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Bart Kosko

Publications and source records attributed to Bart Kosko.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

Modeling gunshot bruises in soft body armor with an adaptive fuzzy system.

Gunshots produce bruise patterns on persons who wear soft body armor when shot even though the armor stops the bullets. An adaptive fuzzy system modeled these bruise patterns based on the depth and width of the deformed armor given a projectile's mass and momentum. The fuzzy system used rules with sinc-shaped if-part fuzzy sets and was robust against random rule pruning: Median and mean test errors remained low even after removing up to one fifth of the rules. Handguns shot different caliber bullets at armor that had a 10%-ordnance gelatin backing. The gelatin blocks were tissue simulants. The gunshot data tuned the additive fuzzy function approximator. The fuzzy system's conditional variance V[Y/X = x] described the second-order uncertainty of the function approximation. Handguns with different barrel lengths shot bullets over a fixed distance at armor-clad gelatin blocks that we made with Type 250 A Ordnance Gelatin. The bullet-armor experiments found that a bullet's weight and momentum correlated with the depth of its impact on armor-clad gelatin (R2 = 0.881 and p-value < 0.001 for the null hypothesis that the regression line had zero slope). Related experiments on plumber's putty showed that highspeed baseball impacts compared well to bullet-armor impacts for large-caliber handguns. A baseball's momentum correlated with its impact depth in putty (R2 = 0.93 and p-value < 0.001). A bullet's momentum similarly correlated with its armor-impact in putty (R2 = 0.97 and p-value < 0.001). A Gujarati-Chow test showed that the two putty-impact regression lines had statistically indistinguishable slopes for p-value = 0.396. Baseball impact depths were comparable to bullet-armor impact depths: Getting shot with a .22 caliber bullet when wearing soft body armor resembles getting hit in the chest with a 40-mph baseball. Getting shot with a .45 caliber bullet resembles getting hit with a 90-mph baseball.

Computer Simulation↗

Robust stochastic resonance for simple threshold neurons.

Simulation and theoretical results show that memoryless threshold neurons benefit from small amounts of almost all types of additive noise and so produce the stochastic-resonance or SR effect. Input-output mutual information measures the performance of such threshold systems that use subthreshold signals. The SR result holds for all possible noise probability density functions with finite variance. The only constraint is that the noise mean must fall outside a "forbidden" threshold-related interval that the user can control--a new theorem shows that this condition is also necessary. A corollary and simulations show that the SR effect occurs for right-sided beta and Weibull noise as well. These SR results further hold for the entire uncountably infinite class of alpha-stable probability density functions. Alpha-stable noise densities have infinite variance and infinite higher-order moments and often model impulsive noise environments. The stable noise densities include the special case of symmetric bell-curve densities with thick tails such as the Cauchy probability density. The SR result for alpha-stable noise densities shows that the SR effect in threshold and thresholdlike systems is robust against occasional or even frequent violent fluctuations in noise. Regression analysis reveals both an exponential relationship for the optimal noise dispersion as a function of the alpha bell-curve tail thickness and an approximate linear relationship for the SR-maximal mutual information as a function of the alpha bell-curve tail thickness.

Action Potentials↗

Adaptive stochastic resonance in noisy neurons based on mutual information.

Noise can improve how memoryless neurons process signals and maximize their throughput information. Such favorable use of noise is the so-called "stochastic resonance" or SR effect at the level of threshold neurons and continuous neurons. This paper presents theoretical and simulation evidence that 1) lone noisy threshold and continuous neurons exhibit the SR effect in terms of the mutual information between random input and output sequences, 2) a new statistically robust learning law can find this entropy-optimal noise level, and 3) the adaptive SR effect is robust against highly impulsive noise with infinite variance. Histograms estimate the relevant probability density functions at each learning iteration. A theorem shows that almost all noise probability density functions produce some SR effect in threshold neurons even if the noise is impulsive and has infinite variance. The optimal noise level in threshold neurons also behaves nonlinearly as the input signal amplitude increases. Simulations further show that the SR effect persists for several sigmoidal neurons and for Gaussian radial-basis-function neurons.

Algorithms↗

Stochastic resonance in noisy spiking retinal and sensory neuron models.

Two new theorems show that small amounts of additive white noise can improve the bit count or mutual information of several popular models of spiking retinal neurons and spiking sensory neurons. The first theorem gives necessary and sufficient conditions for this noise benefit or stochastic resonance (SR) effect for subthreshold signals in a standard family of Poisson spiking models of retinal neurons. The result holds for all types of finite-variance noise and for all types of infinite-variance stable noise: SR occurs if and only if a sum of noise means or location parameters falls outside a 'forbidden interval' of values. The second theorem gives a similar forbidden-interval sufficient condition for the SR effect for several types of spiking sensory neurons that include the Fitzhugh-Nagumo neuron, the leaky integrate-and-fire neuron, and the reduced Type I neuron model if the additive noise is Gaussian white noise. Simulations show that neither the forbidden-interval condition nor Gaussianity is necessary for the SR effect.

Algorithms↗

Stochastic resonance in noisy threshold neurons.

Stochastic resonance occurs when noise improves how a nonlinear system performs. This paper presents two general stochastic-resonance theorems for threshold neurons that process noisy Bernoulli input sequences. The performance measure is Shannon mutual information. The theorems show that small amounts of independent additive noise can increase the mutual information of threshold neurons if the neurons detect subthreshold signals. The first theorem shows that this stochastic-resonance effect holds for all finite-variance noise probability density functions that obey a simple mean constraint that the user can control. A corollary shows that this stochastic-resonance effect occurs for the important family of (right-sided) gamma noise. The second theorem shows that this effect holds for all infinite-variance noise types in the broad family of stable distributions. Stable bell curves can model extremely impulsive noise environments. So the second theorem shows that this stochastic-resonance effect is robust against violent fluctuations in the additive noise process.

Electricity↗