10651609
Improved Nyström low-rank approximation and error analysis
Low-rank matrix approximation is an effective tool in alleviating the memory and computational burdens of kernel methods and sampling, as the mainstream of such algorithms, has drawn considerable attention in both theory and practice. This paper presents detailed studies on the Nyström sampling scheme and in particular, an error analysis that directly relates the Nyström approximation quality with the encoding powers of the landmark points in summarizing the data. The resultant error bound suggests a simple and efficient sampling scheme, the k-means clustering algorithm, for Nyström low-rank approximation. We compare it with state-of-the-art approaches that range from greedy schemes to probabilistic sampling. Our algorithm achieves significant performance gains in a number of supervised/unsupervised learning tasks including kernel PCA and least squares SVM.
5858271
Prototype vector machine for large scale semi-supervised learning
Practical data mining rarely falls exactly into the supervised learning scenario. Rather, the growing amount of unlabeled data poses a big challenge to large-scale semi-supervised learning (SSL). We note that the computational intensiveness of graph-based SSL arises largely from the manifold or graph regularization, which in turn lead to large models that are difficult to handle. To alleviate this, we proposed the prototype vector machine (PVM), a highly scalable, graph-based algorithm for large-scale SSL. Our key innovation is the use of "prototypes vectors" for efficient approximation on both the graph-based regularizer and model representation. The choice of prototypes are grounded upon two important criteria: they not only perform effective low-rank approximation of the kernel matrix, but also span a model suffering the minimum information loss compared with the complete model. We demonstrate encouraging performance and appealing scaling properties of the PVM on a number of machine learning benchmark data sets.
5878411
Density-Weighted Nystrm Method for Computing Large Kernel Eigensystems
The Nystrm method is a well-known sampling-based technique for approximating the eigensystem of large kernel matrices. However, the chosen samples in the Nystrm method are all assumed to be of equal importance, which deviates from the integral equation that defines the kernel eigenfunctions. Motivated by this observation, we extend the Nystrm method to a more general, density-weighted version. We show that by introducing the probability density function as a natural weighting scheme, the approximation of the eigensystem can be greatly improved. An efficient algorithm is proposed to enforce such weighting in practice, which has the same complexity as the original Nystrm method and hence is notably cheaper than several other alternatives. Experiments on kernel principal component analysis, spectral clustering, and image segmentation demonstrate the encouraging performance of our algorithm.
14078787
Maximum Margin Clustering Made Practical
Motivated by the success of large margin methods in supervised learning, maximum margin clustering (MMC) is a recent approach that aims at extending large margin methods to unsupervised learning. However, its optimization problem is nonconvex and existing MMC methods all rely on reformulating and relaxing the nonconvex optimization problem as semidefinite programs (SDP). Though SDP is convex and standard solvers are available, they are computationally very expensive and only small data sets can be handled. To make MMC more practical, we avoid SDP relaxations and propose in this paper an efficient approach that performs alternating optimization directly on the original nonconvex problem. A key step to avoid premature convergence in the resultant iterative procedure is to change the loss function from the hinge loss to the Laplacian/square loss so that overconfident predictions are penalized. Experiments on a number of synthetic and real-world data sets demonstrate that the proposed approach is more accurate, much faster (hundreds to tens of thousands of times faster), and can handle data sets that are hundreds of times larger than the largest data set reported in the MMC literature.
2688754
A method for evaluating upper bound of simultaneous switching gates using circuit partition
This paper presents a method for evaluating an upper bound of simultaneous switching gates in combinational circuits. In this method, the original circuit is partitioned into subcircuits, and the upper bound is approximately computed as the sum of maximum switching gates for all subcircuits. In order to increase the accuracy, we adopted an evaluation function that takes account of both the interconnections among subcircuits and the number of generated subcircuits. Experimental results for ISCAS circuits show that the method efficiently evaluates the upper bounds of switching gates.
10595235
A Block Coprocessor for User Data Rate Improvements to GPRS Coding Scheme 4
The general packet radio service (GPRS) has been developed to allow packet data to be transported efficiently over an existing circuit-switched radio network, such as GSM. The main application of GPRS are in transporting Internet protocol (IP) datagrams from web servers (for telemetry or for mobile Internet browsers). Four GPRS baseband coding schemes are defined to offer a trade-off in requested data rates versus propagation channel conditions. However, data rates in the order of > 100 kbits/s are only achievable if the simplest coding scheme is used (CS-4) which offers little error detection and correction (EDC) (requiring excellent SNR) and the receiver hardware is capable of full duplex which is not currently available in the consumer market. A simple EDC scheme to improve the GPRS block error rate (BLER) performance is presented, particularly for CS-4, however gains in other coding schemes are seen. For every GPRS radio block that is corrected by the EDC scheme, the block does not need to be retransmitted releasing bandwidth in the channel and improving the user's application data rate. As GPRS requires intensive processing in the baseband, a viable field programmable gate array (FPGA) solution is presented in this paper.
29061314
Improving CS-4 User Data Rate in GPRS Enabled Devices by Using a BLER Co-processor
 The General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) was developed to allow packet data to be transported efficiently over an existing circuit switched radio network. The main applications for GPRS are in transporting IP datagram’s from the user’s mobile Internet browser to and from the Internet, or in telemetry equipment. A simple Error Detection and Correction (EDC) scheme to improve the GPRS Block Error Rate (BLER) performance is presented, particularly for coding scheme 4 (CS-4), however gains in other coding schemes are seen. For every GPRS radio block that is corrected by the EDC scheme, the block does not need to be retransmitted releasing bandwidth in the channel, improving throughput and the user’s application data rate. As GPRS requires intensive processing in the baseband, a viable hardware solution for a GPRS BLER co-processor is discussed that has been currently implemented in a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and presented in this paper.
13932512
Joint Transmit Rate, Power and Antenna Allocation for MIMO Systems with Multimedia Traffic
This paper proposes an adaptive transmission scheme for MIMO systems to provide different bit error rates and transmission rates for multimedia traffic. The adaptive transmission scheme allocates antennas, rate and power jointly according to the feedback information to satisfy the diverse QoS requirements of the multimedia traffic. Furthermore, an efficient search algorithm with low complexity is proposed for practical implementation. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves the spectral efficiency while guaranteeing the QoS requirements of multimedia traffic. Moreover, the proposed search algorithm achieves close optimal performance with great complexity reduction.
16124831
Microstructure Evolution of Stainless Steel during Laser Metal Deposition Shaping
Laser Metal Deposition Shaping (LMDS) is a process that fuses gas delivered metal powders within a focal zone of a laser beam to produce fully dense, 3-dimensional metal components. A variety of materials have been processed with LMDS, ranging from stainless steel to superalloy. To evaluate the processing parameters and resulting microstructures, solidification studies have been performed on defined alloy systems. For example, solidification cooling rates and growth velocities have been determined based upon secondary dendrite arm spacings formed during solidification in stainless steel. Corresponding to the great change of cooling rates, growth rates vary dramatically. As a result, process definition has been developed based upon the microstructure evolution during solidification.