Network medicine is an emerging paradigm for studying the co-occurrence between diseases. While diseases are often interlinked through complex patterns, most of the existing work in this area has focused on studying pairwise relationships between diseases. In this paper, we use a state-of-the-art Markov network learning method to learn interactions between musculoskeletal disorders and cardiovascular diseases and compare this to pairwise approaches. Our experimental results confirm that the sophisticated structure learner produces more accurate models, which can help reveal interesting patterns in the co-occurrence of diseases.

Network medicine is an emerging paradigm for studying the co-occurrence between diseases. While diseases are often interlinked through complex patterns, most of the existing work in this area has focused on studying pairwise relationships between diseases. In this paper, we use a state-of-the-art Markov network learning method to learn interactions between musculoskeletal disorders and cardiovascular diseases and compare this to pairwise approaches. Our experimental results confirm that the sophisticated structure learner produces more accurate models, which can help reveal interesting patterns in the co-occurrence of diseases.

In this short position paper, we consider MaxWalkSAT, a local search algorithm for MAP inference in probabilistic graphical models, and lift it to the first-order level, yielding a powerful algorithm for MAP inference in Markov logic networks (MLNs). Lifted MaxWalkSAT is based on the observation that if the MLN is monadic, namely if each predicate is unary then MaxWalkSAT is completely liftable in the sense that no grounding is required at inference time. We propose to utilize this observation in a straight-forward manner: convert the MLN to an equivalent monadic MLN by grounding a subset of its logical variables and then apply lifted MaxWalkSAT on it. It turns out however that the problem of finding the smallest subset of logical variables which when grounded will yield a monadic MLN is NP-hard in general and therefore we propose an approximation algorithm for solving it.

The Rao-Blackwell theorem is utilized to analyze and improve the scalability of inference in large probabilistic models that exhibit symmetries. A novel marginal density estimator is introduced and shown both analytically and empirically to outperform standard estimators by several orders of magnitude. The developed theory and algorithms apply to a broad class of probabilistic models including statistical relational models considered not susceptible to lifted probabilistic inference.

This paper is devoted to fair optimization in Multiobjective Markov Decision Processes (MOMDPs). A MOMDP is an extension of the MDP model for planning under uncertainty while trying to optimize several reward functions simultaneously. This applies to multiagent problems when rewards define individual utility functions, or in multicriteria problems when rewards refer to different features. In this setting, we study the determination of policies leading to Lorenz-non-dominated tradeoffs. Lorenz dominance is a refinement of Pareto dominance that was introduced in Social Choice for the measurement of inequalities. In this paper, we introduce methods to efficiently approximate the sets of Lorenz-non-dominated solutions of infinite-horizon, discounted MOMDPs. The approximations are polynomial-sized subsets of those solutions.

RockIt is a maximum a-posteriori (MAP) query engine for statistical relational models. MAP inference in graphical models is an optimization problem which can be compiled to integer linear programs (ILPs).We describe several advances in translating MAP queries to ILP instances and present the novel meta-algorithm cutting plane aggregation (CPA). CPA exploits local context-specific symmetries and bundles up sets of linear constraints. The resulting counting constraints lead to more compact ILPs and make the symmetry of the ground model more explicit to state-of-the-art ILP solvers. Moreover, RockIt parallelizes most parts of the MAP inference pipeline taking advantage of ubiquitous shared-memory multi-core architectures. We report on extensive experiments with Markov logic network (MLN) benchmarks showing that RockIt outperforms the state-of-the-art systems Alchemy, Markov TheBeast, and Tuffy both in terms of efficiency and quality of results.

Statistical relational learning (SRL) augments probabilistic models with relational representations and facilitates reasoning over sets of objects. When learning the probabilistic parameters for SRL models, however, one often resorts to reasoning over individual objects. To address this challenge, we compile a Markov logic network into a compact and efficient first-order data structure and use weighted first-order model counting to exactly optimize the likelihood of the parameters in a lifted manner. By exploiting the relational structure in the model, it is possible to learn more accurate parameters and dramatically improve the run time of the likelihood calculation. This allows us to calculate the exact likelihood for models where previously only approximate inference was feasible. Results on real-world data sets show that this approach learns more accurate models.

We present a robust framework for complex event recognition that is well-suited for integrating information that varies widely in detail and granularity. Consider the scenario of an agent in an instrumented space performing a complex task while describing what he is doing in a natural manner. The system takes in a variety of information, including objects and gestures recognized by RGB-D and descriptions of events extracted from recognized and parsed speech. The system outputs a complete reconstruction of the agent’s plan, explaining actions in terms of more complex activities and filling in unobserved but necessary events. We show how to use Markov Logic (a probabilistic extension to first order logic) to create a theory in which observations can be partial, noisy, and refer to future or temporally ambiguous events; complex events are composed from simpler events in a manner that exposes their structure for inference and learning; and uncertainty is handled in a sound probabilistic manner. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach for tracking cooking plans in the presence of noisy and incomplete observations.

Modal Markov Logic for a single agent has previously been proposed as an extension to propositional Markov logic. While the framework allowed reasoning under the principle of maximum entropy for various modal logics, it is not feasible to apply its counting based inference to reason about the beliefs and knowledge of multiple agents due to magnitude of the numbers involved. We propose a modal extension of propositional Markov logicthat avoids this problem by coarsening the state space.The problem stems from the fact that in the single-agent setting, the state space is only doubly exponential in the number of propositions in the domain, but the state space can potentially become infinite in the multi-agent setting. In addition, the proposed framework adds only the overhead of deciding satisfiability for the chosen modal logic on the top of the complexity of exact inference in propositional Markov logic. The proposed framework allows one to find a distribution that matches probabilities of formulas obtained from training data (or provided by an expert). Finally, we show how one can compute lower and upper bounds on probabilities of arbitrary formulas.

RockIt is a maximum a-posteriori (MAP) query engine for statistical relational models. MAP inference in graphical models is an optimization problem which can be compiled to integer linear programs (ILPs). We describe several advances in translating MAP queries to ILP instances and present the novel meta-algorithm cutting plane aggregation (CPA). CPA exploits local context-specific symmetries and bundles up sets of linear constraints. The resulting counting constraints lead to more compact ILPs and make the symmetry of the ground model more explicit to state-of-the-art ILP solvers. Moreover, RockIt parallelizes most parts of the MAP inference pipeline taking advantage of ubiquitous shared-memory multi-core architectures. We report on extensive experiments with Markov logic network (MLN) benchmarks showing that RockIt outperforms the state-of-the-art systems Alchemy, Markov TheBeast, and Tuffy both in terms of efficiency and quality of results. This paper is a short version of a AAAI publication of the same name.