440 research outputs found
Effects of Coulomb Friction on the Performance of a Servomechanism Having Backlash. Part II—Transient Response Considerations
The paper gives results of analysis of the effects of coulomb friction
on the transient response of a servo system containing backlash in the output coupling. First,
the qualitative aspects of the transient response Characteristics are discussed with the help
of frequency response methods; next, a quantitative discussion of the same is provided with
the help of a piece-wise linear solution of the characteristic differential equations. Simulator
results in support of the theoretical observations are also give
Interest Rates and Information Geometry
The space of probability distributions on a given sample space possesses
natural geometric properties. For example, in the case of a smooth parametric
family of probability distributions on the real line, the parameter space has a
Riemannian structure induced by the embedding of the family into the Hilbert
space of square-integrable functions, and is characterised by the Fisher-Rao
metric. In the nonparametric case the relevant geometry is determined by the
spherical distance function of Bhattacharyya. In the context of term structure
modelling, we show that minus the derivative of the discount function with
respect to the maturity date gives rise to a probability density. This follows
as a consequence of the positivity of interest rates. Therefore, by mapping the
density functions associated with a given family of term structures to Hilbert
space, the resulting metrical geometry can be used to analyse the relationship
of yield curves to one another. We show that the general arbitrage-free yield
curve dynamics can be represented as a process taking values in the convex
space of smooth density functions on the positive real line. It follows that
the theory of interest rate dynamics can be represented by a class of processes
in Hilbert space. We also derive the dynamics for the central moments
associated with the distribution determined by the yield curve.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figure
Statistical mechanics of transcription-factor binding site discovery using Hidden Markov Models
Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are a commonly used tool for inference of
transcription factor (TF) binding sites from DNA sequence data. We exploit the
mathematical equivalence between HMMs for TF binding and the "inverse"
statistical mechanics of hard rods in a one-dimensional disordered potential to
investigate learning in HMMs. We derive analytic expressions for the Fisher
information, a commonly employed measure of confidence in learned parameters,
in the biologically relevant limit where the density of binding sites is low.
We then use techniques from statistical mechanics to derive a scaling principle
relating the specificity (binding energy) of a TF to the minimum amount of
training data necessary to learn it.Comment: 25 pages, 2 figures, 1 table V2 - typos fixed and new references
adde
A distinct peak-flux distribution of the third class of gamma-ray bursts: A possible signature of X-ray flashes?
Gamma-ray bursts are the most luminous events in the Universe. Going beyond
the short-long classification scheme we work in the context of three burst
populations with the third group of intermediate duration and softest spectrum.
We are looking for physical properties which discriminate the intermediate
duration bursts from the other two classes. We use maximum likelihood fits to
establish group memberships in the duration-hardness plane. To confirm these
results we also use k-means and hierarchical clustering. We use Monte-Carlo
simulations to test the significance of the existence of the intermediate group
and we find it with 99.8% probability. The intermediate duration population has
a significantly lower peak-flux (with 99.94% significance). Also, long bursts
with measured redshift have higher peak-fluxes (with 98.6% significance) than
long bursts without measured redshifts. As the third group is the softest, we
argue that we have {related} them with X-ray flashes among the gamma-ray
bursts. We give a new, probabilistic definition for this class of events.Comment: accepted for publication in Ap
A geometric approach to visualization of variability in functional data
We propose a new method for the construction and visualization of boxplot-type displays for functional data. We use a recent functional data analysis framework, based on a representation of functions called square-root slope functions, to decompose observed variation in functional data into three main components: amplitude, phase, and vertical translation. We then construct separate displays for each component, using the geometry and metric of each representation space, based on a novel definition of the median, the two quartiles, and extreme observations. The outlyingness of functional data is a very complex concept. Thus, we propose to identify outliers based on any of the three main components after decomposition. We provide a variety of visualization tools for the proposed boxplot-type displays including surface plots. We evaluate the proposed method using extensive simulations and then focus our attention on three real data applications including exploratory data analysis of sea surface temperature functions, electrocardiogram functions and growth curves
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