35,001 research outputs found
Algorithmic statistics: forty years later
Algorithmic statistics has two different (and almost orthogonal) motivations.
From the philosophical point of view, it tries to formalize how the statistics
works and why some statistical models are better than others. After this notion
of a "good model" is introduced, a natural question arises: it is possible that
for some piece of data there is no good model? If yes, how often these bad
("non-stochastic") data appear "in real life"?
Another, more technical motivation comes from algorithmic information theory.
In this theory a notion of complexity of a finite object (=amount of
information in this object) is introduced; it assigns to every object some
number, called its algorithmic complexity (or Kolmogorov complexity).
Algorithmic statistic provides a more fine-grained classification: for each
finite object some curve is defined that characterizes its behavior. It turns
out that several different definitions give (approximately) the same curve.
In this survey we try to provide an exposition of the main results in the
field (including full proofs for the most important ones), as well as some
historical comments. We assume that the reader is familiar with the main
notions of algorithmic information (Kolmogorov complexity) theory.Comment: Missing proofs adde
Algorithmic statistics revisited
The mission of statistics is to provide adequate statistical hypotheses
(models) for observed data. But what is an "adequate" model? To answer this
question, one needs to use the notions of algorithmic information theory. It
turns out that for every data string one can naturally define
"stochasticity profile", a curve that represents a trade-off between complexity
of a model and its adequacy. This curve has four different equivalent
definitions in terms of (1)~randomness deficiency, (2)~minimal description
length, (3)~position in the lists of simple strings and (4)~Kolmogorov
complexity with decompression time bounded by busy beaver function. We present
a survey of the corresponding definitions and results relating them to each
other
Around Kolmogorov complexity: basic notions and results
Algorithmic information theory studies description complexity and randomness
and is now a well known field of theoretical computer science and mathematical
logic. There are several textbooks and monographs devoted to this theory where
one can find the detailed exposition of many difficult results as well as
historical references. However, it seems that a short survey of its basic
notions and main results relating these notions to each other, is missing.
This report attempts to fill this gap and covers the basic notions of
algorithmic information theory: Kolmogorov complexity (plain, conditional,
prefix), Solomonoff universal a priori probability, notions of randomness
(Martin-L\"of randomness, Mises--Church randomness), effective Hausdorff
dimension. We prove their basic properties (symmetry of information, connection
between a priori probability and prefix complexity, criterion of randomness in
terms of complexity, complexity characterization for effective dimension) and
show some applications (incompressibility method in computational complexity
theory, incompleteness theorems). It is based on the lecture notes of a course
at Uppsala University given by the author
alphaCertified: certifying solutions to polynomial systems
Smale's alpha-theory uses estimates related to the convergence of Newton's
method to give criteria implying that Newton iterations will converge
quadratically to solutions to a square polynomial system. The program
alphaCertified implements algorithms based on alpha-theory to certify solutions
to polynomial systems using both exact rational arithmetic and arbitrary
precision floating point arithmetic. It also implements an algorithm to certify
whether a given point corresponds to a real solution to a real polynomial
system, as well as algorithms to heuristically validate solutions to
overdetermined systems. Examples are presented to demonstrate the algorithms.Comment: 21 page
On Restricted Nonnegative Matrix Factorization
Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is the problem of decomposing a given
nonnegative matrix into a product of a nonnegative matrix and a nonnegative matrix . Restricted NMF
requires in addition that the column spaces of and coincide. Finding
the minimal inner dimension is known to be NP-hard, both for NMF and
restricted NMF. We show that restricted NMF is closely related to a question
about the nature of minimal probabilistic automata, posed by Paz in his seminal
1971 textbook. We use this connection to answer Paz's question negatively, thus
falsifying a positive answer claimed in 1974. Furthermore, we investigate
whether a rational matrix always has a restricted NMF of minimal inner
dimension whose factors and are also rational. We show that this holds
for matrices of rank at most and we exhibit a rank- matrix for which
and require irrational entries.Comment: Full version of an ICALP'16 pape
Wireless Network Information Flow: A Deterministic Approach
In a wireless network with a single source and a single destination and an
arbitrary number of relay nodes, what is the maximum rate of information flow
achievable? We make progress on this long standing problem through a two-step
approach. First we propose a deterministic channel model which captures the key
wireless properties of signal strength, broadcast and superposition. We obtain
an exact characterization of the capacity of a network with nodes connected by
such deterministic channels. This result is a natural generalization of the
celebrated max-flow min-cut theorem for wired networks. Second, we use the
insights obtained from the deterministic analysis to design a new
quantize-map-and-forward scheme for Gaussian networks. In this scheme, each
relay quantizes the received signal at the noise level and maps it to a random
Gaussian codeword for forwarding, and the final destination decodes the
source's message based on the received signal. We show that, in contrast to
existing schemes, this scheme can achieve the cut-set upper bound to within a
gap which is independent of the channel parameters. In the case of the relay
channel with a single relay as well as the two-relay Gaussian diamond network,
the gap is 1 bit/s/Hz. Moreover, the scheme is universal in the sense that the
relays need no knowledge of the values of the channel parameters to
(approximately) achieve the rate supportable by the network. We also present
extensions of the results to multicast networks, half-duplex networks and
ergodic networks.Comment: To appear in IEEE transactions on Information Theory, Vol 57, No 4,
April 201
Prefix Codes for Power Laws with Countable Support
In prefix coding over an infinite alphabet, methods that consider specific
distributions generally consider those that decline more quickly than a power
law (e.g., Golomb coding). Particular power-law distributions, however, model
many random variables encountered in practice. For such random variables,
compression performance is judged via estimates of expected bits per input
symbol. This correspondence introduces a family of prefix codes with an eye
towards near-optimal coding of known distributions. Compression performance is
precisely estimated for well-known probability distributions using these codes
and using previously known prefix codes. One application of these near-optimal
codes is an improved representation of rational numbers.Comment: 5 pages, 2 tables, submitted to Transactions on Information Theor
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