Geochemical mapping of risk element concentrations in soils is performed in countries around the world. It results in large datasets of high analytical quality, which can be used to identify soils that violate individual legislative limits for safe food production. However, there is a lack of advanced data mining tools that would be suitable for sensitive exploratory data analysis of big data while respecting the natural variability of soil composition. To distinguish anthropogenic contamination from natural variation, the analysis of the entire data distributions for smaller sub-areas is key. In this article, we propose a new data mining method for geochemical mapping data based on functional data analysis of probability density functions in the framework of Bayes spaces after post-stratification of a big dataset to smaller districts. Proposed tools allow us to analyse the entire distribution, going beyond a superficial detection of extreme concentration anomalies. We illustrate the proposed methodology on a dataset gathered according to the Czech national legislation (1990--2009). Taking into account specific properties of probability density functions and recent results for orthogonal decomposition of multivariate densities enabled us to reveal real contamination patterns that were so far only suspected in Czech agricultural soils. We process the above Czech soil composition dataset by first compartmentalising it into spatial units, in particular the districts, and by subsequently clustering these districts according to diagnostic features of their uni- and multivariate distributions at high concentration ends. Comparison between compartments is key to the reliable distinction of diffuse contamination. In this work, we used soil contamination by Cu-bearing pesticides as an example for empirical testing of the proposed data mining approach.
This paper introduces a time-domain combined field integral equation for electromagnetic scattering by a perfect electric conductor. The new equation is obtained by leveraging the quasi-Helmholtz projectors, which separate both the unknown and the source fields into solenoidal and irrotational components. These two components are then appropriately rescaled to cure the solution from a loss of accuracy occurring when the time step is large. Yukawa-type integral operators of a purely imaginary wave number are also used as a Calderon preconditioner to eliminate the ill-conditioning of matrix systems. The stabilized time-domain electric and magnetic field integral equations are linearly combined in a Calderon-like fashion, then temporally discretized using a proper pair of trial functions, resulting in a marching-on-in-time linear system. The novel formulation is immune to spurious resonances, dense discretization breakdown, large-time step breakdown and dc instabilities stemming from non-trivial kernels. Numerical results for both simply-connected and multiply-connected scatterers corroborate the theoretical analysis.
Singularly perturbed boundary value problems pose a significant challenge for their numerical approximations because of the presence of sharp boundary layers. These sharp boundary layers are responsible for the stiffness of solutions, which leads to large computational errors, if not properly handled. It is well-known that the classical numerical methods as well as the Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) require some special treatments near the boundary, e.g., using extensive mesh refinements or finer collocation points, in order to obtain an accurate approximate solution especially inside of the stiff boundary layer. In this article, we modify the PINNs and construct our new semi-analytic SL-PINNs suitable for singularly perturbed boundary value problems. Performing the boundary layer analysis, we first find the corrector functions describing the singular behavior of the stiff solutions inside boundary layers. Then we obtain the SL-PINN approximations of the singularly perturbed problems by embedding the explicit correctors in the structure of PINNs or by training the correctors together with the PINN approximations. Our numerical experiments confirm that our new SL-PINN methods produce stable and accurate approximations for stiff solutions.
Curb detection is essential for environmental awareness in Automated Driving (AD), as it typically limits drivable and non-drivable areas. Annotated data are necessary for developing and validating an AD function. However, the number of public datasets with annotated point cloud curbs is scarce. This paper presents a method for detecting 3D curbs in a sequence of point clouds captured from a LiDAR sensor, which consists of two main steps. First, our approach detects the curbs at each scan using a segmentation deep neural network. Then, a sequence-level processing step estimates the 3D curbs in the reconstructed point cloud using the odometry of the vehicle. From these 3D points of the curb, we obtain polylines structured following ASAM OpenLABEL standard. These detections can be used as pre-annotations in labelling pipelines to efficiently generate curb-related ground truth data. We validate our approach through an experiment in which different human annotators were required to annotate curbs in a group of LiDAR-based sequences with and without our automatically generated pre-annotations. The results show that the manual annotation time is reduced by 50.99% thanks to our detections, keeping the data quality level.
Although high-resolution gridded climate variables are provided by multiple sources, the need for country and region-specific climate data weighted by indicators of economic activity is becoming increasingly common in environmental and economic research. We process available information from different climate data sources to provide spatially aggregated data with global coverage for both countries (GADM0 resolution) and regions (GADM1 resolution) and for a variety of climate indicators (average precipitations, average temperatures, average SPEI). We weigh gridded climate data by population density or by night light intensity -- both proxies of economic activity -- before aggregation. Climate variables are measured daily, monthly, and annually, covering (depending on the data source) a time window from 1900 (at the earliest) to 2023. We pipeline all the preprocessing procedures in a unified framework, which we share in the open-access Weighted Climate Data Repository web app. Finally, we validate our data through a systematic comparison with those employed in leading climate impact studies.
The accurate and efficient evaluation of Newtonian potentials over general 2-D domains is important for the numerical solution of Poisson's equation and volume integral equations. In this paper, we present a simple and efficient high-order algorithm for computing the Newtonian potential over a planar domain discretized by an unstructured mesh. The algorithm is based on the use of Green's third identity for transforming the Newtonian potential into a collection of layer potentials over the boundaries of the mesh elements, which can be easily evaluated by the Helsing-Ojala method. One important component of our algorithm is the use of high-order (up to order 20) bivariate polynomial interpolation in the monomial basis, for which we provide extensive justification. The performance of our algorithm is illustrated through several numerical experiments.
Finite-dimensional truncations are routinely used to approximate partial differential equations (PDEs), either to obtain numerical solutions or to derive reduced-order models. The resulting discretized equations are known to violate certain physical properties of the system. In particular, first integrals of the PDE may not remain invariant after discretization. Here, we use the method of reduced-order nonlinear solutions (RONS) to ensure that the conserved quantities of the PDE survive its finite-dimensional truncation. In particular, we develop two methods: Galerkin RONS and finite volume RONS. Galerkin RONS ensures the conservation of first integrals in Galerkin-type truncations, whether used for direct numerical simulations or reduced-order modeling. Similarly, finite volume RONS conserves any number of first integrals of the system, including its total energy, after finite volume discretization. Both methods are applicable to general time-dependent PDEs and can be easily incorporated in existing Galerkin-type or finite volume code. We demonstrate the efficacy of our methods on two examples: direct numerical simulations of the shallow water equation and a reduced-order model of the nonlinear Schrodinger equation. As a byproduct, we also generalize RONS to phenomena described by a system of PDEs.
A proof-of-randomness (PoR) protocol is a fair and low energy-cost consensus mechanism for blockchains. Each network node of a blockchain may use a true random number generator (TRNG) and hash algorism to fulfil the PoR protocol. In this whitepaper, we give the consensus mechanism of the PoR protocol, and classify it into a new kind of randomized algorithms called Macau. The PoR protocol could generate a blockchain without any competition of computing power or stake of cryptocurrency. Besides, we give some advantages of integrating quantum random number generator (QRNG) chips into hardware wallets, and also discuss the way to cooperate with quantum key distribution (QKD) technology.
We discuss avoidance of sure loss and coherence results for semicopulas and standardized functions, i.e., for grounded, 1-increasing functions with value $1$ at $(1,1,\ldots, 1)$. We characterize the existence of a $k$-increasing $n$-variate function $C$ fulfilling $A\leq C\leq B$ for standardized $n$-variate functions $A,B$ and discuss the method for constructing this function. Our proofs also include procedures for extending functions on some countably infinite mesh to functions on the unit box. We provide a characterization when $A$ respectively $B$ coincides with the pointwise infimum respectively supremum of the set of all $k$-increasing $n$-variate functions $C$ fulfilling $A\leq C\leq B$.
We extend the use of piecewise orthogonal collocation to computing periodic solutions of renewal equations, which are particularly important in modeling population dynamics. We prove convergence through a rigorous error analysis. Finally, we show some numerical experiments confirming the theoretical results, and a couple of applications in view of bifurcation analysis.
Strong spatial mixing (SSM) is an important quantitative notion of correlation decay for Gibbs distributions arising in statistical physics, probability theory, and theoretical computer science. A longstanding conjecture is that the uniform distribution on proper $q$-colorings on a $\Delta$-regular tree exhibits SSM whenever $q \ge \Delta+1$. Moreover, it is widely believed that as long as SSM holds on bounded-degree trees with $q$ colors, one would obtain an efficient sampler for $q$-colorings on all bounded-degree graphs via simple Markov chain algorithms. It is surprising that such a basic question is still open, even on trees, but then again it also highlights how much we still have to learn about random colorings. In this paper, we show the following: (1) For any $\Delta \ge 3$, SSM holds for random $q$-colorings on trees of maximum degree $\Delta$ whenever $q \ge \Delta + 3$. Thus we almost fully resolve the aforementioned conjecture. Our result substantially improves upon the previously best bound which requires $q \ge 1.59\Delta+\gamma^*$ for an absolute constant $\gamma^* > 0$. (2) For any $\Delta\ge 3$ and girth $g = \Omega_\Delta(1)$, we establish optimal mixing of the Glauber dynamics for $q$-colorings on graphs of maximum degree $\Delta$ and girth $g$ whenever $q \ge \Delta+3$. Our approach is based on a new general reduction from spectral independence on large-girth graphs to SSM on trees that is of independent interest. Using the same techniques, we also prove near-optimal bounds on weak spatial mixing (WSM), a closely-related notion to SSM, for the antiferromagnetic Potts model on trees.