7,387 research outputs found
Bivariate Ordered Probit Analysis of Public Attitudes Toward Multifunctionality of Agriculture in the U.S.
Agricultural and Food Policy,
Discrete denoising of heterogenous two-dimensional data
We consider discrete denoising of two-dimensional data with characteristics
that may be varying abruptly between regions.
Using a quadtree decomposition technique and space-filling curves, we extend
the recently developed S-DUDE (Shifting Discrete Universal DEnoiser), which was
tailored to one-dimensional data, to the two-dimensional case. Our scheme
competes with a genie that has access, in addition to the noisy data, also to
the underlying noiseless data, and can employ different two-dimensional
sliding window denoisers along distinct regions obtained by a quadtree
decomposition with leaves, in a way that minimizes the overall loss. We
show that, regardless of what the underlying noiseless data may be, the
two-dimensional S-DUDE performs essentially as well as this genie, provided
that the number of distinct regions satisfies , where is the total
size of the data. The resulting algorithm complexity is still linear in both
and , as in the one-dimensional case. Our experimental results show that
the two-dimensional S-DUDE can be effective when the characteristics of the
underlying clean image vary across different regions in the data.Comment: 16 pages, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor
Exploring E-cigarettes: Ingredients, Health Effects, and Considerations for Use
Electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes are becoming an increasingly popular nicotine delivery system, especially among adolescents and college aged students. They appeal to this population because they are new, are convenient to use, have appealing flavors, and are viewed as a cleaner, safer alternative to cigarettes. However, there are known ingredients in both the e-cigarette solution and vapors that have significant health effects and it is becoming an emerging public health issue that needs to be addressed. There is a gap in the knowledge about the potential harmful effects of e-cigarettes on both the part of the user and the healthcare providers who may need to counsel a user of e-cigarettes, since a lot of evidence is still emerging related to the health effects of e-cigarette use. To address this gap in knowledge, this paper summarizes some of the literature related to e-cigarette use, their health and safety effects that could be used to inform both users and healthcare providers, specifically nurses and nurse practitioners. There is still much to be learned about the long-term effects of e-cigarette use and what healthcare providers can do to minimize those effects
Stability analysis and control for bipedal locomotion using energy methods
In this thesis, we investigate the stability of limit cycles of passive dynamic walking. The formation process of the limit cycles is approached from the view of energy interaction. We introduce for the first time the notion of the energy portrait analysis originated from the phase portrait. The energy plane is spanned by the total energy of the system and its derivative, and different energy trajectories represent the energy portrait in the plane. One of the advantages of this method is that the stability of the limit cycles can be easily shown in a 2D plane regardless of the dimension of the system. The energy portrait of passive dynamic walking reveals that the limit cycles are formed by the interaction between energy loss and energy gain during each cycle, and they are equal at equilibria in the energy plane. In addition, the energy portrait is exploited to examine the existence of semi-passive limit cycles generated using the energy supply only at the take-off phase. It is shown that the energy interaction at the ground contact compensates for the energy supply, which makes the total energy invariant yielding limit cycles. This result means that new limit cycles can be generated according to the energy supply without changing the ground slope, and level ground walking, whose energy gain at the contact phase is always zero, can be achieved without actuation during the swing phase. We design multiple switching controllers by virtue of this property to increase the basin of attraction. Multiple limit cycles are linearized using the Poincare map method, and the feedback gains are computed taking into account the robustness and actuator saturation. Once a trajectory diverges from a basin of attraction, we switch the current controller to one that includes the trajectory in its basin of attraction. Numerical simulations confirm that a set of limit cycles can be used to increase the basin of attraction further by switching the controllers one after another. To enhance our knowledge of the limit cycles, we performed sophisticated simulations and found all stable and unstable limit cycles from the various ground slopes not only for the symmetric legs but also for the unequal legs that cause gait asymmetries. As a result, we present a novel classification of the passive limit cycles showing six distinct groups that are consecutive and cyclical
Health Concerns and Consumer Preferences for Soy Foods: Choice Modeling Approach
Consumer/Household Economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,
Bivariate Beta-LSTM
Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) infers the long term dependency through a cell
state maintained by the input and the forget gate structures, which models a
gate output as a value in [0,1] through a sigmoid function. However, due to the
graduality of the sigmoid function, the sigmoid gate is not flexible in
representing multi-modality or skewness. Besides, the previous models lack
modeling on the correlation between the gates, which would be a new method to
adopt inductive bias for a relationship between previous and current input.
This paper proposes a new gate structure with the bivariate Beta distribution.
The proposed gate structure enables probabilistic modeling on the gates within
the LSTM cell so that the modelers can customize the cell state flow with
priors and distributions. Moreover, we theoretically show the higher upper
bound of the gradient compared to the sigmoid function, and we empirically
observed that the bivariate Beta distribution gate structure provides higher
gradient values in training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of bivariate Beta
gate structure on the sentence classification, image classification, polyphonic
music modeling, and image caption generation.Comment: AAAI 202
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