arXiv subjects

Lav R. Varshney

Publications and source records attributed to Lav R. Varshney.

160 records · Page 9Linked to original sources

arXiv2014

Reliable Crowdsourcing for Multi-Class Labeling using Coding Theory

Crowdsourcing systems often have crowd workers that perform unreliable work on the task they are assigned. In this paper, we propose the use of error-control codes and decoding algorithms to design crowdsourcing systems for reliable classification despite unreliable crowd workers. Coding-theory based techniques also allow us to pose easy-to-answer binary questions to the crowd workers. We consider three different crowdsourcing models: systems with independent crowd workers, systems with peer-dependent reward schemes, and systems where workers have common sources of information. For each of these models, we analyze classification performance with the proposed coding-based scheme. We develop an ordering principle for the quality of crowds and describe how system performance changes with the quality of the crowd. We also show that pairing among workers and diversification of the questions help in improving system performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed coding-based scheme using both simulated data and real datasets from Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing microtask platform. Results suggest that use of good codes may improve the performance of the crowdsourcing task over typical majority-voting approaches.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2013

A Big Data Approach to Computational Creativity

Computational creativity is an emerging branch of artificial intelligence that places computers in the center of the creative process. Broadly, creativity involves a generative step to produce many ideas and a selective step to determine the ones that are the best. Many previous attempts at computational creativity, however, have not been able to achieve a valid selective step. This work shows how bringing data sources from the creative domain and from hedonic psychophysics together with big data analytics techniques can overcome this shortcoming to yield a system that can produce novel and high-quality creative artifacts. Our data-driven approach is demonstrated through a computational creativity system for culinary recipes and menus we developed and deployed, which can operate either autonomously or semi-autonomously with human interaction. We also comment on the volume, velocity, variety, and veracity of data in computational creativity.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2013

Flavor Pairing in Medieval European Cuisine: A Study in Cooking with Dirty Data

An important part of cooking with computers is using statistical methods to create new, flavorful ingredient combinations. The flavor pairing hypothesis states that culinary ingredients with common chemical flavor components combine well to produce pleasant dishes. It has been recently shown that this design principle is a basis for modern Western cuisine and is reversed for Asian cuisine. Such data-driven analysis compares the chemistry of ingredients to ingredient sets found in recipes. However, analytics-based generation of novel flavor profiles can only be as good as the underlying chemical and recipe data. Incomplete, inaccurate, and irrelevant data may degrade flavor pairing inferences. Chemical data on flavor compounds is incomplete due to the nature of the experiments that must be conducted to obtain it. Recipe data may have issues due to text parsing errors, imprecision in textual descriptions of ingredients, and the fact that the same ingredient may be known by different names in different recipes. Moreover, the process of matching ingredients in chemical data and recipe data may be fraught with mistakes. Much of the `dirtiness' of the data cannot be cleansed even with manual curation. In this work, we collect a new data set of recipes from Medieval Europe before the Columbian Exchange and investigate the flavor pairing hypothesis historically. To investigate the role of data incompleteness and error as part of this hypothesis testing, we use two separate chemical compound data sets with different levels of cleanliness. Notably, the different data sets give conflicting conclusions about the flavor pairing hypothesis in Medieval Europe. As a contribution towards social science, we obtain inferences about the evolution of culinary arts when many new ingredients are suddenly made available.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2013

Optimal Grouping for Group Minimax Hypothesis Testing

Bayesian hypothesis testing and minimax hypothesis testing represent extreme instances of detection in which the prior probabilities of the hypotheses are either completely and precisely known, or are completely unknown. Group minimax, also known as Gamma-minimax, is a robust intermediary between Bayesian and minimax hypothesis testing that allows for coarse or partial advance knowledge of the hypothesis priors by using information on sets in which the prior lies. Existing work on group minimax, however, does not consider the question of how to define the sets or groups of priors; it is assumed that the groups are given. In this work, we propose a novel intermediate detection scheme formulated through the quantization of the space of prior probabilities that optimally determines groups and also representative priors within the groups. We show that when viewed from a quantization perspective, group minimax amounts to determining centroids with a minimax Bayes risk error divergence distortion criterion: the appropriate Bregman divergence for this task. Moreover, the optimal partitioning of the space of prior probabilities is a Bregman Voronoi diagram. Together, the optimal grouping and representation points are an epsilon-net with respect to Bayes risk error divergence, and permit a rate-distortion type asymptotic analysis of detection performance with the number of groups. Examples of detecting signals corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise and of distinguishing exponentially-distributed signals are presented.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2012

Toward a Comparative Cognitive History: Archimedes and D. H. J. Polymath

Is collective intelligence just individual intelligence writ large, or are there fundamental differences? This position paper argues that a cognitive history methodology can shed light into the nature of collective intelligence and its differences from individual intelligence. To advance this proposed area of research, a small case study on the structure of argument and proof is presented. Quantitative metrics from network science are used to compare the artifacts of deduction from two sources. The first is the work of Archimedes of Syracuse, putatively an individual, and of other ancient Greek mathematicians. The second is work of the Polymath Project, a massively collaborative mathematics project that used blog posts and comments to prove new results in combinatorics.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2011

Quantization of Prior Probabilities for Collaborative Distributed Hypothesis Testing

This paper studies the quantization of prior probabilities, drawn from an ensemble, for distributed detection and data fusion. Design and performance equivalences between a team of N agents tied by a fixed fusion rule and a more powerful single agent are obtained. Effects of identical quantization and diverse quantization are compared. Consideration of perceived common risk enables agents using diverse quantizers to collaborate in hypothesis testing, and it is proven that the minimum mean Bayes risk error is achieved by diverse quantization. The comparison shows that optimal diverse quantization with K cells per quantizer performs as well as optimal identical quantization with N(K-1)+1 cells per quantizer. Similar results are obtained for maximum Bayes risk error as the distortion criterion.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2011

Channels That Die

Given the possibility of communication systems failing catastrophically, we investigate limits to communicating over channels that fail at random times. These channels are finite-state semi-Markov channels. We show that communication with arbitrarily small probability of error is not possible. Making use of results in finite blocklength channel coding, we determine sequences of blocklengths that optimize transmission volume communicated at fixed maximum message error probabilities. We provide a partial ordering of communication channels. A dynamic programming formulation is used to show the structural result that channel state feedback does not improve performance.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2011

Distributed Scalar Quantization for Computing: High-Resolution Analysis and Extensions

Communication of quantized information is frequently followed by a computation. We consider situations of \emph{distributed functional scalar quantization}: distributed scalar quantization of (possibly correlated) sources followed by centralized computation of a function. Under smoothness conditions on the sources and function, companding scalar quantizer designs are developed to minimize mean-squared error (MSE) of the computed function as the quantizer resolution is allowed to grow. Striking improvements over quantizers designed without consideration of the function are possible and are larger in the entropy-constrained setting than in the fixed-rate setting. As extensions to the basic analysis, we characterize a large class of functions for which regular quantization suffices, consider certain functions for which asymptotic optimality is achieved without arbitrarily fine quantization, and allow limited collaboration between source encoders. In the entropy-constrained setting, a single bit per sample communicated between encoders can have an arbitrarily-large effect on functional distortion. In contrast, such communication has very little effect in the fixed-rate setting.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2011

Malleable Coding with Fixed Reuse

In cloud computing, storage area networks, remote backup storage, and similar settings, stored data is modified with updates from new versions. Representing information and modifying the representation are both expensive. Therefore it is desirable for the data to not only be compressed but to also be easily modified during updates. A malleable coding scheme considers both compression efficiency and ease of alteration, promoting codeword reuse. We examine the trade-off between compression efficiency and malleability cost-the difficulty of synchronizing compressed versions-measured as the length of a reused prefix portion. Through a coding theorem, the region of achievable rates and malleability is expressed as a single-letter optimization. Relationships to common information problems are also described.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2010

Frame Permutation Quantization

Frame permutation quantization (FPQ) is a new vector quantization technique using finite frames. In FPQ, a vector is encoded using a permutation source code to quantize its frame expansion. This means that the encoding is a partial ordering of the frame expansion coefficients. Compared to ordinary permutation source coding, FPQ produces a greater number of possible quantization rates and a higher maximum rate. Various representations for the partitions induced by FPQ are presented, and reconstruction algorithms based on linear programming, quadratic programming, and recursive orthogonal projection are derived. Implementations of the linear and quadratic programming algorithms for uniform and Gaussian sources show performance improvements over entropy-constrained scalar quantization for certain combinations of vector dimension and coding rate. Monte Carlo evaluation of the recursive algorithm shows that mean-squared error (MSE) decays as 1/M^4 for an M-element frame, which is consistent with previous results on optimal decay of MSE. Reconstruction using the canonical dual frame is also studied, and several results relate properties of the analysis frame to whether linear reconstruction techniques provide consistent reconstructions.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2010

Concentric Permutation Source Codes

Permutation codes are a class of structured vector quantizers with a computationally-simple encoding procedure based on sorting the scalar components. Using a codebook comprising several permutation codes as subcodes preserves the simplicity of encoding while increasing the number of rate-distortion operating points, improving the convex hull of operating points, and increasing design complexity. We show that when the subcodes are designed with the same composition, optimization of the codebook reduces to a lower-dimensional vector quantizer design within a single cone. Heuristics for reducing design complexity are presented, including an optimization of the rate allocation in a shape-gain vector quantizer with gain-dependent wrapped spherical shape codebook.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2010

Structural Properties of the Caenorhabditis elegans Neuronal Network

Despite recent interest in reconstructing neuronal networks, complete wiring diagrams on the level of individual synapses remain scarce and the insights into function they can provide remain unclear. Even for Caenorhabditis elegans, whose neuronal network is relatively small and stereotypical from animal to animal, published wiring diagrams are neither accurate nor complete and self-consistent. Using materials from White et al. and new electron micrographs we assemble whole, self-consistent gap junction and chemical synapse networks of hermaphrodite C. elegans. We propose a method to visualize the wiring diagram, which reflects network signal flow. We calculate statistical and topological properties of the network, such as degree distributions, synaptic multiplicities, and small-world properties, that help in understanding network signal propagation. We identify neurons that may play central roles in information processing and network motifs that could serve as functional modules of the network. We explore propagation of neuronal activity in response to sensory or artificial stimulation using linear systems theory and find several activity patterns that could serve as substrates of previously described behaviors. Finally, we analyze the interaction between the gap junction and the chemical synapse networks. Since several statistical properties of the C. elegans network, such as multiplicity and motif distributions are similar to those found in mammalian neocortex, they likely point to general principles of neuronal networks. The wiring diagram reported here can help in understanding the mechanistic basis of behavior by generating predictions about future experiments involving genetic perturbations, laser ablations, or monitoring propagation of neuronal activity in response to stimulation.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2010

Performance of LDPC Codes Under Faulty Iterative Decoding

Departing from traditional communication theory where decoding algorithms are assumed to perform without error, a system where noise perturbs both computational devices and communication channels is considered here. This paper studies limits in processing noisy signals with noisy circuits by investigating the effect of noise on standard iterative decoders for low-density parity-check codes. Concentration of decoding performance around its average is shown to hold when noise is introduced into message-passing and local computation. Density evolution equations for simple faulty iterative decoders are derived. In one model, computing nonlinear estimation thresholds shows that performance degrades smoothly as decoder noise increases, but arbitrarily small probability of error is not achievable. Probability of error may be driven to zero in another system model; the decoding threshold again decreases smoothly with decoder noise. As an application of the methods developed, an achievability result for reliable memory systems constructed from unreliable components is provided.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2008

Malleable Coding: Compressed Palimpsests

A malleable coding scheme considers not only compression efficiency but also the ease of alteration, thus encouraging some form of recycling of an old compressed version in the formation of a new one. Malleability cost is the difficulty of synchronizing compressed versions, and malleable codes are of particular interest when representing information and modifying the representation are both expensive. We examine the trade-off between compression efficiency and malleability cost under a malleability metric defined with respect to a string edit distance. This problem introduces a metric topology to the compressed domain. We characterize the achievable rates and malleability as the solution of a subgraph isomorphism problem. This can be used to argue that allowing conditional entropy of the edited message given the original message to grow linearly with block length creates an exponential increase in code length.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2008

Quantization of Prior Probabilities for Hypothesis Testing

Bayesian hypothesis testing is investigated when the prior probabilities of the hypotheses, taken as a random vector, are quantized. Nearest neighbor and centroid conditions are derived using mean Bayes risk error as a distortion measure for quantization. A high-resolution approximation to the distortion-rate function is also obtained. Human decision making in segregated populations is studied assuming Bayesian hypothesis testing with quantized priors.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2007

Benefiting from Disorder: Source Coding for Unordered Data

The order of letters is not always relevant in a communication task. This paper discusses the implications of order irrelevance on source coding, presenting results in several major branches of source coding theory: lossless coding, universal lossless coding, rate-distortion, high-rate quantization, and universal lossy coding. The main conclusions demonstrate that there is a significant rate savings when order is irrelevant. In particular, lossless coding of n letters from a finite alphabet requires Theta(log n) bits and universal lossless coding requires n + o(n) bits for many countable alphabet sources. However, there are no universal schemes that can drive a strong redundancy measure to zero. Results for lossy coding include distribution-free expressions for the rate savings from order irrelevance in various high-rate quantization schemes. Rate-distortion bounds are given, and it is shown that the analogue of the Shannon lower bound is loose at all finite rates.

cs.IT↗