Networks offer a powerful approach to modeling complex systems by representing the underlying set of pairwise interactions. Link prediction is the task that predicts links of a network that are not directly visible, with profound applications in biological, social, and other complex systems. Despite intensive utilization of the topological feature in this task, it is unclear to what extent a feature can be leveraged to infer missing links. Here, we aim to unveil the capability of a topological feature in link prediction by identifying its prediction performance upper bound. We introduce a theoretical framework that is compatible with different indexes to gauge the feature, different prediction approaches to utilize the feature, and different metrics to quantify the prediction performance. The maximum capability of a topological feature follows a simple yet theoretically validated expression, which only depends on the extent to which the feature is held in missing and nonexistent links. Because a family of indexes based on the same feature shares the same upper bound, the potential of all others can be estimated from one single index. Furthermore, a feature's capability is lifted in the supervised prediction, which can be mathematically quantified, allowing us to estimate the benefit of applying machine learning algorithms. The universality of the pattern uncovered is empirically verified by 550 structurally diverse networks. The findings have applications in feature and method selection, and shed light on network characteristics that make a topological feature effective in link prediction.
Federated Learning (FL) allows edge devices (or clients) to keep data locally while simultaneously training a shared high-quality global model. However, current research is generally based on an assumption that the training data of local clients have ground-truth. Furthermore, FL faces the challenge of statistical heterogeneity, i.e., the distribution of the client's local training data is non-independent identically distributed (non-IID). In this paper, we present a robust semi-supervised FL system design, where the system aims to solve the problem of data availability and non-IID in FL. In particular, this paper focuses on studying the labels-at-server scenario where there is only a limited amount of labeled data on the server and only unlabeled data on the clients. In our system design, we propose a novel method to tackle the problems, which we refer to as Federated Mixing (FedMix). FedMix improves the naive combination of FL and semi-supervised learning methods and designs parameter decomposition strategies for disjointed learning of labeled, unlabeled data, and global models. To alleviate the non-IID problem, we propose a novel aggregation rule based on the frequency of the client's participation in training, namely the FedFreq aggregation algorithm, which can adjust the weight of the corresponding local model according to this frequency. Extensive evaluations conducted on CIFAR-10 dataset show that the performance of our proposed method is significantly better than those of the current baseline. It is worth noting that our system is robust to different non-IID levels of client data.
It is challenging to detect small-floating object in the sea clutter for a surface radar. In this paper, we have observed that the backscatters from the target brake the continuity of the underlying motion of the sea surface in the time-Doppler spectra (TDS) images. Following this visual clue, we exploit the local binary pattern (LBP) to measure the variations of texture in the TDS images. It is shown that the radar returns containing target and those only having clutter are separable in the feature space of LBP. An unsupervised one-class support vector machine (SVM) is then utilized to detect the deviation of the LBP histogram of the clutter. The outiler of the detector is classified as the target. In the real-life IPIX radar data sets, our visual feature based detector shows favorable detection rate compared to other three existing approaches.