Mathematics Commons^™

Supplementary Text To Accompany “Cell Groups Reveal Structure Of Stimulus Space”, Carina Curto, Vladimir Itskov

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

Here we present a brief exposition of some material from algebraic topology that we use in our methods. We include it for completeness, as it may not be familiar for many readers. In particular, we define simplicial complexes, simplicial homology groups, and state the theorem cited in the Results section. See [Bott and Tu, 1982, Ewald, 1996, Hatcher, 2002] for more details.

Cell Groups Reveal Structure Of Stimulus Space, Carina Curto, Vladimir Itskov

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

An important task of the brain is to represent the outside world. It is unclear how the brain may do this, however, as it can only rely on neural responses and has no independent access to external stimuli in order to ‘‘decode’’ what those responses mean. We investigate what can be learned about a space of stimuli using only the action potentials (spikes) of cells with stereotyped—but unknown—receptive fields. Using hippocampal place cells as a model system, we show that one can (1) extract global features of the environment and (2) construct an accurate representation of space, up to an …

Threefold Flops Via Matrix Factorization, Carina Curto, David R. Morrison

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

The structure of birational maps between algebraic varieties becomes increasingly complicated as the dimension of the varieties increases. There is no birational geometry to speak of in dimension one: if two complete algebraic curves are birationally isomorphic then they are biregularly isomorphic. In dimension two we encounter the phenomenon of the blowup of a point, and every birational isomorphism can be factored into a sequence of blowups and blowdowns. In dimension three, however, we first encounter birational maps which are biregular outside of a subvariety of codimension two (called the center of the birational map). When the center has a …

A Universal Theory Of Decoding And Pseudocodewords, Nathan Axvig, Deanna Dreher, Katherine Morrison, Eric T. Psota, Lance C. Pérez, Judy L. Walker

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

The discovery of turbo codes [5] and the subsequent rediscovery of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes [9, 18] represent a major milestone in the field of coding theory. These two classes of codes can achieve realistic bit error rates, between 10−5 and 10−12, with signalto- noise ratios that are only slightly above the minimum possible for a given channel and code rate established by Shannon’s original capacity theorems. In this sense, these codes are said to be near-capacity-achieving codes and are sometimes considered to have solved (in the engineering sense, at least) the coding problem for the additive white Gaussian noise …

Nonbinary Quantum Error-Correcting Codes From Algebraic Curves, Jon-Lark Kim, Judy L. Walker

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

We give a generalized CSS construction for nonbinary quantum error-correcting codes. Using this we construct nonbinary quantum stabilizer codes from algebraic curves. We also give asymptotically good nonbinary quantum codes from a Garcia- Stichtenoth tower of function fields which are constructible in polynomial time.

Binary quantum error-correcting codes have been constructed in several ways. One interesting construction uses algebraic-geometry codes [2], [6], [7], [12], with the main idea being to apply the binary CSS construction [4], [5], [16] to the asymptotically good algebraic-geometry codes arising from the Garcia-Stichtenoth [11] tower of function fields over F_q2 (where q is a …

Local Cohomology And Support For Triangulated Categories, Dave Benson, Srikanth Iyengar, Henning Krause

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

We propose a new method for defining a notion of support for objects in any compactly generated triangulated category admitting small coproducts. This approach is based on a construction of local cohomology functors on triangulated categories, with respect to a central ring of operators. Suitably specialized one recovers, for example, the theory for commutative noetherian rings due to Foxby and Neeman, the theory of Avramov and Buchweitz for complete intersection local rings, and varieties for representations of finite groups according to Benson, Carlson, and Rickard. We give explicit examples of objects whose triangulated support and cohomological support differ. In the …

Average Min-Sum Decoding Of Ldpc Codes, Nathan Axvig, Deanna Dreher, Katherine Morrison, Eric T. Psota, Lance C. Pérez, Judy L. Walker

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

Simulations have shown that the outputs of minsum (MS) decoding generally behave in one of two ways: the output either eventually stabilizes at a codeword or eventually cycles through a finite set of vectors that may include both codewords and non-codewords. This inconsistency in MS across iterations has significantly contributed to the difficulty in studying the performance of this decoder. To overcome this problem, a new decoder, average min-sum (AMS), is proposed; this decoder outputs the average of the min-sum output vectors over a finite set of iterations. Simulations comparing MS, AMS, linear programming (LP) decoding, and maximum likelihood (ML) …

Towards Universal Cover Decoding, Nathan Axvig, Deanna Dreher, Katherine Morrison, Eric T. Psota, Lance C. Pérez, Judy L. Walker

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

Low complexity decoding of low-density paritycheck (LDPC) codes may be obtained from the application of iterative message-passing decoding algorithms to the bipartite Tanner graph of the code. Arguably, the two most important decoding algorithms for LDPC codes are the sum-product decoder and the min-sum (MS) decoder. On a bipartite graph without cycles (a tree), the sum-product decoder minimizes the probability of bit error, while the min-sum decoder minimizes the probability of word error [9]. While the behavior of sum-product and min-sum is easily understood when operating on trees, their behavior becomes much more difficult to characterize when the Tanner graph …

Valuations For Spike Train Prediction, Vladimir Itskov, Carina Curto, Kenneth D. Harris

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

The ultimate product of an electrophysiology experiment is often a decision on which biological hypothesis or model best explains the observed data. We outline a paradigm designed for comparison of different models, which we refer to as spike train prediction. A key ingredient of this paradigm is a prediction quality valuation that estimates how close a predicted conditional intensity function is to an actual observed spike train. Although a valuation based on log likelihood (L) is most natural, it has various complications in this context. We propose that a quadratic valuation (Q) can be used as an alternative to L. …

Matrix Model Superpotentials And Ade Singularities, Carina Curto

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

We use F. Ferrari’s methods relating matrix models to Calabi–Yau spaces in order to explain much of Intriligator and Wecht’s ADE classification of N = 1 superconformal theories which arise as RG fixed points of N = 1 SQCD theories with adjoints. We find that ADE superpotentials in the Intriligator–Wecht classification exactly match matrix model superpotentials obtained from Calabi–Yau with corresponding ADE singularities. Moreover, in the additional Ô, Â, Dˆ and Ê cases we find new singular geometries. These “hat” geometries are closely related to their ADE counterparts, but feature non-isolated singularities. As a byproduct, we give simple descriptions for …

Ldpc Codes From Voltage Graphs, Christine A. Kelley, Judy L. Walker

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

Several well-known structure-based constructions of LDPC codes, for example codes based on permutation and circulant matrices and in particular, quasi-cyclic LDPC codes, can be interpreted via algebraic voltage assignments. We explain this connection and show how this idea from topological graph theory can be used to give simple proofs of many known properties of these codes. In addition, the notion of abelianinevitable cycle is introduced and the subgraphs giving rise to these cycles are classified. We also indicate how, by using more sophisticated voltage assignments, new classes of good LDPC codes may be obtained.