In this paper, we examine the problem of partial inference in the context of structured prediction. Using a generative model approach, we consider the task of maximizing a score function with unary and pairwise potentials in the space of labels on graphs. Employing a two-stage convex optimization algorithm for label recovery, we analyze the conditions under which a majority of the labels can be recovered. We introduce a novel perspective on the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions and primal and dual construction, and provide statistical and topological requirements for partial recovery with provable guarantees.
This study compares the performance of a causal and a predictive model in modeling travel mode choice in three neighborhoods in Chicago. A causal discovery algorithm and a causal inference technique were used to extract the causal relationships in the mode choice decision making process and to estimate the quantitative causal effects between the variables both directly from observational data. The model results reveal that trip distance and vehicle ownership are the direct causes of mode choice in the three neighborhoods. Artificial neural network models were estimated to predict mode choice. Their accuracy was over 70%, and the SHAP values obtained measure the importance of each variable. We find that both the causal and predictive modeling approaches are useful for the purpose they serve. We also note that the study of mode choice behavior through causal modeling is mostly unexplored, yet it could transform our understanding of the mode choice behavior. Further research is needed to realize the full potential of these techniques in modeling mode choice.
We present a nonparametric model-agnostic framework for building prediction intervals of insurance claims, with finite sample statistical guarantees, extending the technique of split conformal prediction to the domain of two-stage frequency-severity modeling. The effectiveness of the framework is showcased with simulated and real datasets. When the underlying severity model is a random forest, we extend the two-stage split conformal prediction procedure, showing how the out-of-bag mechanism can be leveraged to eliminate the need for a calibration set and to enable the production of prediction intervals with adaptive width.
Recent advances in event camera research emphasize processing data in its original sparse form, which allows the use of its unique features such as high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, low latency, and resistance to image blur. One promising approach for analyzing event data is through graph convolutional networks (GCNs). However, current research in this domain primarily focuses on optimizing computational costs, neglecting the associated memory costs. In this paper, we consider both factors together in order to achieve satisfying results and relatively low model complexity. For this purpose, we performed a comparative analysis of different graph convolution operations, considering factors such as execution time, the number of trainable model parameters, data format requirements, and training outcomes. Our results show a 450-fold reduction in the number of parameters for the feature extraction module and a 4.5-fold reduction in the size of the data representation while maintaining a classification accuracy of 52.3%, which is 6.3% higher compared to the operation used in state-of-the-art approaches. To further evaluate performance, we implemented the object detection architecture and evaluated its performance on the N-Caltech101 dataset. The results showed an accuracy of 53.7 % [email protected] and reached an execution rate of 82 graphs per second.
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used for document classification. However, most existing methods are based on static word co-occurrence graphs without sentence-level information, which poses three challenges:(1) word ambiguity, (2) word synonymity, and (3) dynamic contextual dependency. To address these challenges, we propose a novel GNN-based sparse structure learning model for inductive document classification. Specifically, a document-level graph is initially generated by a disjoint union of sentence-level word co-occurrence graphs. Our model collects a set of trainable edges connecting disjoint words between sentences and employs structure learning to sparsely select edges with dynamic contextual dependencies. Graphs with sparse structures can jointly exploit local and global contextual information in documents through GNNs. For inductive learning, the refined document graph is further fed into a general readout function for graph-level classification and optimization in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms most state-of-the-art results, and reveal the necessity to learn sparse structures for each document.
Recommender system is one of the most important information services on today's Internet. Recently, graph neural networks have become the new state-of-the-art approach of recommender systems. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of the literature in graph neural network-based recommender systems. We first introduce the background and the history of the development of both recommender systems and graph neural networks. For recommender systems, in general, there are four aspects for categorizing existing works: stage, scenario, objective, and application. For graph neural networks, the existing methods consist of two categories, spectral models and spatial ones. We then discuss the motivation of applying graph neural networks into recommender systems, mainly consisting of the high-order connectivity, the structural property of data, and the enhanced supervision signal. We then systematically analyze the challenges in graph construction, embedding propagation/aggregation, model optimization, and computation efficiency. Afterward and primarily, we provide a comprehensive overview of a multitude of existing works of graph neural network-based recommender systems, following the taxonomy above. Finally, we raise discussions on the open problems and promising future directions of this area. We summarize the representative papers along with their codes repositories in //github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/GNN-Recommender-Systems.
This paper focuses on two fundamental tasks of graph analysis: community detection and node representation learning, which capture the global and local structures of graphs, respectively. In the current literature, these two tasks are usually independently studied while they are actually highly correlated. We propose a probabilistic generative model called vGraph to learn community membership and node representation collaboratively. Specifically, we assume that each node can be represented as a mixture of communities, and each community is defined as a multinomial distribution over nodes. Both the mixing coefficients and the community distribution are parameterized by the low-dimensional representations of the nodes and communities. We designed an effective variational inference algorithm which regularizes the community membership of neighboring nodes to be similar in the latent space. Experimental results on multiple real-world graphs show that vGraph is very effective in both community detection and node representation learning, outperforming many competitive baselines in both tasks. We show that the framework of vGraph is quite flexible and can be easily extended to detect hierarchical communities.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
Dynamic programming (DP) solves a variety of structured combinatorial problems by iteratively breaking them down into smaller subproblems. In spite of their versatility, DP algorithms are usually non-differentiable, which hampers their use as a layer in neural networks trained by backpropagation. To address this issue, we propose to smooth the max operator in the dynamic programming recursion, using a strongly convex regularizer. This allows to relax both the optimal value and solution of the original combinatorial problem, and turns a broad class of DP algorithms into differentiable operators. Theoretically, we provide a new probabilistic perspective on backpropagating through these DP operators, and relate them to inference in graphical models. We derive two particular instantiations of our framework, a smoothed Viterbi algorithm for sequence prediction and a smoothed DTW algorithm for time-series alignment. We showcase these instantiations on two structured prediction tasks and on structured and sparse attention for neural machine translation.
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.