Nonlinear superhorizon perturbations of non-canonical scalar field

We develop a theory of non-linear cosmological perturbations at superhorizon scales for a scalar field with a Lagrangian of the form $P(X,\phi)$, where $X=-\partial^{\mu}\phi\partial_{\mu}\phi$ and $\phi$ is the scalar field. We employ the ADM formalism and the spatial gradient expansion approach to obtain general solutions valid up to the second order in the gradient expansion. This formulation can be applied to, for example, DBI inflation models to investigate superhorizon evolution of non-Gaussianities. With slight modification, we also obtain general solutions valid up to the same order for a perfect fluid with a general equation of state $P=P(\rho)$.Comment: 14 page

Score Fusion by Maximizing the Area under the ROC Curve

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02172-5_61Information fusion is currently a very active research topic aimed at improving the performance of biometric systems. This paper proposes a novel method for optimizing the parameters of a score fusion model based on maximizing an index related to the Area Under the ROC Curve. This approach has the convenience that the fusion parameters are learned without having to specify the client and impostor priors or the costs for the different errors. Empirical results on several datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.Work supported by the Spanish projects DPI2006-15542-C04 and TIN2008-04571 and the Generalitat Valenciana - Consellería d’Educació under an FPI scholarship.Villegas Santamaría, M.; Paredes Palacios, R. (2009). Score Fusion by Maximizing the Area under the ROC Curve. En Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis: 4th Iberian Conference, IbPRIA 2009 Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal, June 10-12, 2009 Proceedings. Springer Verlag (Germany). 473-480. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02172-5_61S473480Toh, K.A., Kim, J., Lee, S.: Biometric scores fusion based on total error rate minimization. Pattern Recognition 41(3), 1066–1082 (2008)Jain, A., Nandakumar, K., Ross, A.: Score normalization in multimodal biometric systems. Pattern Recognition 38(12), 2270–2285 (2005)Gutschoven, B., Verlinde, P.: Multi-modal identity verification using support vector machines (svm). In: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Information Fusion. FUSION 2000, vol. 2, pp. THB3/3–THB3/8 (July 2000)Ma, Y., Cukic, B., Singh, H.: A classification approach to multi-biometric score fusion. In: Kanade, T., Jain, A., Ratha, N.K. (eds.) AVBPA 2005. LNCS, vol. 3546, pp. 484–493. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)Maurer, D.E., Baker, J.P.: Fusing multimodal biometrics with quality estimates via a bayesian belief network. Pattern Recogn. 41(3), 821–832 (2008)Ling, C.X., Huang, J., Zhang, H.: Auc: a statistically consistent and more discriminating measure than accuracy. In: Proc. of IJCAI 2003, pp. 519–524 (2003)Yan, L., Dodier, R.H., Mozer, M., Wolniewicz, R.H.: Optimizing classifier performance via an approximation to the wilcoxon-mann-whitney statistic. In: Machine Learning, Proceedings of the Twentieth International Conference (ICML 2003), Washington, DC, USA, pp. 848–855. AAAI Press, Menlo Park (2003)Marrocco, C., Molinara, M., Tortorella, F.: Exploiting auc for optimal linear combinations of dichotomizers. Pattern Recogn. Lett. 27(8), 900–907 (2006)Marrocco, C., Duin, R.P.W., Tortorella, F.: Maximizing the area under the roc curve by pairwise feature combination. Pattern Recogn. 41(6), 1961–1974 (2008)Paredes, R., Vidal, E.: Learning prototypes and distances: a prototype reduction technique based on nearest neighbor error minimization. Pattern Recognition 39(2), 180–188 (2006)Villegas, M., Paredes, R.: Simultaneous learning of a discriminative projection and prototypes for nearest-neighbor classification. In: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. CVPR 2008, pp. 1–8 (2008)Nandakumar, K., Chen, Y., Dass, S.C., Jain, A.: Likelihood ratio-based biometric score fusion. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 30(2), 342–347 (2008)Poh, N., Bengio, S.: A score-level fusion benchmark database for biometric authentication. In: Kanade, T., Jain, A., Ratha, N.K. (eds.) AVBPA 2005. LNCS, vol. 3546, pp. 1059–1070. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)National Institute of Standards and Technology: NIST Biometric Scores Set - Release 1 (BSSR1) (2004), http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/894.03/biometricscores/Bengio, S., Mariéthoz, J., Keller, M.: The expected performance curve. In: Proceedings of the Second Workshop on ROC Analysis in ML, pp. 9–16 (2005

A complete 3D numerical study of the effects of pseudoscalar-photon mixing on quasar polarizations

We present the results of three-dimensional simulations of quasar polarizations in the presence of pseudoscalar-photon mixing in the intergalactic medium. The intergalactic magnetic field is assumed to be uncorrelated in wave vector space but correlated in real space. Such a field may be obtained if its origin is primordial. Furthermore we assume that the quasars, located at cosmological distances, have negligible initial polarization. In the presence of pseudoscalar-photon mixing we show, through a direct comparison with observations, that this may explain the observed large scale alignments in quasar polarizations within the framework of big bang cosmology. We find that the simulation results give a reasonably good fit to the observed data.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, significant changes, to appear in EPJ

A strongly first order electroweak phase transition from strong symmetry-breaking interactions

We argue that a strongly first order electroweak phase transition is natural in the presence of strong symmetry-breaking interactions, such as technicolor. We demonstrate this using an effective linear scalar theory of the symmetry-breaking sector.Comment: LaTex, 15 pages, 3 figures in EPS format. Phys. Rev. D approved Typographically Correct version, minor grammatical change

Multiple Traits for People Identification

Present biometric systems mostly rely on a single physical or behavioral feature for either identification or verification. However, day to day use of single biometries in massive or uncontrolled scenarios still has several shortcomings. These can be due to complex or unstable hardware settings, to changing environmental conditions or even to immature software procedures: some classification problems are intrinsically hard to solve. Possible spoofing of single biometric features is an additional issue. Last but not least, some features may occasionally lack the requisite of universality. As a consequence, biometric systems based on a single feature often have poor reliability, especially in applications where high security is needed. Multimodal systems, i.e., systems that concurrently exploit multiple features, are a possible way to achieve improved effectiveness and reliability. There are several issues that must be addressed when designing such a system, including the choice of the set of biometric features, the normalization method, the integration schema and the fusion process, and the use of a measure of reliability for each subsystem on a single response basis. This chapter describes the state of the art regarding such issues and sketches some suggestions for future work

Screening of cosmological constant for De Sitter Universe in non-local gravity, phantom-divide crossing and finite-time future singularities

We investigate de Sitter solutions in non-local gravity as well as in non-local gravity with Lagrange constraint multiplier. We examine a condition to avoid a ghost and discuss a screening scenario for a cosmological constant in de Sitter solutions. Furthermore, we explicitly demonstrate that three types of the finite-time future singularities can occur in non-local gravity and explore their properties. In addition, we evaluate the effective equation of state for the universe and show that the late-time accelerating universe may be effectively the quintessence, cosmological constant or phantom-like phases. In particular, it is found that there is a case in which a crossing of the phantom divide from the non-phantom (quintessence) phase to the phantom one can be realized when a finite-time future singularity occurs. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the addition of an $R^2$ term can cure the finite-time future singularities in non-local gravity. It is also suggested that in the framework of non-local gravity, adding an $R^2$ term leads to possible unification of the early-time inflation with the late-time cosmic acceleration.Comment: 42 pages, no figure, version accepted for publication in General Relativity and Gravitatio

A Single Visualization Technique for Displaying Multiple Metabolite-Phenotype Associations

To assist with management and interpretation of human metabolomics data, which are rapidly increasing in quantity and complexity, we need better visualization tools. Using a dataset of several hundred metabolite measures profiled in a cohort of similar to 1500 individuals sampled from a population-based community study, we performed association analyses with eight demographic and clinical traits and outcomes. We compared frequently used existing graphical approaches with a novel ` rain plot' approach to display the results of these analyses. The ` rain plot' combines features of a raindrop plot and a conventional heatmap to convey results of multiple association analyses. A rain plot can simultaneously indicate e ff ect size, directionality, and statistical significance of associations between metabolites and several traits. This approach enables visual comparison features of all metabolites examined with a given trait. The rain plot extends prior approaches and o ff ers complementary information for data interpretation. Additional work is needed in data visualizations for metabolomics to assist investigators in the process of understanding and convey large-scale analysis results e ff ectively, feasibly, and practically

Search for a W' boson decaying to a bottom quark and a top quark in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

Results are presented from a search for a W' boson using a dataset corresponding to 5.0 inverse femtobarns of integrated luminosity collected during 2011 by the CMS experiment at the LHC in pp collisions at sqrt(s)=7 TeV. The W' boson is modeled as a heavy W boson, but different scenarios for the couplings to fermions are considered, involving both left-handed and right-handed chiral projections of the fermions, as well as an arbitrary mixture of the two. The search is performed in the decay channel W' to t b, leading to a final state signature with a single lepton (e, mu), missing transverse energy, and jets, at least one of which is tagged as a b-jet. A W' boson that couples to fermions with the same coupling constant as the W, but to the right-handed rather than left-handed chiral projections, is excluded for masses below 1.85 TeV at the 95% confidence level. For the first time using LHC data, constraints on the W' gauge coupling for a set of left- and right-handed coupling combinations have been placed. These results represent a significant improvement over previously published limits.Comment: Submitted to Physics Letters B. Replaced with version publishe