Sparsifying the Fisher Linear Discriminant by Rotation

Many high dimensional classification techniques have been proposed in the literature based on sparse linear discriminant analysis (LDA). To efficiently use them, sparsity of linear classifiers is a prerequisite. However, this might not be readily available in many applications, and rotations of data are required to create the needed sparsity. In this paper, we propose a family of rotations to create the required sparsity. The basic idea is to use the principal components of the sample covariance matrix of the pooled samples and its variants to rotate the data first and to then apply an existing high dimensional classifier. This rotate-and-solve procedure can be combined with any existing classifiers, and is robust against the sparsity level of the true model. We show that these rotations do create the sparsity needed for high dimensional classifications and provide theoretical understanding why such a rotation works empirically. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by a number of simulated and real data examples, and the improvements of our method over some popular high dimensional classification rules are clearly shown.Comment: 30 pages and 9 figures. This paper has been accepted by Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology). The first two versions of this paper were uploaded to Bin Dong's web site under the title "A Rotate-and-Solve Procedure for Classification" in 2013 May and 2014 January. This version may be slightly different from the published versio

Work Distributions in 1-D Fermions and Bosons with Dual Contact Interactions

We extend the well-known static duality \cite{girardeau1960relationship, cheon1999fermion} between 1-D Bosons and 1-D Fermions to the dynamical version. By utilizing this dynamical duality we find the duality of non-equilibrium work distributions between interacting 1-D bosonic (Lieb-Liniger model) and 1-D fermionic (Cheon-Shigehara model) systems with dual contact interactions. As a special case, the work distribution of the Tonks-Girardeau (TG) gas is identical to that of 1-D free fermionic system even though their momentum distributions are significantly different. In the classical limit, the work distributions of Lieb-Liniger models (Cheon-Shigehara models) with arbitrary coupling strength converge to that of the 1-D noninteracting distinguishable particles, although their elemetary excitations (quasi-particles) obey different statistics, e.g. the Bose-Einstein, the Fermi-Dirac and the fractional statistics. We also present numerical results of the work distributions of Lieb-Liniger model with various coupling strengths, which demonstrate the convergence of work distributions in the classical limit.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure, 2 table

Hinge solitons in three-dimensional second-order topological insulators

A second-order topological insulator in three dimensions refers to a topological insulator with gapless states localized on the hinges, which is a generalization of a traditional topological insulator with gapless states localized on the surfaces. Here we theoretically demonstrate the existence of stable solitons localized on the hinges of a second-order topological insulator in three dimensions when nonlinearity is involved. By means of systematic numerical study, we find that the soliton has strong localization in real space and propagates along the hinge unidirectionally without changing its shape. We further construct an electric network to simulate the second-order topological insulator. When a nonlinear inductor is appropriately involved, we find that the system can support a bright soliton for the voltage distribution demonstrated by stable time evolution of a voltage pulse.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure