Skip to main content

Graph Estimation From Multi-Attribute Data

Author(s): Kolar, Mladen; Liu, Han; Xing, Eric P.

Download
To refer to this page use: http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/pr1cf8r
Abstract: Undirected graphical models are important in a number of modern applications that involve exploring or exploiting dependency structures underlying the data. For example, they are often used to explore complex systems where connections between entities are not well understood, such as in functional brain networks or genetic networks. Existing methods for estimating structure of undirected graphical models focus on scenarios where each node represents a scalar random variable, such as a binary neural activation state or a continuous mRNA abundance measurement, even though in many real world problems, nodes can represent multivariate variables with much richer meanings, such as whole images, text documents, or multi-view feature vectors. In this paper, we propose a new principled framework for estimating the structure of undirected graphical models from such multivariate (or multi-attribute) nodal data. The structure of a graph is inferred through estimation of non-zero partial canonical correlation between nodes. Under a Gaussian model, this strategy is equivalent to estimating conditional independencies between random vectors represented by the nodes and it generalizes the classical problem of covariance selection (Dempster, 1972). We relate the problem of estimating non-zero partial canonical correlations to maximizing a penalized Gaussian likelihood objective and develop a method that efficiently maximizes this objective. Extensive simulation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the method under various conditions. We provide illustrative applications to uncovering gene regulatory networks from gene and protein profiles, and uncovering brain connectivity graph from positron emission tomography data. Finally, we provide sufficient conditions under which the true graphical structure can be recovered correctly.
Publication Date: 2014
Citation: Kolar, Mladen, Han Liu, and Eric P. Xing. "Graph estimation from multi-attribute data." The Journal of Machine Learning Research 15, no. 1 (2014): 1713-1750. Retrieved from http://www.jmlr.org/papers/v15/kolar14a.html
ISSN: 1532-4435
EISSN: 1533-7928
Pages: 1713 - 1750
Language: eng
Type of Material: Journal Article
Journal/Proceeding Title: Journal of Machine Learning Research
Version: Final published version. This is an open access article.



Items in OAR@Princeton are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.