In the paper, the class of discrete linear systems is enlarged with the inclusion of discrete-time fractional linear systems. These are systems described by fractional difference equations and fractional frequency responses. It is shown how io compute the impulse response and transfer function. Fractal signals are introduced as output of special linear systems: fractional differaccumulators, sy...

This paper describes a robust feature extraction method for continuous speech recognition. Central to the method is the Minimum Variance Distortionless Response (MVDR) method of spectrum estimation and a feature trajectory smoothing technique for reducing the variance in the feature vectors. The above method, when evaluated on continuous speech recognition tasks in a stationary and moving car, ...

This paper experimentally examines how information affects behavior in a threshold public goods game. Three treatments investigate how subjects react to varying amounts of information about the contribution behavior of other group members. Results suggest that revealing anonymous information about others' contributions leads to a significant decrease in contributions and an increase in the vari...

We present a simple modification to the idea of impact-based search which has proven highly effective for several applications. Impacts measure the average reduction in search space due to propagation after a variable assignment has been committed. Rather than considering the mean reduction only, we consider the idea of incorporating the variance in reduction. Experimental results show that usi...

We consider discrete time, finite state space Markov rewaxd processes which depend on a set of parameters. Previously, we proposed a simulation-based methodology to tune the parameters to optimize the average reward. The resulting algorithms converge with probability 1, but may have a high variance. Here we propose two approaches to reduce the variance, which however introduce a new bias into t...

STUDY OBJECTIVES Environmental noise exposure disturbs sleep and impairs recuperation, and may contribute to the increased risk for (cardiovascular) disease. Noise policy and regulation are usually based on average responses despite potentially large inter-individual differences in the effects of traffic noise on sleep. In this analysis, we investigated what percentage of the total variance in ...

In a 1976 paper published in Science, Knuth presented an algorithm to sample (non-uniform) self-avoiding walks crossing a square of side k. From this sample, he constructed an estimator for the number of such walks. The quality of this estimator is directly related to the (relative) variance of a certain random variable Xk . From his experiments, Knuth suspected that this variance was extremely...