13,867 research outputs found
Marriages of Mathematics and Physics: A Challenge for Biology
The human attempts to access, measure and organize physical phenomena have led to a manifold construction of mathematical and physical spaces. We will survey the evolution of geometries from Euclid to the Algebraic Geometry of the 20th century. The role of Persian/Arabic Algebra in this transition and its Western symbolic development is emphasized. In this relation, we will also discuss changes in the ontological attitudes toward mathematics and its applications. Historically, the encounter of geometric and algebraic perspectives enriched the mathematical practices and their foundations. Yet, the collapse of Euclidean certitudes, of over 2300 years, and the crisis in the mathematical analysis of the 19th century, led to the exclusion of “geometric judgments” from the foundations of Mathematics. After the success and the limits of the logico-formal analysis, it is necessary to broaden our foundational tools and re-examine the interactions with natural sciences. In particular, the way the geometric and algebraic approaches organize knowledge is analyzed as a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural issue and will be examined in Mathematical Physics and Biology. We finally discuss how the current notions of mathematical (phase) “space” should be revisited for the purposes of life sciences
Optimal Output Regulation for Square, Over-Actuated and Under-Actuated Linear Systems
This paper considers two different problems in trajectory tracking control
for linear systems. First, if the control is not unique which is most input
energy efficient. Second, if exact tracking is infeasible which control
performs most accurately. These are typical challenges for over-actuated
systems and for under-actuated systems, respectively. We formulate both goals
as optimal output regulation problems. Then we contribute two new sets of
regulator equations to output regulation theory that provide the desired
solutions. A thorough study indicates solvability and uniqueness under weak
assumptions. E.g., we can always determine the solution of the classical
regulator equations that is most input energy efficient. This is of great value
if there are infinitely many solutions. We derive our results by a linear
quadratic tracking approach and establish a useful link to output regulation
theory.Comment: 8 pages, 0 figures, final version to appear in IEEE Transactions on
Automatic Contro
Learning in Real-Time Search: A Unifying Framework
Real-time search methods are suited for tasks in which the agent is
interacting with an initially unknown environment in real time. In such
simultaneous planning and learning problems, the agent has to select its
actions in a limited amount of time, while sensing only a local part of the
environment centered at the agents current location. Real-time heuristic search
agents select actions using a limited lookahead search and evaluating the
frontier states with a heuristic function. Over repeated experiences, they
refine heuristic values of states to avoid infinite loops and to converge to
better solutions. The wide spread of such settings in autonomous software and
hardware agents has led to an explosion of real-time search algorithms over the
last two decades. Not only is a potential user confronted with a hodgepodge of
algorithms, but he also faces the choice of control parameters they use. In
this paper we address both problems. The first contribution is an introduction
of a simple three-parameter framework (named LRTS) which extracts the core
ideas behind many existing algorithms. We then prove that LRTA*, epsilon-LRTA*,
SLA*, and gamma-Trap algorithms are special cases of our framework. Thus, they
are unified and extended with additional features. Second, we prove
completeness and convergence of any algorithm covered by the LRTS framework.
Third, we prove several upper-bounds relating the control parameters and
solution quality. Finally, we analyze the influence of the three control
parameters empirically in the realistic scalable domains of real-time
navigation on initially unknown maps from a commercial role-playing game as
well as routing in ad hoc sensor networks
Asymptotic Properties of Bayes Risk of a General Class of Shrinkage Priors in Multiple Hypothesis Testing Under Sparsity
Consider the problem of simultaneous testing for the means of independent
normal observations. In this paper, we study some asymptotic optimality
properties of certain multiple testing rules induced by a general class of
one-group shrinkage priors in a Bayesian decision theoretic framework, where
the overall loss is taken as the number of misclassified hypotheses. We assume
a two-groups normal mixture model for the data and consider the asymptotic
framework adopted in Bogdan et al. (2011) who introduced the notion of
asymptotic Bayes optimality under sparsity in the context of multiple testing.
The general class of one-group priors under study is rich enough to include,
among others, the families of three parameter beta, generalized double Pareto
priors, and in particular the horseshoe, the normal-exponential-gamma and the
Strawderman-Berger priors. We establish that within our chosen asymptotic
framework, the multiple testing rules under study asymptotically attain the
risk of the Bayes Oracle up to a multiplicative factor, with the constant in
the risk close to the constant in the Oracle risk. This is similar to a result
obtained in Datta and Ghosh (2013) for the multiple testing rule based on the
horseshoe estimator introduced in Carvalho et al. (2009, 2010). We further show
that under very mild assumption on the underlying sparsity parameter, the
induced decision rules based on an empirical Bayes estimate of the
corresponding global shrinkage parameter proposed by van der Pas et al. (2014),
attain the optimal Bayes risk up to the same multiplicative factor
asymptotically. We provide a unifying argument applicable for the general class
of priors under study. In the process, we settle a conjecture regarding
optimality property of the generalized double Pareto priors made in Datta and
Ghosh (2013). Our work also shows that the result in Datta and Ghosh (2013) can
be improved further
On Low-rank Trace Regression under General Sampling Distribution
A growing number of modern statistical learning problems involve estimating a
large number of parameters from a (smaller) number of noisy observations. In a
subset of these problems (matrix completion, matrix compressed sensing, and
multi-task learning) the unknown parameters form a high-dimensional matrix B*,
and two popular approaches for the estimation are convex relaxation of
rank-penalized regression or non-convex optimization. It is also known that
these estimators satisfy near optimal error bounds under assumptions on rank,
coherence, or spikiness of the unknown matrix.
In this paper, we introduce a unifying technique for analyzing all of these
problems via both estimators that leads to short proofs for the existing
results as well as new results. Specifically, first we introduce a general
notion of spikiness for B* and consider a general family of estimators and
prove non-asymptotic error bounds for the their estimation error. Our approach
relies on a generic recipe to prove restricted strong convexity for the
sampling operator of the trace regression. Second, and most notably, we prove
similar error bounds when the regularization parameter is chosen via K-fold
cross-validation. This result is significant in that existing theory on
cross-validated estimators do not apply to our setting since our estimators are
not known to satisfy their required notion of stability. Third, we study
applications of our general results to four subproblems of (1) matrix
completion, (2) multi-task learning, (3) compressed sensing with Gaussian
ensembles, and (4) compressed sensing with factored measurements. For (1), (3),
and (4) we recover matching error bounds as those found in the literature, and
for (2) we obtain (to the best of our knowledge) the first such error bound. We
also demonstrate how our frameworks applies to the exact recovery problem in
(3) and (4).Comment: 32 pages, 1 figur
A Unifying Theory of Dark Energy and Dark Matter: Negative Masses and Matter Creation within a Modified CDM Framework
Dark energy and dark matter constitute 95% of the observable Universe. Yet
the physical nature of these two phenomena remains a mystery. Einstein
suggested a long-forgotten solution: gravitationally repulsive negative masses,
which drive cosmic expansion and cannot coalesce into light-emitting
structures. However, contemporary cosmological results are derived upon the
reasonable assumption that the Universe only contains positive masses. By
reconsidering this assumption, I have constructed a toy model which suggests
that both dark phenomena can be unified into a single negative mass fluid. The
model is a modified CDM cosmology, and indicates that
continuously-created negative masses can resemble the cosmological constant and
can flatten the rotation curves of galaxies. The model leads to a cyclic
universe with a time-variable Hubble parameter, potentially providing
compatibility with the current tension that is emerging in cosmological
measurements. In the first three-dimensional N-body simulations of negative
mass matter in the scientific literature, this exotic material naturally forms
haloes around galaxies that extend to several galactic radii. These haloes are
not cuspy. The proposed cosmological model is therefore able to predict the
observed distribution of dark matter in galaxies from first principles. The
model makes several testable predictions and seems to have the potential to be
consistent with observational evidence from distant supernovae, the cosmic
microwave background, and galaxy clusters. These findings may imply that
negative masses are a real and physical aspect of our Universe, or
alternatively may imply the existence of a superseding theory that in some
limit can be modelled by effective negative masses. Both cases lead to the
surprising conclusion that the compelling puzzle of the dark Universe may have
been due to a simple sign error.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics (A&A). Videos
of the simulations are available online at: https://goo.gl/rZN1P
- …