24,225 research outputs found
Consensus Propagation
We propose consensus propagation, an asynchronous distributed protocol for
averaging numbers across a network. We establish convergence, characterize the
convergence rate for regular graphs, and demonstrate that the protocol exhibits
better scaling properties than pairwise averaging, an alternative that has
received much recent attention. Consensus propagation can be viewed as a
special case of belief propagation, and our results contribute to the belief
propagation literature. In particular, beyond singly-connected graphs, there
are very few classes of relevant problems for which belief propagation is known
to converge.Comment: journal versio
Blending Learning and Inference in Structured Prediction
In this paper we derive an efficient algorithm to learn the parameters of
structured predictors in general graphical models. This algorithm blends the
learning and inference tasks, which results in a significant speedup over
traditional approaches, such as conditional random fields and structured
support vector machines. For this purpose we utilize the structures of the
predictors to describe a low dimensional structured prediction task which
encourages local consistencies within the different structures while learning
the parameters of the model. Convexity of the learning task provides the means
to enforce the consistencies between the different parts. The
inference-learning blending algorithm that we propose is guaranteed to converge
to the optimum of the low dimensional primal and dual programs. Unlike many of
the existing approaches, the inference-learning blending allows us to learn
efficiently high-order graphical models, over regions of any size, and very
large number of parameters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach,
while presenting state-of-the-art results in stereo estimation, semantic
segmentation, shape reconstruction, and indoor scene understanding
Robust Estimators under the Imprecise Dirichlet Model
Walley's Imprecise Dirichlet Model (IDM) for categorical data overcomes
several fundamental problems which other approaches to uncertainty suffer from.
Yet, to be useful in practice, one needs efficient ways for computing the
imprecise=robust sets or intervals. The main objective of this work is to
derive exact, conservative, and approximate, robust and credible interval
estimates under the IDM for a large class of statistical estimators, including
the entropy and mutual information.Comment: 16 LaTeX page
An Iterative Receiver for OFDM With Sparsity-Based Parametric Channel Estimation
In this work we design a receiver that iteratively passes soft information
between the channel estimation and data decoding stages. The receiver
incorporates sparsity-based parametric channel estimation. State-of-the-art
sparsity-based iterative receivers simplify the channel estimation problem by
restricting the multipath delays to a grid. Our receiver does not impose such a
restriction. As a result it does not suffer from the leakage effect, which
destroys sparsity. Communication at near capacity rates in high SNR requires a
large modulation order. Due to the close proximity of modulation symbols in
such systems, the grid-based approximation is of insufficient accuracy. We show
numerically that a state-of-the-art iterative receiver with grid-based sparse
channel estimation exhibits a bit-error-rate floor in the high SNR regime. On
the contrary, our receiver performs very close to the perfect channel state
information bound for all SNR values. We also demonstrate both theoretically
and numerically that parametric channel estimation works well in dense
channels, i.e., when the number of multipath components is large and each
individual component cannot be resolved.Comment: Major revision, accepted for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin
Belief Consensus Algorithms for Fast Distributed Target Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks
In distributed target tracking for wireless sensor networks, agreement on the
target state can be achieved by the construction and maintenance of a
communication path, in order to exchange information regarding local likelihood
functions. Such an approach lacks robustness to failures and is not easily
applicable to ad-hoc networks. To address this, several methods have been
proposed that allow agreement on the global likelihood through fully
distributed belief consensus (BC) algorithms, operating on local likelihoods in
distributed particle filtering (DPF). However, a unified comparison of the
convergence speed and communication cost has not been performed. In this paper,
we provide such a comparison and propose a novel BC algorithm based on belief
propagation (BP). According to our study, DPF based on metropolis belief
consensus (MBC) is the fastest in loopy graphs, while DPF based on BP consensus
is the fastest in tree graphs. Moreover, we found that BC-based DPF methods
have lower communication overhead than data flooding when the network is
sufficiently sparse
Large scale probabilistic available bandwidth estimation
The common utilization-based definition of available bandwidth and many of
the existing tools to estimate it suffer from several important weaknesses: i)
most tools report a point estimate of average available bandwidth over a
measurement interval and do not provide a confidence interval; ii) the commonly
adopted models used to relate the available bandwidth metric to the measured
data are invalid in almost all practical scenarios; iii) existing tools do not
scale well and are not suited to the task of multi-path estimation in
large-scale networks; iv) almost all tools use ad-hoc techniques to address
measurement noise; and v) tools do not provide enough flexibility in terms of
accuracy, overhead, latency and reliability to adapt to the requirements of
various applications. In this paper we propose a new definition for available
bandwidth and a novel framework that addresses these issues. We define
probabilistic available bandwidth (PAB) as the largest input rate at which we
can send a traffic flow along a path while achieving, with specified
probability, an output rate that is almost as large as the input rate. PAB is
expressed directly in terms of the measurable output rate and includes
adjustable parameters that allow the user to adapt to different application
requirements. Our probabilistic framework to estimate network-wide
probabilistic available bandwidth is based on packet trains, Bayesian
inference, factor graphs and active sampling. We deploy our tool on the
PlanetLab network and our results show that we can obtain accurate estimates
with a much smaller measurement overhead compared to existing approaches.Comment: Submitted to Computer Network
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