Showing papers on "Greedy algorithm published in 2012"

Phase Recovery, MaxCut and Complex Semidefinite Programming

Abstract: Phase retrieval seeks to recover a signal x from the amplitude |Ax| of linear measurements. We cast the phase retrieval problem as a non-convex quadratic program over a complex phase vector and formulate a tractable relaxation (called PhaseCut) similar to the classical MaxCut semidefinite program. We solve this problem using a provably convergent block coordinate descent algorithm whose structure is similar to that of the original greedy algorithm in Gerchberg-Saxton, where each iteration is a matrix vector product. Numerical results show the performance of this approach over three different phase retrieval problems, in comparison with greedy phase retrieval algorithms and matrix completion formulations.

Influence Blocking Maximization in Social Networks under the Competitive Linear Threshold Model.

Abstract: In many real-world situations, different and often opposite opinions, innovations, or products are competing with one another for their social influence in a networked society. In this paper, we study competitive influence propagation in social networks under the competitive linear threshold (CLT) model, an extension to the classic linear threshold model. Under the CLT model, we focus on the problem that one entity tries to block the influence propagation of its competing entity as much as possible by strategically selecting a number of seed nodes that could initiate its own influence propagation. We call this problem the influence blocking maximization (IBM) problem. We prove that the objective function of IBM in the CLT model is submodular, and thus a greedy algorithm could achieve 1 − 1/e approximation ratio. However, the greedy algorithm requires Monte-Carlo simulations of competitive influence propagation, which makes the algorithm not efficient. We design an efficient algorithm CLDAG, which utilizes the properties of the CLT model, to address this issue. We conduct extensive simulations of CLDAG, the greedy algorithm, and other baseline algorithms on real-world and synthetic datasets. Our results show that CLDAG is able to provide best accuracy in par with the greedy algorithm and often better than other algorithms, while it is two orders of magnitude faster than the greedy algorithm.

Online task assignment in crowdsourcing markets

Abstract: We explore the problem of assigning heterogeneous tasks to workers with different, unknown skill sets in crowdsourcing markets such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. We first formalize the online task assignment problem, in which a requester has a fixed set of tasks and a budget that specifies how many times he would like each task completed. Workers arrive one at a time (with the same worker potentially arriving multiple times), and must be assigned to a task upon arrival. The goal is to allocate workers to tasks in a way that maximizes the total benefit that the requester obtains from the completed work. Inspired by recent research on the online adwords problem, we present a two-phase exploration-exploitation assignment algorithm and prove that it is competitive with respect to the optimal offline algorithm which has access to the unknown skill levels of each worker. We empirically evaluate this algorithm using data collected on Mechanical Turk and show that it performs better than random assignment or greedy algorithms. To our knowledge, this is the first work to extend the online primal-dual technique used in the online adwords problem to a scenario with unknown parameters, and the first to offer an empirical validation of an online primal-dual algorithm.

Scalable influence maximization for independent cascade model in large-scale social networks

Abstract: Influence maximization, defined by Kempe et al. (SIGKDD 2003), is the problem of finding a small set of seed nodes in a social network that maximizes the spread of influence under certain influence cascade models. The scalability of influence maximization is a key factor for enabling prevalent viral marketing in large-scale online social networks. Prior solutions, such as the greedy algorithm of Kempe et al. (SIGKDD 2003) and its improvements are slow and not scalable, while other heuristic algorithms do not provide consistently good performance on influence spreads. In this article, we design a new heuristic algorithm that is easily scalable to millions of nodes and edges in our experiments. Our algorithm has a simple tunable parameter for users to control the balance between the running time and the influence spread of the algorithm. Our results from extensive simulations on several real-world and synthetic networks demonstrate that our algorithm is currently the best scalable solution to the influence maximization problem: (a) our algorithm scales beyond million-sized graphs where the greedy algorithm becomes infeasible, and (b) in all size ranges, our algorithm performs consistently well in influence spread—it is always among the best algorithms, and in most cases it significantly outperforms all other scalable heuristics to as much as 100–260% increase in influence spread.

A Tight Linear Time (1/2)-Approximation for Unconstrained Submodular Maximization

Abstract: We consider the Unconstrained Sub modular Maximization problem in which we are given a non-negative sub modular function $f:2^{N}\right arrow R^+$, and the objective is to find a subset $S\subseteq N$ maximizing $f(S)$. This is one of the most basic sub modular optimization problems, having a wide range of applications. Some well known problems captured by Unconstrained Sub modular Maximization include Max-Cut, Max-DiCut, and variants of Max-SAT and maximum facility location. We present a simple randomized linear time algorithm achieving a tight approximation guarantee of $1/2$, thus matching the known hardness result of Feige et al. Our algorithm is based on an adaptation of the greedy approach which exploits certain symmetry properties of the problem. Our method might seem counterintuitive, since it is known that the greedy algorithm fails to achieve any bounded approximation factor for the problem.

A priori convergence of the greedy algorithm for the parametrized reduced basis method

Abstract: The convergence and efficiency of the reduced basis method used for the approximation of the solutions to a class of problems written as a parametrized PDE depends heavily on the choice of the elements that constitute the "reduced basis". The purpose of this paper is to analyze the a priori convergence for one of the approaches used for the selection of these elements, the greedy algorithm. Under natural hypothesis on the set of all solutions to the problem obtained when the parameter varies, we prove that three greedy algorithms converge; the last algorithm, based on the use of an a posteriori estimator, is the approach actually employed in the calculations.

Time-critical influence maximization in social networks with time-delayed diffusion process

Abstract: Influence maximization is a problem of finding a small set of highly influential users in a social network such that the spread of influence under certain propagation models is maximized. Inthis paper, we consider time-critical influence maximization, in which one wants to maximize influence spread within a given deadline. Since timing is considered in the optimization, we also extend the Independent Cascade (IC) model to incorporate the time delay aspect of influence diffusion in social networks. We show that time-critical influence maximization under the time-delayed IC model maintains desired properties such as submodularity, which allows a greedy algorithm to achieve an approximation ratio of 1 - 1/e, to circumvent the NP-hardness of the problem. To overcome the inefficiency of the approximation algorithm, we design two heuristic algorithms: the first one is based on a dynamic programming procedure that computes exact influence in tree structures, while the second one converts the problem to one in the original IC model and then applies existing fast heuristics to it. Our simulation results demonstrate that our heuristics achieve the same level of influence spread as the greedy algorithm while running a few orders of magnitude faster, and they also outperform existing algorithms that disregard the deadline constraint and delays in diffusion.

The Orthogonal Super Greedy Algorithm and Applications in Compressed Sensing

Abstract: The general theory of greedy approximation is well developed. Much less is known about how specific features of a dictionary can be used to our advantage. In this paper, we discuss incoherent dictionaries. We build a new greedy algorithm which is called the orthogonal super greedy algorithm (OSGA). We show that the rates of convergence of OSGA and the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) with respect to incoherent dictionaries are the same. Based on the analysis of the number of orthogonal projections and the number of iterations, we observed that OSGA is times simpler (more efficient) than OMP. Greedy approximation is also a fundamental tool for sparse signal recovery. The performance of orthogonal multimatching pursuit, a counterpart of OSGA in the compressed sensing setting, is also analyzed under restricted isometry property conditions.

Design of an effective algorithm for fast response to the re-scheduling of railway traffic during disturbances

Abstract: An attractive and sustainable railway traffic system is characterized by having a high security, high accessibility, high energy performance and offering reliable services with sufficient punctuality. At the same time, the network is to be utilized to a large extent in a cost-effective way. This requires a continuous balance between maintaining a high utilization and sufficiently high robustness to minimize the sensitivity to disturbances. The occurrence of some disturbances can be prevented to some extent but the occurrence of unpredictable events are unavoidable and their consequences then need to be analyzed, minimized and communicated to the affected users. Valuable information necessary to perform a complete consequence analysis of a disturbance and the re-scheduling is however not always available for the traffic managers. With current conditions, it is also not always possible for the traffic managers to take this information into account since he or she needs to act fast without any decision-support assisting in computing an effective re-scheduling solution. In previous research we have designed an optimization-based approach for re-scheduling which seems promising. However, for certain scenarios it is difficult to find good solutions within seconds. Therefore, we have developed a greedy algorithm which effectively delivers good solutions within the permitted time as a complement to the previous approach. To quickly retrieve a feasible solution the algorithm performs a depth-first search using an evaluation function to prioritise when conflicts arise and then branches according to a set of criteria.

Scheduling and Power Allocation in a Cognitive Radar Network for Multiple-Target Tracking

Abstract: We propose a cognitive radar network (CRN) system for the joint estimation of the target state comprising the positions and velocities of multiple targets, and the channel state comprising the propagation conditions of an urban transmission channel. We develop a measurement model for the received signal by considering a finite-dimensional representation of the time-varying system function which characterizes the urban transmission channel. We employ sequential Bayesian filtering at the receiver to estimate the target and the channel state. We propose a hybrid Bayesian filter that operates by partitioning the state space into smaller subspaces and thereby reducing the complexity involved with high-dimensional state space. The feedback loop that embodies the radar environment and the receiver enables the transmitter to employ approximate greedy programming to find a suitable subset of antennas to be employed in each tracking interval, as well as the power transmitted by these antennas. We compute the posterior Cramer-Rao bound (PCRB) on the estimates of the target state and the channel state and use it as an optimization criterion for the antenna selection and power allocation algorithms. We use several numerical examples to demonstrate the performance of the proposed system.

Time Constrained Influence Maximization in Social Networks

Abstract: Influence maximization is a fundamental research problem in social networks. Viral marketing, one of its applications, is to get a small number of users to adopt a product, which subsequently triggers a large cascade of further adoptions by utilizing """"Word-of-Mouth"""" effect in social networks. Influence maximization problem has been extensively studied recently. However, none of the previous work considers the time constraint in the influence maximization problem. In this paper, we propose the time constrained influence maximization problem. We show that the problem is NP-hard, and prove the monotonicity and submodularity of the time constrained influence spread function. Based on this, we develop a greedy algorithm with performance guarantees. To improve the algorithm scalability, we propose two Influence Spreading Path based methods. Extensive experiments conducted over four public available datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the Influence Spreading Path based methods.

StaticGreedy: solving the scalability-accuracy dilemma in influence maximization

Abstract: Influence maximization, defined as a problem of finding a set of seed nodes to trigger a maximized spread of influence, is crucial to viral marketing on social networks. For practical viral marketing on large scale social networks, it is required that influence maximization algorithms should have both guaranteed accuracy and high scalability. However, existing algorithms suffer a scalability-accuracy dilemma: conventional greedy algorithms guarantee the accuracy with expensive computation, while the scalable heuristic algorithms suffer from unstable accuracy. In this paper, we focus on solving this scalability-accuracy dilemma. We point out that the essential reason of the dilemma is the surprising fact that the submodularity, a key requirement of the objective function for a greedy algorithm to approximate the optimum, is not guaranteed in all conventional greedy algorithms in the literature of influence maximization. Therefore a greedy algorithm has to afford a huge number of Monte Carlo simulations to reduce the pain caused by unguaranteed submodularity. Motivated by this critical finding, we propose a static greedy algorithm, named StaticGreedy, to strictly guarantee the submodularity of influence spread function during the seed selection process. The proposed algorithm makes the computational expense dramatically reduced by two orders of magnitude without loss of accuracy. Moreover, we propose a dynamical update strategy which can speed up the StaticGreedy algorithm by 2-7 times on large scale social networks.

Feature Selection With Harmony Search

Abstract: Many search strategies have been exploited for the task of feature selection (FS), in an effort to identify more compact and better quality subsets. Such work typically involves the use of greedy hill climbing (HC), or nature-inspired heuristics, in order to discover the optimal solution without going through exhaustive search. In this paper, a novel FS approach based on harmony search (HS) is presented. It is a general approach that can be used in conjunction with many subset evaluation techniques. The simplicity of HS is exploited to reduce the overall complexity of the search process. The proposed approach is able to escape from local solutions and identify multiple solutions owing to the stochastic nature of HS. Additional parameter control schemes are introduced to reduce the effort and impact of parameter configuration. These can be further combined with the iterative refinement strategy, tailored to enforce the discovery of quality subsets. The resulting approach is compared with those that rely on HC, genetic algorithms, and particle swarm optimization, accompanied by in-depth studies of the suggested improvements.

A Comparison of Greedy and Optimal Assessment of Natural Language Student Input Using Word-to-Word Similarity Metrics

Abstract: We present in this paper a novel, optimal semantic similarity approach based on word-to-word similarity metrics to solve the important task of assessing natural language student input in dialogue-based intelligent tutoring systems. The optimal matching is guaranteed using the sailor assignment problem, also known as the job assignment problem, a well-known combinatorial optimization problem. We compare the optimal matching method with a greedy method as well as with a baseline method on data sets from two intelligent tutoring systems, AutoTutor and iSTART.

Greedy Sparsity-Constrained Optimization

Abstract: Sparsity-constrained optimization has wide applicability in machine learning, statistics, and signal processing problems such as feature selection and compressive Sensing. A vast body of work has studied the sparsity-constrained optimization from theoretical, algorithmic, and application aspects in the context of sparse estimation in linear models where the fidelity of the estimate is measured by the squared error. In contrast, relatively less effort has been made in the study of sparsity-constrained optimization in cases where nonlinear models are involved or the cost function is not quadratic. In this paper we propose a greedy algorithm, Gradient Support Pursuit (GraSP), to approximate sparse minima of cost functions of arbitrary form. Should a cost function have a Stable Restricted Hessian (SRH) or a Stable Restricted Linearization (SRL), both of which are introduced in this paper, our algorithm is guaranteed to produce a sparse vector within a bounded distance from the true sparse optimum. Our approach generalizes known results for quadratic cost functions that arise in sparse linear regression and Compressive Sensing. We also evaluate the performance of GraSP through numerical simulations on synthetic data, where the algorithm is employed for sparse logistic regression with and without $\ell_2$-regularization.

Near-Optimal MAP Inference for Determinantal Point Processes

Abstract: Determinantal point processes (DPPs) have recently been proposed as computationally efficient probabilistic models of diverse sets for a variety of applications, including document summarization, image search, and pose estimation. Many DPP inference operations, including normalization and sampling, are tractable; however, finding the most likely configuration (MAP), which is often required in practice for decoding, is NP-hard, so we must resort to approximate inference. This optimization problem, which also arises in experimental design and sensor placement, involves finding the largest principal minor of a positive semidefinite matrix. Because the objective is log-submodular, greedy algorithms have been used in the past with some empirical success; however, these methods only give approximation guarantees in the special case of monotone objectives, which correspond to a restricted class of DPPs. In this paper we propose a new algorithm for approximating the MAP problem based on continuous techniques for submodular function maximization. Our method involves a novel continuous relaxation of the log-probability function, which, in contrast to the multilinear extension used for general submodular functions, can be evaluated and differentiated exactly and efficiently. We obtain a practical algorithm with a 1/4-approximation guarantee for a more general class of non-monotone DPPs; our algorithm also extends to MAP inference under complex polytope constraints, making it possible to combine DPPs with Markov random fields, weighted matchings, and other models. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms standard and recent methods on both synthetic and real-world data.

On frame-based scheduling for directional mmWave WPANs

Abstract: Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications in the 60 GHz band can provide multi-gigabit rates for emerging bandwidth-intensive applications, and has thus gained considerable interest recently. In this paper, we investigate the problem of efficient scheduling in mmWave wireless personal area networks (WPAN). We develop a frame-based scheduling directional MAC protocol, termed FDMAC, to achieve the goal of leveraging collision-free concurrent transmissions to fully exploit spatial reuse in mmWave WPANs. The high efficiency of FDMAC is achieved by amortizing the scheduling overhead over multiple concurrent, back-to-back transmissions in a row. The core of FDMAC is a graph coloring-based scheduling algorithm, termed greedy coloring (GC) algorithm, that can compute near-optimal schedules with respect to the total transmission time with low complexity. The proposed FDMAC is analyzed and evaluated under various traffic models and patterns. Its superior performance is validated with extensive simulations.

Keyword-aware optimal route search

Abstract: Identifying a preferable route is an important problem that finds applications in map services. When a user plans a trip within a city, the user may want to find "a most popular route such that it passes by shopping mall, restaurant, and pub, and the travel time to and from his hotel is within 4 hours." However, none of the algorithms in the existing work on route planning can be used to answer such queries. Motivated by this, we define the problem of keyword-aware optimal route query, denoted by KOR, which is to find an optimal route such that it covers a set of user-specified keywords, a specified budget constraint is satisfied, and an objective score of the route is optimal. The problem of answering KOR queries is NP-hard. We devise an approximation algorithm OSScaling with provable approximation bounds. Based on this algorithm, another more efficient approximation algorithm BucketBound is proposed. We also design a greedy approximation algorithm. Results of empirical studies show that all the proposed algorithms are capable of answering KOR queries efficiently, while the BucketBound and Greedy algorithms run faster. The empirical studies also offer insight into the accuracy of the proposed algorithms.

Opportunistic Cooperation in Cognitive Femtocell Networks

Abstract: We investigate opportunistic cooperation between secondary (femtocell) users and primary (macrocell) users in cognitive femtocell networks. We consider two models for such cooperation. In the first model, called the Cooperative Relay Model, a secondary user cannot transmit its own data concurrently with a primary user. However, it can employ cooperative relaying of primary user data in order to improve the latter's effective transmission rate. In the second model, called the Interference Model, a secondary user is allowed to transmit its data concurrently with a primary user. However, the secondary user can "cooperate" by deferring its transmissions when the primary user is busy. In both models, the secondary users must make intelligent cooperation decisions as they seek to maximize their own throughput subject to average power constraints. The decision options are different during idle and busy periods of the primary user, and the decisions in turn influence the durations of these periods according to a controllable infinite state Markov chain. Such problems can be formulated as constrained Markov decision problems, and conventional solution techniques require either extensive knowledge of the system dynamics or learning based approaches that suffer from large convergence times. However, using a generalized Lyapunov optimization technique, we design a novel greedy and online control algorithm that overcomes these challenges. Remarkably, this algorithm does not require any knowledge of the network arrival rates and is provably optimal.

Resource augmentation for weighted flow-time explained by dual fitting

Abstract: We propose a general dual-fitting technique for analyzing online scheduling algorithms in the unrelated machines setting where the objective function involves weighted flow-time, and we allow the machines of the on-line algorithm to have (1 + e)-extra speed than the offline optimum (the so-called speed augmentation model). Typically, such algorithms are analyzed using non-trivial potential functions which yield little insight into the proof technique. We propose that one can often analyze such algorithms by looking at the dual (or Lagrangian dual) of the linear (or convex) program for the corresponding scheduling problem, and finding a feasible dual solution as the on-line algorithm proceeds. As representative cases, we get the following results:• For the problem of minimizing weighted flow-time, we give an O (1/e)-competitive greedy algorithm. This is an improvement by a factor of 1/e on the competitive ratio of the greedy algorithm of Chadha-Garg-Kumar-Muralidhara.• For the problem of minimizing weighted lk norm of flow-time, we show that a greedy algorithm gives an O (1/e)-competitive ratio. This marginally improves the result of Im and Moseley.• For the problem of minimizing weighted flow-time plus energy, and when the energy function f(s) is equal to sγ, γ > 1, we show that a natural greedy algorithm is O(γ2)-competitive. Prior to our work, such a result was known for the related machines setting only (Gupta-Krishnaswamy-Pruhs).

A Small Depth-16 Circuit for the AES S-Box

Abstract: New techniques for reducing the depth of circuits for cryptographic applications are described. These techniques also keep the number of gates quite small. The result, when applied to the AES S-Box, is a circuit with depth 16 and only 128 gates. For the inverse, it is also depth 16 and has only 127 gates. There is a shared middle part, common to both the S-Box and its inverse, consisting of 63 gates. The best previous comparable design for the AES S-Box has depth 22 and size 148 [12].

A Sparsification Approach to Set Membership Identification of Switched Affine Systems

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of robust identification of a class of discrete-time affine hybrid systems, switched affine models, in a set membership framework. Given a finite collection of noisy input/output data and some minimal a priori information about the set of admissible plants, the objective is to identify a suitable set of affine models along with a switching sequence that can explain the available experimental information, while minimizing either the number of switches or subsystems. For the case where it is desired to minimize the number of switches, the key idea of the paper is to reduce this problem to a sparsification form, where the goal is to maximize sparsity of a suitably constructed vector sequence. Our main result shows that in the case of l∞ bounded noise, this sparsification problem can be exactly solved via convex optimization. In the general case where the noise is only known to belong to a convex set N, the problem is generically NP-hard. However, as we show in the paper, efficient convex relaxations can be obtained by exploiting recent results on sparse signal recovery. Similarly, we present both a sparsification formulation and a convex relaxation for the (known to be NP hard) case where it is desired to minimize the number of subsystems. These results are illustrated using two non-trivial problems arising in computer vision applications: video-shot and dynamic texture segmentation.

Greedy Algorithms for Reduced Bases in Banach Spaces

Abstract: Given a Banach space X and one of its compact sets F, we consider the problem of finding a good n dimensional space X_n \subset X which can be used to approximate the elements of F. The best possible error we can achieve for such an approximation is given by the Kolmogorov width d_n(F)_X. However, finding the space which gives this performance is typically numerically intractable. Recently, a new greedy strategy for obtaining good spaces was given in the context of the reduced basis method for solving a parametric family of PDEs. The performance of this greedy algorithm was initially analyzed in A. Buffa, Y. Maday, A.T. Patera, C. Prud'homme, and G. Turinici, "A Priori convergence of the greedy algorithm for the parameterized reduced basis", M2AN Math. Model. Numer. Anal., 46(2012), 595-603 in the case X = H is a Hilbert space. The results there were significantly improved on in P. Binev, A. Cohen, W. Dahmen, R. DeVore, G. Petrova, and P. Wojtaszczyk, "Convergence rates for greedy algorithms in reduced bases Methods", SIAM J. Math. Anal., 43 (2011), 1457-1472. The purpose of the present paper is to give a new analysis of the performance of such greedy algorithms. Our analysis not only gives improved results for the Hilbert space case but can also be applied to the same greedy procedure in general Banach spaces.

Mesh Segmentation with Concavity-Aware Fields

Abstract: This paper presents a simple and efficient automatic mesh segmentation algorithm that solely exploits the shape concavity information. The method locates concave creases and seams using a set of concavity-sensitive scalar fields. These fields are computed by solving a Laplacian system with a novel concavity-sensitive weighting scheme. Isolines sampled from the concavity-aware fields naturally gather at concave seams, serving as good cutting boundary candidates. In addition, the fields provide sufficient information allowing efficient evaluation of the candidate cuts. We perform a summarization of all field gradient magnitudes to define a score for each isoline and employ a score-based greedy algorithm to select the best cuts. Extensive experiments and quantitative analysis have shown that the quality of our segmentations are better than or comparable with existing state-of-the-art more complex approaches.

Max-Sum diversification, monotone submodular functions and dynamic updates

Abstract: Result diversification has many important applications in databases, operations research, information retrieval, and finance. In this paper, we study and extend a particular version of result diversification, known as max-sum diversification. More specifically, we consider the setting where we are given a set of elements in a metric space and a set valuation function f defined on every subset. For any given subset S, the overall objective is a linear combination of f(S) and the sum of the distances induced by S. The goal is to find a subset S satisfying some constraints that maximizes the overall objective.This problem is first studied by Gollapudi and Sharma in [17] for modular set functions and for sets satisfying a cardinality constraint (uniform matroids). In their paper, they give a 2-approximation algorithm by reducing to an earlier result in [20]. The first part of this paper considers an extension of the modular case to the monotone submodular case, for which the algorithm in [17] no longer applies. Interestingly, we are able to maintain the same 2-approximation using a natural, but different greedy algorithm. We then further extend the problem by considering any matroid constraint and show that a natural single swap local search algorithm provides a 2-approximation in this more general setting. This extends the Nemhauser, Wolsey and Fisher approximation result [20] for the problem of submodular function maximization subject to a matroid constraint (without the distance function component).The second part of the paper focuses on dynamic updates for the modular case. Suppose we have a good initial approximate solution and then there is a single weight-perturbation either on the valuation of an element or on the distance between two elements. Given that users expect some stability in the results they see, we ask how easy is it to maintain a good approximation without significantly changing the initial set. We measure this by the number of updates, where each update is a swap of a single element in the current solution with a single element outside the current solution. We show that we can maintain an approximation ratio of 3 by just a single update if the perturbation is not too large.

Submodular dictionary learning for sparse coding

Abstract: A greedy-based approach to learn a compact and discriminative dictionary for sparse representation is presented. We propose an objective function consisting of two components: entropy rate of a random walk on a graph and a discriminative term. Dictionary learning is achieved by finding a graph topology which maximizes the objective function. By exploiting the monotonicity and submodularity properties of the objective function and the matroid constraint, we present a highly efficient greedy-based optimization algorithm. It is more than an order of magnitude faster than several recently proposed dictionary learning approaches. Moreover, the greedy algorithm gives a near-optimal solution with a (1/2)-approximation bound. Our approach yields dictionaries having the property that feature points from the same class have very similar sparse codes. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms several recently proposed dictionary learning techniques for face, action and object category recognition.

An Information-Theoretic Approach to PMU Placement in Electric Power Systems

Abstract: This paper presents an information-theoretic approach to address the phasor measurement unit (PMU) placement problem in electric power systems. Different from the conventional 'topological observability' based approaches, this paper advocates a much more refined, information-theoretic criterion, namely the mutual information (MI) between the PMU measurements and the power system states. The proposed MI criterion can not only include the full system observability as a special case, but also can rigorously model the remaining uncertainties in the power system states with PMU measurements, so as to generate highly informative PMU configurations. Further, the MI criterion can facilitate robust PMU placement by explicitly modeling probabilistic PMU outages. We propose a greedy PMU placement algorithm, and show that it achieves an approximation ratio of (1-1/e) for any PMU placement budget. We further show that the performance is the best that one can achieve in practice, in the sense that it is NP-hard to achieve any approximation ratio beyond (1-1/e). Such performance guarantee makes the greedy algorithm very attractive in the practical scenario of multi-stage installations for utilities with limited budgets. Finally, simulation results demonstrate near-optimal performance of the proposed PMU placement algorithm.

Time-Critical Influence Maximization in Social Networks with Time-Delayed Diffusion Process

Abstract: Influence maximization is a problem of finding a small set of highly influential users, also known as seeds, in a social network such that the spread of influence under certain propagation models is maximized. In this paper, we consider time-critical influence maximization, in which one wants to maximize influence spread within a given deadline. Since timing is considered in the optimization, we also extend the Independent Cascade (IC) model and the Linear Threshold (LT) model to incorporate the time delay aspect of influence diffusion among individuals in social networks. We show that time-critical influence maximization under the time-delayed IC and LT models maintains desired properties such as submodularity, which allows a greedy approximation algorithm to achieve an approximation ratio of $1-1/e$. To overcome the inefficiency of the greedy algorithm, we design two heuristic algorithms: the first one is based on a dynamic programming procedure that computes exact influence in tree structures and directed acyclic subgraphs, while the second one converts the problem to one in the original models and then applies existing fast heuristic algorithms to it. Our simulation results demonstrate that our algorithms achieve the same level of influence spread as the greedy algorithm while running a few orders of magnitude faster, and they also outperform existing fast heuristics that disregard the deadline constraint and delays in diffusion.