The scope of the thesis is the analysis and design of fault tolerant control (FTC) schemes through the use of set-theoretic methods. In the framework of multisensor schemes, the faults appearance and the modalities to accurately detect them are investigated as well as the design of control laws which assure the closed-loop stability. By using invariant/contractive sets to describe the residual signals, a fault detection and isolation (FDI) mechanism with reduced computational demands is implemented based on set-separation. A dual mechanism, implemented by a recovery block, which certificates previously fault-affected sensors is also studied. From a broader theoretical perspective, we point to the conditions which allow the inclusion of {FDI} objectives in the control law design. This leads to static feedback gains synthesis by means of numerically attractive optimization problems. Depending on the parameters selected for tuning, is shown that the FTC design can be completed by a reference governor or a predictive control scheme which adapts the state trajectory and the feedback control action in order to assure {FDI}. When necessary, the specific issues originated by the use of set-theoretic methods are detailed and various improvements are proposed towards: invariant set construction, mixed integer programming (MIP), stability for switched systems (dwell-time notions).

Over the past few years, there has been a renewed interest in the consensus problem for ensembles of partitions. Recent work is primarily motivated by the developments in the area of combining multiple supervised learners. Unlike the consensus of supervised classifications, the consensus of data partitions is a challenging problem due to the lack of globally defined cluster labels and to the inherent difficulty of data clustering as an unsupervised learning problem. Moreover, the true number of clusters may be unknown. A fundamental goal of consensus methods for partitions is to obtain an optimal summary of an ensemble and to discover a cluster structure with accuracy and robustness exceeding those of the individual ensemble partitions. The quality of the consensus partitions highly depends on the ensemble generation mechanism and on the suitability of the consensus method for combining the generated ensemble. Typically, consensus methods derive an ensemble representation that is used as the basis for extracting the consensus partition. Most ensemble representations circumvent the labeling problem. On the other hand, voting-based methods establish direct parallels with consensus methods for supervised classifications, by seeking an optimal relabeling of the ensemble partitions and deriving an ensemble representation consisting of a central aggregated partition. An important element of the voting-based aggregation problem is the pairwise relabeling of an ensemble partition with respect to a representative partition of the ensemble, which is refered to here as the voting problem. The voting problem is commonly formulated as a weighted bipartite matching problem. In this dissertation, a general theoretical framework for the voting problem as a multi-response regression problem is proposed. The problem is formulated as seeking to estimate the uncertainties associated with the assignments of the objects to the representative clusters, given their assignments to the clusters of an ensemble partition. A new voting scheme, referred to as cumulative voting, is derived as a special instance of the proposed regression formulation corresponding to fitting a linear model by least squares estimation. The proposed formulation reveals the close relationships between the underlying loss functions of the cumulative voting and bipartite matching schemes. A useful feature of the proposed framework is that it can be applied to model substantial variability between partitions, such as a variable number of clusters. A general aggregation algorithm with variants corresponding to cumulative voting and bipartite matching is applied and a simulation-based analysis is presented to compare the suitability of each scheme to different ensemble generation mechanisms. The bipartite matching is found to be more suitable than cumulative voting for a particular generation model, whereby each ensemble partition is generated as a noisy permutation of an underlying labeling, according to a probability of error. For ensembles with a variable number of clusters, it is proposed that the aggregated partition be viewed as an estimated distributional representation of the ensemble, on the basis of which, a criterion may be defined to seek an optimally compressed consensus partition. The properties and features of the proposed cumulative voting scheme are studied. In particular, the relationship between cumulative voting and the well-known co-association matrix is highlighted. Furthermore, an adaptive aggregation algorithm that is suited for the cumulative voting scheme is proposed. The algorithm aims at selecting the initial reference partition and the aggregation sequence of the ensemble partitions the loss of mutual information associated with the aggregated partition is minimized. In order to subsequently extract the final consensus partition, an efficient agglomerative algorithm is developed. The algorithm merges the aggregated clusters such that the maximum amount of information is preserved. Furthermore, it allows the optimal number of consensus clusters to be estimated. An empirical study using several artificial and real-world datasets demonstrates that the proposed cumulative voting scheme leads to discovering substantially more accurate consensus partitions compared to bipartite matching, in the case of ensembles with a relatively large or a variable number of clusters. Compared to other recent consensus methods, the proposed method is found to be comparable with or better than the best performing methods. Moreover, accurate estimates of the true number of clusters are often achieved using cumulative voting, whereas consistently poor estimates are achieved based on bipartite matching. The empirical evidence demonstrates that the bipartite matching scheme is not suitable for these types of ensembles.

Over the past few years, there has been a renewed interest in the consensus problem for ensembles of partitions. Recent work is primarily motivated by the developments in the area of combining multiple supervised learners. Unlike the consensus of supervised classifications, the consensus of data partitions is a challenging problem due to the lack of globally defined cluster labels and to the inherent difficulty of data clustering as an unsupervised learning problem. Moreover, the true number of clusters may be unknown. A fundamental goal of consensus methods for partitions is to obtain an optimal summary of an ensemble and to discover a cluster structure with accuracy and robustness exceeding those of the individual ensemble partitions. The quality of the consensus partitions highly depends on the ensemble generation mechanism and on the suitability of the consensus method for combining the generated ensemble. Typically, consensus methods derive an ensemble representation that is used as the basis for extracting the consensus partition. Most ensemble representations circumvent the labeling problem. On the other hand, voting-based methods establish direct parallels with consensus methods for supervised classifications, by seeking an optimal relabeling of the ensemble partitions and deriving an ensemble representation consisting of a central aggregated partition. An important element of the voting-based aggregation problem is the pairwise relabeling of an ensemble partition with respect to a representative partition of the ensemble, which is refered to here as the voting problem. The voting problem is commonly formulated as a weighted bipartite matching problem. In this dissertation, a general theoretical framework for the voting problem as a multi-response regression problem is proposed. The problem is formulated as seeking to estimate the uncertainties associated with the assignments of the objects to the representative clusters, given their assignments to the clusters of an ensemble partition. A new voting scheme, referred to as cumulative voting, is derived as a special instance of the proposed regression formulation corresponding to fitting a linear model by least squares estimation. The proposed formulation reveals the close relationships between the underlying loss functions of the cumulative voting and bipartite matching schemes. A useful feature of the proposed framework is that it can be applied to model substantial variability between partitions, such as a variable number of clusters. A general aggregation algorithm with variants corresponding to cumulative voting and bipartite matching is applied and a simulation-based analysis is presented to compare the suitability of each scheme to different ensemble generation mechanisms. The bipartite matching is found to be more suitable than cumulative voting for a particular generation model, whereby each ensemble partition is generated as a noisy permutation of an underlying labeling, according to a probability of error. For ensembles with a variable number of clusters, it is proposed that the aggregated partition be viewed as an estimated distributional representation of the ensemble, on the basis of which, a criterion may be defined to seek an optimally compressed consensus partition. The properties and features of the proposed cumulative voting scheme are studied. In particular, the relationship between cumulative voting and the well-known co-association matrix is highlighted. Furthermore, an adaptive aggregation algorithm that is suited for the cumulative voting scheme is proposed. The algorithm aims at selecting the initial reference partition and the aggregation sequence of the ensemble partitions the loss of mutual information associated with the aggregated partition is minimized. In order to subsequently extract the final consensus partition, an efficient agglomerative algorithm is developed. The algorithm merges the aggregated clusters such that the maximum amount of information is preserved. Furthermore, it allows the optimal number of consensus clusters to be estimated. An empirical study using several artificial and real-world datasets demonstrates that the proposed cumulative voting scheme leads to discovering substantially more accurate consensus partitions compared to bipartite matching, in the case of ensembles with a relatively large or a variable number of clusters. Compared to other recent consensus methods, the proposed method is found to be comparable with or better than the best performing methods. Moreover, accurate estimates of the true number of clusters are often achieved using cumulative voting, whereas consistently poor estimates are achieved based on bipartite matching. The empirical evidence demonstrates that the bipartite matching scheme is not suitable for these types of ensembles.

There are many unsolved questions about the future of climate, and most of them are due to lack of knowledgeabout the complex system of atmosphere, but still there are models that produce relatively realistic projectionsof the future although there are uncertainties in the presentation of them, and that's where statistical methodscould be of help. Here a short introduction is given to the projection of future climate with GCM ensembles andthe uncertainties about them, the emerging probabilistic approach, as well as the REA (Reliability EnsembleAverage) method for measuring the reliability of the model projections. In order to have an impression of theresults of the GCM ensemble results and their uncertainties the results of the weather forecast over a time periodof one year in three dierent cities of Sweden is studied as well.

Most studies of gustatory coding have been performed in either anesthetized or awake, passively stimulated rats. In this dissertation the influences of behavioral state on gustatory processing in awake rats are described. In the first set of experiments, the effects of non-contingent tastant delivery on the chemical tuning of single neurons were explored. Tastants were delivered non-contingently through intra-oral cannulas to restrained, non water-deprived rats while single unit responses were recorded from the gustatory cortex (GC). As the subjects' behavior progressed from acceptance to rejection of the tastants, the chemical tuning of the neurons changed as well. This suggests that the subjects' behavioral state powerfully influences gustatory processing. In the second set of experiments, rats were trained to lick for fluid reinforcement on an FR5 schedule while single unit activity was recorded from GC. In this case, the chemical tuning was much more stable. Under this paradigm, chemosensory responses were rapid (~ 150 ms) and broadly tuned. In the third study, it was found that ensembles of GC neurons could discriminate between tastants and their concentrations on a single trial basis, and such discrimination was accomplished with a combination of rate and temporal coding. Ensembles of GC neurons also anticipated the identity of the upcoming stimulus when the tastant delivery was predictable. Finally, it was found that ensembles of GC neurons could discriminate between the bitter stimuli nicotine and quinine. Nicotine is both a bitter tastant and a trigeminal stimulant, and when the acetylcholine receptors in the lingual epithelium were blocked with mecamylamine, the ensembles failed to discriminate nicotine from quinine.

Mes travaux s'articulent autour de trois thématiques. <br />La première thèmatique porte sur la résolution via l'approche minimax de divers problèmes d'estimation et de tests d'hypothèses dans un cadre non-paramétrique. <br />En statistique Bayésienne non-paramétrique, je me suis intéressée à un problème d'estimation d'ensembles à niveau. Les résultats obtenus résultent de l'étude des propriétés asymptotiques d'estimation Bayésienne d'ensembles à niveau. Ce sont des résultats généraux au sens où la consistance et la vitesse de convergence de l'estimateur Bayésien sont établies pour une large classe de lois a priori. <br />La troisième thématique concerne un problème d'estimation paramétrique dans un modèle de déconvolution aveugle bruitée : il s'agit de restituer la loi du signal entrant. La consistance ainsi que la distribution asymptotique d'une nouvelle procédure d'estimation sont établies.

Reproduction de : Thèse de doctorat : Informatique : Reims : 2005. / Titre provenant de l'écran titre. Bibliogr. f. 143-156.

Thèse de doctorat : Urbanisme : Paris 12 : 2006. / Titre provenant de l'écran titre.

Thesis (Ph. D.--Music)--University of California, San Diego, 2000. / Vita.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2003. / Vita. "Three related compositions written for string quartet, small ensemble (soprano, violin, viola, cello, flute, clarinet, piano) and percussion duo"--P. viii; 3rd work an open form composition. Also available on the World Wide Web. (Access restricted to UC campuses).