8,037 research outputs found
Evolution of the discrete cosine transform using genetic programming
Compression of 2 dimensional data is important for the efficient transmission, storage and manipulation
of Images. The most common technique used for lossy image compression relies on fast application of
the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). The cosine transform has been heavily researched and many
efficient methods have been determined and successfully applied in practice; this paper presents a novel
method for evolving a DCT algorithm using genetic programming. We show that it is possible to evolve a
very close approximation to a 4 point transform. In theory, an 8 point transform could also be evolved
using the same technique
Efficient data augmentation for fitting stochastic epidemic models to prevalence data
Stochastic epidemic models describe the dynamics of an epidemic as a disease
spreads through a population. Typically, only a fraction of cases are observed
at a set of discrete times. The absence of complete information about the time
evolution of an epidemic gives rise to a complicated latent variable problem in
which the state space size of the epidemic grows large as the population size
increases. This makes analytically integrating over the missing data infeasible
for populations of even moderate size. We present a data augmentation Markov
chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) framework for Bayesian estimation of stochastic
epidemic model parameters, in which measurements are augmented with
subject-level disease histories. In our MCMC algorithm, we propose each new
subject-level path, conditional on the data, using a time-inhomogeneous
continuous-time Markov process with rates determined by the infection histories
of other individuals. The method is general, and may be applied, with minimal
modifications, to a broad class of stochastic epidemic models. We present our
algorithm in the context of multiple stochastic epidemic models in which the
data are binomially sampled prevalence counts, and apply our method to data
from an outbreak of influenza in a British boarding school
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