Footfall based biometric system is perhaps the only person identification technique which does not hinder the natural movement of an individual. This is a clear edge over all other biometric systems which require a formidable amount of human intervention and encroach upon an individual's privacy to some extent or the other. This paper presents a Fog computing architecture for implementing footfall based biometric system using widespread geographically distributed geophones (vibration sensor). Results were stored in an Internet of Things (IoT) cloud. We have tested our biometric system on an indigenous database (created by us) containing 46000 footfall events from 8 individuals and achieved an accuracy of 73%, 90% and 95% in case of 1, 5 and 10 footsteps per sample. We also proposed a basis pursuit based data compression technique DS8BP for wireless transmission of footfall events to the Fog. DS8BP compresses the original footfall events (sampled at 8 kHz) by a factor of 108 and also acts as a smoothing filter. These experimental results depict the high viability of our technique in the realm of person identification and access control systems.

We employ a set of standard basis functions, e.g., polynomials, to approximate the governing equation with high accuracy. Upon recasting the problem into a function approximation problem, we discuss several important aspects for accurate approximation. Most notably, we discuss the importance of using a large number of short bursts of trajectory data, rather than using data from a single long trajectory. Several options for the numerical algorithms to perform accurate approximation are then presented, along with an error estimate of the final equation approximation. We then present an extensive set of numerical examples of both linear and nonlinear systems to demonstrate the properties and effectiveness of our equation recovery algorithms.

The reproducibility of scientific research has become a point of critical concern. We argue that openness and transparency are critical for reproducibility, and we outline an ecosystem for open and transparent science that has emerged within the human neuroimaging community. We discuss the range of open data sharing resources that have been developed for neuroimaging data, and the role of data standards (particularly the Brain Imaging Data Structure) in enabling the automated sharing, processing, and reuse of large neuroimaging datasets. We outline how the open-source Python language has provided the basis for a data science platform that enables reproducible data analysis and visualization. We also discuss how new advances in software engineering, such as containerization, provide the basis for greater reproducibility in data analysis. The emergence of this new ecosystem provides an example for many areas of science that are currently struggling with reproducibility.

A novel approach is put forth that utilizes data similarity, quantified on a graph, to improve upon the reconstruction performance of principal component analysis. The tasks of data dimensionality reduction and reconstruction are formulated as graph filtering operations, that enable the exploitation of data node connectivity in a graph via the adjacency matrix. The unknown reducing and reconstruction filters are determined by optimizing a mean-square error cost that entails the data, as well as their graph adjacency matrix. Working in the graph spectral domain enables the derivation of simple gradient descent recursions used to update the matrix filter taps. Numerical tests in real image datasets demonstrate the better reconstruction performance of the novel method over standard principal component analysis.

Purpose: To investigate the feasibility of myelin water content quantification using fast dual-echo steady-state (DESS) scans and machine learning with kernels. Methods: We optimized combinations of steady-state (SS) scans for precisely estimating the fast-relaxing signal fraction ff of a two-compartment signal model, subject to a scan time constraint. We estimated ff from the optimized DESS acquisition using a recently developed method for rapid parameter estimation via regression with kernels (PERK). We compared DESS PERK ff estimates to conventional myelin water fraction (MWF) estimates from a longer multi-echo spin-echo (MESE) acquisition in simulation, in vivo, and ex vivo studies. Results: Simulations demonstrate that DESS PERK ff estimators and MESE MWF estimators achieve comparable error levels. In vivo and ex vivo experiments demonstrate that MESE MWF and DESS PERK ff estimates are quantitatively comparable measures of WM myelin water content. To our knowledge, these experiments are the first to demonstrate myelin water images from a SS acquisition that are quantitatively similar to conventional MESE MWF images. Conclusion: Combinations of fast DESS scans can be designed to enable precise ff estimation. PERK is well-suited for ff estimation. DESS PERK ff and MESE MWF estimates are quantitatively similar measures of WM myelin water content.

In clinical practice and biomedical research, measurements are often collected sparsely and irregularly in time while the data acquisition is expensive and inconvenient. Examples include measurements of spine bone mineral density, cancer growth through mammography or biopsy, a progression of defect of vision, or assessment of gait in patients with neurological disorders. Since the data collection is often costly and inconvenient, estimation of progression from sparse observations is of great interest for practitioners. From the statistical standpoint, such data is often analyzed in the context of a mixed-effect model where time is treated as both random and fixed effect. Alternatively, researchers analyze Gaussian processes or functional data where observations are assumed to be drawn from a certain distribution of processes. These models are flexible but rely on probabilistic assumptions and require very careful implementation. In this study, we propose an alternative elementary framework for analyzing longitudinal data, relying on matrix completion. Our method yields point estimates of progression curves by iterative application of the SVD. Our framework covers multivariate longitudinal data, regression and can be easily extended to other settings. We apply our methods to understand trends of progression of motor impairment in children with Cerebral Palsy. Our model approximates individual progression curves and explains 30% of the variability. Low-rank representation of progression trends enables discovering that subtypes of Cerebral Palsy exhibit different progression trends.

We propose a novel linear discriminant analysis approach for the classification of high-dimensional matrix-valued data that commonly arises from imaging studies. Motivated by the equivalence of the conventional linear discriminant analysis and the ordinary least squares, we consider an efficient nuclear norm penalized regression that encourages a low-rank structure. Theoretical properties including a non-asymptotic risk bound and a rank consistency result are established. Simulation studies and an application to electroencephalography data show the superior performance of the proposed method over the existing approaches.

5th generation networks are envisioned to provide seamless and ubiquitous connection to 1000-fold more devices and is believed to provide ultra-low latency and higher data rates up to tens of Gbps. Different technologies enabling these requirements are being developed including mmWave communications, Massive MIMO and beamforming, Device to Device (D2D) communications and Heterogeneous Networks. D2D communication is a promising technology to enable applications requiring high bandwidth such as online streaming and online gaming etc. It can also provide ultra- low latencies required for applications like vehicle to vehicle communication for autonomous driving. D2D communication can provide higher data rates with high energy efficiency and spectral efficiency compared to conventional communication. The performance benefits of D2D communication can be best achieved when D2D users reuses the spectrum being utilized by the conventional cellular users. This spectrum sharing in a multi-tier heterogeneous network will introduce complex interference among D2D users and cellular users which needs to be resolved. Motivated by limited number of surveys for interference mitigation and resource allocation in D2D enabled heterogeneous networks, we have surveyed different conventional and artificial intelligence based interference mitigation and resource allocation schemes developed in recent years. Our contribution lies in the analysis of conventional interference mitigation techniques and their shortcomings. Finally, the strengths of AI based techniques are determined and open research challenges deduced from the recent research are presented.

Finite mixture models are among the most popular statistical models used in different data science disciplines. Despite their broad applicability, inference under these models typically leads to computationally challenging non-convex problems. While the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is the most popular approach for solving these non-convex problems, the behavior of this algorithm is not well understood. In this work, we focus on the case of mixture of Laplacian (or Gaussian) distribution. We start by analyzing a simple equally weighted mixture of two single dimensional Laplacian distributions and show that every local optimum of the population maximum likelihood estimation problem is globally optimal. Then, we prove that the EM algorithm converges to the ground truth parameters almost surely with random initialization. Our result extends the existing results for Gaussian distribution to Laplacian distribution. Then we numerically study the behavior of mixture models with more than two components. Motivated by our extensive numerical experiments, we propose a novel stochastic method for estimating the mean of components of a mixture model. Our numerical experiments show that our algorithm outperforms the Naive EM algorithm in almost all scenarios.

Despite recent advances in regularisation theory, the issue of parameter selection still remains a challenge for most applications. In a recent work the framework of statistical learning was used to approximate the optimal Tikhonov regularisation parameter from noisy data. In this work, we improve their results and extend the analysis to the elastic net regularisation, providing explicit error bounds on the accuracy of the approximated parameter and the corresponding regularisation solution in a simplified case. Furthermore, in the general case we design a data-driven, automated algorithm for the computation of an approximate regularisation parameter. Our analysis combines statistical learning theory with insights from regularisation theory. We compare our approach with state-of-the-art parameter selection criteria and illustrate its superiority in terms of accuracy and computational time on simulated and real data sets.