Probability estimation method for fatigue crack growth rate based on a∼t data from service

Purpose–The study aims to provide a basis for the effective use of safety-related information data and a quantitative assessment way for the occurrence probability of the safety risk such as the fatigue fracture of the key components.Design/methodology/approach–The fatigue crack growth rate is of dispersion,which is often used to accurately describe with probability density.In view of the external dispersion caused by the load,a simple and applicable probability expression of fatigue crack growth rate is adopted based on the fatigue growth theory.Considering the isolation among the pairs of crack length a and crack formation time t(a∼t data)obtained from same kind of structural parts,a statistical analysis approach of t distribution is proposed,which divides the crack length in several segments.Furthermore,according to the compatibility criterion of crack growth,that is,there is statistical development correspondence among a∼t data,the probability model of crack growth rate is established.Findings–The results show that the crack growth rate in the stable growth stage can be approximately expressed by the crack growth control curve da/dt=5 Q•a,and the probability density of the crack growth parameter Q represents the external dispersion;t follows two-parameter Weibull distribution in certain a values.Originality/value–The probability density f(Q)can be estimated by using the probability model of crack growth rate,and a calculation example shows that the estimation method is effective and practical.

Probability estimation based on grey system theory for simulation evaluation

In the evaluation of some simulation systems, only small samples data are gotten due to the limited conditions. In allusion to the evaluation problem of small sample data, an interval estimation approach with the improved grey confidence degree is proposed.On the basis of the definition of grey distance, three kinds of definition of the grey weight for every sample element in grey estimated value are put forward, and then the improved grey confidence degree is designed. In accordance with the new concept, the grey interval estimation for small sample data is deduced. Furthermore,the bootstrap method is applied for more accurate grey confidence interval. Through resampling of the bootstrap, numerous small samples with the corresponding confidence intervals can be obtained. Then the final confidence interval is calculated from the union of these grey confidence intervals. In the end, the simulation system evaluation using the proposed method is conducted. The simulation results show that the reasonable confidence interval is acquired, which demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.

A Generalized Wind Turbine Anomaly Detection Method Based on Combined Probability Estimation Model

Anomaly detection based on the data collected from the supervisory control and data acquisition(SCADA)system is crucial to reduce the failure rate of wind turbines(WTs).The difficulty of this kind of methods is to dynamically identify the threshold for anomaly detection under changing operating conditions.In this paper,a generalized WT anomaly detection method based on the combined probability estimation model(CPEM)is proposed.The CPEM can estimate the conditional probability density function(PDF)of the target variable given changing conditions.Its generalization and accuracy are better than those of the independent probability estimation model because it combines the advantages of various kinds of probability estimation models through linear combination.By using the CPEM,the normal operating bounds under different operating conditions can be obtained,which dynamically form the thresholds for anomaly detection.Meanwhile,with respect to the thresholds,hypothesis testing(HT)is adopted to identify the anomaly by inspecting whether the observations exceed the thresholds at a given significance level,providing sound mathematical support for anomaly detection and making the detection results more reliable.The effectiveness of the proposed method is tested by using the actual data of WTs with known faults.The results illustrate that the proposed method can detect the abnormal operating state of the gearbox and generator much more early than the system fault alarm.

Influencing factor analysis of interception probability and classification-regression neural network based estimation

The interception probability of a single missile is the basis for combat plan design and weapon performance evaluation,while its influencing factors are complex and mutually coupled.Existing calculation methods have very limited analysis of the influence mechanism of influencing factors,and none of them has analyzed the influence of the guidance law.This paper considers the influencing factors of both the interceptor and the target more comprehensively.Interceptor parameters include speed,guidance law,guidance error,fuze error,and fragment killing ability,while target performance includes speed,maneuverability,and vulnerability.In this paper,an interception model is established,Monte Carlo simulation is carried out,and the influence mechanism of each factor is analyzed based on the model and simulation results.Finally,this paper proposes a classification-regression neural network to quickly estimate the interception probability based on the value of influencing factors.The proposed method reduces the interference of invalid interception data to valid data,so its prediction accuracy is significantly better than that of pure regression neural networks.

A New Statistical Modeling Approach for Survival Analysis of Cancer Patients—Multiple Myeloma Cancer

Background: The Cox Proportional Hazard (Cox-PH) model has been a popularly used method for survival analysis of cancer data given the survival times as a function of covariates or risk factors. However, it is very seldom to see the assumptions for the application of the Cox-PH model satisfied in most of the research studies, raising questions about the effectiveness, robustness, and accuracy of the model predicting the proportion of survival times. This is because the necessary assumptions in most cases are difficult to satisfy, as well as the assessment of interaction among covariates. Methods: To further improve the therapeutic/treatment strategy for cancer diseases, we proposed a new approach to survival analysis using multiple myeloma (MM) cancer data. We first developed a data-driven nonlinear statistical model that predicts the survival times with 93% accuracy. We then performed a parametric analysis on the predicted survival times to obtain the survival function which is used in estimating the proportion of survival times. Results: The new proposed approach for survival analysis has proved to be more robust and gives better estimates of the proportion of survival than the Cox-PH model. Also, satisfying the proposed model assumptions and finding interactions among risk factors is less difficult compared to the Cox-PH model. The proposed model can predict the real values of the survival times and the identified risk factors are ranked according to the percent of contribution to the survival time. Conclusion: The new proposed nonlinear statistical model approach for survival analysis of cancer diseases is very efficient and provides an improved and innovative strategy for cancer therapeutic/treatment.

Bioinspired polarized light compass in moonlit sky for heading determination based on probability density estimation

Bioinspired polarized skylight navigation,which can be used in unfamiliar territories,is an important alternative autonomous navigation technique in the absence of Global Navigation Satellite System(GNSS).However,the polarization pattern in night environment with noise effects and model uncertainties is a less explored area.Although several decades have passed since the first publication about the polarization of the moonlit night sky,the usefulness of nocturnal polarization navigation is only sporadic in previous researches.This study demonstrates that the nocturnal polarized light is capable of providing accurate and stable navigation information in dim light outdoor environment.Based on the statistical characteristics of Angle of Polarization(Ao P)error,a probability density estimation method is proposed for heading determination.To illustrate the application potentials,the simulation and outdoor experiments are performed.Resultingly,the proposed method robustly models the distribution of Ao P error and gives accurate heading estimation evaluated by Standard Deviation(STD)which is 0.32°in a clear night sky and 0.47°in a cloudy night sky.

Recommending Personalized POIs from Location Based Social Network

Location based social networks（ LBSNs） provide location specific data generated from smart phone into online social networks thus people can share their points of interest（ POIs）. POI collections are complex and can be influenced by various factors,such as user preferences,social relationships and geographical influence. Therefore,recommending new locations in LBSNs requires to take all these factors into consideration. However,one problem is how to determine optimal weights of influencing factors in an algorithm in which these factors are combined. The user similarity can be obtained from the user check-in data,or from the user friend information,or based on the different geographical influences on each user＇s check-in activities. In this paper,we propose an algorithm that calculates the user similarity based on check-in records and social relationships,using a proposed weighting function to adjust the weights of these two kinds of similarities based on the geographical distance between users. In addition,a non-parametric density estimation method is applied to predict the unique geographical influence on each user by getting the density probability plot of the distance between every pair of user＇s check-in locations. Experimental results,using foursquare datasets,have shown that comparisons between the proposed algorithm and the other five baseline recommendation algorithms in LBSNs demonstrate that our proposed algorithm is superior in accuracy and recall,furthermore solving the sparsity problem.

An Optimization Technique for PMF Estimation in Approximate Circuits

As an emerging computing technology,approximate computing enables computing systems to utilize hardware resources efficiently.Recently,approximate arithmetic units have received extensive attention and have been employed as hardware modules to build approximate circuit systems,such as approximate accelerators.In order to make the approximate circuit system meet the application requirements,it is imperative to quickly estimate the error quality caused by the approximate unit,especially in the high-level synthesis of the approximate circuit.However,there are few studies in the literature on how to efficiently evaluate the errors in the approximate circuit system.Hence,this paper focuses on error evaluation techniques for circuit systems consisting of approximate adders and approximate multipliers,which are the key hardware components in fault-tolerant applications.In this paper,the characteristics of probability mass function(PMF)based estimation are analyzed initially,and then an optimization technique for PMF-based estimation is proposed with consideration of these features.Finally,experiments prove that the optimization technology can reduce the time required for PMF-based estimation and improve the estimation quality.

Hybrid Bayesian estimation tree learning with discrete and fuzzy labels

Classical decision tree model is one of the classical machine learning models for its simplicity and effectiveness in applications. However, compared to the DT model, probability estimation trees （PETs） give a better estimation on class probability. In order to get a good probability estimation, we usually need large trees which are not desirable with respect to model transparency. Linguistic decision tree （LDT） is a PET model based on label semantics. Fuzzy labels are used for building the tree and each branch is associated with a probability distribution over classes. If there is no overlap between neighboring fuzzy labels, these fuzzy labels then become discrete labels and a LDT with discrete labels becomes a special case of the PET model. In this paper, two hybrid models by combining the naive Bayes classifier and PETs are proposed in order to build a model with good performance without losing too much transparency. The first model uses naive Bayes estimation given a PET, and the second model uses a set of small-sized PETs as estimators by assuming the independence between these trees. Empirical studies on discrete and fuzzy labels show that the first model outperforms the PET model at shallow depth, and the second model is equivalent to the naive Bayes and PET.

Supply-Demand Analysis of Urban Emergency Shelters Based on Spatiotemporal Population Estimation

Supply–demand analysis is an important part of the planning of urban emergency shelters.Using Pudong New Area,Shanghai,China as an example,this study estimated daytime and nighttime population of the study area based on fine-scale land use data,census data,statistical yearbook information,and Tencent user-density big data.An exponential function-based,probability density estimation method was used to analyze the spatial supply of and demand for shelters under an earthquake scenario.The results show that even if all potential available shelters are considered,they still cannot satisfy the demand of the existing population for evacuation and sheltering,especially in the northern region of Pudong,under both the daytime and the nighttime scenarios.The proposed method can reveal the spatiotemporal imbalance between shelter supply and demand.We also conducted a preliminary location selection analysis of shelters based on the supply–demand analysis results.The location selection results demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method.It can be applied to identify the areas where the supply of shelters is seriously inadequate,and provide effective decision support for the planning of urban emergency shelters.

Particle flters for probability hypothesis density flter with the presence of unknown measurement noise covariance

In Bayesian multi-target fltering,knowledge of measurement noise variance is very important.Signifcant mismatches in noise parameters will result in biased estimates.In this paper,a new particle flter for a probability hypothesis density（PHD）flter handling unknown measurement noise variances is proposed.The approach is based on marginalizing the unknown parameters out of the posterior distribution by using variational Bayesian（VB）methods.Moreover,the sequential Monte Carlo method is used to approximate the posterior intensity considering non-linear and non-Gaussian conditions.Unlike other particle flters for this challenging class of PHD flters,the proposed method can adaptively learn the unknown and time-varying noise variances while fltering.Simulation results show that the proposed method improves estimation accuracy in terms of both the number of targets and their states.

Use of artificial neural networks to identify and analyze polymerized actin-based cytoskeletal structures in 3D confocal images

Background:Living cells need to undergo subtle shape adaptations in response to the topography of their substrates.These shape changes are mainly determined by reorganization of their internal cytoskeleton,with a major contribution from filamentous(F)actin.Bundles of F-actin play a major role in determining cell shape and their interaction with substrates,either as“stress fibers,”or as our newly discovered“Concave Actin Bundles”(CABs),which mainly occur while endothelial cells wrap micro-fibers in culture.Methods:To better understand the morphology and functions of these CABs,it is necessary to recognize and analyze as many of them as possible in complex cellular ensembles,which is a demanding and time-consuming task.In this study,we present a novel algorithm to automatically recognize CABs without further human intervention.We developed and employed a multilayer perceptron artificial neural network(“the recognizer”),which was trained to identify CABs.Results:The recognizer demonstrated high overall recognition rate and reliability in both randomized training,and in subsequent testing experiments.Conclusion:It would be an effective replacement for validation by visual detection which is both tedious and inherently prone to errors.

Learning random forests for ranking

The random forests （RF） algorithm, which combines the predictions from an ensemble of random trees, has achieved significant improvements in terms of classification accuracy. In many real-world applications, however, ranking is often required in order to make optimal decisions. Thus, we focus our attention on the ranking performance of RF in this paper. Our experi- mental results based on the entire 36 UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository （UCI） data sets published on the main website of Weka platform show that RF doesn＇t perform well in ranking, and is even about the same as a single C4.4 tree. This fact raises the question of whether several improvements to RF can scale up its ranking performance. To answer this question, we single out an improved random forests （IRF） algorithm. Instead of the information gain measure and the maximum-likelihood estimate, the average gain measure and the similarity- weighted estimate are used in IRF. Our experiments show that IRF significantly outperforms all the other algorithms used to compare in terms of ranking while maintains the high classification accuracy characterizing RF.

Harmonic moments and large deviations for a critical Galton-Watson process with immigration

In this paper,a critical Galton-Watson branching process with immigration Z_(n)is studied.We first obtain the convergence rate of the harmonic moment of Z_(n).Then the large deviation of S_(Z_(n)):∑_(i=1)^(Z_(n))X_(i)is obtained,where{X_(i)}is a sequence of independent and identically distributed zero-mean random variables with the tail indexα>2.We shall see that the converging rate is determined by the immigration mean,the variance of reproducing and the tail index of X_(1)^(+),compared with the previous result for the supercritical case,where the rate depends on the Schroder constant and the tail index.