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Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Weather index insurance has become a popular subject in agricultural risk management. Under these policies farmers receive payments if they experience adverse weather for their crops. Spatial basis risk is the risk that weather observed at stations does not correspond to the weather experienced by the farmer. The objective of this research is to determine to what extent spatial basis risk can be impacted by the interpolation technique used to estimate weather conditions. Using forage crops from Ontario, Canada, as an example, a temperature based insurance index is developed. Seven different interpolation methods are used to estimate indemnities for forage producers. Results show that the number of weather stations in the interpolation area has a larger impact on spatial basis risk than the choice of interpolation technique. For insurers wishing to implement this type of insurance, more focus should be placed on increasing the number of available weather stations. / October 2016

Depuis l'antiquité jusqu'à aujourd'hui, le domaine de la logique a gagné une importance remarquable et contribue désormais à de nombreuses autres branches, telles que la philosophie, les mathématiques, la fabrication de matériel informatique, la linguistique, l'informatique, l'intelligence artificielle, etc. À chacun de ces scénarios correspondent des besoins spécifiques, qui vont d'exigences très concrètes, telles qu'une méthode d'inférence efficace, à des propriétés théoriques plus abstraites, telles qu'un système d'axiomes élégant. Étant donnée cette grande diversité d'utilisations, une palette hétéroclite de langages formels a été développée. Pendant de nombreuses années, les langages classiques (notamment la logique du premier ordre) étaient la seule alternative concevable, mais cet assortiment d'applications a rendu d'autres types de logiques également désirables dans de nombreuses situations. Imaginez que l'heure de choisir une logique pour une tâche spécifique arrive. Comment choisir la plus appropriée? Quelles propriétés devrions-nous rechercher? Comment "mesurer'' une logique par rapport aux autres? Ce sont des questions difficiles, et il n'existe pas de recette générale à suivre. Dans cette thèse, nous allons simplement restreindre ces questions à une famille particulière de logiques, et dans ce contexte, nous explorerons les aspects théoriques qui aideront à répondre à ces préoccupations. Beaucoup peut être découvert par une analyse attentive des cas les plus intéressants, et notre contribution sera développée selon cette philosophie. Les logiques modales propositionnelles offrent une alternative aux langages traditionnels. Elles peuvent être considérées comme un ensemble d'outils permettant de concevoir des logiques adaptées à des tâches précises, possédant un contrôle fin sur leur expressivité. De plus, il s'est avéré que les logiques modales possèdent un bon comportement computationnel, qui se trouve être robuste y compris malgré l'ajout d'extensions. Ces caractéristiques, parmi d'autres, ont élevé les logiques modales au rang d'alternatives désirables aux langages classiques. Dans ce thèse, nous allons présenter une nouvelle famille de logiques modales appelée logiques mémorielles. Les logiques modales traditionnelles permettent de décrire les structures relationnelles d'un point de vue local. Mais pourquoi ne pas changer cette structure? Nous voulons étudier l'ajout d'une structure de stockage explicite aux logiques modales, une mémoire, qui permet de modéliser un comportement dynamique à travers des opérateurs mémoriels explicites. Ces opérateurs sauvent ou restaurent de l'information vers et à partir de la mémoire. Naturellement, selon le type de structure de sauvegarde désiré et les opérateurs mémoriels disponibles, la logique résultante possèdera différentes propriétés qui valent la peine d'être étudiées. Cette thèse est organisée de la façon suivante. Dans le Chapitre 1, nous commençons par rappeler brièvement comment la logique modale est née, en montrant les différents points de vue historiques la concernant. Puis, nous présentons formellement la logique modale de base et un ensemble d'opérateurs étendus qui aident à capturer le ``goût'' modal de langages plus riches. Nous finissons ce chapitre en donnant un premier aperçu des logiques mémorielles, et montrons comment elles peuvent aider à modéliser l'état quand nous choisissons d'utiliser un ensemble comme une structure de sauvegarde. Le Chapitre 2 est dédié à la présentation détaillée des logiques mémorielles. Nous montrons quelques exemples qui peuvent être décrits en ajoutant un ensemble à des structures relationnelles usuelles, ainsi que les opérateurs ensemblistes usuels permettant l'ajout d'élément et le test d'appartenance. Puis, nous montrons que d'autres opérateurs mémoriels peuvent être envisagés, et nous discutons de la possibilité d'ajouter des contraintes à l'interaction entre la mémoire et les opérateurs modaux. Ces contraintes peuvent être vues comme une manière d'avoir un contrôle fin sur l'expressivité de la logique. Comme nous avons fait des changements aux logiques modales classiques, nous nous intéressons à l'analyse de l'impact de ces changements sur les logiques résultantes. Ainsi, le reste de ce chapitre présente une boite à outils logique basique avec laquelle nous pouvons analyser cette nouvelle famille de logiques. Cette boite à outils peut être vue comme un plan qui organise le reste de cette thèse et qui permet d'analyser les logiques mémorielles en termes d'expressivité, de complexité, d'interpolation et de théorie de la preuve. Le reste des chapitres consiste à étudier en détail chacun de ces aspects. Dans les Chapitres 3 et 4, nous explorons l'expressivité de plusieurs logiques mémorielles et nous étudions la décidabilité de leur problème de satisfiabilité. Dans les cas décidables, nous déterminons leur complexité. Nous analysons l'impact des différents opérateurs mémoriels considérés, et leur interaction. Nous étudions également d'autres conteneurs mémoriels, tels que la pile. Puis, dans le Chapitre 4, nous analysons l'interpolation de Craig et la définabilité de Beth pour certains fragments des logiques mémorielles. Nous étudions également les logiques mémorielles du point de vue de la théorie de la preuve. Dans les Chapitres 6 et 7, nous passons aux axiomatisations à la Hilbert et aux systèmes de tableaux, et nous caractérisons plusieurs fragments de la famille des logiques mémorielles, en utilisant principalement des techniques empruntées aux logiques hybrides. Nous concluons dans le Chapitre 8 avec quelques remarques, des problèmes ouverts et des directions pour de futures recherches. / From ancient times to the present day, the field of logic has gained significant strength and now it actively contributes to many different areas, such as philos- ophy, mathematics, linguistic, computer science, artificial intelligence, hardware manufacture, etc. Each of these scenarios has specific needs, that range from very concrete requirements, like an efficient inference method, to more abstract theoretical properties, like a neat axiomatic system. Given this wide diversity of uses, a motley collection of formal languages has been developed. For many years, classical languages (mainly classical first order logic) were the alternative, but this assortment of applications made other types of logics also attractive in many situations. Imagine that the time for choosing a logic for some specific task arrives. How can we decide which is the one that fits best? Which properties should we look for? How can we “measure” a logic with respect to others? These are not easy questions, and there is not a general recipe one can follow. In this thesis we are just going to restrict these questions to a particular family of logics, and in that context we will investigate theoretical aspects that help to answer some of these concerns. Much can be discovered by carefully analyzing appealing cases, and our contribution will be developed having that philosophy in mind. Propositional modal logics offer an alternative to traditional languages. They can be regarded as a set of tools that allow to design logics specially tailored for specific tasks, having a fine-grained control on their expressivity. Additionally, modal logics turned out to have a good computational behavior, which proved to be quite robust under extensions. These characteristics, among others, placed modal logics as an attractive alternative to classical languages. In this dissertation we are going to present a new family of modal logics called memory logics. Traditional modal logics enables to describe relational structures from a local perspective. But what about changing the structure? We want to explore the addition of an explicit storage structure to modal logics, a mem- ory, that allows to model dynamic behavior through explicit memory operators. These operators store or retrieve information to and from the memory. Natu- rally, depending on which type of storage structure we want, and which memory operators are available, the resulting logic will enjoy different properties that are worth investigating. The thesis is organized as follows. In Chapter 1 we start by giving a brief recap of how modal logic was born, showing the different historical perspectives used to look at modal logic. Then we formally present the basic modal logic and a set of extended operators that helps grasp the modal “flavor” of some richer languages. We finish this chapter by giving a first glance of memory logics, and showing how they can help to model state when we choose to use a set as storage structure. Chapter 2 is devoted to present memory logics in detail. We show some examples that can be described by adding a set to standard relational structures, and the usual set operators to add elements and test membership. We then show some other memory operators that can be considered, and we discuss the possibility of adding constraints to the interplay between memory and modal operators. These constraints can be regarded as a way to have a finer-grained control on the logic expressivity. Since we have made changes to classical modal logics, we are interested in analyzing the impact those changes cause in the resulting logics. Therefore, the rest of this chapter presents a basic logic toolkit through which we can analyze this new family of logics. This toolkit can be seen as an outline that organizes the rest of the thesis and that allows to analyze memory logics in terms of expressivity, complexity, interpolation and proof theory. The rest of the chapters investigate each of these aspects in detail. In Chap- ters 3 and 4 we explore the expressive power of several memory logics and we study the decidability of their satisfiability problem. In the decidable cases, we determine their computational complexity. We analyze the impact of the differ- ent memory operators we consider, and how they interact. We also study other memory containers, such as a stack. Then, in Chapter 5, we analyze Craig inter- polation and Beth definability for some memory logic fragments. We also study memory logics from a proof theoretical perspective. In Chapter 6 and 7 we turn to Hilbert style axiomatizations and tableau systems, and we characterize several fragments of the memory logic family mostly using techniques borrowed from hy- brid logics. We close in Chapter 8 with some concluding remarks, open problems and directions for further research.

O problema de reconstruir uma função f a partir de um número finito de valores conhecidos f(x0), f(x1), ..., f(xn) aparece com frequência em modelagem matemática. Em geral, não é possível determinar f completamente a partir de f(x0), f(x1), ..., f(xn), mas, em muitos casos de interesse, podemos encontrar aproximações razoáveis para f usando interpolação, que consiste em determinar uma função (um polinômio, ou uma função racional ou trigonométrica, etc) g que satisfaça g(xi) = f(xi); i = 0, 1, ..., n: Na prática, a função interpoladora g é avaliada em precisão finita e o valor final computado de g(x) pode diferir do valor exato g(x) devido a erros de arredondamento. Essa diferença pode, inclusive, ultrapassar o erro de interpolação E(x) = f(x) - g(x) em várias ordens de magnitude, comprometendo todo o processo de aproximação. A estabilidade numérica de um algoritmo reflete sua sensibilidade em relação a erros de arredondamento. Neste trabalho apresentamos uma análise detalhada da estabilidade numérica de alguns algoritmos utilizados no cálculo de interpoladores polinomiais ou racionais que podem ser postos na forma baricêntrica. Os principais resultados deste trabalho também estão disponíveis em língua inglesa nos artigos - Mascarenhas, W e Camargo, A. P., On the backward stability of the second barycentric formula for interpolation, Dolomites research notes on approximation v. 7 (2014) pp. 1-12. - Camargo, A. P., On the numerical stability of Floater-Hormann\'s rational interpolant, Numerical Algorithms, DOI 10.1007/s11075-015-0037-z. - Camargo, A. P., Erratum: On the numerical stability of Floater-Hormann\'s rational interpolant\", Numerical Algorithms, DOI 10.1007/s11075-015-0071-x. - Camargo, A. P. e Mascarenhas, W., The stability of extended Floater-Hormann interpolants, Numerische Mathematik, submetido. arXiv:1409.2808v5 / The problem of reconstructing a function f from a finite set of known values f(x0), f(x1), ..., f(xn) appears frequently in mathematical modeling. It is not possible, in general, to completely determine f from f(x0), f(x1), ..., f(xn) but, in several cases of interest, it is possible to find reasonable approximations for f by interpolation, which consists in finding a suitable function (a polynomial function, a rational or trigonometric function, etc.) g such that g(xi) = f(xi); i = 0, 1, ..., n: In practice, the interpolating function g is evaluated in finite precision and the final computed value of g(x) may differ from the exact value g(x) due to rounding. In fact, such difference can even exceed the interpolation error E(x) = f(x)-g(x) in several orders of magnitude, compromising the entire approximation process. The numerical stability of an algorithm reflect is sensibility with respect to rounding. In this work we present a detailed analysis of the numerical stability of some algorithms used to evaluate polynomial or rational interpolants which can be put in the barycentric format. The main results of this work are also available in english in the papers - Mascarenhas, W e Camargo, A. P., On the backward stability of the second barycentric formula for interpolation, Dolomites research notes on approximation v. 7 (2014) pp. 1-12. - Camargo, A. P., On the numerical stability of Floater-Hormann\'s rational interpolant, Numerical Algorithms, DOI 10.1007/s11075-015-0037-z. - Camargo, A. P., Erratum: On the numerical stability of Floater-Hormann\'s rational interpolant\", Numerical Algorithms, DOI 10.1007/s11075-015-0071-x. - Camargo, A. P. e Mascarenhas, W., The stability of extended Floater-Hormann interpolants, Numerische Mathematik, submetido. arXiv:1409.2808v5

Benson spaces of higher order are introduced extending the idea of N. Krugljak and M. Milman, A distance between orbits that controls commutator estimates and invertibilty of operators, Advances in Mathematics 182 (2004), 78-123. The concept of Benson shift operators is introduced and a class of spaces equipped with these operators is considered. Commutator theorems of higher order on orbit spaces generated by a single element are proved for this class. It is shown that these results apply to the complex method of interpolation and to the real method of interpolation for the case q=1. Two new characterizations are presented of the domain space of the "derivation" operator in the context of orbital methods. Comparisons to the work of others are made, especially the unifying paper of M. Cwikel, N. Kalton, M. Milman and R. Rochberg, A United Theory of Commutator Estimates for a Class of Interpolation Methods, Advances in Mathematics 169 2002, 241-312. / by Eva, Kasprikova / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This thesis covers two main areas which are related to the mapping and examination of the ionosphere. The first examines the performance and specific nuances of various state-of-the-art interpolation methods with specific application to mapping the ionosphere. This work forms the most widely scoped examination of interpolation technique for ionospheric imaging to date, and includes the introduction of normalised convolution techniques to geophysical data. In this study, adaptive-normalised convolution was found to perform well in ionospheric electron content mapping, and the popular technique, kriging was found to have problems which limit its usefulness. The second, is the development and examination of automatic data-driven motion estimation methods for use on ionospheric electron content data. Particular emphasis is given to storm events, during which characteristic shapes appear and move across the North Pole. This is a particular challenge, as images covering this region tend to have a very-low resolution. Several motion estimation methods are developed and applied to such data, including methods based on optical flow, correlation and boundarycorrespondence. Correlation and relaxation labelling based methods are found to perform reasonably, and boundary based methods based on shape-context matching are found to perform well, when coupled with a regularisation stage. Overall, the techniques examined and developed here will help advance the process of examining the features and morphology of the ionosphere, both during storms and quiet times.

by Sze Tsz-leung. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91). / Chapter Chapter 1 --- Introduction / Chapter 1.1 --- Basic concepts of Monte Carlo integration --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1.1 --- Importance sampling --- p.4 / Chapter 1.1.2 --- Control variate --- p.5 / Chapter 1.1.3 --- Antithetic variate --- p.6 / Chapter 1.1.4 --- Stratified sampling --- p.7 / Chapter 1.1.5 --- Biased Estimator --- p.10 / Chapter 1.2 --- Some special methods in Monte Carlo integration --- p.11 / Chapter 1.2.1 --- Haber´ةs modified Monte Carlo quadrature I --- p.11 / Chapter 1.2.2 --- Haber's modified Monte Carlo quadrature II --- p.11 / Chapter 1.2.3 --- Weighted Monte Carlo integration --- p.12 / Chapter 1.2.4 --- Adaptive importance sampling --- p.13 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- New methods / Chapter 2.1 --- The use of Newton Cotes quadrature formulae in stage one --- p.17 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Using one-dimensional trapezoidal rule --- p.17 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Using two-dimensional or higher dimensional product trapezoidal rule --- p.21 / Chapter 2.1.3 --- Extension to higher order one-dimensional Newton Cotes formulae --- p.32 / Chapter 2.2 --- The use of Guass quadrature rule in stage one --- p.45 / Chapter 2.3 --- Some variations of the new methods --- p.56 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- Using probability points in both stages --- p.56 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- Importance sampling --- p.59 / Chapter 2.3.2.1 --- Triangular distribution --- p.60 / Chapter 2.3.2.2 --- Beta distribution --- p.64 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- Examples / Chapter 3.1 --- Example one: using trapezoidal rule as basic rule --- p.73 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- One-dimensional case --- p.73 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- Two-dimensional case --- p.80 / Chapter 3.2 --- Example two: Using Simpson's 3/8 rule as basic rule --- p.85 / Chapter 3.3 --- Example three： Using Guass rule as basic rule --- p.86 / Chapter Chapter 4 --- Conclusion and discussions --- p.88 / Reference --- p.91

Este trabalho apresenta um estudo sobre métodos utilizados para realizar metamorfose entre imagens digitais. Segundo esses métodos é possível estabelecer uma imagem fonte, uma destino e, através de operações de mapeamento de texturas, realizar uma seqüência de imagens intermediárias. Essas imagens intermediárias apresentam-se como deformações sobre a imagem fonte ou como etapas de transição entre as imagens originais, efeito produzido pela inserção de um processo de fusão de imagens. O processo de deformação varia segundo o método empregado e influencia diretamente nos resultados por ele gerado. Assim, dois métodos com características diferentes para deformação de imagens foram escolhidos, dentre os encontrados, para um estudo mais aprofundado e são referenciados como o Método das Malhas e o Método dos Campos de Influência. Esses métodos são apresentados, seus funcionamentos discutidos e resultados gerados para se estabelecer uma análise entre os mesmos. A análise é efetuada segundo os aspectos de tempo de processamento, consumo de minoria e atribuição de correspondências entre as imagens, sendo que esta última característica leva em consideração o tempo total gasto para se estabelecer as correspondências necessárias entre a imagem fonte e a destino. Neste ponto também é estabelecido um quadro comparativo entre os métodos escolhidos, destacando-se vantagens e desvantagens. Os resultados da aplicação dos métodos analisados encontram-se distribuídos ao longo do texto sob a forma de imagens e tabelas, são utilizados para provar a eficiência desses métodos e foram gerados por um sistema de testes implementado. O sistema de testes desenvolvido possibilita a geração de imagens, segundo o método escolhido, informa os tempos utilizados no processamento e exibe essas imagens seqüencialmente sob a forma de uma animação. Por fim o trabalho apresenta conclusões sobre o estudo, salientando aspectos considerados relevantes quando do estudo e implementação dos métodos, e indica futuras extensões que podem ser efetuadas a fim de tornar o sistema de testes mais flexível e completo. / This work presents a study on methods used to make digital images metamorphosis. According to these methods it is possible to establish a source image, a destination image and also to generate a sequence of intermediate images through operations of texture mapping. These intermediate images appears as deformations of the source image or as transition steps between the original images which are produced by the insertion of a cross-dissolve process. The warping process varies according to the method which is used and it influences directly its results. Thus, two methods for image warping with different characteristics were chosen, among the available ones, for a more detailed study and are refered as the Mesh Method and as the Fields of Influence Method. These two methods are presented, their functioning is discussed and results are generated to allow comparative analyses. The analysis concerns aspects of processing time, memory allocation and correspondence establishment, which take into account the time waisted in order to establish the correspondences between the images. At this point it is also established a comparative table between the chosen methods highlighting advantages and disadvantages. The results of the application of the analysed methods are distributed throughout the text as images and tables, which are used to prove the efficiency of them and were generated by a test system implemented. The system developed provides the generation of images, according to the choosen method, informs the time waisted on processing and shows those images sequentially as an animation. Finally this work presents conclusions about the study and indicates future extensions that can be done in order to make the developed system more flexible and complete.

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Mecânica. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2010