Active Classification for POMDPs: a Kalman-like State Estimator

The problem of state tracking with active observation control is considered for a system modeled by a discrete-time, finite-state Markov chain observed through conditionally Gaussian measurement vectors. The measurement model statistics are shaped by the underlying state and an exogenous control input, which influence the observations' quality. Exploiting an innovations approach, an approximate minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) filter is derived to estimate the Markov chain system state. To optimize the control strategy, the associated mean-squared error is used as an optimization criterion in a partially observable Markov decision process formulation. A stochastic dynamic programming algorithm is proposed to solve for the optimal solution. To enhance the quality of system state estimates, approximate MMSE smoothing estimators are also derived. Finally, the performance of the proposed framework is illustrated on the problem of physical activity detection in wireless body sensing networks. The power of the proposed framework lies within its ability to accommodate a broad spectrum of active classification applications including sensor management for object classification and tracking, estimation of sparse signals and radar scheduling.Comment: 38 pages, 6 figure

An Integrated Dataset of Civil Issue Reports and Neighborhood Characteristics for Computational Social Science Research

SeeClickFix data (issue IDs & statistics) along with socioeconomic, demographic and walkability information: - Neighborhood names (nei_final_simple) - Number of unique users - Number of issue reports - Number of thanks and votes - Number of anonymous issue reports - Number of non-anonymous reports and reporters - Response times, in seconds - Median household incomes - Household types count - Population and population density - Race and ethnic population - Age range population - Marital statuses count - Employment statuses count - Food stamps count - Educational attainments count - Walk, transit, bike scores SeeClickFix data was collected in April 2018 and includes reported civil issues between January 5, 2010 and February 10, 2018. Socioeconomic and demographic information was collected from Statistical Atlas (https://statisticalatlas.com/place/New-York/Albany/Overview), which obtains its data from the US Census Bureau, and Walk, Bike and Transit Scores were collected from the WalkScore website (https://www.walkscore.com/)