Mining partial periodic correlations in time series

Recently, periodic pattern mining from time series data has been studied extensively. However, an interesting type of periodic pattern, called partial periodic (PP) correlation in this paper, has not been investigated. An example of PP correlation is that power consumption is high either on Monday or Tuesday but not on both days. In general, a PP correlation is a set of offsets within a particular period such that the data at these offsets are correlated with a certain user-desired strength. In the above example, the period is a week (7 days), and each day of the week is an offset of the period. PP correlations can provide insightful knowledge about the time series and can be used for predicting future values. This paper introduces an algorithm to mine time series for PP correlations based on the principal component analysis (PCA) method. Specifically, given a period, the algorithm maps the time series data to data points in a multidimensional space, where the dimensions correspond to the offsets within the period. A PP correlation is then equivalent to correlation of data when projected to a subset of the dimensions. The algorithm discovers, with one sequential scan of data, all those PP correlations (called minimum PP correlations) that are not unions of some other PP correlations. Experiments using both real and synthetic data sets show that the PCA-based algorithm is highly efficient and effective in finding the minimum PP correlations. Zhen He is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at La Trobe University. His main research areas are database systems optimization, time series mining, wireless sensor networks, and XML information retrieval. Prior to joining La Trobe University, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate in the University of Vermont. He holds Bachelors, Honors and Ph.D degrees in Computer Science from the Australian National University. X. Sean Wang received his Ph.D degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 1992. He is currently the Dorothean Chair Professor in Computer Science at the University of Vermont. He has published widely in the general area of databases and information security, and was a recipient of the US National Science Foundation Research Initiation and CAREER awards. His research interests include database systems, information security, data mining, and sensor data processing. Byung Suk Lee is associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Vermont. His main research areas are database systems, data modeling, and information retrieval. He held positions in industry and academia: Gold Star Electric, Bell Communications Research, Datacom Global Communications, University of St. Thomas, and currently University of Vermont. He was also a visiting professor at Dartmouth College and a participating guest at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He served on international conferences as a program committee member, a publicity chair, and a special session organizer, and also on US federal funding proposal review panel. He holds a BS degree from Seoul National University, MS from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Ph.D from Stanford University. Alan C. H. Ling is an assistant professor at Department of Computer Science in University of Vermont. His research interests include combinatorial design theory, coding theory, sequence designs, and applications of design theory.     

Evaluation of tile–wall bonding integrity based on impact acoustics and support vector machine

It is well recognized that the impact-acoustic emissions contain information that can indicate the presence of the adhesive defects in the bonding structures. In our previous papers, artificial neural network (ANN) was adopted to assess the bonding integrity of the tile–walls with the feature extracted from the power spectral density (PSD) of the impact-acoustic signals acting as the input of classifier. However, in addition to the inconvenience posed by the general drawbacks such as long training time and large number of training samples needed, the performance of the classic ANN classifier is deteriorated by the similar spectral characteristics between different bonding status caused by abnormal impacts. In this paper our previous works was developed by the employment of the least-squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) classifier instead of the ANN to derive a bonding integrity recognition approach with better reliability and enhanced immunity to surface roughness. With the help of the specially designed artificial sample slabs, experiments results obtained with the proposed method are provided and compared with that using the ANN classifier, demonstrating the effectiveness of the present strategy.     

An atomistic-continuum inhomogeneous material model for the elastic bending of metal nanocantilevers

The equivalent elastic modulus of nanocantilever can be obtained using atomistic simulation. However, the use of this modulus to predict the bending of nanocantilever results in significant error compared with direct atomistic simulation. The error originates from the surface effect. In our current work, the nanocantilever is considered as an inhomogeneous continuum material. The distributions of materials parameters at the cross-section, such as atomistic elastic constants, are calculated from atomistic simulations. These atomistic-information-based materials parameters are used as inputs to continuum model. A numerical example case validates the presented model and methodology. To correctly predict the structure-property relations of elemental nano-structures are very important for the design of nano-devices. Our continuum model includes nano-effects and provides another way to study nanomechanics.     

TrajStat: GIS-based software that uses various trajectory statistical analysis methods to identify potential sources from long-term air pollution measurement data

Statistical analysis of air mass back trajectories combined with long-term ambient air pollution measurements are useful tools for source identification. Using these methods, the geographic information system (GIS) based software, TrajStat, was developed to view, query, and cluster the trajectories and compute the potential source contribution function (PSCF) and concentration weighted trajectory (CWT) analyses when measurement data are included.     

Stereo-Based Stochastic Mapping for Robust Speech Recognition

We present a stochastic mapping technique for robust speech recognition that uses stereo data. The idea is based on constructing a Gaussian mixture model for the joint distribution of the clean and noisy features and using this distribution to predict the clean speech during testing. The proposed mapping is called stereo-based stochastic mapping (SSM). Two different estimators are considered. One is iterative and is based on the maximum a posteriori (MAP) criterion while the other uses the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion. The resulting estimators are effectively a mixture of linear transforms weighted by component posteriors, and the parameters of the linear transformations are derived from the joint distribution. Compared to the uncompensated result, the proposed method results in 45% relative improvement in word error rate (WER) for digit recognition in the car. In the same setting, SSM outperforms SPLICE and gives similar results to MMSE compensation of Huang A 66% relative improvement in word error rate (WER) is observed when applied in conjunction with multistyle training (MST) for large vocabulary English speech recognition in a real environment. Also, the combination of the proposed mapping with CMLLR leads to about 38% relative improvement in performance compared to CMLLR alone for real field data.     

Effect of the modulation transfer function of a digital image-acquisition device on phase-measuring profilometry

Systematic errors in phase-measuring profilometry that are introduced by the modulation transfer function of a digital image-acquisition device are analyzed. New phase expressions and phase-deviation formulas are given. The results for simulations and experiments demonstrate that the algorithm of phase-measuring profilometry cannot be regarded as a point-to-point operation. To obtain precise results, an optimum scheme for setting the measurement system is also proposed.     

Two-dimensional Kerr-Fourier imaging of translucent phantoms in thick turbid media

Translucent scattering phantoms hidden inside a 5.5-cm-thick Intralipid solution were imaged as a function of phantom scattering coefficients by the use of a picosecond time- and space-gated Kerr-Fourier imaging system. A 2-mm-thick translucent phantom with a 0.1% concentration (scattering coefficient) difference from the 55-mm-thick surrounding scattering host can be distinguished at a signal level of ~10(-10) of the incidence illumination intensity.