmax) regression. We treat counts for each response
category as independent Poisson regressions via plug-in estimates for fixed
effects shared across categories. The work is driven by the
high-dimensional-response multinomial models that are used in analysis of a
large number of random counts. Our motivating applications are in text
analysis, where documents are tokenized and the token counts are modeled as
arising from a multinomial dependent upon document attributes. We estimate such
models for a publicly available data set of reviews from Yelp, with text
regressed onto a large set of explanatory variables (user, business, and rating
information). The fitted models serve as a basis for exploring the connection
between words and variables of interest, for reducing dimension into supervised
factor scores, and for prediction. We argue that the approach herein provides
an attractive option for social scientists and other text analysts who wish to
bring familiar regression tools to bear on text data.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-AOAS831 in the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Intensity-based image registration using multiple distributed agents
Image registration is the process of geometrically aligning images taken from different sensors, viewpoints or instances in time. It plays a key role in the detection of defects or anomalies for automated visual inspection. A multiagent distributed blackboard system has been developed for intensity-based image registration. The images are divided into segments and allocated to agents on separate processors, allowing parallel computation of a similarity metric that measures the degree of likeness between reference and sensed images after the application of a transform. The need for a dedicated control module is removed by coordination of agents via the blackboard. Tests show that additional agents increase speed, provided the communication capacity of the blackboard is not saturated. The success of the approach in achieving registration, despite significant misalignment of the original images, is demonstrated in the detection of manufacturing defects on screen-printed plastic bottles and printed circuit boards
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