The upcoming NASA mission HelioSwarm will use nine spacecraft to make the first simultaneous multi-point measurements of space plasmas spanning multiple scales. Using the wave-telescope technique, HelioSwarm's measurements will allow for both the calculation of the power in wavevector-and-frequency space and the characterization of the associated dispersion relations of waves present in the plasma at MHD and ion-kinetic scales. This technique has been applied to the four-spacecraft missions of CLUSTER and MMS and its effectiveness has previously been characterized in a handful of case studies. We expand this uncertainty quantification analysis to arbitrary configurations of four through nine spacecraft for three-dimensional plane waves. We use Bayesian inference to learn equations that approximate the error in reconstructing the wavevector as a function of relative wavevector magnitude, spacecraft configuration shape, and number of spacecraft. We demonstrate the application of these equations to data drawn from a nine-spacecraft configuration to both improve the accuracy of the technique, as well as expand the magnitudes of wavevectors that can be characterized.
Data from populations of systems are prevalent in many industrial applications. Machines and infrastructure are increasingly instrumented with sensing systems, emitting streams of telemetry data with complex interdependencies. In practice, data-centric monitoring procedures tend to consider these assets (and respective models) as distinct -- operating in isolation and associated with independent data. In contrast, this work captures the statistical correlations and interdependencies between models of a group of systems. Utilising a Bayesian multilevel approach, the value of data can be extended, since the population can be considered as a whole, rather than constituent parts. Most interestingly, domain expertise and knowledge of the underlying physics can be encoded in the model at the system, subgroup, or population level. We present an example of acoustic emission (time-of-arrival) mapping for source location, to illustrate how multilevel models naturally lend themselves to representing aggregate systems in engineering. In particular, we focus on constraining the combined models with domain knowledge to enhance transfer learning and enable further insights at the population level.
Disorders of coronary arteries lead to severe health problems such as atherosclerosis, angina, heart attack and even death. Considering the clinical significance of coronary arteries, an efficient computational model is a vital step towards tissue engineering, enhancing the research of coronary diseases and developing medical treatment and interventional tools. In this work, we applied inverse uncertainty quantification to a microscale agent-based arterial tissue model, a component of a multiscale in-stent restenosis model. Inverse uncertainty quantification was performed to calibrate the arterial tissue model to achieve the mechanical response in line with tissue experimental data. Bayesian calibration with bias term correction was applied to reduce the uncertainty of unknown polynomial coefficients of the attractive force function and achieved agreement with the mechanical behaviour of arterial tissue based on the uniaxial strain tests. Due to the high computational costs of the model, a surrogate model based on Gaussian process was developed to ensure the feasibility of the computation.
The use of AI systems in healthcare for the early screening of diseases is of great clinical importance. Deep learning has shown great promise in medical imaging, but the reliability and trustworthiness of AI systems limit their deployment in real clinical scenes, where patient safety is at stake. Uncertainty estimation plays a pivotal role in producing a confidence evaluation along with the prediction of the deep model. This is particularly important in medical imaging, where the uncertainty in the model's predictions can be used to identify areas of concern or to provide additional information to the clinician. In this paper, we review the various types of uncertainty in deep learning, including aleatoric uncertainty and epistemic uncertainty. We further discuss how they can be estimated in medical imaging. More importantly, we review recent advances in deep learning models that incorporate uncertainty estimation in medical imaging. Finally, we discuss the challenges and future directions in uncertainty estimation in deep learning for medical imaging. We hope this review will ignite further interest in the community and provide researchers with an up-to-date reference regarding applications of uncertainty estimation models in medical imaging.
The revolutionary technology of \emph{Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces (SIM)} has been recently shown to be capable of carrying out advanced signal processing directly in the native electromagnetic (EM) wave domain. An SIM is fabricated by a sophisticated amalgam of multiple stacked metasurface layers, which may outperform its single-layer metasurface counterparts, such as reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISd) and metasurface lenses. We harness this new SIM concept for implementing efficient holographic multiple-input multiple-output (HMIMO) communications that dot require excessive radio-frequency (RF) chains, which constitutes a substantial benefit compared to existing implementations. We first present an HMIMO communication system based on a pair of SIMs at the transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX), respectively. In sharp contrast to the conventional MIMO designs, the considered SIMs are capable of automatically accomplishing transmit precoding and receiver combining, as the EM waves propagate through them. As such, each information data stream can be directly radiated and recovered from the corresponding transmit and receive ports. Secondly, we formulate the problem of minimizing the error between the actual end-to-end SIMs'parametrized channel matrix and the target diagonal one, with the latter representing a flawless interference-free system of parallel subchannels. This is achieved by jointly optimizing the phase shifts associated with all the metasurface layers of both the TX-SIM and RX-SIM. We then design a gradient descent algorithm to solve the resultant non-convex problem. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze the HMIMO channel capacity bound and provide some useful fundamental insights. Extensive simulation results are provided for characterizing our SIM-based HMIMO system, quantifying its substantial performance benefits.
A Low-rank Spectral Optimization Problem (LSOP) minimizes a linear objective subject to multiple two-sided linear matrix inequalities intersected with a low-rank and spectral constrained domain set. Although solving LSOP is, in general, NP-hard, its partial convexification (i.e., replacing the domain set by its convex hull) termed "LSOP-R," is often tractable and yields a high-quality solution. This motivates us to study the strength of LSOP-R. Specifically, we derive rank bounds for any extreme point of the feasible set of LSOP-R and prove their tightness for the domain sets with different matrix spaces. The proposed rank bounds recover two well-known results in the literature from a fresh angle and also allow us to derive sufficient conditions under which the relaxation LSOP-R is equivalent to the original LSOP. To effectively solve LSOP-R, we develop a column generation algorithm with a vector-based convex pricing oracle, coupled with a rank-reduction algorithm, which ensures the output solution satisfies the theoretical rank bound. Finally, we numerically verify the strength of the LSOP-R and the efficacy of the proposed algorithms.
Originally introduced as a neural network for ensemble learning, mixture of experts (MoE) has recently become a fundamental building block of highly successful modern deep neural networks for heterogeneous data analysis in several applications, including those in machine learning, statistics, bioinformatics, economics, and medicine. Despite its popularity in practice, a satisfactory level of understanding of the convergence behavior of Gaussian-gated MoE parameter estimation is far from complete. The underlying reason for this challenge is the inclusion of covariates in the Gaussian gating and expert networks, which leads to their intrinsically complex interactions via partial differential equations with respect to their parameters. We address these issues by designing novel Voronoi loss functions to accurately capture heterogeneity in the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for resolving parameter estimation in these models. Our results reveal distinct behaviors of the MLE under two settings: the first setting is when all the location parameters in the Gaussian gating are non-zeros while the second setting is when there exists at least one zero-valued location parameter. Notably, these behaviors can be characterized by the solvability of two different systems of polynomial equations. Finally, we conduct a simulation study to verify our theoretical results.
The Schr\"odinger bridge problem (SBP) is gaining increasing attention in generative modeling and showing promising potential even in comparison with the score-based generative models (SGMs). SBP can be interpreted as an entropy-regularized optimal transport problem, which conducts projections onto every other marginal alternatingly. However, in practice, only approximated projections are accessible and their convergence is not well understood. To fill this gap, we present a first convergence analysis of the Schr\"odinger bridge algorithm based on approximated projections. As for its practical applications, we apply SBP to probabilistic time series imputation by generating missing values conditioned on observed data. We show that optimizing the transport cost improves the performance and the proposed algorithm achieves the state-of-the-art result in healthcare and environmental data while exhibiting the advantage of exploring both temporal and feature patterns in probabilistic time series imputation.
This paper focuses on statistical modelling using additive Gaussian process (GP) models and their efficient implementation for large-scale spatio-temporal data with a multi-dimensional grid structure. To achieve this, we exploit the Kronecker product structures of the covariance kernel. While this method has gained popularity in the GP literature, the existing approach is limited to covariance kernels with a tensor product structure and does not allow flexible modelling and selection of interaction effects. This is considered an important component in spatio-temporal analysis. We extend the method to a more general class of additive GP models that accounts for main effects and selected interaction effects. Our approach allows for easy identification and interpretation of interaction effects. The proposed model is applied to the analysis of NO$_2$ concentrations during the COVID-19 lockdown in London. Our scalable method enables analysis of large-scale, hourly-recorded data collected from 59 different stations across the city, providing additional insights to findings from previous research using daily or weekly averaged data.
We analyze the long-time behavior of numerical schemes, studied by \cite{LQ21} in a finite time horizon, for a class of monotone SPDEs driven by multiplicative noise. We derive several time-independent a priori estimates for both the exact and numerical solutions and establish time-independent strong error estimates between them. These uniform estimates, in combination with ergodic theory of Markov processes, are utilized to establish the exponential ergodicity of these numerical schemes with an invariant measure. Applying these results to the stochastic Allen--Cahn equation indicates that these numerical schemes always have at least one invariant measure, respectively, and converge strongly to the exact solution with sharp time-independent rates. We also show that the invariant measures of these schemes are also exponentially ergodic and thus give an affirmative answer to a question proposed in \cite{CHS21}, provided that the interface thickness is not too small.
Games and simulators can be a valuable platform to execute complex multi-agent, multiplayer, imperfect information scenarios with significant parallels to military applications: multiple participants manage resources and make decisions that command assets to secure specific areas of a map or neutralize opposing forces. These characteristics have attracted the artificial intelligence (AI) community by supporting development of algorithms with complex benchmarks and the capability to rapidly iterate over new ideas. The success of artificial intelligence algorithms in real-time strategy games such as StarCraft II have also attracted the attention of the military research community aiming to explore similar techniques in military counterpart scenarios. Aiming to bridge the connection between games and military applications, this work discusses past and current efforts on how games and simulators, together with the artificial intelligence algorithms, have been adapted to simulate certain aspects of military missions and how they might impact the future battlefield. This paper also investigates how advances in virtual reality and visual augmentation systems open new possibilities in human interfaces with gaming platforms and their military parallels.