Sharif Digital Repository

A new technique for the laminar-turbulent intermittency measurement based on the surface hot-film data is presented. The existing techniques require data acquired from the calibrated hot-films which leads to the real wall shear stress values. However, calibration of the hot-films is usually very complex. In the proposed method, a technique based on the probability distribution function (PDF) of the acquired data using the uncalibrated hot-film sensors is presented and evaluated. The PDF is prepared for a reduced form of the quasi-wall shear stress value instead of the real shear stress value one. This leads to a standard normal distribution curve for the PDF in the turbulent flow region and... 

Noise reduction of speech signals plays an important role in telecommunication systems. Various types of speech additive noise can be introduced such as babble, crowd, large city, and highway which are the main factor of degradation in perceived speech quality. There are some cases on the receiver side of telecommunication systems, where the direct value of interfering noise is not available and there is just access to noisy speech. In these cases the noise cannot be cancelled totally but it may be possible to reduce the noise in a sensible way by utilizing the statistics of the noise and speech signal. In this paper the proposed method for noise reduction is Bayesian recursive state-space... 

Ubiquitous power-law as a fingerprint of Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) is used for describing catastrophic events in different fields. In this paper, by investigating the prerequisites of SOC, we show that SOC-like dynamics drive a correlation among disturbances in Iranian bulk power systems. The existence of power-law regions in probability distribution is discussed for empirical data using maximum likelihood estimation. To verify the results, long time correlation is evaluated in terms of Hurst exponents, by means of statistical analysis of time series, including Rescaled Range (R/S) and Scaled Windowed Variance (SWV) analysis. Also, sensitivity analysis showed that for correct... 

In this paper, the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of the change point in a high-yield process when a linear trend disturbance occurs in the proportion nonconformity of the process is first derived. Then, the performances of the proposed change point estimator in terms of both accuracy and precision are compared to the MLE of the change point designed for step changes. The results of the comparison analysis that is performed using Monte Carlo simulation experiments show that not only the average estimates of the change point estimator designed for linear trends are closer to the real change point, but also its mean square error is smaller than the one of the estimator designed for step... 

This paper presents the application of information gap decision theory (IGDT) to help the distribution network operators (DNOs) in choosing the supplying resources for meeting the demand of their customers. The three main energy resources are pool market, distributed generations (DGs), and the bilateral contracts. In deregulated environment, the DNO is faced with many uncertainties associated to the mentioned resources which may not have enough information about their nature and behaviors. In such cases, the classical methods like probabilistic methods or fuzzy methods are not applicable for uncertainty modeling because they need some information about the uncertainty behaviors like... 

The noise exists in almost all environments such as cellular mobile telephone systems. Various types of noise can be introduced such as speech additive noise which is the main factor of degradation in perceived speech quality. At some applications for example at the receiver of a telecommunication system, the direct value of interfering noise is not available and there is just access to noisy speech. In these cases the noise cannot be cancelled totally but it may be possible to reduce the noise in a sensible way by utilizing the statistics of the noise and speech signal. In this paper the proposed method for noise reduction is Bayesian recursive state-space Kalman filter, which is a method... 

Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems are widely used for detection of various kinds of abnormalities in mammography images. Masses are one type of these abnormalities which are mostly characterized by their margin and shape. For classification of masses proper features are needed to be extracted. However, the number of well-known features for describing margin is much fewer than geometrical, shape, and textural ones. In addition, most of the existing margin features are highly dependent on segmentation accuracy. In this work, new features for describing margin of masses are presented which can handle inaccuracies in segmentation. These features are obtained from a set of waveforms by... 

Marton's inner bound is the best known achievable region for a general discrete memoryless broadcast channel. To compute Marton's inner bound one has to solve an optimization problem over a set of joint distributions on the input and auxiliary random variables. The optimizers turn out to be structured in many cases. Finding properties of optimizers not only results in efficient evaluation of the region, but it may also help one to prove factorization of Marton's inner bound (and thus its optimality). The first part of this paper formulates this factorization approach explicitly and states some conjectures and results along this line. The second part of this paper focuses primarily on the... 

If at least one out of two serial machines that produce a specific product in manufacturing environments malfunctions, there will be non conforming items produced. Determining the optimal time of the machines' maintenance is the one of major concerns. While a convenient common practice for this kind of problem is to fit a single probability distribution to the combined defect data, it does not adequately capture the fact that there are two different underlying causes of failures. A better approach is to view the defects as arising from a mixture population: one due to the first machine failures and the other due to the second one. In this article, a mixture model along with both Bayesian... 

Recently, there has been a growing interest in estimation of sparse channels as they are observed in underwater acoustic and ultrawideband channels. In this paper we present a new Bayesian sparse channel estimation (SCE) algorithm that, unlike traditional SCE methods, exploits noise statistical information to improve the estimates. The proposed method uses approximate maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) to detect the non-zero channel tap locations while least square estimation is used to determine the values of the channel taps. Computer simulations shows that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms in terms of normalized mean squared error (NMSE) and approaches... 

In this paper, we introduce a generalization of the Multiple-Access-Relay- Channel (MARC) called Multiple-Access-Relay-Network (MARN). In the proposed network, there are many transmitters, many relays and one receiver. The MARC model was first introduced by Kramer and consists of many transmitters, one receiver and only one relay.We also define semi-deterministic MARN, in which the output of the link between each transmitter and each relay is a deterministic function of the transmitter's input. We first obtain an achievable rate region for MARN by considering Partial Decode-and-Forward (PDF) strategy at the relays. Then we show that in semi-deterministic MARN, the proposed achievable rate... 

Reliability of the power distribution unit (PDU) is very important in electrical systems. Since any failure in this unit leads to system failure. A commonly used method for increasing the reliability of a dc PDU is using the redundant modules. If a fault occurs in a voltage regulator of PDU, it is replaced by its redundant module. In conventional redundancy, each dc voltage regulator has its exclusive redundant modules. Therefore, if both a regulator and its redundant modules fail, the system is stopped. It is an important drawback since the exclusive redundant modules of other voltage regulators may not be used, but, the PDU cannot use them instead of faulty regulators. In this paper, the... 

Construction managers regularly monitor projects to ensure that the project performance is under control. The earned value method (EVM) is a widely used tool to forecast project cost and time at completion. However, the effectiveness of the EVM in forecasting schedule performance has been questioned particularly because of its inability to address the associated uncertainties and poor performance in predicting project duration. The objective of this study is to present an activity-based model to conduct a probabilistic assessment and estimation of schedule performance in repetitive construction projects. This model, called the Weibull evaluation and forecasting model (WEFM), emphasizes the... 

The generalized belief propagation (GBP), introduced by Yedidia et al., is an extension of the belief propagation (BP) algorithm, which is widely used in different problems involved in calculating exact or approximate marginals of probability distributions. In many problems, it has been observed that the accuracy of GBP outperforms that of BP considerably. However, due to its generally higher complexity compared to BP, its application is limited in practice. In this paper, we introduce a stochastic version of GBP called stochastic generalized belief propagation (SGBP) that can be considered as an extension to the stochastic BP (SBP) algorithm introduced by Noorshams et al. They have shown... 

Association mapping of genetic diseases has attracted extensive research interest during the recent years. However, most of the methodologies introduced so far suffer from spurious inference of the associated sites due to population inhomogeneities. In this paper, we introduce a statistical framework to compensate for this shortcoming by equipping the current methodologies with a state-of-the-art clustering algorithm being widely used in population genetics applications. The proposed framework jointly infers the disease-associated factors and the hidden population structures. In this regard, a Markov Chain-Monte Carlo (MCMC) procedure has been employed to assess the posterior probability... 

Poisson factorization is a probabilistic model of users and items for recommendation systems, where the so-called implicit consumer data is modeled by a factorized Poisson distribution. There are many variants of Poisson factorization methods who show state-of-the-art performance on real-world recommendation tasks. However, most of them do not explicitly take into account the temporal behavior and the recurrent activities of users which is essential to recommend the right item to the right user at the right time. In this paper, we introduce Recurrent Poisson Factorization (RPF) framework that generalizes the classical PF methods by utilizing a Poisson process for modeling the implicit... 

In this paper, we investigate and develop an alternative approach to the numerical analysis and characterization of random fluctuations with the heavy-tailed probability distribution function (PDF), such as turbulent heat flow and solar flare fluctuations. We identify the heavy-tailed random fluctuations based on the scaling properties of the tail exponent of the PDF, power-law growth of qth order correlation function, and the self-similar properties of the contour lines in two-dimensional random fields. Moreover, this work leads to a substitution for the fractional Edwards-Wilkinson (EW) equation that works in the presence of μ-stable Lévy noise. Our proposed model explains the... 

Nowadays, large-scale power outages induced by ever-growing natural disasters are increasing at a galloping rate. In this regard, this paper aims at improving the resilience of power distribution systems in facing high impact low probability (HILP) events in the planning phase of the system. To this end, optimal switch placement along with the optimal distribution line hardening strategies is proposed to mitigate the repercussions of the natural calamities. So, decreasing the failure probability of the distribution lines alongside the optimal placement of remote-controlled switches (RCSs) to increase the maneuvering capability of the system, the system operator would be able to strengthen...