The method of constructing trigonometric Hermite splines, which interpolate the values of some periodic function and its derivatives in the nodes of a uniform grid, is considered. The proposed method is based on the periodicity properties of trigonometric functions and is reduced to solving only systems of linear algebraic equations of the second order; solutions of these systems can be obtained in advance. When implementing this method, it is necessary to calculate the coefficients of interpolation trigonometric polynomials that interpolate the values of the function itself and the values of its derivatives at the nodes of the uniform grid; known fast Fourier transform algorithms can be used for this purpose. Examples of construction of trigonometric Hermite splines of the first and second orders are given. The proposed method can be recommended for practical use.
Multiuser multiple-input multiple-output wireless communications systems have the potential to satisfy the performance requirements of fifth-generation and future wireless networks. In this context, cell-free (CF) systems, where the antennas are distributed over the area of interest, have attracted attention because of their potential to enhance the overall efficiency and throughput performance when compared to traditional networks based on cells. However, the performance of CF systems is degraded by imperfect channel state information (CSI). To mitigate the detrimental effects of imperfect CSI, we employ rate splitting (RS) - a multiple-access scheme. The RS approach divides the messages of the users into two separate common and private portions so that interference is managed robustly. Unlike prior works, where the impact of RS in CF systems remains unexamined, we propose a CF architecture that employs RS with linear precoders to address deteriorated CSI. We derive closed-form expressions to compute the sum-rate performance of the proposed RS-CF architecture. Our numerical experiments show that our RS-CF system outperforms existing systems in terms of sum-rate, obtaining up to $10$% higher gain.
We prove that for any planar convex body C there is a positive integer m with the property that any finite point set P in the plane can be three-colored such that there is no translate of C containing at least m points of P, all of the same color. As a part of the proof, we show a strengthening of the Erd\H{o}s-Sands-Sauer-Woodrow conjecture. Surprisingly, the proof also relies on the two dimensional case of the Illumination conjecture.
The K-way vertex cut problem} consists in, given a graph G, finding a subset of vertices of a given size, whose removal partitions G into the maximum number of connected components. This problem has many applications in several areas. It has been proven to be NP-complete on general graphs, as well as on split and planar graphs. In this paper, we enrich its complexity study with two new results. First, we prove that it remains NP-complete even when restricted on the class of bipartite graphs. This is unlike what it is expected, given that the K-way vertex cut problem is a generalization of the Maximum Independent set problem which is polynomially solvable on bipartite graphs. We also provide its equivalence to the wellknown problem, namely the Critical Node Problem (CNP), On split graphs. Therefore, any solving algorithm for the CNP on split graphs is a solving algorithm for the K-way vertex cut problem and vice versa.
Consensus is a common method for computing a function of the data distributed among the nodes of a network. Of particular interest is distributed average consensus, whereby the nodes iteratively compute the sample average of the data stored at all the nodes of the network using only near-neighbor communications. In real-world scenarios, these communications must undergo quantization, which introduces distortion to the internode messages. In this thesis, a model for the evolution of the network state statistics at each iteration is developed under the assumptions of Gaussian data and additive quantization error. It is shown that minimization of the communication load in terms of aggregate source coding rate can be posed as a generalized geometric program, for which an equivalent convex optimization can efficiently solve for the global minimum. Optimization procedures are developed for rate-distortion-optimal vector quantization, uniform entropy-coded scalar quantization, and fixed-rate uniform quantization. Numerical results demonstrate the performance of these approaches. For small numbers of iterations, the fixed-rate optimizations are verified using exhaustive search. Comparison to the prior art suggests competitive performance under certain circumstances but strongly motivates the incorporation of more sophisticated coding strategies, such as differential, predictive, or Wyner-Ziv coding.
We study a semidiscrete analogue of the Unified Transform Method introduced by A. S. Fokas, to solve initial-boundary-value problems for linear evolution partial differential equations with constant coefficients on the finite interval $x \in (0,L)$. The semidiscrete method is applied to various spatial discretizations of several first and second-order linear equations, producing the exact solution for the semidiscrete problem, given appropriate initial and boundary data. From these solutions, we derive alternative series representations that are better suited for numerical computations. In addition, we show how the Unified Transform Method treats derivative boundary conditions and ghost points introduced by the choice of discretization stencil and we propose the notion of "natural" discretizations. We consider the continuum limit of the semidiscrete solutions and compare with standard finite-difference schemes.
This paper proposes a macroscopic model to describe the equilibrium distribution of passenger arrivals for the morning commute problem in a congested urban rail transit system. We use a macroscopic train operation sub-model developed by Seo et al (2017a,b) to express the interaction between the dynamics of passengers and trains in a simplified manner while maintaining their essential physical relations. The equilibrium conditions of the proposed model are derived and a solution method is provided. The characteristics of the equilibrium are then examined through analytical discussion and numerical examples. As an application of the proposed model, we analyze a simple time-dependent timetable optimization problem with equilibrium constraints and reveal that a "capacity increasing paradox" exists such that a higher dispatch frequency can increase the equilibrium cost. Furthermore, insights into the design of the timetable are obtained and the timetable influence on passengers' equilibrium travel costs are evaluated.
We propose a general and scalable approximate sampling strategy for probabilistic models with discrete variables. Our approach uses gradients of the likelihood function with respect to its discrete inputs to propose updates in a Metropolis-Hastings sampler. We show empirically that this approach outperforms generic samplers in a number of difficult settings including Ising models, Potts models, restricted Boltzmann machines, and factorial hidden Markov models. We also demonstrate the use of our improved sampler for training deep energy-based models on high dimensional discrete data. This approach outperforms variational auto-encoders and existing energy-based models. Finally, we give bounds showing that our approach is near-optimal in the class of samplers which propose local updates.
Superpixel segmentation has become an important research problem in image processing. In this paper, we propose an Iterative Spanning Forest (ISF) framework, based on sequences of Image Foresting Transforms, where one can choose i) a seed sampling strategy, ii) a connectivity function, iii) an adjacency relation, and iv) a seed pixel recomputation procedure to generate improved sets of connected superpixels (supervoxels in 3D) per iteration. The superpixels in ISF structurally correspond to spanning trees rooted at those seeds. We present five ISF methods to illustrate different choices of its components. These methods are compared with approaches from the state-of-the-art in effectiveness and efficiency. The experiments involve 2D and 3D datasets with distinct characteristics, and a high level application, named sky image segmentation. The theoretical properties of ISF are demonstrated in the supplementary material and the results show that some of its methods are competitive with or superior to the best baselines in effectiveness and efficiency.
Discrete random structures are important tools in Bayesian nonparametrics and the resulting models have proven effective in density estimation, clustering, topic modeling and prediction, among others. In this paper, we consider nested processes and study the dependence structures they induce. Dependence ranges between homogeneity, corresponding to full exchangeability, and maximum heterogeneity, corresponding to (unconditional) independence across samples. The popular nested Dirichlet process is shown to degenerate to the fully exchangeable case when there are ties across samples at the observed or latent level. To overcome this drawback, inherent to nesting general discrete random measures, we introduce a novel class of latent nested processes. These are obtained by adding common and group-specific completely random measures and, then, normalising to yield dependent random probability measures. We provide results on the partition distributions induced by latent nested processes, and develop an Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler for Bayesian inferences. A test for distributional homogeneity across groups is obtained as a by product. The results and their inferential implications are showcased on synthetic and real data.
In this paper, we study the optimal convergence rate for distributed convex optimization problems in networks. We model the communication restrictions imposed by the network as a set of affine constraints and provide optimal complexity bounds for four different setups, namely: the function $F(\xb) \triangleq \sum_{i=1}^{m}f_i(\xb)$ is strongly convex and smooth, either strongly convex or smooth or just convex. Our results show that Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent on the dual problem can be executed in a distributed manner and obtains the same optimal rates as in the centralized version of the problem (up to constant or logarithmic factors) with an additional cost related to the spectral gap of the interaction matrix. Finally, we discuss some extensions to the proposed setup such as proximal friendly functions, time-varying graphs, improvement of the condition numbers.