In this letter, we examine a general method of approximation, known as the Kikuchi approximation method, for finding the marginals of a product distribution, as well as the corresponding partition function. The Kikuchi approximation method defines a certain constrained optimization problem, called the Kikuchi problem, and treats its stationary points as approximations to the desired marginals. ...

Due to its geo-climatic conditions, Algeria represents a biodiversity hotspot, with sheep breeds well adapted to a patchwork of extremely heterogeneous harsh habitats. The importance of this peculiar genetic reservoir increases as climate change drives the demand for new adaptations. However, the expansion of a single breed (Ouled-Djellal) which occurred in the last decades has generated a crit...

An important current trend in advertising is the replacement of traditional pay-per-exposure (pay-per-impression) pricing models with performance-based mechanisms in which advertisers pay only for measurable actions by consumers. Such pay-per-action (PPA) mechanisms are becoming the predominant method of selling advertising on the Internet. Well-known examples include pay-per-click, pay-per-cal...

Decentralizing optimization problems across a network can reduce the time required to achieve a solution. We consider a wide-area surveillance sensor network observing an environment by varying the state of each sensor so as to assign it to one or more moving objects. The aim is to maximize an arbitrary utility function related to object tracking or object identification, using graph marginaliz...

The marginalization paradox involves a disagreement between two Bayesians who use two different procedures for calculating a posterior in the presence of an improper prior. We show that the argument used to justify the procedure of one of the Bayesians is inapplicable. There is therefore no reason to expect agreement, no paradox, and no evidence that improper priors are inherently inconsistent....

With the increased accuracy and angular scale coverage of the recent CMB experiments it has become important to include calibration and beam uncertainties when estimating cosmological parameters. This requires an integration over possible values of the calibration and beam size, which can be performed numerically but greatly increases computation times. We present a fast and general method for ...

Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) or not? The answer is not! Within the historical context of our discipline, a doctorate degree should stand for advancing and translating knowledge. Clinical practice is the core of this knowledge. Separating the practice and research missions could undermine our ability to be equal partners in universities, as well as diminish our effectiveness in establishing ...

The presence of a vertical externality, and therefore an incentive to integrate or to impose vertical restraints, is investigated in 11 posted-offer experiments. Upstream markets are characterized by a single seller. When the downstream market consists of three firms, there is no evidence of a vertical externality, and behavior is consistent with the vertically integrated outcome. With a single...

Likelihood based-learning of graphical models faces challenges of computational-complexity and robustness to model error. This paper studies methods that fit parameters directly to maximize a measure of the accuracy of predicted marginals, taking into account both model and inference approximations at training time. Experiments on imaging problems suggest marginalization-based learning performs...

Many NLP tasks make predictions that are inherently coupled to syntactic relations, but for many languages the resources required to provide such syntactic annotations are unavailable. For others it is unclear exactly how much of the syntactic annotations can be effectively leveraged with current models, and what structures in the syntactic trees are most relevant to the current task. We propos...