Many applications in signal processing and machine learning require the study of probability density functions (pdfs) that can only be accessed through noisy evaluations. In this work, we analyze importance sampling (IS), i.e., IS working with evaluations target density. We present general framework derive optimal proposal densities for estimators. The proposals incorporate information variance...

In this paper we consider the joint performance of fountain codes and 802.11a/g PHY modulation/coding. We consider optimality both in terms of maximizing goodput and minimizing energy, and results are presented for both theoretical and experimental channel models. In contrast to studies in cellular networks, we find that in 802.11a/g WLANs the cross-layer approach of a higher-layer fountain cod...

Given an edge-weighted transportation network G and a list of transportation requests L, the stacker crane problem is to find a minimum-cost tour for a server along the edges of G that serves all requests. The server has capacity one, and starts and stops at the same vertex. In this paper, we consider the case that the transportation network G is a tree, and that the requests are chosen randoml...