Embedding Conjugate Gradient in Learning Random Walks for Landscape Connectivity Modeling in Conservation

Embedding Conjugate Gradient in Learning Random Walks for Landscape Connectivity Modeling in Conservation

Pramith Devulapalli, Bistra Dilkina, Yexiang Xue

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Special track on AI for CompSust and Human well-being. Pages 4338-4344. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/598

Models capturing parameterized random walks on graphs have been widely adopted in wildlife conservation to study species dispersal as a function of landscape features. Learning the probabilistic model empowers ecologists to understand animal responses to conservation strategies. By exploiting the connection between random walks and simple electric networks, we show that learning a random walk model can be reduced to finding the optimal graph Laplacian for a circuit. We propose a moment matching strategy that correlates the model’s hitting and commuting times with those observed empirically. To find the best Laplacian, we propose a neural network capable of back-propagating gradients through the matrix inverse in an end-to-end fashion. We developed a scalable method called CGInv which back-propagates the gradients through a neural network encoding each layer as a conjugate gradient iteration. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we apply our computational framework to applications in landscape connectivity modeling. Our experiments successfully demonstrate that our framework effectively and efficiently recovers the ground-truth configurations.
Keywords:
Machine Learning Applications: Environmental
Machine Learning: Learning Graphical Models
Machine Learning: Deep Learning
Machine Learning: Time-series;Data Streams