RI: Small: Learning and Inference with Perfect Graphs

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This proposal investigates new computational and combinatorial tools for learning from data and performing inference about data. As such, it serves as a bridge between the machine learning community and the combinatorics community. The latter field develops efficient algorithms or shows when an efficient solution to a particular problem exists. The project will support graduate students in the intersection of these two fields to combine recent theoretical results with practical data problems. The team will produce a website of tutorials, data sets, downloadable code, interactive visual examples and course materials to allow better integration across the two fields. The combinatorics community has identified a family of inputs called perfect graphs where otherwise hard problems are efficiently solvable. This proposal will investigate how to bridge this powerful theoretical result to the area of machine learning and formally characterize which learning and inference problems are efficiently solvable.More specifically, the team will investigate data learning problems (such as clustering a data set into subgroups that are self-similar or finding anomalies in a database) and statistical inference problems (computing the most likely or most typical outcome from observed measurements). These problems will be compiled or represented as graphs and networks. Then, these graphs and networks can be more formally diagnosed using perfect graph theory to determine if the instance of the problem is easy (or hard) and to provide efficient solutions via exact algorithms on perfect graphs. These solvers will be implemented using message passing or convex programming.