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We present a new method for the estimation of two dimensional (2D) angles of arrival (AOAs), namely, azimuth and incidence angles of multiple narrowband signals of same frequency in the far field of antenna array., Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure

Online consumer reviews reflect the testimonials of real people, unlike advertisements. As such, they have critical impact on potential consumers, and indirectly on businesses. According to a Harvard study (Luca 2011), +1 rise in star-rating increases revenue by 5-9%. Problematically, such financial incentives have created a market for spammers to fabricate reviews, to unjustly promote or demote businesses, activities known as opinion spam (Jindal and Liu 2008). A vast majority of existing work on this problem have formulations based on static review data, with respective techniques operating in an offline fashion. Spam campaigns, however, are intended to make most impact during their course. Abnormal events triggered by spammers' activities could be masked in the load of future events, which static analysis would fail to identify. In this work, we approach the opinion spam problem with a temporal formulation. Specifically, we monitor a list of carefully selected indicative signals of opinion spam over time and design efficient techniques to both detect and characterize abnormal events in real-time. Experiments on datasets from two different review sites show that our approach is fast, effective, and practical to be deployed in real-world systems., Comment: 10 pages, 29 figures

The question whether RM codes are capacity-achieving is a long-standing open problem in coding theory that was recently answered in the affirmative for transmission over erasure channels [1], [2]. Remarkably, the proof does not rely on specific properties of RM codes, apart from their symmetry. Indeed, the main technical result consists in showing that any sequence of linear codes, with doubly-transitive permutation groups, achieves capacity on the memoryless erasure channel under bit-MAP decoding. Thus, a natural question is what happens under block-MAP decoding. In [1], [2], by exploiting further symmetries of the code, the bit-MAP threshold was shown to be sharp enough so that the block erasure probability also converges to 0. However, this technique relies heavily on the fact that the transmission is over an erasure channel. We present an alternative approach to strengthen results regarding the bit-MAP threshold to block-MAP thresholds. This approach is based on a careful analysis of the weight distribution of RM codes. In particular, the flavor of the main result is the following: assume that the bit-MAP error probability decays as $N^{-\delta}$, for some $\delta>0$. Then, the block-MAP error probability also converges to 0. This technique applies to transmission over any binary memoryless symmetric channel. Thus, it can be thought of as a first step in extending the proof that RM codes are capacity-achieving to the general case., Comment: 7 pages, accepted at ISIT'16

We introduce a new approach to proving that a sequence of deterministic linear codes achieves capacity on an erasure channel under maximum a posteriori decoding. Rather than relying on the precise structure of the codes our method exploits code symmetry. In particular, the technique applies to any sequence of linear codes where the blocklengths are strictly increasing, the code rates converge, and the permutation group of each code is doubly transitive. In other words, we show that symmetry alone implies near-optimal performance. An important consequence of this result is that a sequence of Reed-Muller codes with increasing blocklength and converging rate achieves capacity. This possibility has been suggested previously in the literature but it has only been proven for cases where the limiting code rate is 0 or 1. Moreover, these results extend naturally to all affine-invariant codes and, thus, to extended primitive narrow-sense BCH codes. This also resolves, in the affirmative, the existence question for capacity-achieving sequences of binary cyclic codes. The primary tools used in the proof are the sharp threshold property for symmetric monotone boolean functions and the area theorem for extrinsic information transfer functions., Comment: This article combines our previous articles arXiv:1505.05123 and arXiv:1505.05831

This paper introduces a new approach to proving that a sequence of deterministic linear codes achieves capacity on an erasure channel under maximum a posteriori decoding. Rather than relying on the precise structure of the codes, this method requires only that the codes are highly symmetric. In particular, the technique applies to any sequence of linear codes where the blocklengths are strictly increasing, the code rates converge to a number between 0 and 1, and the permutation group of each code is doubly transitive. This also provides a rare example in information theory where symmetry alone implies near-optimal performance. An important consequence of this result is that a sequence of Reed-Muller codes with increasing blocklength achieves capacity if its code rate converges to a number between 0 and 1. This possibility has been suggested previously in the literature but it has only been proven for cases where the limiting code rate is 0 or 1. Moreover, these results extend naturally to affine-invariant codes and, thus, to all extended primitive narrow-sense BCH codes. The primary tools used in the proof are the sharp threshold property for monotone boolean functions and the area theorem for extrinsic information transfer functions., Comment: (v2) Added Section V (titled 'Discussion') and a detailed discussion of primitive narrow-sense BCH codes (Section IV-C)

These notes review six lectures given by Prof. Andrea Montanari on the topic of statistical estimation for linear models. The first two lectures cover the principles of signal recovery from linear measurements in terms of minimax risk. Subsequent lectures demonstrate the application of these principles to several practical problems in science and engineering. Specifically, these topics include denoising of error-laden signals, recovery of compressively sensed signals, reconstruction of low-rank matrices, and also the discovery of hidden cliques within large networks., Comment: Chapter of "Statistical Physics, Optimization, Inference, and Message-Passing Algorithms", Eds.: F. Krzakala, F. Ricci-Tersenghi, L. Zdeborova, R. Zecchina, E. W. Tramel, L. F. Cugliandolo (Oxford University Press, to appear)

Spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, which were first introduced as LDPC convolutional codes, have been shown to exhibit excellent performance under low-complexity belief-propagation decoding. This phenomenon is now termed threshold saturation via spatial coupling. Spatially-coupled codes have been successfully applied in numerous areas. In particular, it was proven that spatially-coupled regular LDPC codes universally achieve capacity over the class of binary memoryless symmetric (BMS) channels under belief-propagation decoding. Recently, potential functions have been used to simplify threshold saturation proofs for scalar and vector recursions. In this paper, potential functions are used to prove threshold saturation for irregular LDPC and low-density generator-matrix (LDGM) codes on BMS channels, extending the simplified proof technique to BMS channels. The corresponding potential functions are closely related to the average Bethe free entropy of the ensembles in the large-system limit. These functions also appear in statistical physics when the replica method is used to analyze optimal decoding., Comment: (v1) This article supersedes arXiv:1301.6111 (v2) Accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

Low-density parity-check (LDPC) convolutional codes have been shown to exhibit excellent performance under low-complexity belief-propagation decoding [1], [2]. This phenomenon is now termed threshold saturation via spatial coupling. The underlying principle behind this appears to be very general and spatially-coupled (SC) codes have been successfully applied in numerous areas. Recently, SC regular LDPC codes have been proven to achieve capacity universally, over the class of binary memoryless symmetric (BMS) channels, under belief-propagation decoding [3], [4]. In [5], [6], potential functions are used to prove that the BP threshold of SC irregular LDPC ensembles saturates, for the binary erasure channel, to the conjectured MAP threshold (known as the Maxwell threshold) of the underlying irregular ensembles. In this paper, that proof technique is generalized to BMS channels, thereby extending some results of [4] to irregular LDPC ensembles. We also believe that this approach can be expanded to cover a wide class of graphical models whose message-passing rules are associated with a Bethe free energy., Comment: (v1) In proceedings of Allerton 2012; Corrected a typo in equation (5). (v2) This update corrects an error in Definition 13 and typos in equations (7) and (8). An extended version of this article with complete proofs is at arXiv:1309.7543

In this paper, we analyze the coexistence of a primary and a secondary (cognitive) network when both networks use the IEEE 802.11 based distributed coordination function for medium access control. Specifically, we consider the problem of channel capture by a secondary network that uses spectrum sensing to determine the availability of the channel, and its impact on the primary throughput. We integrate the notion of transmission slots in Bianchi's Markov model with the physical time slots, to derive the transmission probability of the secondary network as a function of its scan duration. This is used to obtain analytical expressions for the throughput achievable by the primary and secondary networks. Our analysis considers both saturated and unsaturated networks. By performing a numerical search, the secondary network parameters are selected to maximize its throughput for a given level of protection of the primary network throughput. The theoretical expressions are validated using extensive simulations carried out in the Network Simulator 2. Our results provide critical insights into the performance and robustness of different schemes for medium access by the secondary network. In particular, we find that the channel captures by the secondary network does not significantly impact the primary throughput, and that simply increasing the secondary contention window size is only marginally inferior to silent-period based methods in terms of its throughput performance., Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications

This article considers the performance of wireless communication systems that utilize reconfigurable or pattern-dynamic antennas. The focus is on finite-state channels with memory and performance is assessed in terms of real-time behavior. In a wireless setting, when a slow fading channel enters a deep fade, the corresponding communication system faces the threat of successive decoding failures at the destination. Under such circumstances, rapidly getting out of deep fades becomes a priority. Recent advances in fast reconfigurable antennas provide new means to alter the statistical profile of fading channels and thereby reduce the probability of prolonged fades. Fast reconfigurable antennas are therefore poised to improve overall performance, especially for delay-sensitive traffic in slow-fading environments. This potential for enhanced performance motivates this study of the temporal behavior of point-to-point communication systems with reconfigurable antennas. Specifically, agile wireless communication schemes over erasure channels are analyzed; situations where using reconfigurable antennas yield substantial performance gains in terms of throughput and average delay are identified. Scenarios where only partial state information is available at the receiver are also examined, naturally leading to partially observable decision processes., Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Communications

This article considers the performance of digital communication systems transmitting messages over finite-state erasure channels with memory. Information bits are protected from channel erasures using error-correcting codes; successful receptions of codewords are acknowledged at the source through instantaneous feedback. The primary focus of this research is on delay-sensitive applications, codes with finite block lengths and, necessarily, non-vanishing probabilities of decoding failure. The contribution of this article is twofold. A methodology to compute the distribution of the time required to empty a buffer is introduced. Based on this distribution, the mean hitting time to an empty queue and delay-violation probabilities for specific thresholds can be computed explicitly. The proposed techniques apply to situations where the transmit buffer contains a predetermined number of information bits at the onset of the data transfer. Furthermore, as additional performance criteria, large deviation principles are obtained for the empirical mean service time and the average packet-transmission time associated with the communication process. This rigorous framework yields a pragmatic methodology to select code rate and block length for the communication unit as functions of the service requirements. Examples motivated by practical systems are provided to further illustrate the applicability of these techniques., Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory