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Abstract The increasing prevalence of wearable devices enables low-cost, long-term collection of health relevant data such as heart rate, exercise, and sleep signals. Currently these data are used to monitor short term changes with limited interpretation of their relevance to health. These data provide an untapped resource to monitor daily and long-term activity patterns. Changes and trends identified from such data can provide insights and guidance to the management of many chronic conditions that change over time. In this study we conducted a machine learning based analysis of longitudinal heart rate data collected over multiple years from Fitbit devices. We built a multi-resolutional pipeline for time series analysis, using model-free clustering methods inspired by statistical conformal prediction framework. With this method, we were able to detect health relevant events, their interesting patterns (e.g., daily routines, seasonal differences, and anomalies), and correlations to acute and chronic changes in health conditions. We present the results, lessons, and insights learned, and how to address the challenge of lack of labels. The study confirms the value of long-term heart rate data for health monitoring and surveillance, as complementary to extensive yet intermittent examinations by health care providers. 

Metric magnitude of a point cloud is a measure of its ``size. It has been adapted to various mathematical contexts and recent work suggests that it can enhance machine learning and optimization algorithms. But its usability is limited due to the computational cost when the dataset is large or when the computation must be carried out repeatedly (e.g. in model training). In this paper, we study the magnitude computation problem, and show efficient ways of approximating it. We show that it can be cast as a convex optimization problem, but not as a submodular optimization. The paper describes two new algorithms -- an iterative approximation algorithm that converges fast and is accurate in practice, and a subset selection method that makes the computation even faster. It has previously been proposed that the magnitude of model sequences generated during stochastic gradient descent is correlated to the generalization gap. Extension of this result using our more scalable algorithms shows that longer sequences bear higher correlations. We also describe new applications of magnitude in machine learning -- as an effective regularizer for neural network training, and as a novel clustering criterion. 

Given a weighted graph G = (V,E,w), a (β, ε)-hopset H is an edge set such that for any s,t ∈ V, where s can reach t in G, there is a path from s to t in G ∪ H which uses at most β hops whose length is in the range [dist_G(s,t), (1+ε)dist_G(s,t)]. We break away from the traditional question that asks for a hopset H that achieves small |H| and small diameter β and instead study the sensitivity of H, a new quality measure. The sensitivity of a vertex (or edge) given a hopset H is, informally, the number of times a single hop in G ∪ H bypasses it; a bit more formally, assuming shortest paths in G are unique, it is the number of hopset edges (s,t) ∈ H such that the vertex (or edge) is contained in the unique st-path in G having length exactly dist_G(s,t). The sensitivity associated with H is then the maximum sensitivity over all vertices (or edges). The highlights of our results are: - A construction for (Õ(√n), 0)-hopsets on undirected graphs with O(log n) sensitivity, complemented with a lower bound showing that Õ(√n) is tight up to polylogarithmic factors for any construction with polylogarithmic sensitivity. - A construction for (n^o(1), ε)-hopsets on undirected graphs with n^o(1) sensitivity for any ε > 0 that is at least inverse polylogarithmic, complemented with a lower bound on the tradeoff between β, ε, and the sensitivity. - We define a notion of sensitivity for β-shortcut sets (which are the reachability analogues of hopsets) and give a construction for Õ(√n)-shortcut sets on directed graphs with O(log n) sensitivity, complemented with a lower bound showing that β = Ω̃(n^{1/3}) for any construction with polylogarithmic sensitivity. We believe hopset sensitivity is a natural measure in and of itself, and could potentially find use in a diverse range of contexts. More concretely, the notion of hopset sensitivity is also directly motivated by the Differentially Private All Sets Range Queries problem [Deng et al. WADS 23]. Our result for O(log n) sensitivity (Õ(√n), 0)-hopsets on undirected graphs immediately improves the current best-known upper bound on utility from Õ(n^{1/3}) to Õ(n^{1/4}) in the pure-DP setting, which is tight up to polylogarithmic factors. 

We introduce and study the problem of balanced districting, where given an undirected graph with vertices carrying two types of weights (different population, resource types, etc) the goal is to maximize the total weights covered in vertex disjoint districts such that each district is a star or (in general) a connected induced subgraph with the two weights to be balanced. This problem is strongly motivated by political redistricting, where contiguity, population balance, and compactness are essential. We provide hardness and approximation algorithms for this problem. In particular, we show NP-hardness for an approximation better than n^{1/2-δ} for any constant δ > 0 in general graphs even when the districts are star graphs, as well as NP-hardness on complete graphs, tree graphs, planar graphs and other restricted settings. On the other hand, we develop an algorithm for balanced star districting that gives an O(√n)-approximation on any graph (which is basically tight considering matching hardness of approximation results), an O(log n) approximation on planar graphs with extensions to minor-free graphs. Our algorithm uses a modified Whack-a-Mole algorithm [Bhattacharya, Kiss, and Saranurak, SODA 2023] to find a sparse solution of a fractional packing linear program (despite exponentially many variables) which requires a new design of a separation oracle specific for our balanced districting problem. To turn the fractional solution to a feasible integer solution, we adopt the randomized rounding algorithm by [Chan and Har-Peled, SoCG 2009]. To get a good approximation ratio of the rounding procedure, a crucial element in the analysis is the balanced scattering separators for planar graphs and minor-free graphs - separators that can be partitioned into a small number of k-hop independent sets for some constant k - which may find independent interest in solving other packing style problems. Further, our algorithm is versatile - the very same algorithm can be analyzed in different ways on various graph classes, which leads to class-dependent approximation ratios. We also provide a FPTAS algorithm for complete graphs and tree graphs, as well as greedy algorithms and approximation ratios when the district cardinality is bounded, the graph has bounded degree or the weights are binary. We refer the readers to the full version of the paper for complete set of results and proofs.