Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 22 (NIPS 2009)
Ilya Sutskever, Joshua Tenenbaum, Russ R. Salakhutdinov
We consider the problem of learning probabilistic models for complex relational structures between various types of objects. A model can help us ``understand a dataset of relational facts in at least two ways, by finding interpretable structure in the data, and by supporting predictions, or inferences about whether particular unobserved relations are likely to be true. Often there is a tradeoff between these two aims: cluster-based models yield more easily interpretable representations, while factorization-based approaches have better predictive performance on large data sets. We introduce the Bayesian Clustered Tensor Factorization (BCTF) model, which embeds a factorized representation of relations in a nonparametric Bayesian clustering framework. Inference is fully Bayesian but scales well to large data sets. The model simultaneously discovers interpretable clusters and yields predictive performance that matches or beats previous probabilistic models for relational data.