Recurrent Dirichlet Belief Networks for interpretable Dynamic Relational Data Modelling

Recurrent Dirichlet Belief Networks for interpretable Dynamic Relational Data Modelling

Yaqiong Li, Xuhui Fan, Ling Chen, Bin Li, Zheng Yu, Scott A. Sisson

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 2470-2476. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/342

The Dirichlet Belief Network~(DirBN) has been recently proposed as a promising approach in learning interpretable deep latent representations for objects. In this work, we leverage its interpretable modelling architecture and propose a deep dynamic probabilistic framework -- the Recurrent Dirichlet Belief Network~(Recurrent-DBN) -- to study interpretable hidden structures from dynamic relational data. The proposed Recurrent-DBN has the following merits: (1) it infers interpretable and organised hierarchical latent structures for objects within and across time steps; (2) it enables recurrent long-term temporal dependence modelling, which outperforms the one-order Markov descriptions in most of the dynamic probabilistic frameworks; (3) the computational cost scales to the number of positive links only. In addition, we develop a new inference strategy, which first upward-and-backward propagates latent counts and then downward-and-forward samples variables, to enable efficient Gibbs sampling for the Recurrent-DBN. We apply the Recurrent-DBN to dynamic relational data problems. The extensive experiment results on real-world data validate the advantages of the Recurrent-DBN over the state-of-the-art models in interpretable latent structure discovery and improved link prediction performance.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Probabilistic Machine Learning
Machine Learning: Deep Generative Models