13 research outputs found
A Multitask Diffusion Strategy with Optimized Inter-Cluster Cooperation
We consider a multitask estimation problem where nodes in a network are
divided into several connected clusters, with each cluster performing a
least-mean-squares estimation of a different random parameter vector. Inspired
by the adapt-then-combine diffusion strategy, we propose a multitask diffusion
strategy whose mean stability can be ensured whenever individual nodes are
stable in the mean, regardless of the inter-cluster cooperation weights. In
addition, the proposed strategy is able to achieve an asymptotically unbiased
estimation, when the parameters have same mean. We also develop an
inter-cluster cooperation weights selection scheme that allows each node in the
network to locally optimize its inter-cluster cooperation weights. Numerical
results demonstrate that our approach leads to a lower average steady-state
network mean-square deviation, compared with using weights selected by various
other commonly adopted methods in the literature.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figures, submitted to IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in
Signal Processin
On the Properties of Gromov Matrices and their Applications in Network Inference
The spanning tree heuristic is a commonly adopted procedure in network
inference and estimation. It allows one to generalize an inference method
developed for trees, which is usually based on a statistically rigorous
approach, to a heuristic procedure for general graphs by (usually randomly)
choosing a spanning tree in the graph to apply the approach developed for
trees. However, there are an intractable number of spanning trees in a dense
graph. In this paper, we represent a weighted tree with a matrix, which we call
a Gromov matrix. We propose a method that constructs a family of Gromov
matrices using convex combinations, which can be used for inference and
estimation instead of a randomly selected spanning tree. This procedure
increases the size of the candidate set and hence enhances the performance of
the classical spanning tree heuristic. On the other hand, our new scheme is
based on simple algebraic constructions using matrices, and hence is still
computationally tractable. We discuss some applications on network inference
and estimation to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method
Compressive Privacy for a Linear Dynamical System
We consider a linear dynamical system in which the state vector consists of
both public and private states. One or more sensors make measurements of the
state vector and sends information to a fusion center, which performs the final
state estimation. To achieve an optimal tradeoff between the utility of
estimating the public states and protection of the private states, the
measurements at each time step are linearly compressed into a lower dimensional
space. Under the centralized setting where all measurements are collected by a
single sensor, we propose an optimization problem and an algorithm to find the
best compression matrix. Under the decentralized setting where measurements are
made separately at multiple sensors, each sensor optimizes its own local
compression matrix. We propose methods to separate the overall optimization
problem into multiple sub-problems that can be solved locally at each sensor.
We consider the cases where there is no message exchange between the sensors;
and where each sensor takes turns to transmit messages to the other sensors.
Simulations and empirical experiments demonstrate the efficiency of our
proposed approach in allowing the fusion center to estimate the public states
with good accuracy while preventing it from estimating the private states
accurately
An Unsupervised Bayesian Neural Network for Truth Discovery in Social Networks
The problem of estimating event truths from conflicting agent opinions in a
social network is investigated. An autoencoder learns the complex relationships
between event truths, agent reliabilities and agent observations. A Bayesian
network model is proposed to guide the learning process by modeling the
relationship of the autoencoder's outputs with different variables. At the same
time, it also models the social relationships between agents in the network.
The proposed approach is unsupervised and is applicable when ground truth
labels of events are unavailable. A variational inference method is used to
jointly estimate the hidden variables in the Bayesian network and the
parameters in the autoencoder. Experiments on three real datasets demonstrate
that our proposed approach is competitive with, and in most cases better than,
several state-of-the-art benchmark methods
Arbitrarily Strong Utility-Privacy Tradeoff in Multi-Agent Systems
Each agent in a network makes a local observation that is linearly related to
a set of public and private parameters. The agents send their observations to a
fusion center to allow it to estimate the public parameters. To prevent leakage
of the private parameters, each agent first sanitizes its local observation
using a local privacy mechanism before transmitting it to the fusion center. We
investigate the utility-privacy tradeoff in terms of the Cram\'er-Rao lower
bounds for estimating the public and private parameters. We study the class of
privacy mechanisms given by linear compression and noise perturbation, and
derive necessary and sufficient conditions for achieving arbitrarily strong
utility-privacy tradeoff in a multi-agent system for both the cases where prior
information is available and unavailable, respectively. We also provide a
method to find the maximum estimation privacy achievable without compromising
the utility and propose an alternating algorithm to optimize the
utility-privacy tradeoff in the case where arbitrarily strong utility-privacy
tradeoff is not achievable