Computer Sciences Commons^™

A Heuristic Solution Of The Toll Optimal Problem With Congestion Affected Costs, Vyacheslav Kalashnikov, José Guadalupe Flores Muñiz, Nataliya Kalashnykova

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

An important problem concerning the toll roads is the setting of appropriate costs for driving along paid arcs of a transportation network. Our paper treats this problem as a bilevel programming model. At the upper level, decisions are made by a public regulator/private company that administers the toll roads endeavoring to elevate their benefits. At the lower level, several transportation companies/individual users appease the existing demand for transportation of goods or passengers while selecting the routes that would minimize their total travel costs. In contrast to the previous models, here the lower level problem assumes quadratic costs implied by the …

Why Growth Of Cancerous Tumors Is Gompertzian: A Symmetry-Based Explanation, Pedro Barragan Olague, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It is known that the growth of a cancerous tumor is well described by the Gompertz's equation. The existing explanations for this equation rely on specifics of cell dynamics. However, the fact that for many different types of tumors, with different cell dynamics, we observe the same growth pattern, make us believe that there should be a more fundamental explanation for this equation. In this paper, we show that a symmetry-based approach indeed leads to such an explanation: indeed, out of all scale-invariant growth dynamics, the Gompertzian growth is the closest to the linear-approximation exponential growth model.

Fuzzy Data Processing Beyond Min T-Norm, Andrzej Pownuk, Vladik Kreinovich, Songsak Sriboonchitta

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Usual algorithms for fuzzy data processing -- based on the usual form of Zadeh's extension principle -- implicitly assume that we use the min "and"-operation (t-norm). It is known, however, that in many practical situations, other t-norms more adequately describe human reasoning. It is therefore desirable to extend the usual algorithms to situations when we use t-norms different from min. Such an extension is provided in this paper.

What Is The Best Way To Add Large Number Of Integers: Number-By-Number As Computers Do Or Lowest-Digits-Than-Next-Digits-Etc As We Humans Do?, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

When we need to add several integers, computers add them one by one, while we usually add them digit by digit: first, we add all the lowest digits, then we add all next lowest digits, etc. Which way is faster? Should we learn from computers or should we teach computers to add several integers our way?

In this paper, we show that the computer way is faster. This adds one more example to the list of cases when computer-based arithmetic algorithms are much more efficient than the algorithms that we humans normally use.

Fuzzy Pareto Solution In Multi-Criteria Group Decision Making With Intuitionistic Linguistic Preference Relation, Bui Cong Cuong, Vladik Kreinovich, Le Hoang Son, Nilanjan Dey

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In this paper, we investigate the multi criteria group decision making with intuitionistic linguistic preference relation. The concept of Fuzzy Collective Solution (FCS) is used to evaluate and rank the candidate solution sets for modeling under linguistic assessments. Intuitionistic linguistic preference relation and associated aggregation procedures are then defined in a new concept of Fuzzy Pareto Solution. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate computing procedures. The results affirm efficiency of the proposed method.

Scaling-Invariant Description Of Dependence Between Fuzzy Variables: Towards A Fuzzy Version Of Copulas, Gerardo Muela, Vladik Kreinovich, Christian Servin

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

To get a general description of dependence between n fuzzy variables x₁, ..., x_n, we can use the membership function μ(x₁, ..., x_n) that describes, for each possible tuple of values (x₁, ..., x_n) to which extent this tuple is possible.

There are, however, many ways to elicit these degrees. Different elicitations lead, in general, to different numerical values of these degrees -- although, ideally, tuples which have a higher degree of possibility in one scale should have a higher degree in other scales as well. It is …

Use Of Machine Learning To Analyze And -- Hopefully -- Predict Volcano Activity, Justin Parra, Olac Fuentes, Elizabeth Y. Anthony, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Volcanic eruptions cause significant loss of lives and property around the world each year. Their importance is highlighted by the sheer number of volcanoes for which eruptive activity is probable. These volcanoes are classified as in a state of unrest. The Global Volcano Project maintained by the Smithsonian Institution estimates that approximately 600 volcanoes, many proximal to major urban areas, are currently in this state of unrest. A spectrum of phenomena serve as precursors to eruption, including ground deformation, emission of gases, and seismic activity. The precursors are caused by magma upwelling from the Moho to the shallow (2-5 km) …

It Is Advantageous To Make A Syllabus As Precise As Possible: Decision-Theoretic Analysis, Francisco Zapata, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Should a syllabus be precise? Shall we indicate exactly how many points we should assign for each test and for each assignment? On the one hand, many students like such certainty. On the other hand, instructors would like to have some flexibility: if an assignment turns out to be more complex than expected, we should be able to increase the number of points for this assignment, and, vice versa, it it turns out to be simpler than expected, we should be able to decrease the number of points.

In this paper, we analyze this problem from a decision-theoretic viewpoint. Our …

Why Multiplication Has Higher Priority Than Addition: A Pedagogical Remark, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Traditionally, multiplication has higher priority over addition; this means that there is no need to add parentheses if we want to perform multiplication first, and we need to explicitly add parentheses if we want addition to be performed first. Why not use an alternative arrangement, in which addition has higher priority? In this paper, we explain the traditional priority arrangement by showing that in the general case, the traditional arrangement allows us to use fewer parentheses than the alternative one.

Writing Jml Specifications Using Java 8 Streams, Yoonsik Cheon, Zejing Cao, Khandoker Rahad

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

JML is a formal behavioral interface specification language for Java to document Java program modules such as classes and interfaces. When composing JML specifications, one frequently writes assertions involving a collection of values. In this paper we propose to use Java 8 streams for writing more concise and cleaner assertions on a collection. The use of streams in JML can be minimal and non-invasive in the conventional style of writing assertions. It can also be holistic to write all assertions in the abstract state defined by streams. We perform a small case study to illustrate our approach and show its …

Gaussian And Cauchy Functions In The Filled Function Method -- Why And What Next: On The Example Of Optimizing Road Tolls, José Guadalupe Flores Muñiz, Vyacheslav V. Kalashnikov, Nataliya Kalashnykova, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical problems, we need to find the values of the parameters that optimize the desired objective function. For example, for the toll roads, it is important to set the toll values that lead to the fastest return on investment.

There exist many optimization algorithms, the problem is that these algorithms often end up in a local optimum. One of the promising methods to avoid the local optima is the filled function method, in which we, in effect, first optimize a smoothed version of the objective function, and then use the resulting optimum to look for the optimum of …

A Simplified Derivation Of Confidence Regions Based On Inferential Models, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Recently, a new inferential models approach has been proposed for statistics. Specifically, this approach provides a new random-set-based way to come up with confidence regions. In this paper, we show that the confidence regions obtained by using the main version of this new methodology can also be naturally obtained directly, without invoking random sets.

How To Assign Numerical Values To Partially Ordered Levels Of Confidence: Robustness Approach, Kimberly Kato

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, expert's levels of confidence are described by words from natural language, and these words are only partially ordered. Since computers are much more efficient processing numbers than words, it is desirable to assign numerical values to these degrees. Of course, there are many possible assignments that preserve order between words. It is reasonable to select an assignment which is the most robust, i.e., for which the largest possible deviation from the numerical values still preserves the order. In this paper, we describe such assignments for situations when we have 2, 3, and 4 different words.

Why Half-Frequency In Intelligent Compaction, Pedro Barragan Olague, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

To gauge how well vibrating rollers have compacted the road segment, it is reasonable to process the acceleration measured by the attached sensors. Theoretically, we expect the resulting signal to be periodic with the same frequency f with which the roller vibrates -- and thus, after a Fourier transform, we expect to observe only frequencies which are multiples of the vibration frequency f.

Surprisingly, often, we also observe a peak at half-frequency f/2.

In this paper, we explain this empirical phenomenon: we show that it is a particular case of a spontaneous symmetry violation, and that the general physical theory …

Intuitionistic Fuzzy Logic Is Not Always Equivalent To Interval-Valued One, Christian Servin, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It has been shown that from the purely mathematical viewpoint, the (traditional) intuitionistic fuzzy logic is equivalent to interval-valued fuzzy logic. In this paper, we show that if we go beyond the traditional "and"- and "or"-operations, then intuitionistic fuzzy logic becomes more general than the interval-valued one.

Preliminary Investigation Of Mobile System Features Potentially Relevant To Hpc, David Pruitt, Eric Freudenthal

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Energy consumption's increasing importance in scientific computing has driven an interest in developing energy efficient high performance systems. Energy constraints of mobile computing has motivated the design and evolution of low-power computing systems capable of supporting a variety of compute-intensive user interfaces and applications. Others have observed the evolution of mobile devices to also provide high performance. Their work has primarily examined the performance and efficiency of compute-intensive scientific programs executed either on mobile systems or hybrids of mobile CPUs grafted into non-mobile (sometimes HPC) systems.

This report describes an investigation of performance and energy consumption of a single scientific …

Are Java Programming Best Practices Also Best Practices For Android?, Yoonsik Cheon

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Android apps are written in Java. Android beginners assume that Java programming best practices are equally applicable to Android programming. In this paper, we perform a small case study to show that the assumption can be wrong. We port a well-written Java application to Android. A certain key assumption of object-oriented programming doesn't hold on the Android platform. Thus, some of the best practices in writing Java programs are not best practices for Android. In fact, they are anti-patterns that Android programmers should avoid. We show concrete examples of these anti-patterns or watch-outs along with their fixes.

Von Neumann-Morgenstern Solutions, Quantum Physics, And Stored Programs Vs. Data: Unity Of Von Neumann's Legacy, Olga Kosheleva, Martha Osegueda Escobar, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In this paper, we show that several seemingly unrelated topics of John von Neumann's research are actually very closely related.

Cosmological Inflation: A Simple Qualitative Explanation, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In this paper, we provide a simple qualitative explanation of the cosmological inflation -- a phenomenon that at the beginning of the Universe, its size was exponentially increasing.

Why Utility Non-Linearly Depends On Money: A Commonsense Explanation, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Mahdokhat Afravi

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Human decision making is based on the notion of utility. Empirical studies have shown that utility non-linearly depends on the money amount. In this paper, we provide a commonsense explanation of this empirical fact: namely, that without such non-linearity, we would not have a correct description of such a commonsense behavior as saving money for retirement.

Why Pairwise Testing Works So Well: A Possible Theoretical Explanation Of An Empirical Phenomenon, Francisco Zapata, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Some software defects can be detected only if we consider all possible combinations of three, four, or more inputs. However, empirical data shows that the overwhelming majority of software defects are detected during pairwise testing, when we only test the software on combinations of pairs of different inputs. In this paper, we provide a possible theoretical explanation for the corresponding empirical data.

Computability Of The Avoidance Set And Of The Set-Valued Identification Problem, Anthony Welte, Luc Jaulin, Martine Ceberio, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In some practical situations, we need to find the {\em avoidance set}, i.e., the set of all initial states for which the system never goes into the forbidden region. Algorithms are known for computing the avoidance set in several practically important cases. In this paper, we consider a general case, and we show that, in some reasonable sense, the corresponding general problem is always algorithmically solvable. A similar algorithm is possible for another general system-related problem: the problem of describing the set of all possible states which are consistent with the available measurement results.

Hifocap: An Android App For Wearable Health Devices, Yoonsik Cheon, Rodrigo A. Romero

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Android is becoming a platform for mobile health-care devices and apps. However, there are many challenges in developing soft real-time, health-care apps for non-dedicated mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. In this paper we share our experiences in developing the HifoCap app, a mobile app for receiving electroencephalogram (EEG) wave samples from a wearable device, visualizing the received EEG samples, and transmitting them to a cloud storage server. The app is network and data-intensive. We describe the challenges we faced while developing the HifoCap app---e.g., ensuring the soft real-time requirement in the presence of uncertainty on the Android platform---along …

Preliminaries To A Study Of Stance In News Broadcasts, Nigel Ward

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Aspects of stance have significant potential for information retrieval and filtering. This technical report is about stance in radio news broadcast, and is intended primarily to motivate and document details of the data and annotations used in the work reported in Inferring Stance from Prosody (Ward et al., 2016). It describes the process of identifying 14 important aspects of stance, describes two corpora for investigating stance, describes the annotation of those corpora, presents some preliminary observations, and lists a set of useful prosodic features.

For Multi-Interval-Valued Fuzzy Sets, Centroid Defuzzification Is Equivalent To Defuzzifying Its Interval Hull: A Theorem, Vladik Kreinovich, Songsak Sriboonchitta

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In the traditional fuzzy logic, the expert's degree of certainty in a statement is described either by a number from the interval [0,1] or by a subinterval of such an interval. To adequately describe the opinion of several experts, researchers proposed to use a union of the corresponding sets -- which is, in general, more complex than an interval. In this paper, we prove that for such set-valued fuzzy sets, centroid defuzzification is equivalent to defuzzifying its interval hull.

As a consequence of this result, we prove that the centroid defuzzification of a general type-2 fuzzy set can be reduced …

Metric Spaces Under Interval Uncertainty: Towards An Adequate Definition, Mahdokhat Afravi, Vladik Kreinovich, Thongchai Dumrongpokaphan

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, we only know the bounds on the distances. A natural question is: knowing these bounds, can we check whether there exists a metric whose distance always lie within these bounds -- or such a metric is not possible and thus, the bounds are inconsistent. In this paper, we provide an answer to this question. We also describe possible applications of this result to a description of opposite notions in commonsense reasoning.

Decision Making Under Interval Uncertainty As A Natural Example Of A Quandle, Mahdokhat Afravi, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many real-life situations, we need to select an alternative from a set of possible alternatives. In many such situations, we have a well-defined objective function u(a) that describes our preferences. If we know the exact value of u(a) for each alternative a, then we select the alternative with the largest value of u(a). In practice, however, we usually know the consequences of each decision $a$ only with some uncertainty. As a result, for each alternative $a$, instead of the exact utility value $u(a)$, we only know the interval of possible values. In this paper, we show that the resulting …

Why Hausdorff Distance Is Natural In Interval Computations, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Several different metrics have been proposed to describe distance between intervals and, more generally, between compact sets. In this paper, we show that from the viewpoint of interval computations, the most adequate distance is the Hausdorff distance d_H(A,A') -- the smallest value ε > 0 for which every element a from the set A is ε-close to some element a' from the ser A', and every element a' from the set A' is ε-close to some element a of the set A.

Robust Data Processing In The Presence Of Uncertainty And Outliers: Case Of Localization Problems, Anthony Welte, Luc Jaulin, Martine Ceberio, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

To properly process data, we need to take into account both the measurement errors and the fact that some of the observations may be outliers. This is especially important in radar-based localization problems, where some signals may reflect not from the analyzed object, but from some nearby object. There are known methods for dealing with both measurement errors and outliers in situations in which we have full information about the corresponding probability distributions. There are also known statistics-based methods for dealing with measurement errors in situations when we only have partial information about the corresponding probabilities. In this paper, we …

A Classification Of Representable T-Norm Operators For Picture Fuzzy Sets, Bui Cong Cuong, Vladik Kreinovich, Roan Thi Ngan

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

T-norms and t-conorms are basic operators of fuzzy logics. The classifications of these operators are significant problems. Some results of the classifications of fuzzy logics operators for fuzzy sets are known. In 2013, we defined the picture fuzzy sets, and in 2015 some representable t-norms operators and t-conorms operators were defined. In this paper, we investigate the classification of representable picture t-norms and picture t-conorms operators for picture fuzzy sets.