Learning Nonparametric Relational Models by Conjugately Incorporating Node Information in a Network

Relational model learning is useful for numerous practical applications. Many algorithms have been proposed in recent years to tackle this important yet challenging problem. Existing algorithms utilize only binary directional link data to recover hidden network structures. However, there exists far richer and more meaningful information in other parts of a network which one can (and should) exploit. The attributes associated with each node, for instance, contain crucial information to help practitioners understand the underlying relationships in a network. For this reason, in this paper, we propose two models and their solutions, namely the node-information involved mixed-membership model and the node-information involved latent-feature model, in an effort to systematically incorporate additional node information. To effectively achieve this aim, node information is used to generate individual sticks of a stick-breaking process. In this way, not only can we avoid the need to prespecify the number of communities beforehand, the algorithm also encourages that nodes exhibiting similar information have a higher chance of assigning the same community membership. Substantial efforts have been made toward achieving the appropriateness and efficiency of these models, including the use of conjugate priors. We evaluate our framework and its inference algorithms using real-world data sets, which show the generality and effectiveness of our models in capturing implicit network structures.