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In this paper we consider the problem of estimating the eigenvectors of the sample covariance matrix of decentralized measurements in a distributed fashion. The need for a distributed scheme is motivated by the many moment based methods that resort to the covariance of the data to extract information from the measurements. For large sensor network, gathering the data at a central processor generates a communication bottleneck. Our algorithm is based on a combination of the so called power method, that is used to compute the eigenvectors, and the average consensus protocol, that is utilized to structure the information exchange into a gossiping protocol. Our work shows how a completely distributed scheme based on near neighbors communications is feasible, and applies the proposed method to the estimation of the direction of arrival of a signal source.

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Abstract-A crucial problem of Social Sciences is under what conditions agreement, or disagreement, emerge in a network of interacting agents. This topic has application in many contexts, including business and marketing decisions, with potential impact on information and technological networks. In this paper we consider a particular model of interaction between a group of individuals connected through a network of acquaintances.In the first model, a node waits an exponentially time with parameter one, and when it expires it chooses one of its neighbors' at random and adopts its decision. In the second one, the node chooses the opinion which is the most adopted by its neighbors (hence, majority rule). We show how different updating rule of the agent' state lead to different emerging patterns, namely, agreement and disagreement. In addition, in the case of agreement, we provide bounds on the time to convergence for various types of graphs.

We describe the Customer LifeTime Value (CLTV) prediction system deployed at ASOS.com, a global online fashion retailer. CLTV prediction is an important problem in e-commerce where an accurate estimate of future value allows retailers to e ectively allocate marketing spend, identify and nurture high value customers and mitigate exposure to losses. e system at ASOS provides daily estimates of the future value of every customer and is one of the cornerstones of the personalised shopping experience. e state of the art in this domain uses large numbers of handcra ed features and ensemble regressors to forecast value, predict churn and evaluate customer loyalty. Recently, domains including language, vision and speech have shown dramatic advances by replacing handcra ed features with features that are learned automatically from data. We detail the system deployed at ASOS and show that learning feature representations is a promising extension to the state of the art in CLTV modelling. We propose a novel way to generate embeddings of customers, which addresses the issue of the ever changing product catalogue and obtain a signi cant improvement over an exhaustive set of handcra ed features.

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