Atmospheric near surface wind speed and wind direction play an important role in many applications, ranging from air quality modeling, building design, wind turbine placement to climate change research. It is therefore crucial to accurately estimate the joint probability distribution of wind speed and direction. In this work we develop a conditional approach to model these two variables, where the joint distribution is decomposed into the product of the marginal distribution of wind direction and the conditional distribution of wind speed given wind direction. To accommodate the circular nature of wind direction a von Mises mixture model is used; the conditional wind speed distribution is modeled as a directional dependent Weibull distribution via a two-stage estimation procedure, consisting of a directional binned Weibull parameter estimation, followed by a harmonic regression to estimate the dependence of the Weibull parameters on wind direction. A Monte Carlo simulation study indicates that our method outperforms an alternative method that uses periodic spline quantile regression in terms of estimation efficiency. We illustrate our method by using the output from a regional climate model to investigate how the joint distribution of wind speed and direction may change under some future climate scenarios.
This work proposes the extended functional tensor train (EFTT) format for compressing and working with multivariate functions on tensor product domains. Our compression algorithm combines tensorized Chebyshev interpolation with a low-rank approximation algorithm that is entirely based on function evaluations. Compared to existing methods based on the functional tensor train format, our approach often reduces the required storage, sometimes considerably, while achieving the same accuracy. In particular, we reduce the number of function evaluations required to achieve a prescribed accuracy by up to over 96% compared to the algorithm from [Gorodetsky, Karaman and Marzouk, Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Eng., 347 (2019)] .
Although the applications of Non-Homogeneous Poisson Processes to model and study the threshold overshoots of interest in different time series of measurements have proven to provide good results, they needed to be complemented with an efficient and automatic diagnostic technique to establish the location of the change-points, which, when taken into account, make the estimated model fit poorly in regards of the information contained in the real model. For this reason, we propose a new method to solve the segmentation uncertainty of the time series of measurements, where the emission distribution of exceedances of a specific threshold is the focus of investigation. One of the great contributions of the present algorithm is that all the days that overflowed are candidates to be a change-point, so all the possible configurations of overflow days are the possible chromosomes, which will unite to have offspring. Under the heuristics of a genetic algorithm, the solution to the problem of finding such change points will be guaranteed to be non-local and the best possible one, reducing wasted machine time evaluating the least likely chromosomes to be a solution to the problem. The analytical evaluation technique will be by means of the Minimum Description Length (\textit{MDL}) as the objective function, which is the joint posterior distribution function of the parameters of each regime and the change points that determines them and which account as well for the influence of the presence of said times.
In cluster randomized experiments, units are often recruited after the random cluster assignment, and data are only available for the recruited sample. Post-randomization recruitment can lead to selection bias, inducing systematic differences between the overall and the recruited populations, and between the recruited intervention and control arms. In this setting, we define causal estimands for the overall and the recruited populations. We first show that if units select their cluster independently of the treatment assignment, cluster randomization implies individual randomization in the overall population. We then prove that under the assumption of ignorable recruitment, the average treatment effect on the recruited population can be consistently estimated from the recruited sample using inverse probability weighting. Generally we cannot identify the average treatment effect on the overall population. Nonetheless, we show, via a principal stratification formulation, that one can use weighting of the recruited sample to identify treatment effects on two meaningful subpopulations of the overall population: units who would be recruited into the study regardless of the assignment, and units who would be recruited in the study under treatment but not under control. We develop a corresponding estimation strategy and a sensitivity analysis method for checking the ignorable recruitment assumption.
In this paper, we introduce the concept of fractional integration for spatial autoregressive models. We show that the range of the dependence can be spatially extended or diminished by introducing a further fractional integration parameter to spatial autoregressive moving average models (SARMA). This new model is called the spatial autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average model, briefly sp-ARFIMA. We show the relation to time-series ARFIMA models and also to (higher-order) spatial autoregressive models. Moreover, an estimation procedure based on the maximum-likelihood principle is introduced and analysed in a series of simulation studies. Eventually, the use of the model is illustrated by an empirical example of atmospheric fine particles, so-called aerosol optical thickness, which is important in weather, climate and environmental science.
In autonomous driving tasks, scene understanding is the first step towards predicting the future behavior of the surrounding traffic participants. Yet, how to represent a given scene and extract its features are still open research questions. In this study, we propose a novel text-based representation of traffic scenes and process it with a pre-trained language encoder. First, we show that text-based representations, combined with classical rasterized image representations, lead to descriptive scene embeddings. Second, we benchmark our predictions on the nuScenes dataset and show significant improvements compared to baselines. Third, we show in an ablation study that a joint encoder of text and rasterized images outperforms the individual encoders confirming that both representations have their complementary strengths.
A challenging category of robotics problems arises when sensing incurs substantial costs. This paper examines settings in which a robot wishes to limit its observations of state, for instance, motivated by specific considerations of energy management, stealth, or implicit coordination. We formulate the problem of planning under uncertainty when the robot's observations are intermittent but their timing is known via a pre-declared schedule. After having established the appropriate notion of an optimal policy for such settings, we tackle the problem of joint optimization of the cumulative execution cost and the number of state observations, both in expectation under discounts. To approach this multi-objective optimization problem, we introduce an algorithm that can identify the Pareto front for a class of schedules that are advantageous in the discounted setting. The algorithm proceeds in an accumulative fashion, prepending additions to a working set of schedules and then computing incremental changes to the value functions. Because full exhaustive construction becomes computationally prohibitive for moderate-sized problems, we propose a filtering approach to prune the working set. Empirical results demonstrate that this filtering is effective at reducing computation while incurring only negligible reduction in quality. In summarizing our findings, we provide a characterization of the run-time vs quality trade-off involved.
Model order reduction provides low-complexity high-fidelity surrogate models that allow rapid and accurate solutions of parametric differential equations. The development of reduced order models for parametric nonlinear Hamiltonian systems is challenged by several factors: (i) the geometric structure encoding the physical properties of the dynamics; (ii) the slowly decaying Kolmogorov n-width of conservative dynamics; (iii) the gradient structure of the nonlinear flow velocity; (iv) high variations in the numerical rank of the state as a function of time and parameters. We propose to address these aspects via a structure-preserving adaptive approach that combines symplectic dynamical low-rank approximation with adaptive gradient-preserving hyper-reduction and parameters sampling. Additionally, we propose to vary in time the dimensions of both the reduced basis space and the hyper-reduction space by monitoring the quality of the reduced solution via an error indicator related to the projection error of the Hamiltonian vector field. The resulting adaptive hyper-reduced models preserve the geometric structure of the Hamiltonian flow, do not rely on prior information on the dynamics, and can be solved at a cost that is linear in the dimension of the full order model and linear in the number of test parameters. Numerical experiments demonstrate the improved performances of the fully adaptive models compared to the original and reduced models.
The joint design of the optical system and the downstream algorithm is a challenging and promising task. Due to the demand for balancing the global optimal of imaging systems and the computational cost of physical simulation, existing methods cannot achieve efficient joint design of complex systems such as smartphones and drones. In this work, starting from the perspective of the optical design, we characterize the optics with separated aberrations. Additionally, to bridge the hardware and software without gradients, an image simulation system is presented to reproduce the genuine imaging procedure of lenses with large field-of-views. As for aberration correction, we propose a network to perceive and correct the spatially varying aberrations and validate its superiority over state-of-the-art methods. Comprehensive experiments reveal that the preference for correcting separated aberrations in joint design is as follows: longitudinal chromatic aberration, lateral chromatic aberration, spherical aberration, field curvature, and coma, with astigmatism coming last. Drawing from the preference, a 10% reduction in the total track length of the consumer-level mobile phone lens module is accomplished. Moreover, this procedure spares more space for manufacturing deviations, realizing extreme-quality enhancement of computational photography. The optimization paradigm provides innovative insight into the practical joint design of sophisticated optical systems and post-processing algorithms.
In algorithms for solving optimization problems constrained to a smooth manifold, retractions are a well established tool to ensure that the iterates stay on the manifold. More recently, it has been demonstrated that retractions are a useful concept for other computational tasks on manifold as well, including interpolation tasks. In this work, we consider the application of retractions to the numerical integration of differential equations on fixed-rank matrix manifolds. This is closely related to dynamical low-rank approximation (DLRA) techniques. In fact, any retraction leads to a numerical integrator and, vice versa, certain DLRA techniques bear a direct relation with retractions. As an example for the latter, we introduce a new retraction, called KLS retraction, that is derived from the so-called unconventional integrator for DLRA. We also illustrate how retractions can be used to recover known DLRA techniques and to design new ones. In particular, this work introduces two novel numerical integration schemes that apply to differential equations on general manifolds: the accelerated forward Euler (AFE) method and the Ralston-Hermite (RH) method. Both methods build on retractions by using them as a tool for approximating curves on manifolds. The two methods are proven to have local truncation error of order three. Numerical experiments on classical DLRA examples highlight the advantages and shortcomings of these new methods.
In this work, we introduce a flow based machine learning approach, called reaction coordinate (RC) flow, for discovery of low-dimensional kinetic models of molecular systems. The RC flow utilizes a normalizing flow to design the coordinate transformation and a Brownian dynamics model to approximate the kinetics of RC, where all model parameters can be estimated in a data-driven manner. In contrast to existing model reduction methods for molecular kinetics, RC flow offers a trainable and tractable model of reduced kinetics in continuous time and space due to the invertibility of the normalizing flow. Furthermore, the Brownian dynamics-based reduced kinetic model investigated in this work yields a readily discernible representation of metastable states within the phase space of the molecular system. Numerical experiments demonstrate how effectively the proposed method discovers interpretable and accurate low-dimensional representations of given full-state kinetics from simulations.