Probabilistic Relational Models

Nir Friedman, Lise Getoor, Daphne Koller, Uri Nodelman, Avi Pfeffer, Eran Segal, Ben Taskar

Relational models are the most common representation of structured data. Enterprise business information, marketing and sales data, medical records, and scientific datasets are all stored in relational databases. Recently, there has been growing interest in extracting interesting statistical patterns from these huge amounts of data. These patterns give us a deeper understanding of our domain and the relationships in it. Probabilistic Relational Models (PRMs) are a language based on relational logic for describing statistical models of structured data. In addition to providing a sound and coherent foundation for dealing with the noise and uncertainty encountered in most real-world domains, the models themselves can be learned directly from an existing database or knowledge base using well-founded statistical techniques. PRMs model compex domains in terms of entities, their properties, and the relations between them. These models represent the uncertainty over the properties of an entity, capturing its probabilistic dependence both on other properties of that entity and on properties of related entities. PRMs can even represent uncertainty over the relational structure itself. PRMs provide a new framework for relation data mining, and offer new challenges for the endeavor of learning relational models for real-world domains.


book chapter

Learning Probabilistic Relational Models, L. Getoor, N. Friedman, D. Koller, and A. Pfeffer. Invited contribution to the book Relational Data Mining, S. Dzeroski and N. Lavrac, Eds., Springer-Verlag, 2001 (to appear).  



refereed conferences

Selectivity Estimation using Probabilistic Models L. Getoor, B. Taskar, and D. Koller, To appear in Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, Santa Barbara, California, May 2001.  
SPOOK: A system for probabilistic object-oriented knowledge representation A. Pfeffer, D. Koller, B. Milch, and K. Takusagawa, In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference on Uncertainty in AI (UAI), Stockholm, Sweden, August 1999, pages 541--550.  
Learning Probabilistic Relational Models, N. Friedman, L. Getoor, D. Koller and A. Pfeffer. Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Stockholm, Sweden, August 1999, pages 1300--1307.  
Structured representation of complex stochastic systems, N. Friedman, D. Koller, and A. Pfeffer. Proceedings of the 15th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Madison, Wisconsin, July 1998, pages 157--164.  
Probabilistic frame-based systems, D. Koller and A. Pfeffer. Proceedings of the 15th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Madison, Wisconsin, July 1998, pages 580--587.  
Object-Oriented Bayesian Networks, D. Koller and A. Pfeffer. Proceedings of the 13th Annual Conference on Uncertainty in AI (UAI), Providence, Rhode Island, August 1997, pages 302--313. Winner of the UAI '97 best student paper award.