This paper proposes an electronic circuit simulator-based method to accelerate the power system transient simulation, where the modeling of a generic HVDC (High Voltage Direct Current) system is focused. The electronic circuit simulation equations and the backward differentiation formula for numerical solving are described. Then, the circuit modeling process for power system components such as slack bus, constant power load, and HVDC are respectively illustrated. Finally, a case study is conducted on a four-bus power system to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modeling and simulation method.
Synthetic data generation has been a growing area of research in recent years. However, its potential applications in serious games have not been thoroughly explored. Advances in this field could anticipate data modelling and analysis, as well as speed up the development process. To try to fill this gap in the literature, we propose a simulator architecture for generating probabilistic synthetic data for serious games based on interactive narratives. This architecture is designed to be generic and modular so that it can be used by other researchers on similar problems. To simulate the interaction of synthetic players with questions, we use a cognitive testing model based on the Item Response Theory framework. We also show how probabilistic graphical models (in particular Bayesian networks) can be used to introduce expert knowledge and external data into the simulation. Finally, we apply the proposed architecture and methods in a use case of a serious game focused on cyberbullying. We perform Bayesian inference experiments using a hierarchical model to demonstrate the identifiability and robustness of the generated data.
This article introduces the R package hermiter which facilitates estimation of univariate and bivariate probability density functions and cumulative distribution functions along with full quantile functions (univariate) and nonparametric correlation coefficients (bivariate) using Hermite series based estimators. The algorithms implemented in the hermiter package are particularly useful in the sequential setting (both stationary and non-stationary) and one-pass batch estimation setting for large data sets. In addition, the Hermite series based estimators are approximately mergeable allowing parallel and distributed estimation.
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for causal inference, but they are often powered only for average effects, making estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) challenging. Conversely, large-scale observational studies (OS) offer a wealth of data but suffer from confounding bias. Our paper presents a novel framework to leverage OS data for enhancing the efficiency in estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) from RCTs while mitigating common biases. We propose an innovative approach to combine RCTs and OS data, expanding the traditionally used control arms from external sources. The framework relaxes the typical assumption of CATE invariance across populations, acknowledging the often unaccounted systematic differences between RCT and OS participants. We demonstrate this through the special case of a linear outcome model, where the CATE is sparsely different between the two populations. The core of our framework relies on learning potential outcome means from OS data and using them as a nuisance parameter in CATE estimation from RCT data. We further illustrate through experiments that using OS findings reduces the variance of the estimated CATE from RCTs and can decrease the required sample size for detecting HTEs.
Stroke patients often experience upper limb impairments that restrict their mobility and daily activities. Physical therapy (PT) is the most effective method to improve impairments, but low patient adherence and participation in PT exercises pose significant challenges. To overcome these barriers, a combination of virtual reality (VR) and robotics in PT is promising. However, few systems effectively integrate VR with robotics, especially for upper limb rehabilitation. This work introduces a new virtual rehabilitation solution that combines VR with robotics and a wearable sensor to analyze elbow joint movements. The framework also enhances the capabilities of a traditional robotic device (KinArm) used for motor dysfunction assessment and rehabilitation. A pilot user study (n = 16) was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness and usability of the proposed VR framework. We used a two-way repeated measures experimental design where participants performed two tasks (Circle and Diamond) with two conditions (VR and VR KinArm). We observed no significant differences in the main effect of conditions for task completion time. However, there were significant differences in both the normalized number of mistakes and recorded elbow joint angles (captured as resistance change values from the wearable sleeve sensor) between the Circle and Diamond tasks. Additionally, we report the system usability, task load, and presence in the proposed VR framework. This system demonstrates the potential advantages of an immersive, multi-sensory approach and provides future avenues for research in developing more cost-effective, tailored, and personalized upper limb solutions for home therapy applications.
A micro-macro variant of the parallel-in-time algorithm Parareal has been applied to the ocean-circulation and sea-ice model model FESOM2. The state-of-the-art software in climate research has been developed by the Alfred-Wegener-Institut (AWI) in Bremen, Germany. The algorithm requires two meshes of low and high spatial resolution to define the coarse and fine propagator. As a first assessment we refined the PI mesh, increasing its resolution by factor 4. The main objective of this study was to demonstrate that micro-macro Parareal can provide convergence in diagnostic variables in complex climate research problems. After the introduction to FESOM2 we show how to generate the refined mesh and which interpolation methods were chosen. With the convergence results presented we discuss the success of this attempt and which steps have to be taken to extend the approach to current research problems.
Consider a mechanism that cannot observe how many players there are directly, but instead must rely on their self-reports to know how many are participating. Suppose the players can create new identities to report to the auctioneer at some cost $c$. The usual mechanism design paradigm is equivalent to implicitly assuming that $c$ is infinity for all players, while the usual Sybil attacks literature is that it is zero or finite for one player (the attacker) and infinity for everyone else (the 'honest' players). The false-name proof literature largely assumes the cost to be 0. We consider a model with variable costs that unifies these disparate streams. A paradigmatic normal form game can be extended into a Sybil game by having the action space by the product of the feasible set of identities to create action where each player chooses how many players to present as in the game and their actions in the original normal form game. A mechanism is (dominant) false-name proof if it is (dominant) incentive-compatible for all the players to self-report as at most one identity. We study mechanisms proposed in the literature motivated by settings where anonymity and self-identification are the norms, and show conditions under which they are not Sybil-proof. We characterize a class of dominant Sybil-proof mechanisms for reward sharing and show that they achieve the efficiency upper bound. We consider the extension when agents can credibly commit to the strategy of their sybils and show how this can break mechanisms that would otherwise be false-name proof.
Recent work has demonstrated that using parameter efficient tuning techniques such as prefix tuning (or P-tuning) on pretrained language models can yield performance that is comparable or superior to fine-tuning while dramatically reducing trainable parameters. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of such methods under the context of data augmentation, a common strategy to improve learning under low data regimes, has not been fully explored. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of several popular task-agnostic data augmentation techniques, i.e., EDA, Back Translation, and Mixup, when using two general parameter efficient tuning methods, P-tuning v2 and LoRA, under data scarcity. We show that data augmentation can be used to boost the performance of P-tuning and LoRA models, but the effectiveness of each technique varies and certain methods can lead to a notable degradation in performance, particularly when using larger models and on harder tasks. We further analyze the sentence representations of P-tuning compared to fine-tuning to help understand the above behaviour, and reveal how P-tuning generally presents a more limited ability to separate the sentence embeddings from different classes of augmented data. In addition, it displays poorer performance on heavily altered data. However, we demonstrate that by adding a simple contrastive loss function it can help mitigate such issues for prefix tuning, resulting in sizable improvements to augmented data performance.
In survey sampling, survey data do not necessarily represent the target population, and the samples are often biased. However, information on the survey weights aids in the elimination of selection bias. The Horvitz-Thompson estimator is a well-known unbiased, consistent, and asymptotically normal estimator; however, it is not efficient. Thus, this study derives the semiparametric efficiency bound for various target parameters by considering the survey weight as a random variable and consequently proposes a semiparametric optimal estimator with certain working models on the survey weights. The proposed estimator is consistent, asymptotically normal, and efficient in a class of the regular and asymptotically linear estimators. Further, a limited simulation study is conducted to investigate the finite sample performance of the proposed method. The proposed method is applied to the 1999 Canadian Workplace and Employee Survey data.
In this work, drawing inspiration from the type of noise present in real hardware, we study the output distribution of random quantum circuits under practical non-unital noise sources with constant noise rates. We show that even in the presence of unital sources like the depolarizing channel, the distribution, under the combined noise channel, never resembles a maximally entropic distribution at any depth. To show this, we prove that the output distribution of such circuits never anticoncentrates $\unicode{x2014}$ meaning it is never too "flat" $\unicode{x2014}$ regardless of the depth of the circuit. This is in stark contrast to the behavior of noiseless random quantum circuits or those with only unital noise, both of which anticoncentrate at sufficiently large depths. As consequences, our results have interesting algorithmic implications on both the hardness and easiness of noisy random circuit sampling, since anticoncentration is a critical property exploited by both state-of-the-art classical hardness and easiness results.
A dynamical system produces a dependent multivariate sequence called dynamical time series, developed with an evolution function. As variables in the dynamical time series at the current time-point usually depend on the whole variables in the previous time-point, existing studies forecast the variables at the future time-point by estimating the evolution function. However, some variables in the dynamical time-series are missing in some practical situations. In this study, we propose an autoregressive with slack time series (ARS) model. ARS model involves the simultaneous estimation of the evolution function and the underlying missing variables as a slack time series, with the aid of the time-invariance and linearity of the dynamical system. This study empirically demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed ARS model.