Consider n nodes connected to a single coordinator. Each node receives an individual online data stream of numbers and, at any point in time, the coordinator has to know the k nodes currently observing the largest values, for a given k between 1 and n. We design and analyze an algorithm that solves this problem while bounding the amount of messages exchanged between the nodes and the coordinator. Our algorithm employs the idea of using filters which, intuitively speaking, leads to few messages to be sent, if the new input is "similar" to the previous ones. The algorithm uses a number of messages that is on expectation by a factor of O((log + k) log n) larger than that of an offline algorithm that sets filters in an optimal way, where is upper bounded by the largest value observed by any node.
An important class of problems in this model investigated in literature are threshold computations, i.e., the coordinator is supposed to decide whether the current function value has reached some given threshold @math or not. If the function is monotone, e.g., monitoring the number of distinct values or the sum over all values, exact characterizations including matching lower bounds in the deterministic case are known @cite_4 @cite_5 . However, non-monotone functions, e.g., the entropy @cite_6 , turned out to be much more complex to handle.
@cite_5 @cite_4 @cite_6
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The notion of distributed functional monitoring was recently introduced by Cormode, Muthukrishnan and Yi to initiate a formal study of the communication cost of certain fundamental problems arising in distributed systems, especially sensor networks. In this model, each of k sites reads a stream of tokens and is in communication with a central coordinator, who wishes to continuously monitor some function f of *** , the union of the k streams. The goal is to minimize the number of bits communicated by a protocol that correctly monitors f (*** ), to within some small error. As in previous work, we focus on a threshold version of the problem, where the coordinator's task is simply to maintain a single output bit, which is 0 whenever f (*** ) ≤ *** (1 *** *** ) and 1 whenever f (*** ) *** *** . Following , we term this the (k ,f ,*** ,*** ) functional monitoring problem. In previous work, some upper and lower bounds were obtained for this problem, with f being a frequency moment function, e.g., F 0 , F 1 , F 2 . Importantly, these functions are monotone . Here, we further advance the study of such problems, proving three new classes of results. First, we provide nontrivial monitoring protocols when f is either H , the empirical Shannon entropy of a stream, or any of a related class of entropy functions (Tsallis entropies). These are the first nontrivial algorithms for distributed monitoring of non-monotone functions. Second, we study the effect of non-monotonicity of f on our ability to give nontrivial monitoring protocols, by considering f = F p with deletions allowed, as well as f = H . Third, we prove new lower bounds on this problem when f = F p , for several values of p . We investigate the minimization of Newton's functional for the problem of the body of minimal resistance with maximal height @math cite butt in the class of convex developable functions defined in a disc. This class is a natural candidate to find a (non-radial) minimizer in accordance with the results of cite lrp2. We prove that the minimizer in this class has a minimal set in the form of a regular polygon with @math sides centered in the disc, and numerical experiments indicate that the natural number @math is a non-decreasing function of @math . The corresponding functions all achieve a lower value of the functional than the optimal radially symmetric function with the same height @math . We consider the problem of testing whether an unknown Boolean function f : -- 1, 1 n a#x21C6; -- 1, 1 is monotone versus aepsi;-far from every monotone function. The two main results of this paper are a new lower bound and a new algorithm for this well-studied problem. Lower bound: We prove an a#x03A9;(n1 5) lower bound on the query complexity of any non-adaptive two-sided error algorithm for testing whether an unknown Boolean function f is monotone versus constant-far from monotone. This gives an exponential improvement on the previous lower bound of a#x03A9;(log n) due to [1]. We show that the same lower bound holds for monotonicity testing of Boolean-valued functions over hypergrid domains 1,,m n for all m age; 2. Upper bound: We present an O(n5 6) poly(1 aepsi;)-query algorithm that tests whether an unknown Boolean function f is monotone versus aepsi;-far from monotone. Our algorithm, which is non-adaptive and makes one-sided error, is a modified version of the algorithm of Chakrabarty and Seshadhri[2], which makes O(n7 8) poly(1 aepsi;) queries. 0. Background Notes.- 1. Continuous Partitions of Unity.- 2. Absolutely Continuous Functions.- 3. Some Compactness Theorems.- 4. Weak Convergence and Asymptotic Center of Bounded Sequences.- 5. Closed Convex Hulls and the Mean-Value Theorem.- 6. Lower Semicontinuous Convex Functions and Projections of Best Approximation.- 7. A Concise Introduction to Convex Analysis.- 1. Set-Valued Maps.- 1. Set-Valued Maps and Continuity Concepts.- 2. Examples of Set-Valued Maps.- 3. Continuity Properties of Maps with Closed Convex Graph.- 4. Upper Hemicontinuous Maps and the Convergence Theorem.- 5. Hausdorff Topology.- 6. The Selection Problem.- 7. The Minimal Selection.- 8. Chebishev Selection.- 9. The Barycentric Selection.- 10. Selection Theorems for Locally Selectionable Maps.- 11. Michael's Selection Theorem.- 12. The Approximate Selection Theorem and Kakutani's Fixed Point Theorem.- 13. (7-Selectionable Maps.- 14. Measurable Selections.- 2. Existence of Solutions to Differential Inclusions.- 1. Convex Valued Differential Inclusions.- 2. Qualitative Properties of the Set of Trajectories of Convex-Valued Differential Inclusions.- 3. Nonconvex-Valued Differential Inclusions.- 4. Differential Inclusions with Lipschitzean Maps and the Relaxation Theorem.- 5. The Fixed-Point Approach.- 6. The Lower Semicontinuous Case.- 3. Differential Inclusions with Maximal Monotone Maps.- 1. Maximal Monotone Maps.- 2. Existence and Uniqueness of Solutions to Differential Inclusions with Maximal Monotone Maps.- 3. Asymptotic Behavior of Trajectories and the Ergodic Theorem.- 4. Gradient Inclusions.- 5. Application: Gradient Methods for Constrained Minimization Problems.- 4. Viability Theory: The Nonconvex Case.- 1. Bouligand's Contingent Cone.- 2. Viable and Monotone Trajectories.- 3. Contingent Derivative of a Set-Valued Map.- 4. The Time Dependent Case.- 5. A Continuous Version of Newton's Method.- 6. A Viability Theorem for Continuous Maps with Nonconvex Images..- 7. Differential Inclusions with Memory.- 5. Viability Theory and Regulation of Controled Systems: The Convex Case.- 1. Tangent Cones and Normal Cones to Convex Sets.- 2. Viability Implies the Existence of an Equilibrium.- 3. Viability Implies the Existence of Periodic Trajectories.- 4. Regulation of Controled Systems Through Viability.- 5. Walras Equilibria and Dynamical Price Decentralization.- 6. Differential Variational Inequalities.- 7. Rate Equations and Inclusions.- 6. Liapunov Functions.- 1. Upper Contingent Derivative of a Real-Valued Function.- 2. Liapunov Functions and Existence of Equilibria.- 3. Monotone Trajectories of a Differential Inclusion.- 4. Construction of Liapunov Functions.- 5. Stability and Asymptotic Behavior of Trajectories.- Comments. We study what we call functional monitoring problems. We have k players each tracking their inputs, say player i tracking a multiset Ai(t) up until time t, and communicating with a central coordinator. The coordinator's task is to monitor a given function f computed over the union of the inputs ∪iAi(t), continuously at all times t. The goal is to minimize the number of bits communicated between the players and the coordinator. A simple example is when f is the sum, and the coordinator is required to alert when the sum of a distributed set of values exceeds a given threshold τ. Of interest is the approximate version where the coordinator outputs 1 if f ≥ τ and 0 if f ≤ (1 - e)τ. This defines the (k, f, τ, e) distributed, functional monitoring problem. Functional monitoring problems are fundamental in distributed systems, in particular sensor networks, where we must minimize communication; they also connect to problems in communication complexity, communication theory, and signal processing. Yet few formal bounds are known for functional monitoring. We give upper and lower bounds for the (k, f, τ, e) problem for some of the basic f's. In particular, we study frequency moments (F0, F1, F2). For F0 and F1, we obtain continuously monitoring algorithms with costs almost the same as their one-shot computation algorithms. However, for F2 the monitoring problem seems much harder. We give a carefully constructed multi-round algorithm that uses "sketch summaries" at multiple levels of detail and solves the (k, F2, τ, e) problem with communication O(k2 e+ (√k e)3). Since frequency moment estimation is central to other problems, our results have immediate applications to histograms, wavelet computations, and others. Our algorithmic techniques are likely to be useful for other functional monitoring problems as well. The primary problem in property testing is to decide whether a given function satisfies a certain property or is far from any function satisfying it. This crucially requires a notion of distance between functions. The most prevalent notion is the Hamming distance over the uniform distribution on the domain. This restriction to uniformity is rather limiting, and it is important to investigate distances induced by more general distributions. In this article, we provide simple and optimal testers for bounded derivative properties over arbitrary product distributions. Bounded derivative properties include fundamental properties, such as monotonicity and Lipschitz continuity. Our results subsume almost all known results (upper and lower bounds) on monotonicity and Lipschitz testing over arbitrary ranges. We prove an intimate connection between bounded derivative property testing and binary search trees (BSTs). We exhibit a tester whose query complexity is the sum of expected depths of optimal BSTs for each marginal. Furthermore, we show that this sum-of-depths is also a lower bound. A technical contribution of our work is an optimal dimension reduction theorem for all bounded derivative properties that relates the distance of a function from the property to the distance of restrictions of the function to random lines. Such a theorem has been elusive even for monotonicity, and our theorem is an exponential improvement to the previous best-known result. A function @math is @math -resilient if all its Fourier coefficients of degree at most @math are zero, i.e., @math is uncorrelated with all low-degree parities. We study the notion of @math @math of Boolean functions, where we say that @math is @math -approximately @math -resilient if @math is @math -close to a @math -valued @math -resilient function in @math distance. We show that approximate resilience essentially characterizes the complexity of agnostic learning of a concept class @math over the uniform distribution. Roughly speaking, if all functions in a class @math are far from being @math -resilient then @math can be learned agnostically in time @math and conversely, if @math contains a function close to being @math -resilient then agnostic learning of @math in the statistical query (SQ) framework of Kearns has complexity of at least @math . This characterization is based on the duality between @math approximation by degree- @math polynomials and approximate @math -resilience that we establish. In particular, it implies that @math approximation by low-degree polynomials, known to be sufficient for agnostic learning over product distributions, is in fact necessary. Focusing on monotone Boolean functions, we exhibit the existence of near-optimal @math -approximately @math -resilient monotone functions for all @math . Prior to our work, it was conceivable even that every monotone function is @math -far from any @math -resilient function. Furthermore, we construct simple, explicit monotone functions based on @math and @math that are close to highly resilient functions. Our constructions are based on a fairly general resilience analysis and amplification. These structural results, together with the characterization, imply nearly optimal lower bounds for agnostic learning of monotone juntas. We discuss schemes for exact and approximate computations of permanents, and compare them with each other. Specifically, we analyze and generalize the Belief Propagation (BP) approach to computing the permanent of a non-negative matrix. Known bounds and conjectures are verified in experiments, and some new theoretical relations, bounds and conjectures are proposed. We introduce a fractional free energy functional parameterized by a scalar parameter @math , where @math corresponds to the BP limit and @math corresponds to the exclusion principle Mean-Field (MF) limit, and show monotonicity and continuity of the functional with @math . We observe that the optimal value of @math , where the @math -parameterized functional is equal to the exact free energy (defined as the minus log of the permanent), lies in the @math range, with the low and high values from the range producing provable low and upper bounds for the permanent. Our experimental analysis suggests that the optimal @math varies for different ensembles considered but it always lies in the @math interval. Besides, for all ensembles considered the behavior of the optimal @math is highly distinctive, thus offering a lot of practical potential for estimating permanents of non-negative matrices via the fractional free energy functional approach. This work studies the Generalized Singular Value Thresholding (GSVT) operator Proxσg(·), Proxσg(B) = arg minx ∑mi=1 g(σi(X)) + 1 2 ||X - B||2F, associated with a nonconvex function g defined on the singular values of X. We prove that GSVT can be obtained by performing the proximal operator of g (denoted as Proxg(·)) on the singular values since Proxg(·) is monotone when g is lower bounded. If the nonconvex g satisfies some conditions (many popular nonconvex surrogate functions, e.g., lp-norm, 0 < p < 1, of l0-norm are special cases), a general solver to find Proxg(b) is proposed for any b ≥ 0. GSVT greatly generalizes the known Singular Value Thresholding (SVT) which is a basic subroutine in many convex low rank minimization methods. We are able to solve the nonconvex low rank minimization problem by using GSVT in place of SVT. We show that every algorithm for testing n-variate Boolean functions for monotonicityhas query complexity Ω(n1 4). All previous lower bounds for this problem were designed for non-adaptive algorithms and, as a result, the best previous lower bound for general (possibly adaptive) monotonicity testers was only Ω(logn). Combined with the query complexity of the non-adaptive monotonicity tester of Khot, Minzer, and Safra (FOCS 2015), our lower bound shows that adaptivity can result in at most a quadratic reduction in the query complexity for testing monotonicity. By contrast, we show that there is an exponential gap between the query complexity of adaptive and non-adaptive algorithms for testing regular linear threshold functions (LTFs) for monotonicity. Chen, De, Servedio, and Tan (STOC 2015)recently showed that non-adaptive algorithms require almost Ω(n1 2) queries for this task. We introduce a new adaptive monotonicity testing algorithm which has query complexity O(logn) when the input is a regular LTF. We consider the continual count tracking problem in a distributed environment where the input is an aggregate stream that originates from k distinct sites and the updates are allowed to be non-monotonic, i.e. both increments and decrements are allowed. The goal is to continually track the count within a prescribed relative accuracy e at the lowest possible communication cost. Specifically, we consider an adversarial setting where the input values are selected and assigned to sites by an adversary but the order is according to a random permutation or is a random i.i.d process. The input stream of values is allowed to be non-monotonic with an unknown drift -1≤μ=1 where the case μ = 1 corresponds to the special case of a monotonic stream of only non-negative updates. We show that a randomized algorithm guarantees to track the count accurately with high probability and has the expected communication cost O(min√k (|#956;|e), √k n e, n ), for an input stream of length n, and establish matching lower bounds. This improves upon previously best known algorithm whose expected communication cost is Θ(min√k e,n]) that applies only to an important but more restrictive class of monotonic input streams, and our results are substantially more positive than the communication complexity of Ω(n) under fully adversarial input. We also show how our framework can also accommodate other types of random input streams, including fractional Brownian motion that has been widely used to model temporal long-range dependencies observed in many natural phenomena. Last but not least, we show how our non-monotonic counter can be applied to track the second frequency moment and to a Bayesian linear regression problem. Matching dependencies were recently introduced as declarative rules for data cleaning and entity resolution. Enforcing a matching dependency on a database instance identifies the values of some attributes for two tuples, provided that the values of some other attributes are sufficiently similar. Assuming the existence of matching functions for making two attributes values equal, we formally introduce the process of cleaning an instance using matching dependencies, as a chase-like procedure. We show that matching functions naturally introduce a lattice structure on attribute domains, and a partial order of semantic domination between instances. Using the latter, we define the semantics of clean query answering in terms of certain possible answers as the greatest lower bound least upper bound of all possible answers obtained from the clean instances. We show that clean query answering is intractable in some cases. Then we study queries that behave monotonically w.r.t. semantic domination order, and show that we can provide an under over approximation for clean answers to monotone queries. Moreover, non-monotone positive queries can be relaxed into monotone queries. The 3SUM problem is to decide, given a set of @math real numbers, whether any three sum to zero. It is widely conjectured that a trivial @math -time algorithm is optimal and over the years the consequences of this conjecture have been revealed. This 3SUM conjecture implies @math lower bounds on numerous problems in computational geometry and a variant of the conjecture implies strong lower bounds on triangle enumeration, dynamic graph algorithms, and string matching data structures. In this paper we refute the 3SUM conjecture. We prove that the decision tree complexity of 3SUM is @math and give two subquadratic 3SUM algorithms, a deterministic one running in @math time and a randomized one running in @math time with high probability. Our results lead directly to improved bounds for @math -variate linear degeneracy testing for all odd @math . The problem is to decide, given a linear function @math and a set @math , whether @math . We show the decision tree complexity of this problem is @math . Finally, we give a subcubic algorithm for a generalization of the @math -product over real-valued matrices and apply it to the problem of finding zero-weight triangles in weighted graphs. We give a depth- @math decision tree for this problem, as well as an algorithm running in time @math . We prove that for any decision tree calculating a boolean function @math , [ [f] i=1 ^n (f), ] where @math is the probability that the @math th input variable is read and @math is the influence of the @math th variable on @math . The variance, influence and probability are taken with respect to an arbitrary product measure on @math . It follows that the minimum depth of a decision tree calculating a given balanced function is at least the reciprocal of the largest influence of any input variable. Likewise, any balanced boolean function with a decision tree of depth @math has a variable with influence at least @math . The only previous nontrivial lower bound known was @math . Our inequality has many generalizations, allowing us to prove influence lower bounds for randomized decision trees, decision trees on arbitrary product probability spaces, and decision trees with non-boolean outputs. As an application of our results we give a very easy proof that the randomized query complexity of nontrivial monotone graph properties is at least @math , where @math is the number of vertices and @math is the critical threshold probability. This supersedes the milestone @math bound of Hajnal and is sometimes superior to the best known lower bounds of Chakrabarti-Khot and Friedgut-Kahn-Wigderson. In emerging applications such as location-based services, sensor monitoring and biological management systems, the values of the database items are naturally imprecise. For these uncertain databases, an important query is the Probabilistic k-Nearest-Neighbor Query (k-PNN), which computes the probabilities of sets of k objects for being the closest to a given query point. The evaluation of this query can be both computationally- and I O-expensive, since there is an exponentially large number of k object-sets, and numerical integration is required. Often a user may not be concerned about the exact probability values. For example, he may only need answers that have sufficiently high confidence. We thus propose the Probabilistic Threshold k-Nearest-Neighbor Query (T-k-PNN), which returns sets of k objects that satisfy the query with probabilities higher than some threshold T. Three steps are proposed to handle this query efficiently. In the first stage, objects that cannot constitute an answer are filtered with the aid of a spatial index. The second step, called probabilistic candidate selection, significantly prunes a number of candidate sets to be examined. The remaining sets are sent for verification, which derives the lower and upper bounds of answer probabilities, so that a candidate set can be quickly decided on whether it should be included in the answer. We also examine spatially-efficient data structures that support these methods. Our solution can be applied to uncertain data with arbitrary probability density functions. We have also performed extensive experiments to examine the effectiveness of our methods. We study the problem of approximating the commuting-operator value of a two-player non-local game. It is well-known that it is @math -complete to decide whether the classical value of a non-local game is 1 or @math . Furthermore, as long as @math is small enough, this result does not depend on the gap @math . In contrast, a recent result of Fitzsimons, Ji, Vidick, and Yuen shows that the complexity of computing the quantum value grows without bound as the gap @math decreases. In this paper, we show that this also holds for the commuting-operator value of a game. Specifically, in the language of multi-prover interactive proofs, we show that the power of @math (proofs with two provers, one round, completeness probability @math , soundness probability @math , and commuting-operator strategies) can increase without bound as the gap @math gets arbitrarily small. Our results also extend naturally in two ways, to perfect zero-knowledge protocols, and to lower bounds on the complexity of computing the approximately-commuting value of a game. Thus we get lower bounds on the complexity class @math - @math of perfect zero-knowledge multi-prover proofs with approximately-commuting operator strategies, as the gap @math gets arbitrarily small. While we do not know any computable time upper bound on the class @math , a result of the first author and Vidick shows that for @math and @math , the class @math , with constant communication from the provers, is contained in @math . We give a lower bound of @math (ignoring constants inside the function) for this class, which is tight up to polynomial factors assuming the exponential time hypothesis. Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to suggest an alternative to the widely used Times Cited criterion for analysing citation networks. The approach involves taking account of the natures of the papers that cite a given paper, so as to differentiate between papers that attract the same number of citations.Design methodology approach – ArticleRank is an algorithm that has been derived from Google's PageRank algorithm to measure the influence of journal articles. ArticleRank is applied to two datasets – a citation network based on an early paper on webometrics, and a self‐citation network based on the 19 most cited papers in the Journal of Documentation – using citation data taken from the Web of Knowledge database.Findings – ArticleRank values provide a different ranking of a set of papers from that provided by the corresponding Times Cited values, and overcomes the inability of the latter to differentiate between papers with the same numbers of citations. The difference in rankings between Times Cited ... We prove a new lower bound on the randomized decision tree complexity of monotone graph properties. For a monotone property A of graphs on n vertices, let p = p(A) denote the threshold probability of A, namely the value of p for which a random graph from G(n,p) has property A with probability 1 2. Then the expected number of queries made by any decision tree for A on such a random graph is at least Ω(n 2 max pn, logn ). We resolve several fundamental questions in the area of distributed functional monitoring, initiated by Cormode, Muthukrishnan, and Yi (SODA, 2008). In this model there are @math sites each tracking their input and communicating with a central coordinator that continuously maintain an approximate output to a function @math computed over the union of the inputs. The goal is to minimize the communication. We show the randomized communication complexity of estimating the number of distinct elements up to a @math factor is @math , improving the previous @math bound and matching known upper bounds up to a logarithmic factor. For the @math -th frequency moment @math , @math , we improve the previous @math communication bound to @math . We obtain similar improvements for heavy hitters, empirical entropy, and other problems. We also show that we can estimate @math , for any @math , using @math communication. This greatly improves upon the previous @math bound of Cormode, Muthukrishnan, and Yi for general @math , and their @math bound for @math . For @math , our bound resolves their main open question. Our lower bounds are based on new direct sum theorems for approximate majority, and yield significant improvements to problems in the data stream model, improving the bound for estimating @math in @math passes from @math to @math , giving the first bound for estimating @math in @math passes of @math bits of space that does not use the gap-hamming problem. We introduce several generalizations of classical computer science problems obtained by replacing simpler objective functions with general submodular functions.The new problems include submodular load balancing, which generalizes load balancing or minimum-makespan scheduling, submodular sparsest cut and submodular balanced cut, which generalize their respective graph cut problems, as well as submodular function minimization with a cardinality lower bound. We establish upper and lower bounds for the approximability of these problems with a polynomial number of queries to a function-value oracle.The approximation guarantees for most of our algorithms are of the order of radic(n ln n). We show that this is the inherent difficulty of the problems by proving matching lower bounds.We also give an improved lower bound for the problem of approximately learning a monotone submodular function. In addition, we present an algorithm for approximately learning submodular functions with special structure, whose guarantee is close to the lower bound. Although quite restrictive, the class of functions with this structure includes the ones that are used for lower bounds both by us and in previous work. This demonstrates that if there are significantly stronger lower bounds for this problem, they rely on more general submodular functions.