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As electric grids experience high penetration levels of renewable generation, fundamental changes are required to address real-time situational awareness. This paper uses unique traits of tensors to devise a model-free situational awareness and energy forecasting framework for distribution networks. This work formulates the state of the network at multiple time instants as a three-way tensor; hence, recovering full state information of the network is tantamount to estimating all the values of the tensor. Given measurements received from $mu$phasor measurement units and/or smart meters, the recovery of unobserved quantities is carried out using the low-rank canonical polyadic decomposition of the state tensor---that is, the state estimation task is posed as a tensor imputation problem utilizing observed patterns in measured quantities. Two structured sampling schemes are considered: slab sampling and fiber sampling. For both schemes, we present sufficient conditions on the number of sampled slabs and fibers that guarantee identifiability of the factors of the state tensor. Numerical results demonstrate the ability of the proposed framework to achieve high estimation accuracy in multiple sampling scenarios.
Learning optimal resource allocation policies in wireless systems can be effectively achieved by formulating finite dimensional constrained programs which depend on system configuration, as well as the adopted learning parameterization. The interest here is in cases where system models are unavailable, prompting methods that probe the wireless system with candidate policies, and then use observed performance to determine better policies. This generic procedure is difficult because of the need to cull accurate gradient estimates out of these limited system queries. This paper constructs and exploits smoothed surrogates of constrained ergodic resource allocation problems, the gradients of the former being representable exactly as averages of finite differences that can be obtained through limited system probing. Leveraging this unique property, we develop a new model-free primal-dual algorithm for learning optimal ergodic resource allocations, while we rigorously analyze the relationships between original policy search problems and their surrogates, in both primal and dual domains. First, we show that both primal and dual domain surrogates are uniformly consistent approximations of their corresponding original finite dimensional counterparts. Upon further assuming the use of near-universal policy parameterizations, we also develop explicit bounds on the gap between optimal values of initial, infinite dimensional resource allocation problems, and dual values of their parameterized smoothed surrogates. In fact, we show that this duality gap decreases at a linear rate relative to smoothing and universality parameters. Thus, it can be made arbitrarily small at will, also justifying our proposed primal-dual algorithmic recipe. Numerical simulations confirm the effectiveness of our approach.
Risk-aware control, though with promise to tackle unexpected events, requires a known exact dynamical model. In this work, we propose a model-free framework to learn a risk-aware controller with a focus on the linear system. We formulate it as a discrete-time infinite-horizon LQR problem with a state predictive variance constraint. To solve it, we parameterize the policy with a feedback gain pair and leverage primal-dual methods to optimize it by solely using data. We first study the optimization landscape of the Lagrangian function and establish the strong duality in spite of its non-convex nature. Alongside, we find that the Lagrangian function enjoys an important local gradient dominance property, which is then exploited to develop a convergent random search algorithm to learn the dual function. Furthermore, we propose a primal-dual algorithm with global convergence to learn the optimal policy-multiplier pair. Finally, we validate our results via simulations.
This technical note reviews sate-of-the-art algorithms for linear approximation of high-dimensional dynamical systems using low-rank dynamic mode decomposition (DMD). While repeating several parts of our article low-rank dynamic mode decomposition: an exact and tractable solution, this work provides additional details useful for building a comprehensive picture of state-of-the-art methods.
This paper proposes a novel end-to-end deep learning framework that simultaneously identifies demand baselines and the incentive-based agent demand response model, from the net demand measurements and incentive signals. This learning framework is modularized as two modules: 1) the decision making process of a demand response participant is represented as a differentiable optimization layer, which takes the incentive signal as input and predicts users response; 2) the baseline demand forecast is represented as a standard neural network model, which takes relevant features and predicts users baseline demand. These two intermediate predictions are integrated, to form the net demand forecast. We then propose a gradient-descent approach that backpropagates the net demand forecast errors to update the weights of the agent model and the weights of baseline demand forecast, jointly. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through computation experiments with synthetic demand response traces and a large-scale real world demand response dataset. Our results show that the approach accurately identifies the demand response model, even without any prior knowledge about the baseline demand.
We consider the problem of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation in unknown partially correlated noise environments where the noise covariance matrix is sparse. A sparse noise covariance matrix is a common model for a sparse array of sensors consisted of several widely separated subarrays. Since interelement spacing among sensors in a subarray is small, the noise in the subarray is in general spatially correlated, while, due to large distances between subarrays, the noise between them is uncorrelated. Consequently, the noise covariance matrix of such an array has a block diagonal structure which is indeed sparse. Moreover, in an ordinary nonsparse array, because of small distance between adjacent sensors, there is noise coupling between neighboring sensors, whereas one can assume that nonadjacent sensors have spatially uncorrelated noise which makes again the array noise covariance matrix sparse. Utilizing some recently available tools in low-rank/sparse matrix decomposition, matrix completion, and sparse representation, we propose a novel method which can resolve possibly correlated or even coherent sources in the aforementioned partly correlated noise. In particular, when the sources are uncorrelated, our approach involves solving a second-order cone programming (SOCP), and if they are correlated or coherent, one needs to solve a computationally harder convex program. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by numerical simulations and comparison to the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB).