Nonparametric Bayesian models for learning network coupling relationships
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2015
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As the traditional machine learning setting assumes that the data are identically and independently distributed (i.i.d), this is quite like a perfect conditioned vacuum and seldom a real case in practical applications. Thus, the non-i.i.d learning (Cao, Ou, Yu & Wei 2010)(Cao, Ou & Yu 2012)(Cao 2014) has emerged as a powerful tool in describing the fundamental phenomena in the real world, as more factors to be well catered in this modelling. One critical factor in the non-i.i.d. learning is the relations among the data, ranging from the feature information, node partitioning to the correlation of the outcome, which is referred to as the coupling relation in the non-i.i.d. learning. In our work, we aim at uncovering this coupling relation with the nonparametric Bayesian relational models, that is, the data points in our work are supposed to be coupled with each other, and it is this coupling relation we are interested in for further investigation. The coupling relation is widely seen and motivated in real world applications, for example, the hidden structure learning in social networks for link prediction and structure understanding, the fraud detection in the transactional stock market, the protein interaction modelling in biology.
In this thesis, we are particularly interested in the learning and inferencing on the relational data, which is to further discover the coupling relation between the corresponding points. For the detail modelling perspective, we have focused on the framework of mixed-membership stochastic blockmodel, in which membership indicator and mixed-membership distribution are noted to represent the nodes’ belonging community for one relation and the histogram of all the belonging communities for one node. More specifically, we are trying to model the coupling relation through three different aspects: 1) the mixed-membership distributions’ coupling relation across the time. In this work, the coupling relation is reflected in the sticky phenomenon between the mixed-membership distributions in two consecutive time; 2) the membership indicators’ coupling relation, in which the Copula function is utilized to depict the coupling relation; 3) the node information and mixed-membership distribution’s coupling relation. This is achieved by the new proposal transform for the node information’s integration. As these three aspects describe the critical parts of the nodes’ interaction with the communities, we are hoping the complex hidden structures can thus be well studied. In all of the above extensions, we set the number of the communities in a nonparametric Bayesian prior (mainly Hierarchical Dirichlet Process), instead of fixing it as in the previous classical models. In such a way, the complexity of our model can grow along with the data size. That is to say, while we have more data, our model can have a larger amount of communities to account for them. This appealing property enables our models to fit the data better. Moreover, the nice formalization of the Hierarchical Dirichlet Process facilitates us to some benefits, such as the conjugate prior. Thus, this nonparametric Bayesian prior has introduced new elements to the coupling relations’ learning.
Under this varying backgrounds and scenarios, we have shown our proposed models and frameworks for learning the coupling relations are evidenced to outperform the state-of-the-art methods via literature explanation and empirical results. The outcomes are sequentially accepted by top journals. Therefore, the nonparametric Bayesian models in learning the coupling relations presents high research value and would still be attractive opportunities for further exploration and exploit.
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