Quantitative modeling plays a key role in the natural sciences, and systems that address the task of inductive process modeling can assist researchers in explaining their data. In the past, such systems have been limited to data sets that recorded change over time, but many interesting problems involve both spatial and temporal dynamics. To meet this challenge, we introduce SCISM, an integrated intelligent system which solves the task of inducing process models that account for spatial and temporal variation. We also integrate SCISM with a constraint learning method to reduce computation during induction. Applications to ecological modeling demonstrate that each system fares well on the task, but that the enhanced system does so much faster than the baseline version.

In many networks, vertices have hidden attributes, or types, that are correlated with the networks topology. If the topology is known but these attributes are not, and if learning the attributes is costly, we need a method for choosing which vertex to query in order to learn as much as possible about the attributes of the other vertices. We assume the network is generated by a stochastic block model, but we make no assumptions about its assortativity or disassortativity. We choose which vertex to query using two methods: 1) maximizing the mutual information between its attributes and those of the others (a well-known approach in active learning) and 2) maximizing the average agreement between two independent samples of the conditional Gibbs distribution. Experimental results show that both these methods do much better than simple heuristics. They also consistently identify certain vertices as important by querying them early on.