Hierarchical Machine Learning for Information Networks

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Machine learning for Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a key technology for the future, which has seen strong investment from Canadian governments and businesses. The most advanced AI systems use the most informative data. Especially valuable are information networks that describe links between objects. These links can be material, as in a computer network, or represent abstract relationships, like friendships in a social network, or spatial relationships in an image. Information networks are ubiquitous, maintained by many organizations in a relational database. The goal of my research program is to develop new machine learning methods that leverage, analyze, and integrate the heterogeneous and interdependent data sources in an information network. Machine learning for information networks has led to state-of-the-art performance in several data analysis tasks, such as link-based classification and clustering, link prediction, database query optimization, exception mining, anomaly and fraud detection. A cutting-edge application is extracting network information from massive data sets containing text and/or images. For instance, Google researchers have applied machine learning to web information to build an information network (called the knowledge graph) that contains 570M nodes (entities) and 1.8 billion facts (relationships and attributes). ******The proposed research develops methods that leverage a class ontology to learn a graphical model for a large information network. A graphical model (such as a Bayesian network or a causal graph) can be viewed as a probabilistic knowledge base that represents statistical patterns among nodes, links, and attributes of nodes and links. Graphical model learning therefore provides automated construction of large knowledge bases, which support many data analysis tasks, including link-based predictions and information extraction. In many complex domains, ontologies or class hierarchies are available that provide valuable knowledge about the structure of a domain. For example, in a public university, a faculty member is a department employee, who is a university employee, who is a government employee. My research will investigate how class hierarchies increase the validity of statistical conclusions, the accuracy of statistical models, and the computational scalability of statistical learning for information networks. ******Machine learning for information networks is a fundamental technology for next-generation AI applications, such as extracting structured information from massive text and visual data. The proposed research will contribute an important component technology, graphical model learning and automated knowledge base construction. Students will be trained to develop methods for machine learning from information networks, and to apply them in Canadian industry.