The theory of constraints is an approach to production planning and control that emphasizes on the constraints to increase throughput by effectively managing constraint resources. One application in theory of constraints is product mix decision. Product mix influences the performance measures in multi-product manufacturing system. This paper presents an alternative approach by using of goal pro...

Speaker diarization is the task of identifying “who spoke when” in an audio stream containing multiple speakers. This is an unsupervised task as there is no a priori information about the speakers. Diagnostical studies on state-of-the-art diarization systems have isolated three main issues with the systems; overlapping speech, effects of background noise and speech/nonspeech detection errors on...

Co-clustering has emerged as an important approach for mining contingency data matrices. We present a novel approach to co-clustering based on the Information Bottleneck principle, called Information Bottleneck Co-clustering (IBCC), which supports both soft-partition and hardpartition co-clusterings, and leverages an annealing-style strategy to bypass local optima. Existing co-clustering method...

The first positive trend is the slowing of global population growth. There is a significant shift in global fertility that will enable us at least to think about moving to a world of near stable populations within a century, maybe sooner. Fertility in about 40 per cent of the world’s countries is now below the replacement rate. Another 40 per cent are experiencing continued downward movement of...

A matrix S = (sij) ∈ R n×n is said to determine a transitional measure for a digraph Γ on n vertices if for all i, j, k ∈ {1, . . . , n}, the transition inequality sij sjk ≤ sik sjj holds and reduces to the equality (called the graph bottleneck identity) if and only if every path in Γ from i to k contains j. We show that every positive transitional measure produces a distance by means of a loga...

The term ‘bottleneck’ has been extensively used in operations management literature. Management paradigms like the Theory of Constraints focus on the identification and exploitation of bottlenecks. Yet, we show that the term has not been rigorously defined. We provide a classification of bottleneck definitions available in literature and discuss several myths associated with the concept of bott...

We present an extension of the well-known information bottleneck framework, called conditional information bottleneck, which takes negative relevance information into account by maximizing a conditional mutual information score. This general approach can be utilized in a data mining context to extract relevant information that is at the same time novel relative to known properties or structures...

This paper introduces a bottleneck game with finite sets of commuters and departing time slots as an extension of congestion games by Milchtaich (1996). After characterizing Nash equilibrium of the game, we provide sufficient conditions for which the equivalence between Nash and strong equilibria holds. Somewhat surprisingly, unlike in congestion games, a Nash equilibrium in pure strategies may...

We define the relevant information in a signal x ∈ X as being the information that this signal provides about another signal y ∈ Y . Examples include the information that face images provide about the names of the people portrayed, or the information that speech sounds provide about the words spoken. Understanding the signal x requires more than just predicting y, it also requires specifying wh...