Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “markov random fields”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 55 records · Page 3

MO-DE-207A-09: Low-Dose CT Image Reconstruction Via Learning From Different Patient Normal-Dose Images

Purpose: To investigate a novel low-dose CT (LdCT) image reconstruction strategy for lung CT imaging in radiation therapy. Methods: The proposed approach consists of four steps: (1) use the traditional filtered back-projection (FBP) method to reconstruct the LdCT image; (2) calculate structure similarity (SSIM) index between the FBP-reconstructed LdCT image and a set of normal-dose CT (NdCT) images, and select the NdCT image with the highest SSIM as the learning source; (3) segment the NdCT source image into lung and outside tissue regions via simple thresholding, and adopt multiple linear regression to learn high-order Markov random field (MRF) pattern for each tissue region in the NdCT source image; (4) segment the FBP-reconstructed LdCT image into lung and outside regions as well, and apply the learnt MRF prior in each tissue region for statistical iterative reconstruction of the LdCT image following the penalized weighted least squares (PWLS) framework. Quantitative evaluation of the reconstructed images was based on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), local binary pattern (LBP) and histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) metrics. Results: It was observed that lung and outside tissue regions have different MRF patterns predicted from the NdCT. Visual inspection showed that our method obviously outperformed the traditional FBP method. Comparing with the region-smoothing PWLS method, our method has, in average, 13% increase in SNR, 15% decrease in LBP difference, and 12% decrease in HOG difference from reference standard for all regions of interest, which indicated the superior performance of the proposed method in terms of image resolution and texture preservation. Conclusion: We proposed a novel LdCT image reconstruction method by learning similar image characteristics from a set of NdCT images, and the to-be-learnt NdCT image does not need to be scans from the same subject. This approach is particularly important for enhancing image quality in radiation therapy.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Optimization, Inference and Learning for Advanced Networks

This piece of software aims at providing an implementation of methods to perform efficient optimization, probabilistic inference and model selection and learning for various type of networked systems. The software contains a suite of methods and functions that: 1) perform probabilistic inference and random sampling on networked models 2) select or learn networked models from data 3) solve optimization tasks with a networked structure Network models that are supported by these features include, but are not limited to, factor graphs and Markov random fields such as Ising models, Potts models, p-spins models, Gaussian random fields and restricted Boltzmann machine.

Hijazi, Hassan↗

A Statistical Interpolation Code for Ocean Analysis and Forecasting

Abstract We present a data assimilation package for use with ocean circulation models in analysis, forecasting, and system evaluation applications. The basic functionality of the package is centered on a multivariate linear statistical estimation for a given predicted/background ocean state, observations, and error statistics. Novel features of the package include support for multiple covariance models, and the solution of the least squares normal equations either using the covariance matrix or its inverse—the information matrix. The main focus of this paper, however, is on the solution of the analysis equations using the information matrix, which offers several advantages for solving large problems efficiently. Details of the parameterization of the inverse covariance using Markov random fields are provided and its relationship to finite-difference discretizations of diffusion equations are pointed out. The package can assimilate a variety of observation types from both remote sensing and in situ platforms. The performance of the data assimilation methodology implemented in the package is demonstrated with a yearlong global ocean hindcast with a 1/4° ocean model. The code is implemented in modern Fortran, supports distributed memory, shared memory, multicore architectures, and uses climate and forecasts compliant Network Common Data Form for input/output. The package is freely available with an open source license from www.tendral.com/tsis/ .

Srinivasan, Ashwanth↗

Range data description based on multiple characteristics

An algorithm for describing range images based on Mean curvature (H) and Gaussian curvature (K) is presented. Range images are unique in that they directly approximate the physical surfaces of a real world 3-D scene. The curvature parameters are derived from the fundamental theorems of differential geometry and provides visible invariant pixel labels that can be used to characterize the scene. The sign of H and K can be used to classify each pixel into one of eight possible surface types. Due to the sensitivity of these parameters to noise the resulting HK-sing map does not directly identify surfaces in the range images and must be further processed. A region growing algorithm based on modeling the scene points with a Markov Random Field (MRF) of variable neighborhood size and edge models is suggested. This approach allows the integration of information from multiple characteristics in an efficient way. The performance of the proposed algorithm on a number of synthetic and real range images is discussed.

Al-Hujazi, Ezzet↗

Unsupervised segmentation of polarimetric SAR data using the covariance matrix

An unsupervised selection of polarimetric features useful for the segmentation and analysis of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is presented. The technique is based on multidimensional clustering of the parameters composing the polarimetric covariance matrix of the data. Clustering is performed on the logarithm of these quantities. Once the polarimetric cluster centers have been determined, segmentation of the polarimetric data into regions is performed using a maximum likelihood polarimetric classifier. Segmentation maps are further improved using a Markov random field to describe the statistics of the regions and computing the maximum of the product of the local conditional densities. Examples with real polarimetric SAR imagery are given to illustrate the potential of this method.

Rignot, Eric↗

Maximum a posteriori classification of multifrequency, multilook, synthetic aperture radar intensity data

We present a maximum a posteriori (MAP) classifier for classifying multifrequency, multilook, single polarization SAR intensity data into regions or ensembles of pixels of homogeneous and similar radar backscatter characteristics. A model for the prior joint distribution of the multifrequency SAR intensity data is combined with a Markov random field for representing the interactions between region labels to obtain an expression for the posterior distribution of the region labels given the multifrequency SAR observations. The maximization of the posterior distribution yields Bayes's optimum region labeling or classification of the SAR data or its MAP estimate. The performance of the MAP classifier is evaluated by using computer-simulated multilook SAR intensity data as a function of the parameters in the classification process. Multilook SAR intensity data are shown to yield higher classification accuracies than one-look SAR complex amplitude data. The MAP classifier is extended to the case in which the radar backscatter from the remotely sensed surface varies within the SAR image because of incidence angle effects. The results obtained illustrate the practicality of the method for combining SAR intensity observations acquired at two different frequencies and for improving classification accuracy of SAR data.

Rignot, E.↗

Improved image decompression for reduced transform coding artifacts

The perceived quality of images reconstructed from low bit rate compression is severely degraded by the appearance of transform coding artifacts. This paper proposes a method for producing higher quality reconstructed images based on a stochastic model for the image data. Quantization (scalar or vector) partitions the transform coefficient space and maps all points in a partition cell to a representative reconstruction point, usually taken as the centroid of the cell. The proposed image estimation technique selects the reconstruction point within the quantization partition cell which results in a reconstructed image which best fits a non-Gaussian Markov random field (MRF) image model. This approach results in a convex constrained optimization problem which can be solved iteratively. At each iteration, the gradient projection method is used to update the estimate based on the image model. In the transform domain, the resulting coefficient reconstruction points are projected to the particular quantization partition cells defined by the compressed image. Experimental results will be shown for images compressed using scalar quantization of block DCT and using vector quantization of subband wavelet transform. The proposed image decompression provides a reconstructed image with reduced visibility of transform coding artifacts and superior perceived quality.

Orourke, Thomas P.↗

Computational Characterization and Model Verification for 3D Microstructure Reconstruction of Additively-Manufactured Materials

The goal of this study is to characterize and validate the texture and grain topology of additively-manufactured anisotropic three-dimensional (3D) polycrystalline microstructures. The special focus is on developing methodologies to compare the grain shapes and orientations of two-dimensional (2D) and 3D microstructure representations using the same metric. To generate statistical data, synthetic microstructures are reconstructed from experimental data using Markov random field (MRF). The statistical similarity between the experimental and synthetic microstructures is verified by comparing their grain topologies. A universal measure to compare 2D and 3D grains is portrayed through the concept of image moments that are invariant to shape transformations. The graphical plots developed based on moment invariants to compare the 2D and 3D grains are used to verify the synthetic model

Materials Characterization↗

Metric Ranking of Invariant Networks with Belief Propagation

The management of large-scale distributed information systems relies on the effective use and modeling of monitoring data collected at various points in the distributed information systems. A promising approach is to discover invariant relationships among the monitoring data and generate invariant networks, where a node is a monitoring data source (metric) and a link indicates an invariant relationship between two monitoring data. Such an invariant network representation can help system experts to localize and diagnose the system faults by examining those broken invariant relationships and their related metrics, because system faults usually propagate among the monitoring data and eventually lead to some broken invariant relationships. However, at one time, there are usually a lot of broken links (invariant relationships) within an invariant network. Without proper guidance, it is difficult for system experts to manually inspect this large number of broken links. Thus, a critical challenge is how to effectively and efficiently rank metrics (nodes) of invariant networks according to the anomaly levels of metrics. The ranked list of metrics will provide system experts with useful guidance for them to localize and diagnose the system faults. To this end, we propose to model the nodes and the broken links as a Markov Random Field (MRF), and develop an iteration algorithm to infer the anomaly of each node based on belief propagation (BP). Finally, we validate the proposed algorithm on both realworld and synthetic data sets to illustrate its effectiveness.

Tao, Changxia↗

A Robust Approach to Sequential Information Theoretic Planning

In many sequential planning applications a natural approach to generating high quality plans is to maximize an information reward such as mutual information (MI). Unfortunately, MI lacks a closed form in all but trivial models, and so must be estimated. In applications where the cost of plan execution is expensive, one desires planning estimates which admit theoretical guarantees. Through the use of robust M-estimators we obtain bounds on absolute deviation of estimated MI. Moreover, we propose a sequential algorithm which integrates inference and planning by maximally reusing particles in each stage. We validate the utility of using robust estimators in the sequential approach on a Gaussian Markov Random Field wherein information measures have a closed form. Lastly, we demonstrate the benefits of our integrated approach in the context of sequential experiment design for inferring causal regulatory networks from gene expression levels. Here, our method shows improvements over a recent method which selects intervention experiments based on the same MI objective.

Zheng, Sue↗

End-to-end learning of multiple sequence alignments with differentiable Smith–Waterman

Abstract Motivation Multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) of homologous sequences contain information on structural and functional constraints and their evolutionary histories. Despite their importance for many downstream tasks, such as structure prediction, MSA generation is often treated as a separate pre-processing step, without any guidance from the application it will be used for. Results Here, we implement a smooth and differentiable version of the Smith–Waterman pairwise alignment algorithm that enables jointly learning an MSA and a downstream machine learning system in an end-to-end fashion. To demonstrate its utility, we introduce SMURF (Smooth Markov Unaligned Random Field), a new method that jointly learns an alignment and the parameters of a Markov Random Field for unsupervised contact prediction. We find that SMURF learns MSAs that mildly improve contact prediction on a diverse set of protein and RNA families. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate that by connecting our differentiable alignment module to AlphaFold2 and maximizing predicted confidence, we can learn MSAs that improve structure predictions over the initial MSAs. Interestingly, the alignments that improve AlphaFold predictions are self-inconsistent and can be viewed as adversarial. This work highlights the potential of differentiable dynamic programming to improve neural network pipelines that rely on an alignment and the potential dangers of optimizing predictions of protein sequences with methods that are not fully understood. Availability and implementation Our code and examples are available at: https://github.com/spetti/SMURF. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Hierarchical Gaussian Random Field Sampling for Multilevel Markov Chain Monte Carlo: Coupling Stochastic Partial Differential Equation and the Karhunen–Loève Decomposition

This work introduces structure preserving hierarchical decompositions for sampling Gaussian random fields (GRFs) within the context of multilevel Bayesian inference in high-dimensional space. Existing scalable hierarchical sampling methods, such as those based on stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs), often reduce the dimensionality of the sample space at the cost of accuracy of inference. Other approaches, such that those based on Karhunen-Loève (KL) expansions, offer sample space dimensionality reduction but sacrifice GRF representation accuracy and ergodicity of the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler and are computationally expensive for high-dimensional problems. The proposed method integrates the dimensionality reduction capabilities of KL expansions with the scalability of SPDE-based sampling, thereby providing a robust, unified framework for high-dimensional uncertainty quantification (UQ) that is scalable and accurate, preserves ergodicity, and offers dimensionality reduction of the sample space. The hierarchy in our multilevel algorithm is derived from the geometric multigrid hierarchy. By constructing a hierarchical decomposition that maintains the covariance structure across the levels in the hierarchy, the approach enables efficient coarse-to-fine sampling while ensuring that all samples are drawn from the desired distribution. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated on a benchmark subsurface flow problem, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving computational efficiency and statistical accuracy. Furthermore, our proposed technique is more efficient and accurate and displays better convergence properties than existing methods for high-dimensional Bayesian inference problems.

Gaussian random fields↗

On Kalman filter solution of space-time interpolation

The approximate Kalman filtering algorithm presented in [1] for image sequence processing can introduce unacceptable negative eigenvalues in the information matrix and can have degraded performance in some applications. The improved algorithm presented in this note guarantees a positive definite information matrix, leading to more stable filter performance.

data↗

STPMiner: A Highperformance Spatiotemporal Pattern Mining Toolbox

The volume of spatiotemporal data being generated from scientific simulations and observations from sensors is growing at an astronomical rate. This data explosion is going to pose three challenges to the existing data mining infrastructure: algorithmic, computational, and I/O. Over the years we have implemented several spatiotemporal data mining algorithms including: outliers/anomalies, colocation patterns, change patterns, clustering, classification, and prediction algorithms. In this paper we briefly discuss the core spatiotemporal pattern mining algorithms along with some of the computational and I/O challenges associated with the big data.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Multilevel Hierarchical Decomposition of Finite Element White Noise with Application to Multilevel Markov Chain Monte Carlo

In this work we develop a new hierarchical multilevel approach to generate Gaussian random field realizations in an algorithmically scalable manner that is well suited to incorporating into multilevel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. This approach builds off of other partial differential equation (PDE) approaches for generating Gaussian random field realizations; in particular, a single field realization may be formed by solving a reaction-diffusion PDE with a spatial white noise source function as the right-hand side. While these approaches have been explored to accelerate forward uncertainty quantification tasks, e.g., multilevel Monte Carlo, the previous constructions are not directly applicable to multilevel MCMC frameworks which build fine-scale random fields in a hierarchical fashion from coarse-scale random fields. Our new hierarchical multilevel method relies on a hierarchical decomposition of the white noise source function in $L^2$ which allows us to form Gaussian random field realizations across multiple levels of discretization in a way that fits into multilevel MCMC algorithmic frameworks. After presenting our main theoretical results and numerical scaling results to showcase the utility of this new hierarchical PDE method for generating Gaussian random field realizations, this method is tested on a four-level MCMC algorithm to explore its feasibility.

algebraic multigrid↗

Adaptive Algebraic Multigrid for Finite Element Elliptic Equations with Random Coefficients

This thesis presents a two-grid algorithm based on Smoothed Aggregation Spectral Element Agglomeration Algebraic Multigrid (SA-ρAMGe) combined with adaptation. The aim is to build an efficient solver for the linear systems arising from discretization of second-order elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) with stochastic coefficients. Examples include PDEs that model subsurface flow with random permeability field. During a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation process, that draws PDE coefficient samples from a certain distribution, the PDE coefficients change, hence the resulting linear systems to be solved change. At every such step the system (discretized PDE) needs to be solved and the computed solution used to evaluate some functional(s) of interest that then determine if the coefficient sample is acceptable or not. The MCMC process is hence computationally intensive and requires the solvers used to be efficient and fast. This fact that at every step of MCMC the resulting linear system changes, makes an already existing solver built for the old problem perhaps not as efficient for the problem corresponding to the new sampled coefficient. This motivates the main goal of our study, namely, to adapt an already existing solver to handle the problem (with changed coefficient) with the objective to achieve this goal to be faster and more efficient than building a completely new solver from scratch. Our approach utilizes the local element matrices (for the problem with changed coefficients) to build local problems associated with constructed by the method agglomerated elements (a set of subdomains that cover the given computational domain). We solve a generalized eigenproblem for each set in a subspace spanned by the previous local coarse space (used for the old solver) and a vector, component of the error, that the old solver cannot handle. A portion of the spectrum of these local eigen-problems (corresponding to eigenvalues close to zero) form the coarse basis used to define the new two-level method of our interest. We illustrate the performance of this adaptive two-level procedure with a large set of numerical experiments that demonstrate its efficiency over building the solvers from scratch.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Random field optimization

Herein we present a new modeling paradigm for optimization that we call random field optimization. Random fields are a powerful modeling abstraction that aims to capture the behavior of random variables that live on infinite-dimensional spaces (e.g., space and time) such as stochastic processes (e.g., time series, Gaussian processes, and Markov processes), random matrices, and random spatial fields. This paradigm involves sophisticated mathematical objects (e.g., stochastic differential equations and space-time kernel functions) and has been widely used in neuroscience, geoscience, physics, civil engineering, and computer graphics. Despite of this, however, random fields have seen limited use in optimization; specifically, existing optimization paradigms that involve uncertainty (e.g., stochastic programming and robust optimization) mostly focus on the use of finite random variables. This trend is rapidly changing with the advent of statistical optimization (e.g., Bayesian optimization) and multi-scale optimization (e.g., integration of molecular sciences and process engineering). Our work extends a recently-proposed abstraction for infinite-dimensional optimization problems by capturing more general uncertainty representations. Moreover, we discuss solution paradigms for this new class of problems based on finite transformations and sampling, and identify open questions and challenges.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Markov stochasticity coordinates

Markov dynamics constitute one of the most fundamental models of random motion between the states of a system of interest. Markov dynamics have diverse applications in many fields of science and engineering, and are particularly applicable in the context of random motion in networks. In this paper we present a two-dimensional gauging method of the randomness of Markov dynamics. The method–termed Markov Stochasticity Coordinates–is established, discussed, and exemplified. Also, the method is tweaked to quantify the stochasticity of the first-passage-times of Markov dynamics, and the socioeconomic equality and mobility in human societies.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗