950 research outputs found
Combinatorial Penalties: Which structures are preserved by convex relaxations?
We consider the homogeneous and the non-homogeneous convex relaxations for
combinatorial penalty functions defined on support sets. Our study identifies
key differences in the tightness of the resulting relaxations through the
notion of the lower combinatorial envelope of a set-function along with new
necessary conditions for support identification. We then propose a general
adaptive estimator for convex monotone regularizers, and derive new sufficient
conditions for support recovery in the asymptotic setting
Stability of Influence Maximization
The present article serves as an erratum to our paper of the same title,
which was presented and published in the KDD 2014 conference. In that article,
we claimed falsely that the objective function defined in Section 1.4 is
non-monotone submodular. We are deeply indebted to Debmalya Mandal, Jean
Pouget-Abadie and Yaron Singer for bringing to our attention a counter-example
to that claim.
Subsequent to becoming aware of the counter-example, we have shown that the
objective function is in fact NP-hard to approximate to within a factor of
for any .
In an attempt to fix the record, the present article combines the problem
motivation, models, and experimental results sections from the original
incorrect article with the new hardness result. We would like readers to only
cite and use this version (which will remain an unpublished note) instead of
the incorrect conference version.Comment: Erratum of Paper "Stability of Influence Maximization" which was
presented and published in the KDD1
On Submodularity and Controllability in Complex Dynamical Networks
Controllability and observability have long been recognized as fundamental
structural properties of dynamical systems, but have recently seen renewed
interest in the context of large, complex networks of dynamical systems. A
basic problem is sensor and actuator placement: choose a subset from a finite
set of possible placements to optimize some real-valued controllability and
observability metrics of the network. Surprisingly little is known about the
structure of such combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper, we show
that several important classes of metrics based on the controllability and
observability Gramians have a strong structural property that allows for either
efficient global optimization or an approximation guarantee by using a simple
greedy heuristic for their maximization. In particular, the mapping from
possible placements to several scalar functions of the associated Gramian is
either a modular or submodular set function. The results are illustrated on
randomly generated systems and on a problem of power electronic actuator
placement in a model of the European power grid.Comment: Original arXiv version of IEEE Transactions on Control of Network
Systems paper (Volume 3, Issue 1), with a addendum (located in the ancillary
documents) that explains an error in a proof of the original paper and
provides a counterexample to the corresponding resul
An Optimal Transmission Strategy for Kalman Filtering over Packet Dropping Links with Imperfect Acknowledgements
This paper presents a novel design methodology for optimal transmission
policies at a smart sensor to remotely estimate the state of a stable linear
stochastic dynamical system. The sensor makes measurements of the process and
forms estimates of the state using a local Kalman filter. The sensor transmits
quantized information over a packet dropping link to the remote receiver. The
receiver sends packet receipt acknowledgments back to the sensor via an
erroneous feedback communication channel which is itself packet dropping. The
key novelty of this formulation is that the smart sensor decides, at each
discrete time instant, whether to transmit a quantized version of either its
local state estimate or its local innovation. The objective is to design
optimal transmission policies in order to minimize a long term average cost
function as a convex combination of the receiver's expected estimation error
covariance and the energy needed to transmit the packets. The optimal
transmission policy is obtained by the use of dynamic programming techniques.
Using the concept of submodularity, the optimality of a threshold policy in the
case of scalar systems with perfect packet receipt acknowledgments is proved.
Suboptimal solutions and their structural results are also discussed. Numerical
results are presented illustrating the performance of the optimal and
suboptimal transmission policies.Comment: Conditionally accepted in IEEE Transactions on Control of Network
System
Structured sparsity-inducing norms through submodular functions
Sparse methods for supervised learning aim at finding good linear predictors
from as few variables as possible, i.e., with small cardinality of their
supports. This combinatorial selection problem is often turned into a convex
optimization problem by replacing the cardinality function by its convex
envelope (tightest convex lower bound), in this case the L1-norm. In this
paper, we investigate more general set-functions than the cardinality, that may
incorporate prior knowledge or structural constraints which are common in many
applications: namely, we show that for nondecreasing submodular set-functions,
the corresponding convex envelope can be obtained from its \lova extension, a
common tool in submodular analysis. This defines a family of polyhedral norms,
for which we provide generic algorithmic tools (subgradients and proximal
operators) and theoretical results (conditions for support recovery or
high-dimensional inference). By selecting specific submodular functions, we can
give a new interpretation to known norms, such as those based on
rank-statistics or grouped norms with potentially overlapping groups; we also
define new norms, in particular ones that can be used as non-factorial priors
for supervised learning
- âŠ