arXiv subjects

Pramod K. Varshney

Publications and source records attributed to Pramod K. Varshney.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Design and Performance Analysis of Dual and Multi-hop Diffusive Molecular Communication Systems

This work presents a comprehensive performance analysis of diffusion based direct, dual-hop, and multi-hop molecular communication systems with Brownian motion and drift in the presence of various distortions such as inter-symbol interference (ISI), multi-source interference (MSI), and counting errors. Optimal decision rules are derived employing the likelihood ratio tests (LRTs) for symbol detection at each of the cooperative as well as the destination nanomachines. Further, closed-form expressions are also derived for the probabilities of detection, false alarm at the individual cooperative, destination nanomachines, as well as the overall end-to-end probability of error for source-destination communication. The results also characterize the impact of detection performance of the intermediate cooperative nanomachine(s) on the end-to-end performance of dual/multi hop diffusive molecular communication systems. In addition, capacity expressions are also derived for direct, dual-hop, and multi-hop molecular communication scenarios. Simulation results are presented to corroborate the theoretical results derived and also, to yield insights into system performance.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Diffusive Molecular Communication with Nanomachine Mobility

This work presents a performance analysis for diffusive molecular communication with mobile transmit and receive nanomachines. To begin with, the optimal test is obtained for symbol detection at the receiver nanomachine. Subsequently, closed-form expressions are derived for the probabilities of detection and false alarm, probability of error, and capacity considering also aberrations such as multi-source interference, inter-symbol interference, and counting errors. Simulation results are presented to corroborate the theoretical results derived and also, to yield various insights into the performance of the system. Interestingly, it is shown that the performance of the mobile diffusive molecular communication can be significantly enhanced by allocating large fraction of total available molecules for transmission as the slot interval increases.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

A Coupon-Collector Model of Machine-Aided Discovery

Empirical studies of scientific discovery---so-called Eurekometrics---have indicated that the output of exploration proceeds as a logistic growth curve. Although logistic functions are prevalent in explaining population growth that is resource-limited to a given carrying capacity, their derivation do not apply to discovery processes. This paper develops a generative model for logistic \emph{knowledge discovery} using a novel extension of coupon collection, where an explorer interested in discovering all unknown elements of a set is supported by technology that can respond to queries. This discovery process is parameterized by the novelty and quality of the set of discovered elements at every time step, and randomness is demonstrated to improve performance. Simulation results provide further intuition on the discovery process.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2017

Compressive Sensing-Based Detection with Multimodal Dependent Data

Detection with high dimensional multimodal data is a challenging problem when there are complex inter- and intra- modal dependencies. While several approaches have been proposed for dependent data fusion (e.g., based on copula theory), their advantages come at a high price in terms of computational complexity. In this paper, we treat the detection problem with compressive sensing (CS) where compression at each sensor is achieved via low dimensional random projections. CS has recently been exploited to solve detection problems under various assumptions on the signals of interest, however, its potential for dependent data fusion has not been explored adequately. We exploit the capability of CS to capture statistical properties of uncompressed data in order to compute decision statistics for detection in the compressed domain. First, a Gaussian approximation is employed to perform likelihood ratio (LR) based detection with compressed data. In this approach, inter-modal dependence is captured via a compressed version of the covariance matrix of the concatenated (temporally and spatially) uncompressed data vector. We show that, under certain conditions, this approach with a small number of compressed measurements per node leads to enhanced performance compared to detection with uncompressed data using widely considered suboptimal approaches. Second, we develop a nonparametric approach where a decision statistic based on the second order statistics of uncompressed data is computed in the compressed domain. The second approach is promising over other related nonparametric approaches and the first approach when multimodal data is highly correlated at the expense of slightly increased computational complexity.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2017

Robust Detection of Random Events with Spatially Correlated Data in Wireless Sensor Networks via Distributed Compressive Sensing

In this paper, we exploit the theory of compressive sensing to perform detection of a random source in a dense sensor network. When the sensors are densely deployed, observations at adjacent sensors are highly correlated while those corresponding to distant sensors are less correlated. Thus, the covariance matrix of the concatenated observation vector of all the sensors at any given time can be sparse where the sparse structure depends on the network topology and the correlation model. Exploiting the sparsity structure of the covariance matrix, we develop a robust nonparametric detector to detect the presence of the random event using a compressed version of the data collected at the distributed nodes. We employ the multiple access channel (MAC) model with distributed random projections for sensors to transmit observations so that a compressed version of the observations is available at the fusion center. Detection is performed by constructing a decision statistic based on the covariance information of uncompressed data which is estimated using compressed data. The proposed approach does not require any knowledge of the noise parameter to set the threshold, and is also robust when the distributed random projection matrices become sparse.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Convergence Analysis of Proximal Gradient with Momentum for Nonconvex Optimization

In many modern machine learning applications, structures of underlying mathematical models often yield nonconvex optimization problems. Due to the intractability of nonconvexity, there is a rising need to develop efficient methods for solving general nonconvex problems with certain performance guarantee. In this work, we investigate the accelerated proximal gradient method for nonconvex programming (APGnc). The method compares between a usual proximal gradient step and a linear extrapolation step, and accepts the one that has a lower function value to achieve a monotonic decrease. In specific, under a general nonsmooth and nonconvex setting, we provide a rigorous argument to show that the limit points of the sequence generated by APGnc are critical points of the objective function. Then, by exploiting the Kurdyka-Łojasiewicz (\KL) property for a broad class of functions, we establish the linear and sub-linear convergence rates of the function value sequence generated by APGnc. We further propose a stochastic variance reduced APGnc (SVRG-APGnc), and establish its linear convergence under a special case of the \KL property. We also extend the analysis to the inexact version of these methods and develop an adaptive momentum strategy that improves the numerical performance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

Resource Allocation and Outage Analysis for An Adaptive Cognitive Two-Way Relay Network

In this paper, an adaptive two-way relay cooperation scheme is studied for multiple-relay cognitive radio networks to improve the performance of secondary transmissions. The power allocation and relay selection schemes are derived to minimize the secondary outage probability where only statistical channel information is needed. Exact closed-form expressions for secondary outage probability are derived under a constraint on the quality of service of primary transmissions in terms of the required primary outage probability. To better understand the impact of primary user interference on secondary transmissions, we further investigate the asymptotic behaviors of the secondary relay network including power allocation and outage probability, when the primary signal-to-noise ratio goes to infinity. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed schemes.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Subspace-Aware Index Codes

In this paper, we generalize the well-known index coding problem to exploit the structure in the source-data to improve system throughput. In many applications, the data to be transmitted may lie (or can be well approximated) in a low-dimensional subspace. We exploit this low-dimensional structure of the data using an algebraic framework to solve the index coding problem (referred to as subspace-aware index coding) as opposed to the traditional index coding problem which is subspace-unaware. Also, we propose an efficient algorithm based on the alternating minimization approach to obtain near optimal index codes for both subspace-aware and -unaware cases. Our simulations indicate that under certain conditions, a significant throughput gain (about 90%) can be achieved by subspace-aware index codes over conventional subspace-unaware index codes.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Does Confidence Reporting from the Crowd Benefit Crowdsourcing Performance?

We explore the design of an effective crowdsourcing system for an $M$-ary classification task. Crowd workers complete simple binary microtasks whose results are aggregated to give the final classification decision. We consider the scenario where the workers have a reject option so that they are allowed to skip microtasks when they are unable to or choose not to respond to binary microtasks. Additionally, the workers report quantized confidence levels when they are able to submit definitive answers. We present an aggregation approach using a weighted majority voting rule, where each worker's response is assigned an optimized weight to maximize crowd's classification performance. We obtain a couterintuitive result that the classification performance does not benefit from workers reporting quantized confidence. Therefore, the crowdsourcing system designer should employ the reject option without requiring confidence reporting.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2016

Influential Node Detection in Implicit Social Networks using Multi-task Gaussian Copula Models

Influential node detection is a central research topic in social network analysis. Many existing methods rely on the assumption that the network structure is completely known \textit{a priori}. However, in many applications, network structure is unavailable to explain the underlying information diffusion phenomenon. To address the challenge of information diffusion analysis with incomplete knowledge of network structure, we develop a multi-task low rank linear influence model. By exploiting the relationships between contagions, our approach can simultaneously predict the volume (i.e. time series prediction) for each contagion (or topic) and automatically identify the most influential nodes for each contagion. The proposed model is validated using synthetic data and an ISIS twitter dataset. In addition to improving the volume prediction performance significantly, we show that the proposed approach can reliably infer the most influential users for specific contagions.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2016

Towards the Design of Prospect-Theory based Human Decision Rules for Hypothesis Testing

Detection rules have traditionally been designed for rational agents that minimize the Bayes risk (average decision cost). With the advent of crowd-sensing systems, there is a need to redesign binary hypothesis testing rules for behavioral agents, whose cognitive behavior is not captured by traditional utility functions such as Bayes risk. In this paper, we adopt prospect theory based models for decision makers. We consider special agent models namely optimists and pessimists in this paper, and derive optimal detection rules under different scenarios. Using an illustrative example, we also show how the decision rule of a human agent deviates from the Bayesian decision rule under various behavioral models, considered in this paper.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2016

Detection with Multimodal Dependent Data Using Low Dimensional Random Projections

Performing likelihood ratio based detection with high dimensional multimodal data is a challenging problem since the computation of the joint probability density functions (pdfs) in the presence of inter-modal dependence is difficult. While some computationally expensive approaches have been proposed for dependent multimodal data fusion (e.g., based on copula theory), a commonly used tractable approach is to compute the joint pdf as the product of marginal pdfs ignoring dependence. However, this method leads to poor performance when the data is strongly dependent. In this paper, we consider the problem of detection when dependence among multimodal data is modeled in a compressed domain where compression is obtained using low dimensional random projections. We employ a Gaussian approximation while modeling inter-modal dependence in the compressed domain which is computationally more efficient. We show that, under certain conditions, detection with multimodal dependent data in the compressed domain with a small number of compressed measurements yields enhanced performance compared to detection with high dimensional data via either the product approach or other suboptimal fusion approaches proposed in the literature.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2016

Optimized Sensor Collaboration for Estimation of Temporally Correlated Parameters

In this paper, we aim to design the optimal sensor collaboration strategy for the estimation of time-varying parameters, where collaboration refers to the act of sharing measurements with neighboring sensors prior to transmission to a fusion center. We begin by addressing the sensor collaboration problem for the estimation of uncorrelated parameters. We show that the resulting collaboration problem can be transformed into a special nonconvex optimization problem, where a difference of convex functions carries all the nonconvexity. This specific problem structure enables the use of a convex-concave procedure to obtain a near-optimal solution. When the parameters of interest are temporally correlated, a penalized version of the convex-concave procedure becomes well suited for designing the optimal collaboration scheme. In order to improve computational efficiency, we further propose a fast algorithm that scales gracefully with problem size via the alternating direction method of multipliers. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and the impact of parameter correlation and temporal dynamics of sensor networks on estimation performance.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2016

On Strategic Multi-Antenna Jamming in Centralized Detection Networks

In this paper, we model a complete-information zero-sum game between a centralized detection network with a multiple access channel (MAC) between the sensors and the fusion center (FC), and a jammer with multiple transmitting antennas. We choose error probability at the FC as the performance metric, and investigate pure strategy equilibria for this game, and show that the jammer has no impact on the FC's error probability by employing pure strategies at the Nash equilibrium. Furthermore, we also show that the jammer has an impact on the expected utility if it employs mixed strategies.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2016

Sparse Signal Detection with Compressive Measurements via Partial Support Set Estimation

In this paper, we consider the problem of sparse signal detection based on partial support set estimation with compressive measurements in a distributed network. Multiple nodes in the network are assumed to observe sparse signals which share a common but unknown support. While in the traditional compressive sensing (CS) framework, the goal is to recover the complete sparse signal, in sparse signal detection, complete signal recovery may not be necessary to make a reliable detection decision. In particular, detection can be performed based on partially or inaccurately estimated signals which requires less computational burden than that is required for complete signal recovery. To that end, we investigate the problem of sparse signal detection based on partially estimated support set. First, we discuss how to determine the minimum fraction of the support set to be known so that a desired detection performance is achieved in a centralized setting. Second, we develop two distributed algorithms for sparse signal detection when the raw compressed observations are not available at the central fusion center. In these algorithms, the final decision statistic is computed based on locally estimated partial support sets via orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) at individual nodes. The proposed distributed algorithms with less communication overhead are shown to provide comparable performance (sometimes better) to the centralized approach when the size of the estimated partial support set is very small.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2016

Universal Collaboration Strategies for Signal Detection: A Sparse Learning Approach

This paper considers the problem of high dimensional signal detection in a large distributed network whose nodes can collaborate with their one-hop neighboring nodes (spatial collaboration). We assume that only a small subset of nodes communicate with the Fusion Center (FC). We design optimal collaboration strategies which are universal for a class of deterministic signals. By establishing the equivalence between the collaboration strategy design problem and sparse PCA, we solve the problem efficiently and evaluate the impact of collaboration on detection performance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2016

Multi-object Classification via Crowdsourcing with a Reject Option

Consider designing an effective crowdsourcing system for an $M$-ary classification task. Crowd workers complete simple binary microtasks whose results are aggregated to give the final result. We consider the novel scenario where workers have a reject option so they may skip microtasks when they are unable or choose not to respond. For example, in mismatched speech transcription, workers who do not know the language may not be able to respond to microtasks focused on phonological dimensions outside their categorical perception. We present an aggregation approach using a weighted majority voting rule, where each worker's response is assigned an optimized weight to maximize the crowd's classification performance. We evaluate system performance in both exact and asymptotic forms. Further, we consider the setting where there may be a set of greedy workers that complete microtasks even when they are unable to perform it reliably. We consider an oblivious and an expurgation strategy to deal with greedy workers, developing an algorithm to adaptively switch between the two based on the estimated fraction of greedy workers in the anonymous crowd. Simulation results show improved performance compared with conventional majority voting.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2016

Sensor Selection for Estimation with Correlated Measurement Noise

In this paper, we consider the problem of sensor selection for parameter estimation with correlated measurement noise. We seek optimal sensor activations by formulating an optimization problem, in which the estimation error, given by the trace of the inverse of the Bayesian Fisher information matrix, is minimized subject to energy constraints. Fisher information has been widely used as an effective sensor selection criterion. However, existing information-based sensor selection methods are limited to the case of uncorrelated noise or weakly correlated noise due to the use of approximate metrics. By contrast, here we derive the closed form of the Fisher information matrix with respect to sensor selection variables that is valid for any arbitrary noise correlation regime, and develop both a convex relaxation approach and a greedy algorithm to find near-optimal solutions. We further extend our framework of sensor selection to solve the problem of sensor scheduling, where a greedy algorithm is proposed to determine non-myopic (multi-time step ahead) sensor schedules. Lastly, numerical results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, and to reveal the effect of noise correlation on estimation performance.

stat.AP↗