Masters Degrees (Physics)
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Browsing Masters Degrees (Physics) by Author "Astl, Stefan Ludwig"
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- ItemSuboptimal LULU-estimators in measurements containing outliers(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-12) Astl, Stefan Ludwig; Eggers, H. C.; Rohwer, Carl H.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Science. Dept. of Physics.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Techniques for estimating a signal in the presence of noise which contains outliers are currently not well developed. In this thesis, we consider a constant signal superimposed by a family of noise distributions structured as a tunable mixture f(x) = α g(x) + (1 − α) h(x) between finitesupport components of “well-behaved” noise with small variance g(x) and of “impulsive” noise h(x) with a large amplitude and strongly asymmetric character. When α ≈ 1, h(x) can for example model a cosmic ray striking an experimental detector. In the first part of our work, a method for obtaining the expected values of the positive and negative pulses in the first resolution level of a LULU Discrete Pulse Transform (DPT) is established. Subsequent analysis of sequences smoothed by the operators L1U1 or U1L1 of LULU-theory shows that a robust estimator for the location parameter for g is achieved in the sense that the contribution by h to the expected average of the smoothed sequences is suppressed to order (1 − α)2 or higher. In cases where the specific shape of h can be difficult to guess due to the assumed lack of data, it is thus also shown to be of lesser importance. Furthermore, upon smoothing a sequence with L1U1 or U1L1, estimators for the scale parameters of the model distribution become easily available. In the second part of our work, the same problem and data is approached from a Bayesian inference perspective. The Bayesian estimators are found to be optimal in the sense that they make full use of available information in the data. Heuristic comparison shows, however, that Bayes estimators do not always outperform the LULU estimators. Although the Bayesian perspective provides much insight into the logical connections inherent in the problem, its estimators can be difficult to obtain in analytic form and are slow to compute numerically. Suboptimal LULU-estimators are shown to be reasonable practical compromises in practical problems.