Consistency is a key property of statistical algorithms, when the data is drawn from some underlying probability distribution. Surprisingly, despite decades of work, little is known about consistency of most clustering algorithms. In this paper we investigate consistency of a popular family

We describe the transferable belief model, a model for representing quantified beliefs based on belief functions. Beliefs can be held at two levels: (1) a credal level where beliefs are entertained and quantified by belief functions, (2) a pignistic level where beliefs can be used to make decisions

Markov random field models provide a robust and unified framework for early vision problems such as stereo, optical flow and image restoration. Inference algorithms based on graph cuts and belief propagation yield accurate results, but despite recent advances are often still too slow for practical

with the task of fusing and propagating the impacts of new information through the networks in such a way that, when equilibrium is reached, each proposition will be assigned a measure of belief consistent with the axioms of probability theory. It is shown that if the network is singly connected (e.g. tree

Important inference problems in statistical physics, computer vision, error-correcting coding theory, and artificial intelligence can all be reformulated as the computation of marginal probabilities on factor graphs. The belief propagation (BP) algorithm is an efficient way to solve these problems

Abstract Recently, researchers have demonstrated that "loopy belief propagation" -the use of Pearl's polytree algorithm in a Bayesian network with loops -can perform well in the context of error-correcting codes. The most dramatic instance of this is the near Shannon

of existing resources, and scale gracefully as the network grows. Our caching protocols are based on a special kind of hashing that we call consistent hashing. Roughly speaking, a consistent hash function is one which changes minimally as the range of the function changes. Through the development of good

, or of how investors form beliefs, which is consistent with the empirical findings. The model is based on psychological evidence and produces both underreaction and overreaction for a wide range of parameter values. � 1998 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved. JEL classification: G12; G14

This paper proposes a mechanism for equation-based congestion control for unicast traffic. Most best-effort traffic in the current Internet is well-served by the dominant transport protocol, TCP. However, traffic such as best-effort unicast streaming multimedia could find use for a TCP

In this article we propose a standard for role-based access control (RBAC). Although RBAC models have received broad support as a generalized approach to access control, and are well recognized for their many advantages in performing large-scale authorization management, no single authoritative