Equi-energy sampler with applications in statistical inference and statistical mechanics

We introduce a new sampling algorithm, the equi-energy sampler, for efficient statistical sampling and estimation. Complementary to the widely used temperature-domain methods, the equi-energy sampler, utilizing the temperature--energy duality, targets the energy directly. The focus on the energy function not only facilitates efficient sampling, but also provides a powerful means for statistical estimation, for example, the calculation of the density of states and microcanonical averages in statistical mechanics. The equi-energy sampler is applied to a variety of problems, including exponential regression in statistics, motif sampling in computational biology and protein folding in biophysics.Comment: This paper discussed in: [math.ST/0611217], [math.ST/0611219], [math.ST/0611221], [math.ST/0611222]. Rejoinder in [math.ST/0611224]. Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053606000000515 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Cross-Layer Optimization of Fast Video Delivery in Cache-Enabled Relaying Networks

This paper investigates the cross-layer optimization of fast video delivery and caching for minimization of the overall video delivery time in a two-hop relaying network. The half-duplex relay nodes are equipped with both a cache and a buffer which facilitate joint scheduling of fetching and delivery to exploit the channel diversity for improving the overall delivery performance. The fast delivery control is formulated as a two-stage functional non-convex optimization problem. By exploiting the underlying convex and quasi-convex structures, the problem can be solved exactly and efficiently by the developed algorithm. Simulation results show that significant caching and buffering gains can be achieved with the proposed framework, which translates into a reduction of the overall video delivery time. Besides, a trade-off between caching and buffering gains is unveiled.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures; accepted for presentation at IEEE Globecom, San Diego, CA, Dec. 201

An improved distance measure between the expression profiles linking co-expression and co-regulation in mouse

BACKGROUND: Many statistical algorithms combine microarray expression data and genome sequence data to identify transcription factor binding motifs in the low eukaryotic genomes. Finding cis-regulatory elements in higher eukaryote genomes, however, remains a challenge, as searching in the promoter regions of genes with similar expression patterns often fails. The difficulty is partially attributable to the poor performance of the similarity measures for comparing expression profiles. The widely accepted measures are inadequate for distinguishing genes transcribed from distinct regulatory mechanisms in the complicated genomes of higher eukaryotes. RESULTS: By defining the regulatory similarity between a gene pair as the number of common known transcription factor binding motifs in the promoter regions, we compared the performance of several expression distance measures on seven mouse expression data sets. We propose a new distance measure that accounts for both the linear trends and fold-changes of expression across the samples. CONCLUSION: The study reveals that the proposed distance measure for comparing expression profiles enables us to identify genes with large number of common regulatory elements because it reflects the inherent regulatory information better than widely accepted distance measures such as the Pearson's correlation or cosine correlation with or without log transformation

Cache-Aided Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

In this paper, we propose a novel joint caching and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme to facilitate advanced downlink transmission for next generation cellular networks. In addition to reaping the conventional advantages of caching and NOMA transmission, the proposed cache-aided NOMA scheme also exploits cached data for interference cancellation which is not possible with separate caching and NOMA transmission designs. Furthermore, as caching can help to reduce the residual interference power, several decoding orders are feasible at the receivers, and these decoding orders can be flexibly selected for performance optimization. We characterize the achievable rate region of cache-aided NOMA and investigate its benefits for minimizing the time required to complete video file delivery. Our simulation results reveal that, compared to several baseline schemes, the proposed cache-aided NOMA scheme significantly expands the achievable rate region for downlink transmission, which translates into substantially reduced file delivery times.Comment: Accepted for presentation at IEEE ICC 201

Characterization of slow and fast phase nystagmus

A current literature review of the analog and digital process of vestibular and optical kinetic nystagmus reveals little agreement in the methods used by various labs. The strategies for detection of saccade (fast phase velocity component of nystagmus) vary between labs, and most of the process have not been evaluated and validated with a standard database. A survey was made of major vestibular labs in the U.S. that perform computer analyses of vestibular and optokinetic reflexes to stimuli, and a baseline was established from which to standardize data acquisition and analysis programs. The concept of an Error Index was employed as the criterium for evaluating the performance of the vestibular analysis software programs. The performance criterium is based on the detection of saccades and is the average of the percentages of missed detections and false detections. Evaluation of the programs produced results for lateral gaze with saccadic amplitude of one, two, three, five, and ten degrees with various signal-to-noise ratios. In addition, results were obtained for sinusoidal pursuit of 0.05, 0.10, and 0.50 Hz with saccades from one to ten degrees at various signal-to-noise ratios. Selection of the best program was made from the performance in the lateral gaze with three degrees of saccadic amplitude and in the 0.10 Hz sinusoid with three degrees of saccadic amplitude