arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Jean-Luc Marichal.
We characterize conservative median algebras and semilattices by means of forbidden substructures and by providing their representation as chains. Moreover, using a dual equivalence between median algebras and certain topological structures, we obtain descriptions of the median-preserving mappings between products of finitely many chains.
We study the property of strong barycentric associativity, a stronger version of barycentric associativity for functions with indefinite arities. We introduce and discuss the more general property of strong barycentric preassociativity, a generalization of strong barycentric associativity which does not involve any composition of functions. We also provide a generalization of Kolmogoroff-Nagumo's characterization of the quasi-arithmetic mean functions to strongly barycentrically preassociative functions.
We provide a characterization of the variadic functions which are barycentrically preassociative as compositions of length-preserving associative string functions with one-to-one unary maps. We also discuss some consequences of this characterization.
We describe the class of polynomial functions which are barycentrically associative over an infinite commutative integral domain.
In this paper we consider two properties of variadic functions, namely associativity and preassociativity, that are pertaining to several data and language processing tasks. We propose parameterized relaxations of these properties and provide their descriptions in terms of factorization results. We also give an example where these parameterized notions give rise to natural hierarchies of functions and indicate their potential use in measuring the degrees of associativeness and preassociativeness. We illustrate these results by several examples and constructions and discuss some open problems that lead to further directions of research.
The concept of signature is a useful tool in the analysis of semicoherent systems with continuous and i.i.d. component lifetimes, especially for the comparison of different system designs and the computation of the system reliability. For such systems, we provide conversion formulas between the signature and the reliability function through the corresponding vector of dominations and we derive efficient algorithms for the computation of any of these concepts from the other. We also show how the signature can be easily computed from the reliability function via basic manipulations such as differentiation, coefficient extraction, and integration.
We investigate the barycentric associativity property for functions with indefinite arities and discuss the more general property of barycentric preassociativity, a generalization of barycentric associativity which does not involve any composition of functions. We also provide a generalization of Kolmogoroff-Nagumo's characterization of the quasi-arithmetic mean functions to barycentrically preassociative functions.
The classical property of associativity is very often considered in aggregation function theory and fuzzy logic. In this paper we provide axiomatizations of various classes of preassociative functions, where preassociativity is a generalization of associativity recently introduced by the authors. These axiomatizations are based on existing characterizations of some noteworthy classes of associative operations, such as the class of Aczélian semigroups and the class of t-norms.
We introduce the concept of associativity for string functions, where a string function is a unary operation on the set of strings over a given alphabet. We discuss this new property and describe certain classes of associative string functions. We also characterize the recently introduced preassociative functions as compositions of associative string functions with injective unary maps. Finally, we provide descriptions of the classes of associative and preassociative functions which depend only on the length of the input.
The Banzhaf power and interaction indexes for a pseudo-Boolean function (or a cooperative game) appear naturally as leading coefficients in the standard least squares approximation of the function by a pseudo-Boolean function of a specified degree. We first observe that this property still holds if we consider approximations by pseudo-Boolean functions depending only on specified variables. We then show that the Banzhaf influence index can also be obtained from the latter approximation problem. Considering certain weighted versions of this approximation problem, we introduce a class of weighted Banzhaf influence indexes, analyze their most important properties, and point out similarities between the weighted Banzhaf influence index and the corresponding weighted Banzhaf interaction index. We also discuss the issue of reconstructing a pseudo-Boolean function from prescribed influences and point out very different behaviors in the weighted and non-weighted cases.
Considering a semicoherent system made up of $n$ components having i.i.d. continuous lifetimes, Samaniego defined its structural signature as the $n$-tuple whose $k$-th coordinate is the probability that the $k$-th component failure causes the system to fail. This $n$-tuple, which depends only on the structure of the system and not on the distribution of the component lifetimes, is a very useful tool in the theoretical analysis of coherent systems. It was shown in two independent recent papers how the structural signature of a system partitioned into two disjoint modules can be computed from the signatures of these modules. In this work we consider the general case of a system partitioned into an arbitrary number of disjoint modules organized in an arbitrary way and we provide a general formula for the signature of the system in terms of the signatures of the modules. The concept of signature was recently extended to the general case of semicoherent systems whose components may have dependent lifetimes. The same definition for the $n$-tuple gives rise to the probability signature, which may depend on both the structure of the system and the probability distribution of the component lifetimes. In this general setting, we show how under a natural condition on the distribution of the lifetimes, the probability signature of the system can be expressed in terms of the probability signatures of the modules. We finally discuss a few situations where this condition holds in the non-i.i.d. and nonexchangeable cases and provide some applications of the main results.
We investigate the associativity property for functions of indefinite arities and introduce and discuss the more general property of preassociativity, a generalization of associativity which does not involve any composition of functions.
The subsignatures of a system with continuous and exchangeable component lifetimes form a class of indexes ranging from the Samaniego signature to the Barlow-Proschan importance index. These indexes can be computed through explicit linear expressions involving the values of the structure function of the system. We show how the subsignatures can be computed more efficiently from the reliability function of the system via identifications of variables, differentiations, and integrations.
We extend the well-known Shannon decomposition of Boolean functions to more general classes of functions. Such decompositions, which we call pivotal decompositions, express the fact that every unary section of a function only depends upon its values at two given elements. Pivotal decompositions appear to hold for various function classes, such as the class of lattice polynomial functions or the class of multilinear polynomial functions. We also define function classes characterized by pivotal decompositions and function classes characterized by their unary members and investigate links between these two concepts.
We introduce the concept of subsignature for semicoherent systems as a class of indexes that range from the system signature to the Barlow-Proschan importance index. Specifically, given a nonempty subset M of the set of components of a system, we define the M-signature of the system as the |M|-tuple whose k-th coordinate is the probability that the k-th failure among the components in M causes the system to fail. We give various explicit linear expressions for this probability in terms of the structure function and the distribution of the component lifetimes. We also examine the case of exchangeable lifetimes and the special case when M is a modular set.
It is known that several discrete integrals, including the Choquet and Sugeno integrals as well as some of their generalizations, are comonotonically modular functions. Based on a recent description of the class of comonotonically modular functions, we axiomatically identify more general families of discrete integrals that are comonotonically modular, including signed Choquet integrals and symmetric signed Choquet integrals as well as natural extensions of Sugeno integrals.
For a coherent system the Barlow-Proschan importance index, defined when the component lifetimes are independent, measures the probability that the failure of a given component causes the system to fail. Iyer (1992) extended this concept to the more general case when the component lifetimes are jointly absolutely continuous but not necessarily independent. Assuming only that the joint distribution of component lifetimes has no ties, we give an explicit expression for this extended index in terms of the discrete derivatives of the structure function and provide an interpretation of it as a probabilistic value, a concept introduced in game theory. This enables us to interpret Iyer's formula in this more general setting. We also discuss the analogy between this concept and that of system signature and show how it can be used to define a symmetry index for systems.
We describe the class of n-variable polynomial functions that satisfy Aczél's bisymmetry property over an arbitrary integral domain of characteristic zero with identity.