27,279 research outputs found
Partitioned Sampling of Public Opinions Based on Their Social Dynamics
Public opinion polling is usually done by random sampling from the entire
population, treating individual opinions as independent. In the real world,
individuals' opinions are often correlated, e.g., among friends in a social
network. In this paper, we explore the idea of partitioned sampling, which
partitions individuals with high opinion similarities into groups and then
samples every group separately to obtain an accurate estimate of the population
opinion. We rigorously formulate the above idea as an optimization problem. We
then show that the simple partitions which contain only one sample in each
group are always better, and reduce finding the optimal simple partition to a
well-studied Min-r-Partition problem. We adapt an approximation algorithm and a
heuristic algorithm to solve the optimization problem. Moreover, to obtain
opinion similarity efficiently, we adapt a well-known opinion evolution model
to characterize social interactions, and provide an exact computation of
opinion similarities based on the model. We use both synthetic and real-world
datasets to demonstrate that the partitioned sampling method results in
significant improvement in sampling quality and it is robust when some opinion
similarities are inaccurate or even missing
Performance of multiple-input multiple-output wireless communications systems using distributed antennas
In this contribution we propose and investigate a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communications system, where multiple receive antennas are distributed in the area covered by a cellular cell and connected with the base-station (BS). We first analyze the total received power by the BS through the distributed antennas, when assuming that the mobile's signal is transmitted over lognormal shadowed Rayleigh fading channels. Then, the outage probability of the distributed antenna MIMO systems is investigated, when considering various antenna distribution patterns. Furthermore, space-time coding at the mobile transmitter is considered for enhancing the outage performance of the distributed antenna MIMO system. Our study and simulation results show that the outage performance of a distributed antenna MIMO system can be significantly improved, when either increasing the number of distributed receive antennas or increasing the number of mobile transmit antennas
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