Probabilistic databases play a crucial role in the management and understanding of uncertain data. However, incorporating probabilities into the semantics of incomplete databases has posed many challenges, forcing systems to sacrifice modeling power,
scalability, or restrict the class of relational algebra formula under which they are closed. We propose an alternative approach where the underlying relational database always represents a single world, and an external factor graph encodes a distribution over possible worlds; Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) inference is then used to recover this uncertainty to a desired level of fidelity. Our approach allows the efficient evaluation of arbitrary queries over probabilistic databases with arbitrary dependencies expressed by graphical models with structure that changes during inference. MCMC sampling provides efficiency by hypothesizing {em modifications} to possible worlds rather than generating entire worlds from scratch. Queries are then run over the portions of the world that change, avoiding the onerous cost of running full queries over each sampled world. A significant innovation of this work is the connection between MCMC sampling and materialized view maintenance techniques: we find empirically that using view maintenance techniques is several orders of magnitude faster than naively querying each sampled world. We also demonstrate our systems ability to answer relational queries with aggregation, and demonstrate additional scalability through the use of parallelization.
The rare decay B to K* (to K pi) mu+ mu- is regarded as one of the crucial channels for B physics since its angular distribution gives access to many observables that offer new important tests of the Standard Model and its extensions. We point out a
number of correlations among various observables which will allow a clear distinction between different New Physics (NP) scenarios. Furthermore, we discuss the decay B to K* nu anti-nu which allows for a transparent study of Z penguin effects in NP frameworks in the absence of dipole operator contributions and Higgs penguin contributions. We study all possible observables in B to K* nu anti-nu and the related b to s transitions B to K nu anti-nu and B to X_s nu anti-nu in the context of the SM and various NP models.
We present a MSSM study of the b -> s gamma decay in a Minimal Flavor Violating (MFV) framework, where the form of the soft SUSY breaking terms is determined by the Standard Model Yukawa couplings. In particular, we address the role of gluino contrib
utions, which are set to zero in most studies of the MFV MSSM. Gluino contributions can play an important role in the MFV MSSM whenever mu * tan(beta) is large. In fact, similarly to chargino contributions, gluino contributions are tan(beta) enhanced and can easily dominate charged Higgs contributions for large values of tan(beta). Even though each of the separate contributions to b -> s gamma can be sizeable by itself, surprisingly no absolute lower bound can be placed on any of the relevant SUSY masses, since patterns of partial cancellations among the three competing contributions (Higgs, chargino and gluino) can occur throughout the MSSM parameter space.
