The investigation of the terrorist attack is a time-critical task. The investigators have a limited time window to diagnose the organizational background of the terrorists, to run down and arrest the wire-pullers, and to take an action to prevent or eradicate the terrorist attack. The intuitive interface to visualize the intelligence data set stimulates the investigators' experience and knowledge, and aids them in decision-making for an immediately effective action. This paper presents a computational method to analyze the intelligence data set on the collective actions of the perpetrators of the attack, and to visualize it into the form of a social network diagram which predicts the positions where the wire-pullers conceals themselves.

Markov networks and Bayesian networks are effective graphic representations of the dependencies embedded in probabilistic models. It is well known that independencies captured by Markov networks (called graph-isomorphs) have a finite axiomatic characterization. This paper, however, shows that independencies captured by Bayesian networks (called causal models) have no axiomatization by using even countably many Horn or disjunctive clauses. This is because a sub-independency model of a causal model may be not causal, while graph-isomorphs are closed under sub-models.

Gesture is a non-verbal modality that can contribute crucial information to the understanding of natural language. But not all gestures are informative, and non-communicative hand motions may confuse natural language processing (NLP) and impede learning. People have little difficulty ignoring irrelevant hand movements and focusing on meaningful gestures, suggesting that an automatic system could also be trained to perform this task. However, the informativeness of a gesture is context-dependent and labeling enough data to cover all cases would be expensive. We present conditional modality fusion, a conditional hidden-variable model that learns to predict which gestures are salient for coreference resolution, the task of determining whether two noun phrases refer to the same semantic entity. Moreover, our approach uses only coreference annotations, and not annotations of gesture salience itself. We show that gesture features improve performance on coreference resolution, and that by attending only to gestures that are salient, our method achieves further significant gains. In addition, we show that the model of gesture salience learned in the context of coreference accords with human intuition, by demonstrating that gestures judged to be salient by our model can be used successfully to create multimedia keyframe summaries of video. These summaries are similar to those created by human raters, and significantly outperform summaries produced by baselines from the literature.

We introduce CUI networks, a compact graphical representation of utility functions over multiple attributes. CUI networks model multiattribute utility functions using the well-studied and widely applicable utility independence concept. We show how conditional utility independence leads to an effective functional decomposition that can be exhibited graphically, and how local, compact data at the graph nodes can be used to calculate joint utility. We discuss aspects of elicitation, network construction, and optimization, and contrast our new representation with previous graphical preference modeling.

This paper proposes the incremental Bayesian optimization algorithm (iBOA), which modifies standard BOA by removing the population of solutions and using incremental updates of the Bayesian network. iBOA is shown to be able to learn and exploit unrestricted Bayesian networks using incremental techniques for updating both the structure as well as the parameters of the probabilistic model. This represents an important step toward the design of competent incremental estimation of distribution algorithms that can solve difficult nearly decomposable problems scalably and reliably.

We discuss two parameterizations of models for marginal independencies for discrete distributions which are representable by bi-directed graph models, under the global Markov property. Such models are useful data analytic tools especially if used in combination with other graphical models. The first parameterization, in the saturated case, is also known as the multivariate logistic transformation, the second is a variant that allows, in some (but not all) cases, variation independent parameters. An algorithm for maximum likelihood fitting is proposed, based on an extension of the Aitchison and Silvey method.

Many recent studies analyze how data from different modalities can be combined. Often this is modeled as a system that optimally combines several sources of information about the same variable. However, it has long been realized that this information combining depends on the interpretation of the data. Two cues that are perceived by different modalities can have different causal relationships: (1) They can both have the same cause, in this case we should fully integrate both cues into a joint estimate.

Data sets that characterize human activity over time through collections of timestamped events or counts are of increasing interest in application areas as humancomputer interaction, video surveillance, and Web data analysis. We propose a nonparametric Bayesian framework for modeling collections of such data. In particular, we use a Dirichlet process framework for learning a set of intensity functions corresponding to different categories, which form a basis set for representing individual time-periods (e.g., several days) depending on which categories the time-periods are assigned to. This allows the model to learn in a data-driven fashion what "factors" are generating the observations on a particular day, including (for example) weekday versus weekend effects or day-specific effects corresponding to unique (single-day) occurrences of unusual behavior, sharing information where appropriate to obtain improved estimates of the behavior associated with each category. Applications to real-world data sets of count data involving both vehicles and people are used to illustrate the technique.

The additive clustering model is widely used to infer the features of a set of stimuli from their similarities, on the assumption that similarity is a weighted linear function of common features. This paper develops a fully Bayesian formulation of the additive clustering model, using methods from nonparametric Bayesian statistics to allow the number of features to vary. We use this to explore several approaches to parameter estimation, showing that the nonparametric Bayesian approach provides a straightforward way to obtain estimates of both the number of features used in producing similarity judgments and their importance.

We consider the problem of inferring the structure of a network from cooccurrence data: observations that indicate which nodes occur in a signaling pathway but do not directly reveal node order within the pathway. This problem is motivated by network inference problems arising in computational biology and communication systems, in which it is difficult or impossible to obtain precise time ordering information. Without order information, every permutation of the activated nodes leads to a different feasible solution, resulting in combinatorial explosion of the feasible set. However, physical principles underlying most networked systems suggest that not all feasible solutions are equally likely. Intuitively, nodes that cooccur more frequently are probably more closely connected. Building on this intuition, we model path co-occurrences as randomly shuffled samples of a random walk on the network. We derive a computationally efficient network inference algorithm and, via novel concentration inequalities for importance sampling estimators, prove that a polynomial complexity Monte Carlo version of the algorithm converges with high probability.