Probabilistic Relational Model Benchmark Generation

The validation of any database mining methodology goes through an evaluation process where benchmarks availability is essential. In this paper, we aim to randomly generate relational database benchmarks that allow to check probabilistic dependencies among the attributes. We are particularly interested in Probabilistic Relational Models (PRMs), which extend Bayesian Networks (BNs) to a relational data mining context and enable effective and robust reasoning over relational data. Even though a panoply of works have focused, separately , on the generation of random Bayesian networks and relational databases, no work has been identified for PRMs on that track. This paper provides an algorithmic approach for generating random PRMs from scratch to fill this gap. The proposed method allows to generate PRMs as well as synthetic relational data from a randomly generated relational schema and a random set of probabilistic dependencies. This can be of interest not only for machine learning researchers to evaluate their proposals in a common framework, but also for databases designers to evaluate the effectiveness of the components of a database management system

Joint Video and Text Parsing for Understanding Events and Answering Queries

We propose a framework for parsing video and text jointly for understanding events and answering user queries. Our framework produces a parse graph that represents the compositional structures of spatial information (objects and scenes), temporal information (actions and events) and causal information (causalities between events and fluents) in the video and text. The knowledge representation of our framework is based on a spatial-temporal-causal And-Or graph (S/T/C-AOG), which jointly models possible hierarchical compositions of objects, scenes and events as well as their interactions and mutual contexts, and specifies the prior probabilistic distribution of the parse graphs. We present a probabilistic generative model for joint parsing that captures the relations between the input video/text, their corresponding parse graphs and the joint parse graph. Based on the probabilistic model, we propose a joint parsing system consisting of three modules: video parsing, text parsing and joint inference. Video parsing and text parsing produce two parse graphs from the input video and text respectively. The joint inference module produces a joint parse graph by performing matching, deduction and revision on the video and text parse graphs. The proposed framework has the following objectives: Firstly, we aim at deep semantic parsing of video and text that goes beyond the traditional bag-of-words approaches; Secondly, we perform parsing and reasoning across the spatial, temporal and causal dimensions based on the joint S/T/C-AOG representation; Thirdly, we show that deep joint parsing facilitates subsequent applications such as generating narrative text descriptions and answering queries in the forms of who, what, when, where and why. We empirically evaluated our system based on comparison against ground-truth as well as accuracy of query answering and obtained satisfactory results

The relationship between IR and multimedia databases

Modern extensible database systems support multimedia data through ADTs. However, because of the problems with multimedia query formulation, this support is not sufficient.\ud \ud Multimedia querying requires an iterative search process involving many different representations of the objects in the database. The support that is needed is very similar to the processes in information retrieval.\ud \ud Based on this observation, we develop the miRRor architecture for multimedia query processing. We design a layered framework based on information retrieval techniques, to provide a usable query interface to the multimedia database.\ud \ud First, we introduce a concept layer to enable reasoning over low-level concepts in the database.\ud \ud Second, we add an evidential reasoning layer as an intermediate between the user and the concept layer.\ud \ud Third, we add the functionality to process the users' relevance feedback.\ud \ud We then adapt the inference network model from text retrieval to an evidential reasoning model for multimedia query processing.\ud \ud We conclude with an outline for implementation of miRRor on top of the Monet extensible database system

Tracking by Prediction: A Deep Generative Model for Mutli-Person localisation and Tracking

Current multi-person localisation and tracking systems have an over reliance on the use of appearance models for target re-identification and almost no approaches employ a complete deep learning solution for both objectives. We present a novel, complete deep learning framework for multi-person localisation and tracking. In this context we first introduce a light weight sequential Generative Adversarial Network architecture for person localisation, which overcomes issues related to occlusions and noisy detections, typically found in a multi person environment. In the proposed tracking framework we build upon recent advances in pedestrian trajectory prediction approaches and propose a novel data association scheme based on predicted trajectories. This removes the need for computationally expensive person re-identification systems based on appearance features and generates human like trajectories with minimal fragmentation. The proposed method is evaluated on multiple public benchmarks including both static and dynamic cameras and is capable of generating outstanding performance, especially among other recently proposed deep neural network based approaches.Comment: To appear in IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 201

Controlling the Precision-Recall Tradeoff in Differential Dependency Network Analysis

Graphical models have gained a lot of attention recently as a tool for learning and representing dependencies among variables in multivariate data. Often, domain scientists are looking specifically for differences among the dependency networks of different conditions or populations (e.g. differences between regulatory networks of different species, or differences between dependency networks of diseased versus healthy populations). The standard method for finding these differences is to learn the dependency networks for each condition independently and compare them. We show that this approach is prone to high false discovery rates (low precision) that can render the analysis useless. We then show that by imposing a bias towards learning similar dependency networks for each condition the false discovery rates can be reduced to acceptable levels, at the cost of finding a reduced number of differences. Algorithms developed in the transfer learning literature can be used to vary the strength of the imposed similarity bias and provide a natural mechanism to smoothly adjust this differential precision-recall tradeoff to cater to the requirements of the analysis conducted. We present real case studies (oncological and neurological) where domain experts use the proposed technique to extract useful differential networks that shed light on the biological processes involved in cancer and brain function