An Accelerated Chow and Liu Algorithm: Fitting Tree Distributions to High Dimensional Sparse Data

Chow and Liu introduced an algorithm for fitting a multivariate distribution with a tree (i.e. a density model that assumes that there are only pairwise dependencies between variables) and that the graph of these dependencies is a spanning tree. The original algorithm is quadratic in the dimesion of the domain, and linear in the number of data points that define the target distribution $P$. This paper shows that for sparse, discrete data, fitting a tree distribution can be done in time and memory that is jointly subquadratic in the number of variables and the size of the data set. The new algorithm, called the acCL algorithm, takes advantage of the sparsity of the data to accelerate the computation of pairwise marginals and the sorting of the resulting mutual informations, achieving speed ups of up to 2-3 orders of magnitude in the experiments

Social Media, Gender and the Mediatisation of War: Exploring the German Armed Forces’ Visual Representation of the Afghanistan Operation on Facebook

Studies on the mediatisation of war point to attempts of governments to regulate the visual perspective of their involvements in armed conflict – the most notable example being the practice of ‘embedded reporting’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. This paper focuses on a different strategy of visual meaning-making, namely, the publication of images on social media by armed forces themselves. Specifically, we argue that the mediatisation of war literature could profit from an increased engagement with feminist research, both within Critical Security/Critical Military Studies and within Science and Technology Studies that highlight the close connection between masculinity, technology and control. The article examines the German military mission in Afghanistan as represented on the German armed forces’ official Facebook page. Germany constitutes an interesting, and largely neglected, case for the growing literature on the mediatisation of war: its strong antimilitarist political culture makes the representation of war particularly delicate. The paper examines specific representational patterns of Germany’s involvement in Afghanistan and discusses the implications which arise from what is placed inside the frame of visibility and what remains out of its view

A New Algorithm for Partial Redundancy Elimination based on SSA Form

A new algorithm, SSAPRE, for performing partial redundancy elimination based entirely on SSA form is presented. It achieves optimal code motion similar to lazy code motion [KRS94a, DS93], but is formulated independently and does not involve iterative data flow analysis and bit vectors in its solution. It not only exhibits the characteristics common to other sparse approaches, but also inherits the advantages shared by other SSA-based optimization techniques. SSAPRE also maintains its output in the same SSA form as its input. In describing the algorithm, we state theorems with proofs giving our claims about SSAPRE. We also give additional description about our practical implementation of SSAPRE, and analyze and compare its performance with a bit-vector-based implementation of PRE. We conclude with some discussion of the implications of this work. 1 Introduction The Static Single Assignment Form (SSA) has become a popular program representation in optimizing compilers, because it provid..