138 research outputs found
Structure Selection from Streaming Relational Data
Statistical relational learning techniques have been successfully applied in
a wide range of relational domains. In most of these applications, the human
designers capitalized on their background knowledge by following a
trial-and-error trajectory, where relational features are manually defined by a
human engineer, parameters are learned for those features on the training data,
the resulting model is validated, and the cycle repeats as the engineer adjusts
the set of features. This paper seeks to streamline application development in
large relational domains by introducing a light-weight approach that
efficiently evaluates relational features on pieces of the relational graph
that are streamed to it one at a time. We evaluate our approach on two social
media tasks and demonstrate that it leads to more accurate models that are
learned faster
Lifted graphical models: a survey
Lifted graphical models provide a language for expressing dependencies between different types of entities, their attributes, and their diverse relations, as well as techniques for probabilistic reasoning in such multi-relational domains. In this survey, we review a general form for a lifted graphical model, a par-factor graph, and show how a number of existing statistical relational representations map to this formalism. We discuss inference algorithms, including lifted inference algorithms, that efficiently compute the answers to probabilistic queries over such models. We also review work in learning lifted graphical models from data. There is a growing need for statistical relational models (whether they go by that name or another), as we are inundated with data which is a mix of structured and unstructured, with entities and relations extracted in a noisy manner from text, and with the need to reason effectively with this data. We hope that this synthesis of ideas from many different research groups will provide an accessible starting point for new researchers in this expanding field
Automorphism Groups of Graphical Models and Lifted Variational Inference
Using the theory of group action, we first introduce the concept of the
automorphism group of an exponential family or a graphical model, thus
formalizing the general notion of symmetry of a probabilistic model. This
automorphism group provides a precise mathematical framework for lifted
inference in the general exponential family. Its group action partitions the
set of random variables and feature functions into equivalent classes (called
orbits) having identical marginals and expectations. Then the inference problem
is effectively reduced to that of computing marginals or expectations for each
class, thus avoiding the need to deal with each individual variable or feature.
We demonstrate the usefulness of this general framework in lifting two classes
of variational approximation for MAP inference: local LP relaxation and local
LP relaxation with cycle constraints; the latter yields the first lifted
inference that operate on a bound tighter than local constraints. Initial
experimental results demonstrate that lifted MAP inference with cycle
constraints achieved the state of the art performance, obtaining much better
objective function values than local approximation while remaining relatively
efficient.Comment: Extended version of the paper to appear in Statistical Relational AI
(StaRAI-12) workshop at UAI '1
- …