25,085 research outputs found
On the Implementation of the Probabilistic Logic Programming Language ProbLog
The past few years have seen a surge of interest in the field of
probabilistic logic learning and statistical relational learning. In this
endeavor, many probabilistic logics have been developed. ProbLog is a recent
probabilistic extension of Prolog motivated by the mining of large biological
networks. In ProbLog, facts can be labeled with probabilities. These facts are
treated as mutually independent random variables that indicate whether these
facts belong to a randomly sampled program. Different kinds of queries can be
posed to ProbLog programs. We introduce algorithms that allow the efficient
execution of these queries, discuss their implementation on top of the
YAP-Prolog system, and evaluate their performance in the context of large
networks of biological entities.Comment: 28 pages; To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
(TPLP
The heuristic conception of inference to the best explanation
An influential suggestion about the relationship between Bayesianism and inference to the best explanation holds that IBE functions as a heuristic to approximate Bayesian reasoning. While this view promises to unify Bayesianism and IBE in a very attractive manner, important elements of the view have not yet been spelled out in detail. I present and argue for a heuristic conception of IBE on which IBE serves primarily to locate the most probable available explanatory hypothesis to serve as a working hypothesis in an agentâs further investigations. Along the way, I criticize what I consider to be an overly ambitious conception of the heuristic role of IBE, according to which IBE serves as a guide to absolute probability values. My own conception, by contrast, requires only that IBE can function as a guide to the comparative probability values of available hypotheses. This is shown to be a much more realistic role for IBE given the nature and limitations of the explanatory considerations with which IBE operates
Inference and Evaluation of the Multinomial Mixture Model for Text Clustering
In this article, we investigate the use of a probabilistic model for
unsupervised clustering in text collections. Unsupervised clustering has become
a basic module for many intelligent text processing applications, such as
information retrieval, text classification or information extraction. The model
considered in this contribution consists of a mixture of multinomial
distributions over the word counts, each component corresponding to a different
theme. We present and contrast various estimation procedures, which apply both
in supervised and unsupervised contexts. In supervised learning, this work
suggests a criterion for evaluating the posterior odds of new documents which
is more statistically sound than the "naive Bayes" approach. In an unsupervised
context, we propose measures to set up a systematic evaluation framework and
start with examining the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm as the basic
tool for inference. We discuss the importance of initialization and the
influence of other features such as the smoothing strategy or the size of the
vocabulary, thereby illustrating the difficulties incurred by the high
dimensionality of the parameter space. We also propose a heuristic algorithm
based on iterative EM with vocabulary reduction to solve this problem. Using
the fact that the latent variables can be analytically integrated out, we
finally show that Gibbs sampling algorithm is tractable and compares favorably
to the basic expectation maximization approach
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