A convergent numerical method for $\alpha$-dissipative solutions of the Hunter--Saxton equation is derived. The method is based on applying a tailor-made projection operator to the initial data, and then solving exactly using the generalized method of characteristics. The projection step is the only step that introduces any approximation error. It is therefore crucial that its design ensures not only a good approximation of the initial data, but also that errors due to the energy dissipation at later times remain small. Furthermore, it is shown that the main quantity of interest, the wave profile, converges in $L^{\infty}$ for all $t \geq 0$, while a subsequence of the energy density converges weakly for almost every time.
Let a polytope $P$ be defined by a system $A x \leq b$. We consider the problem of counting the number of integer points inside $P$, assuming that $P$ is $\Delta$-modular, where the polytope $P$ is called $\Delta$-modular if all the rank sub-determinants of $A$ are bounded by $\Delta$ in the absolute value. We present a new FPT-algorithm, parameterized by $\Delta$ and by the maximal number of vertices in $P$, where the maximum is taken by all r.h.s. vectors $b$. We show that our algorithm is more efficient for $\Delta$-modular problems than the approach of A. Barvinok et al. To this end, we do not directly compute the short rational generating function for $P \cap Z^n$, which is commonly used for the considered problem. Instead, we use the dynamic programming principle to compute its particular representation in the form of exponential series that depends on a single variable. We completely do not rely to the Barvinok's unimodular sign decomposition technique. Using our new complexity bound, we consider different special cases that may be of independent interest. For example, we give FPT-algorithms for counting the integer points number in $\Delta$-modular simplices and similar polytopes that have $n + O(1)$ facets. As a special case, for any fixed $m$, we give an FPT-algorithm to count solutions of the unbounded $m$-dimensional $\Delta$-modular subset-sum problem.
Anomalous diffusion is often modelled in terms of the subdiffusion equation, which can involve a weakly singular source term. For this case, many predominant time stepping methods, including the correction of high-order BDF schemes [{\sc Jin, Li, and Zhou}, SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 39 (2017), A3129--A3152], may suffer from a severe order reduction. To fill in this gap, we propose a smoothing method for time stepping schemes, where the singular term is regularized by using a $m$-fold integral-differential calculus and the equation is discretized by the $k$-step BDF convolution quadrature, called ID$m$-BDF$k$ method. We prove that the desired $k$th-order convergence can be recovered even if the source term is a weakly singular and the initial data is not compatible. Numerical experiments illustrate the theoretical results.
In this paper we consider the generalized inverse iteration for computing ground states of the Gross-Pitaevskii eigenvector problem (GPE). For that we prove explicit linear convergence rates that depend on the maximum eigenvalue in magnitude of a weighted linear eigenvalue problem. Furthermore, we show that this eigenvalue can be bounded by the first spectral gap of a linearized Gross-Pitaevskii operator, recovering the same rates as for linear eigenvector problems. With this we establish the first local convergence result for the basic inverse iteration for the GPE without damping. We also show how our findings directly generalize to extended inverse iterations, such as the Gradient Flow Discrete Normalized (GFDN) proposed in [W. Bao, Q. Du, SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 25 (2004)] or the damped inverse iteration suggested in [P. Henning, D. Peterseim, SIAM J. Numer. Anal., 53 (2020)]. Our analysis also reveals why the inverse iteration for the GPE does not react favourably to spectral shifts. This empirical observation can now be explained with a blow-up of a weighting function that crucially contributes to the convergence rates. Our findings are illustrated by numerical experiments.
It is not difficult to think of applications that can be modelled as graph problems in which placing some facility or commodity at a vertex has some positive or negative effect on the values of all the vertices out to some distance, and we want to be able to calculate quickly the cumulative effect on any vertex's value at any time or the list of the most beneficial or most detrimential effects on a vertex. In this paper we show how, given an edge-weighted graph with constant-size separators, we can support the following operations on it in time polylogarithmic in the number of vertices and the number of facilities placed on the vertices, where distances between vertices are measured with respect to the edge weights: Add (v, f, w, d) places a facility of weight w and with effect radius d onto vertex v. Remove (v, f) removes a facility f previously placed on v using Add from v. Sum (v) or Sum (v, d) returns the total weight of all facilities affecting v or, with a distance parameter d, the total weight of all facilities whose effect region intersects the ``circle'' with radius d around v. Top (v, k) or Top (v, k, d) returns the k facilities of greatest weight that affect v or, with a distance parameter d, whose effect region intersects the ``circle'' with radius d around v. The weights of the facilities and the operation that Sum uses to ``sum'' them must form a semigroup. For Top queries, the weights must be drawn from a total order.
We explore the features of two methods of stabilization, aggregation and supremizer methods, for reduced-order modeling of parametrized optimal control problems. In both methods, the reduced basis spaces are augmented to guarantee stability. For the aggregation method, the reduced basis approximation spaces for the state and adjoint variables are augmented in such a way that the spaces are identical. For the supremizer method, the reduced basis approximation space for the state-control product space is augmented with the solutions of a supremizer equation. We implement both of these methods for solving several parametrized control problems and assess their performance. Results indicate that the number of reduced basis vectors needed to approximate the solution space to some tolerance with the supremizer method is much larger, possibly double, that for aggregation. There are also some cases where the supremizer method fails to produce a converged solution. We present results to compare the accuracy, efficiency, and computational costs associated with both methods of stabilization which suggest that stabilization by aggregation is a superior stabilization method for control problems.
The population protocol model introduced by Angluin et al. in 2006 offers a theoretical framework for designing and analyzing distributed algorithms among limited-resource mobile agents. While the original population protocol model considers the concept of anonymity, the issue of privacy is not investigated thoroughly. However, there is a need for time- and space-efficient privacy-preserving techniques in the population protocol model if these algorithms are to be implemented in settings handling sensitive data, such as sensor networks, IoT devices, and drones. In this work, we introduce several formal definitions of privacy, ranging from assuring only plausible deniability of the population input vector to having a full information-theoretic guarantee that knowledge beyond an agent's input and output bear no influence on the probability of a particular input vector. We then apply these definitions to both existing and novel protocols. We show that the Remainder-computing protocol given by Delporte-Gallet et al. in 2007 (which is proven to satisfy output independent privacy under adversarial scheduling) is not information-theoretically private under probabilistic scheduling. In contrast, we provide a new algorithm and demonstrate that it correctly and information-theoretically privately computes Remainder under probabilistic scheduling.
Discovering nonlinear differential equations that describe system dynamics from empirical data is a fundamental challenge in contemporary science. Here, we propose a methodology to identify dynamical laws by integrating denoising techniques to smooth the signal, sparse regression to identify the relevant parameters, and bootstrap confidence intervals to quantify the uncertainty of the estimates. We evaluate our method on well-known ordinary differential equations with an ensemble of random initial conditions, time series of increasing length, and varying signal-to-noise ratios. Our algorithm consistently identifies three-dimensional systems, given moderately-sized time series and high levels of signal quality relative to background noise. By accurately discovering dynamical systems automatically, our methodology has the potential to impact the understanding of complex systems, especially in fields where data are abundant, but developing mathematical models demands considerable effort.
An old problem in multivariate statistics is that linear Gaussian models are often unidentifiable, i.e. some parameters cannot be uniquely estimated. In factor (component) analysis, an orthogonal rotation of the factors is unidentifiable, while in linear regression, the direction of effect cannot be identified. For such linear models, non-Gaussianity of the (latent) variables has been shown to provide identifiability. In the case of factor analysis, this leads to independent component analysis, while in the case of the direction of effect, non-Gaussian versions of structural equation modelling solve the problem. More recently, we have shown how even general nonparametric nonlinear versions of such models can be estimated. Non-Gaussianity is not enough in this case, but assuming we have time series, or that the distributions are suitably modulated by some observed auxiliary variables, the models are identifiable. This paper reviews the identifiability theory for the linear and nonlinear cases, considering both factor analytic models and structural equation models.
Uncertainty arises naturally inmany application domains due to, e.g., data entry errors and ambiguity in data cleaning. Prior work in incomplete and probabilistic databases has investigated the semantics and efficient evaluation of ranking and top-k queries over uncertain data. However, most approaches deal with top-k and ranking in isolation and do represent uncertain input data and query results using separate, incompatible datamodels. We present an efficient approach for under- and over-approximating results of ranking, top-k, and window queries over uncertain data. Our approach integrates well with existing techniques for querying uncertain data, is efficient, and is to the best of our knowledge the first to support windowed aggregation. We design algorithms for physical operators for uncertain sorting and windowed aggregation, and implement them in PostgreSQL.We evaluated our approach on synthetic and real world datasets, demonstrating that it outperforms all competitors, and often produces more accurate results.
This article introduces new multiplicative updates for nonnegative matrix factorization with the $\beta$-divergence and sparse regularization of one of the two factors (say, the activation matrix). It is well known that the norm of the other factor (the dictionary matrix) needs to be controlled in order to avoid an ill-posed formulation. Standard practice consists in constraining the columns of the dictionary to have unit norm, which leads to a nontrivial optimization problem. Our approach leverages a reparametrization of the original problem into the optimization of an equivalent scale-invariant objective function. From there, we derive block-descent majorization-minimization algorithms that result in simple multiplicative updates for either $\ell_{1}$-regularization or the more "aggressive" log-regularization. In contrast with other state-of-the-art methods, our algorithms are universal in the sense that they can be applied to any $\beta$-divergence (i.e., any value of $\beta$) and that they come with convergence guarantees. We report numerical comparisons with existing heuristic and Lagrangian methods using various datasets: face images, an audio spectrogram, hyperspectral data, and song play counts. We show that our methods obtain solutions of similar quality at convergence (similar objective values) but with significantly reduced CPU times.