5,575 research outputs found
Poisson's equation for discrete-time quasi-birth-and-death processes
We consider Poisson's equation for quasi-birth-and-death processes (QBDs) and
we exploit the special transition structure of QBDs to obtain its solutions in
two different forms. One is based on a decomposition through first passage
times to lower levels, the other is based on a recursive expression for the
deviation matrix.
We revisit the link between a solution of Poisson's equation and perturbation
analysis and we show that it applies to QBDs. We conclude with the PH/M/1 queue
as an illustrative example, and we measure the sensitivity of the expected
queue size to the initial value
Accelerated Variance Reduced Stochastic ADMM
Recently, many variance reduced stochastic alternating direction method of
multipliers (ADMM) methods (e.g.\ SAG-ADMM, SDCA-ADMM and SVRG-ADMM) have made
exciting progress such as linear convergence rates for strongly convex
problems. However, the best known convergence rate for general convex problems
is O(1/T) as opposed to O(1/T^2) of accelerated batch algorithms, where is
the number of iterations. Thus, there still remains a gap in convergence rates
between existing stochastic ADMM and batch algorithms. To bridge this gap, we
introduce the momentum acceleration trick for batch optimization into the
stochastic variance reduced gradient based ADMM (SVRG-ADMM), which leads to an
accelerated (ASVRG-ADMM) method. Then we design two different momentum term
update rules for strongly convex and general convex cases. We prove that
ASVRG-ADMM converges linearly for strongly convex problems. Besides having a
low per-iteration complexity as existing stochastic ADMM methods, ASVRG-ADMM
improves the convergence rate on general convex problems from O(1/T) to
O(1/T^2). Our experimental results show the effectiveness of ASVRG-ADMM.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, Appears in Proceedings of the 31th AAAI
Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), San Francisco, California, USA,
pp. 2287--2293, 201
Scalable Algorithms for Tractable Schatten Quasi-Norm Minimization
The Schatten-p quasi-norm is usually used to replace the standard
nuclear norm in order to approximate the rank function more accurately.
However, existing Schatten-p quasi-norm minimization algorithms involve
singular value decomposition (SVD) or eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) in each
iteration, and thus may become very slow and impractical for large-scale
problems. In this paper, we first define two tractable Schatten quasi-norms,
i.e., the Frobenius/nuclear hybrid and bi-nuclear quasi-norms, and then prove
that they are in essence the Schatten-2/3 and 1/2 quasi-norms, respectively,
which lead to the design of very efficient algorithms that only need to update
two much smaller factor matrices. We also design two efficient proximal
alternating linearized minimization algorithms for solving representative
matrix completion problems. Finally, we provide the global convergence and
performance guarantees for our algorithms, which have better convergence
properties than existing algorithms. Experimental results on synthetic and
real-world data show that our algorithms are more accurate than the
state-of-the-art methods, and are orders of magnitude faster.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, Appears in Proceedings of the 30th AAAI
Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Phoenix, Arizona, USA, pp.
2016--2022, 201
A Chinese perspective on Western coverage of China past and present
What would a 21st century Chinese media student make of a documentary about Nixon’s historic trip to China back in 1972? What would they think of former CNN correspondent Mike Chinoy’s view that Nixon colluded with China’s propaganda spin? And what they make of the view in this review of the film, that the Chinese government is still locked into that mentality of using the media for its own ends? LSE media student Yuanyuan Liu gives her view
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