Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Date of Award

1-1-2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D. in Engineering Science

First Advisor

Yixin Chen

Second Advisor

Thai Le

Third Advisor

Charlie Walter

Relational Format

dissertation/thesis

Abstract

Identifying and creating patterns enables humans to fulfill their fundamental desire to make sense of things. At the center of this endeavor, seriation is a process of arranging objects to reveal regularities in their characteristics. We present a method to arrange objects cyclically to achieve orderliness based on a novel concept of perturbation entropy, which models the randomness of a sequence under local perturbations on the ordering. We derive a sharp upper bound on the perturbation entropy and develop an algorithm to search for an ordering that minimizes the upper bound. Connections with the traveling salesman problem and the quadratic assignment problem are discussed and explored. Extensive empirical studies demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach in a variety of applications and the robustness of the algorithm against complex topologies and noise induced by the sparsity of data.

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