Chains are vector-valued signals sampling a curve. They are important to motion signal processing and to many scientific applications including location sensors. We propose a novel measure of smoothness for chains curves by generalizing the scalar-valued concept of monotonicity. Monotonicity can be defined by the connectedness of the inverse image of balls. This definition is coordinate-invariant and can be computed efficiently over chains. Monotone curves can be discontinuous, but continuous monotone curves are differentiable a.e. Over chains, a simple sphere-preserving filter shown to never decrease the degree of monotonicity. It outperforms moving average filters over a synthetic data set. Applications include Time Series Segmentation, chain reconstruction from unordered data points, Optical Character Recognition, and Pattern Matching.
@cite_4 @cite_14 @cite_10 , the authors chose to define monotonicity for curves or chains with an arbitrary direction vector: a curve is monotone if its projection on a line is does not backtrack. While this is a sensible choice given the lack of definition elsewhere, we argue that not all applications support an arbitrary direction that can be used to define monotonicity.
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Monotonicity in concurrent systems stipulates that, in any global state, extant system actions remain executable when new processes are added to the state. This concept is not only natural and common in multi-threaded software, but also useful: if every thread’s memory is finite, monotonicity often guarantees the decidability of safety property verification even when the number of running threads is unknown. In this paper, we show that the act of obtaining finite-data thread abstractions for model checking can be at odds with monotonicity: Predicate-abstracting certain widely used monotone software results in non-monotone multi-threaded Boolean programs — the monotonicity is lost in the abstraction. As a result, well-established sound and complete safety checking algorithms become inapplicable; in fact, safety checking turns out to be undecidable for the obtained class of unbounded-thread Boolean programs. We demonstrate how the abstract programs can be modified into monotone ones, without affecting safety properties of the non-monotone abstraction. This significantly improves earlier approaches of enforcing monotonicity via overapproximations. Maximal monotone operators are set-valued mappings which extend (but are not limited to) the notion of subdifferential of a convex function. The proximal point algorithm is a method for finding a zero of a maximal monotone operator. The algorithm consists in fixed point iterations of a mapping called the resolvent which depends on the maximal monotone operator of interest. The paper investigates a stochastic version of the algorithm where the resolvent used at iteration k is associated to one realization of a random maximal monotone operator. We establish the almost sure ergodic convergence of the iterates to a zero of the expectation (in the Aumann sense) of the latter random operator. Application to constrained stochastic optimization is considered. In a companion paper we described what intuitively would seem to be the most general possible way to generate Coarsening at Random mechanisms, a sequential procedure called randomized monotone coarsening. Counter-examples showed that CAR mechanisms exist which cannot be represented in this way. Here, we further develop these results in two directions. Firstly, we consider what happens when data is coarsened at random in two or more phases. We show that the resulting coarsening mechanism is not CAR anymore, but under suitable assumptions is identified and can provide interesting alternative analysis of data under a non-CAR model. Secondly, we look at sequential mechanisms for generating MAR data, missing components of a multivariate random vector. Randomised monotone missingness schemes, in which one variable at a time is observed and depending on its value, another variable is chosen or the procedure is terminated, supply in our opinion the broadest class of physically interpretable MAR mechanisms. We show that every randomised monotone missingness scheme can be represented by a Markov monotone missingness scheme, in which the choice of which variable to observe next only depends on the set of previously observed variables and their values, not on the sequence in which they were measured. We also show that MAR mechanisms exist which cannot be represented sequentially. We show a directed and robust analogue of a boolean isoperimetric-type theorem of Talagrand [Geom. Funct. Anal., 3 (1993), pp. 295--314]. As an application, we give a monotonicity testing algorithm that makes @math nonadaptive queries to a function @math , always accepts a monotone function, and rejects a function that is @math -far from being monotone with constant probability.