This is the second post of a character network analysis of George R. R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF) series as well as my first submission to the R Bloggers community. A warm welcome to all readers out there! In my first post, I touched on the Tidygraph package to manipulate dataframes and ggraph for network visualisation as well as some tricks to fix the position of nodes when ploting multiple graphs containing the same node set and labeling based on polar coordinates. In this post, we combine the plots together and use gganimate to visualise all 5 books.

Dynamic Temporal Pyramid Network (DTPN) Recognizing instances at different scales simultaneously is a fundamental challenge in visual detection problems. While spatial multi-scale modeling has been well studied in object detection, how to effectively apply a multi-scale architecture to temporal models for activity detection is still under-explored. In this paper, we identify three unique challenges that need to be specifically handled for temporal activity detection compared to its spatial counterpart. To address all these issues, we propose Dynamic Temporal Pyramid Network (DTPN), a new activity detection framework with a multi-scale pyramidal architecture featuring three novel designs: (1) We sample input video frames dynamically with varying frame per seconds (FPS) to construct a natural pyramidal input for video of an arbitrary length. (2) We design a two-branch multi-scale temporal feature hierarchy to deal with the inherent temporal scale variation of activity instances. (3) We further exploit the temporal context of activities by appropriately fusing multi-scale feature maps, and demonstrate that both local and global temporal contexts are important. By combining all these components into a uniform network, we end up with a single-shot activity detector involving single-pass inferencing and end-to-end training. Extensive experiments show that the proposed DTPN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the challenging ActvityNet dataset. …

In previous posts (https://statcompute.wordpress.com/2017/01/22/monotonic-binning-with-smbinning-package) and (https://statcompute.wordpress.com/2017/06/15/finer-monotonic-binning-based-on-isotonic-regression), I’ve developed 2 different algorithms for monotonic binning. While the first tends to generate bins with equal densities, the second would define finer bins based on the isotonic regression.

I’d like to introduce to you the New Zealand Trade Intelligence Dashboard. This is one of the New Zealand government shiny web apps that should have been mentioned in Peter Ellis’ post. If you are only interested in TRADE, you may go to ‘Commodity Intelligence’ section directly.

Because I can’t share data from our item banks, I’ll generate a fake dataset to use in my demonstration. For the exams I’m using for my upcoming standard setting, I want to draw a large sample of items, stratified by both item difficulty (so that I have a range of items across the Rasch difficulties) and item domain (the topic from the exam outline that is assessed by that item). Let’s pretend I have an exam with 3 domains, and a bank of 600 items. I can generate that data like this:

Generalized Power Generalized Weibull Distribution This paper introduces a new generalization of the power generalized Weibull distribution called the generalized power generalized Weibull distribution. This distribution can also be considered as a generalization of Weibull distribution. The hazard rate function of the new model has nice and flexible properties and it can take various shapes, including increasing, decreasing, upside-down bathtub and bathtub shapes. Some of the statistical properties of the new model, including quantile function, moment generating function, reliability function, hazard function and the reverse hazard function are obtained. The moments, incomplete moments, mean deviations and Bonferroni and Lorenz curves and the order statistics densities are also derived. The model parameters are estimated by the maximum likelihood method. The usefulness of the proposed model is illustrated by using two applications of real-life data. …

In many applications such as color image processing, data has more than one piece of information associated with each spatial coordinate, and in such cases the classical optimal mass transport (OMT) must be generalized to handle vector-valued or matrix-valued densities. In this paper, we discuss the vector and matrix optimal mass transport and present three contributions. We first present a rigorous mathematical formulation for these setups and provide analytical results including existence of solutions and strong duality. Next, we present a simple, scalable, and parallelizable methods to solve the vector and matrix-OMT problems. Finally, we implement the proposed methods on a CUDA GPU and present experiments and applications. Vector and Matrix Optimal Mass Transport: Theory, Algorithm, and Applications

Posterior Mean Panel Predictor (pmpp)Dynamic panel modelling framework based on an empirical-Bayes approach. Contains tools for computing point forecasts and bootstrapping prediction inter …

Megan McArdle writes: