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Register a new userDynamic Stochastic Blockmodel Regression for Network Data: Application to International Militarized Conflicts
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A primary goal of social science research is to understand how latent group memberships predict the dynamic process of network evolution. In the modeling of international conflicts, for example, scholars hypothesize that membership in geopolitical coalitions shapes the decision to engage in militarized conflict. Such theories explain the ways in which nodal and dyadic characteristics affect the evolution of relational ties over time via their effects on group memberships. To aid the empirical testing of these arguments, we develop a dynamic model of network data by combining a hidden Markov model with a mixed-membership stochastic blockmodel that identifies latent groups underlying the network structure. Unlike existing models, we incorporate covariates that predict node membership in latent groups as well as the direct formation of edges between dyads. While prior substantive research often assumes the decision to engage in militarized conflict is independent across states and static over time, we demonstrate that conflict patterns are driven by states evolving membership in geopolitical blocs. Changes in monadic covariates like democracy shift states between coalitions, generating heterogeneous effects on conflict over time and across states. The proposed methodology, which relies on a variational approximation to a collapsed posterior distribution as well as stochastic optimization for scalability, is implemented through an open-source software package.
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We develop a new methodology for spatial regression of aggregated outputs on multi-resolution covariates. Such problems often occur with spatial data, for example in crop yield prediction, where the output is spatially-aggregated over an area and the covariates may be observed at multiple resolutions. Building upon previous work on aggregated output regression, we propose a regression framework to synthesise the effects of the covariates at different resolutions on the output and provide uncertainty estimation. We show that, for a crop yield prediction problem, our approach is more scalable, via variational inference, than existing multi-resolution regression models. We also show that our framework yields good predictive performance, compared to existing multi-resolution crop yield models, whilst being able to provide estimation of the underlying spatial effects.
Dail Eireann is the principal chamber of the Irish parliament. The 31st Dail Eireann is the principal chamber of the Irish parliament. The 31st Dail was in session from March 11th, 2011 to February 6th, 2016. Many of the members of the Dail were active on social media and many were Twitter users who followed other members of the Dail. The pattern of following amongst these politicians provides insights into political alignment within the Dail. We propose a new model, called the generalized latent space stochastic blockmodel, which extends and generalizes both the latent space model and the stochastic blockmodel to study social media connections between members of the Dail. The probability of an edge between two nodes in a network depends on their respective class labels as well as latent positions in an unobserved latent space. The proposed model is capable of representing transitivity, clustering, as well as disassortative mixing. A Bayesian method with Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling is proposed for estimation of model parameters. Model selection is performed using the WAIC criterion and models of different number of classes or dimensions of latent space are compared. We use the model to study Twitter following relationships of members of the Dail and interpret structure found in these relationships. We find that the following relationships amongst politicians is mainly driven by past and present political party membership. We also find that the modeling outputs are informative when studying voting within the Dail.
Environmental data may be large due to number of records, number of covariates, or both. Random forests has a reputation for good predictive performance when using many covariates with nonlinear relationships, whereas spatial regression, when using reduced rank methods, has a reputation for good predictive performance when using many records that are spatially autocorrelated. In this study, we compare these two techniques using a data set containing the macroinvertebrate multimetric index (MMI) at 1859 stream sites with over 200 landscape covariates. A primary application is mapping MMI predictions and prediction errors at 1.1 million perennial stream reaches across the conterminous United States. For the spatial regression model, we develop a novel transformation procedure that estimates Box-Cox transformations to linearize covariate relationships and handles possibly zero-inflated covariates. We find that the spatial regression model with transformations, and a subsequent selection of significant covariates, has cross-validation performance slightly better than random forests. We also find that prediction interval coverage is close to nominal for each method, but that spatial regression prediction intervals tend to be narrower and have less variability than quantile regression forest prediction intervals. A simulation study is used to generalize results and clarify advantages of each modeling approach.
Mixed membership problem for undirected network has been well studied in network analysis recent years. However, the more general case of mixed membership for directed network remains a challenge. Here, we propose an interpretable model: bipartite mixed membership stochastic blockmodel (BiMMSB for short) for directed mixed membership networks. BiMMSB allows that row nodes and column nodes of the adjacency matrix can be different and these nodes may have distinct community structure in a directed network. We also develop an efficient spectral algorithm called BiMPCA to estimate the mixed memberships for both row nodes and column nodes in a directed network. We show that the approach is asymptotically consistent under BiMMSB. We demonstrate the advantages of BiMMSB with applications to a small-scale simulation study, the directed Political blogs network and the Papers Citations network.
Considerable effort has been made to increase the scale of Linked Data. However, an inevitable problem when dealing with data integration from multiple sources is that multiple different sources often provide conflicting objects for a certain predicate of the same real-world entity, so-called object conflicts problem. Currently, the object conflicts problem has not received sufficient attention in the Linked Data community. In this paper, we first formalize the object conflicts resolution problem as computing the joint distribution of variables on a heterogeneous information network called the Source-Object Network, which successfully captures the all correlations from objects and Linked Data sources. Then, we introduce a novel approach based on network effects called ObResolution(Object Resolution), to identify a true object from multiple conflicting objects. ObResolution adopts a pairwise Markov Random Field (pMRF) to model all evidences under a unified framework. Extensive experimental results on six real-world datasets show that our method exhibits higher accuracy than existing approaches and it is robust and consistent in various domains. keywords{Linked Data, Object Conflicts, Linked Data Quality, Truth Discovery
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