3,541 research outputs found
Decidability properties for fragments of CHR
We study the decidability of termination for two CHR dialects which,
similarly to the Datalog like languages, are defined by using a signature which
does not allow function symbols (of arity >0). Both languages allow the use of
the = built-in in the body of rules, thus are built on a host language that
supports unification. However each imposes one further restriction. The first
CHR dialect allows only range-restricted rules, that is, it does not allow the
use of variables in the body or in the guard of a rule if they do not appear in
the head. We show that the existence of an infinite computation is decidable
for this dialect. The second dialect instead limits the number of atoms in the
head of rules to one. We prove that in this case, the existence of a
terminating computation is decidable. These results show that both dialects are
strictly less expressive than Turing Machines. It is worth noting that the
language (without function symbols) without these restrictions is as expressive
as Turing Machines
Initial results from the HARP experiment at CERN
Initial results on particle yields obtained by the HARP experiment are
presented. The measurements correspond to proton--nucleus collisions at beam
energies of 12.9 and for a thin Al target of 5% interacion legth. The
angular range considered is between 10 and 250 . This results are the
first step in the upcoming measurement of the forward production cross-section
for the same target and beam energy, relevant for the calculation of the
far--to--near ratio of the K2K experiment.Comment: Presented at the Neutrino 2004 Internation Conferenc
Ancillarity-Sufficiency Interweaving Strategy (ASIS) for Boosting MCMC Estimation of Stochastic Volatility Models
Bayesian inference for stochastic volatility models using MCMC methods highly depends
on actual parameter values in terms of sampling efficiency. While draws from the posterior
utilizing the standard centered parameterization break down when the volatility of volatility parameter
in the latent state equation is small, non-centered versions of the model show deficiencies
for highly persistent latent variable series. The novel approach of ancillarity-sufficiency
interweaving has recently been shown to aid in overcoming these issues for a broad class of
multilevel models. In this paper, we demonstrate how such an interweaving strategy can be
applied to stochastic volatility models in order to greatly improve sampling efficiency for all
parameters and throughout the entire parameter range. Moreover, this method of "combining
best of different worlds" allows for inference for parameter constellations that have previously
been infeasible to estimate without the need to select a particular parameterization beforehand.Series: Research Report Series / Department of Statistics and Mathematic
From here to infinity - sparse finite versus Dirichlet process mixtures in model-based clustering
In model-based-clustering mixture models are used to group data points into
clusters. A useful concept introduced for Gaussian mixtures by Malsiner Walli
et al (2016) are sparse finite mixtures, where the prior distribution on the
weight distribution of a mixture with components is chosen in such a way
that a priori the number of clusters in the data is random and is allowed to be
smaller than with high probability. The number of cluster is then inferred
a posteriori from the data.
The present paper makes the following contributions in the context of sparse
finite mixture modelling. First, it is illustrated that the concept of sparse
finite mixture is very generic and easily extended to cluster various types of
non-Gaussian data, in particular discrete data and continuous multivariate data
arising from non-Gaussian clusters. Second, sparse finite mixtures are compared
to Dirichlet process mixtures with respect to their ability to identify the
number of clusters. For both model classes, a random hyper prior is considered
for the parameters determining the weight distribution. By suitable matching of
these priors, it is shown that the choice of this hyper prior is far more
influential on the cluster solution than whether a sparse finite mixture or a
Dirichlet process mixture is taken into consideration.Comment: Accepted versio
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