From the Publisher:
Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems is a complete andaccessible account of the theoretical foundations and computational methods that underlie plausible reasoning under uncertainty. The author provides a coherent explication of probability as a language for reasoning with partial belief and offers a unifying perspective on other AI approaches to uncertainty, such as the Dempster-Shafer formalism, truth maintenance systems, and nonmonotonic logic. The author distinguishes syntactic and semantic approaches to uncertaintyand offers techniques, based on belief networks, that provide a mechanism for making semantics-based systems operational. Specifically, network-propagation techniques serve as a mechanism for combining the theoretical coherence of probability theory with modern demands of reasoning-systems technology: modular declarative inputs, conceptually meaningful inferences, and parallel distributed computation. Application areas include diagnosis, forecasting, image interpretation, multi-sensor fusion, decision support systems, plan recognition, planning, speech recognitionin short, almost every task requiring that conclusions be drawn from uncertain clues and incomplete information.
Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems will be of special interest to scholars and researchers in AI, decision theory, statistics, logic, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and the management sciences. Professionals in the areas of knowledge-based systems, operations research, engineering, and statistics will find theoretical and computational tools of immediate practical use. The book can also be used as an excellent text for graduate-level courses in AI, operations research, or applied probability.

Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference

Many areas of science depend on exploratory data analysis and visualization. The need to analyze large amounts of multivariate data raises the fundamental problem of dimensionality reduction: how to discover compact representations of high-dimensional data. Here, we introduce locally linear embedding (LLE), an unsupervised learning algorithm that computes low-dimensional, neighborhood-preserving embeddings of high-dimensional inputs. Unlike clustering methods for local dimensionality reduction, LLE maps its inputs into a single global coordinate system of lower dimensionality, and its optimizations do not involve local minima. By exploiting the local symmetries of linear reconstructions, LLE is able to learn the global structure of nonlinear manifolds, such as those generated by images of faces or documents of text.

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Nonlinear dimensionality reduction by locally linear embedding.

From the Publisher:
With this text, you gain an understanding of the fundamental concepts of algorithms, the very heart of computer science. It introduces the basic data structures and programming techniques often used in efficient algorithms. Covers use of lists, push-down stacks, queues, trees, and graphs. Later chapters go into sorting, searching and graphing algorithms, the string-matching algorithms, and the Schonhage-Strassen integer-multiplication algorithm. Provides numerous graded exercises at the end of each chapter.


0201000296B04062001

The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms

The modern science of networks has brought significant advances to our understanding of complex systems. One of the most relevant features of graphs representing real systems is community structure, or clustering, i. e. the organization of vertices in clusters, with many edges joining vertices of the same cluster and comparatively few edges joining vertices of different clusters. Such clusters, or communities, can be considered as fairly independent compartments of a graph, playing a similar role like, e. g., the tissues or the organs in the human body. Detecting communities is of great importance in sociology, biology and computer science, disciplines where systems are often represented as graphs. This problem is very hard and not yet satisfactorily solved, despite the huge effort of a large interdisciplinary community of scientists working on it over the past few years. We will attempt a thorough exposition of the topic, from the definition of the main elements of the problem, to the presentation of most methods developed, with a special focus on techniques designed by statistical physicists, from the discussion of crucial issues like the significance of clustering and how methods should be tested and compared against each other, to the description of applications to real networks.

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Community detection in graphs

In this article we study the amortized efficiency of the "move-to-front" and similar rules for dynamically maintaining a linear list. Under the assumption that accessing the ith element from the front of the list takes 0(i) time, we show that move-to-front is within a consfant factor of optimum among a wide class of list maintenance rules. Other natural heuristics, such as the transpose and frequency count rules, da not share this property. We generalize our results to show that move-to-front is within a constant factor of optimum as long as the access cost is a convex function. We also study paging, a setting in which the access cost is not convex. The paging rule corresponding to move-to-front is the "least recently used" (LRU) replacement rule. We analyze the amortized complexity of LRU, showing that its efficiency differs from that of the off- line paging rule (Belady's MIN algorithm) by a factor that depends on the size of fast memory. No on-line paging algorithm has better amortized performance.

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Update and Paging Rules

In this note we describe an application of low-high orders in fault-tolerant network design. Baswana et al. [DISC 2015] study the following reachability problem. We are given a flow graph $G = (V, A)$ with start vertex $s$, and a spanning tree $T =(V, A_T)$ rooted at $s$. We call a set of arcs $A'$ valid if the subgraph $G' = (V, A_T \cup A')$ of $G$ has the same dominators as $G$. The goal is to find a valid set of minimum size. Baswana et al. gave an $O(m \log{n})$-time algorithm to compute a minimum-size valid set in $O(m \log{n})$ time, where $n = |V|$ and $m = |A|$. Here we provide a simple $O(m)$-time algorithm that uses the dominator tree $D$ of $G$ and a low-high order of it.

A Note on Fault Tolerant Reachability for Directed Graphs

Let $T$ be a binary search tree. We prove two results about the behavior of the Splay algorithm (Sleator and Tarjan 1985). Our first result is that inserting keys into an empty binary search tree via splaying in the order of either $T$'s preorder or $T$'s postorder takes linear time. Our proof uses the fact that preorders and postorders are pattern-avoiding: i.e. they contain no subsequences that are order-isomorphic to $(2,3,1)$ and $(3,1,2)$, respectively. Pattern-avoidance implies certain constraints on the manner in which items are inserted. We exploit this structure with a simple potential function that counts inserted nodes lying on access paths to uninserted nodes. Our methods can likely be extended to permutations that avoid more general patterns. Second, if $T'$ is any other binary search tree with the same keys as $T$ and $T$ is weight-balanced (Nievergelt and Reingold 1973), then splaying $T$'s preorder sequence or $T$'s postorder sequence starting from $T'$ takes linear time. To prove this, we demonstrate that preorders and postorders of balanced search trees do not contain many large "jumps" in symmetric order, and exploit this fact by using the dynamic finger theorem (Cole et al. 2000). Both of our results provide further evidence in favor of the elusive "dynamic optimality conjecture."

Splaying Preorders and Postorders

We study a class of simple algorithms for concurrently computing the connected components of an n-vertex, m-edge graph. Our algorithms are easy to implement in either the COMBINING CRCW PRAM or the MPC computing model. For two related algorithms in this class, we obtain Θ (lg n) step and Θ (m lg n) work bounds.1 For two others, we obtain O(lg2 n) step and O(m lg2 n) work bounds, which are tight for one of them. All our algorithms are simpler than related algorithms in the literature. We also point out some gaps and errors in the analysis of previous algorithms. Our results show that even a basic problem like connected components still has secrets to reveal.

Simple Concurrent Connected Components Algorithms

We survey three algorithms that use depth-ﬁrst search to ﬁnd the strong components of a directed graph in linear time: (1) Tarjan’s algorithm; (2) a cycle-ﬁnding algorithm; and (3) a bidirectional search algorithm.

Robert E. Tarjan

Papers

Update and Paging Rules

A Note on Fault Tolerant Reachability for Directed Graphs

Splaying Preorders and Postorders

Simple Concurrent Connected Components Algorithms

Finding Strong Components Using Depth-First Search