Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NIPS 2017)
Le Fang, Fan Yang, Wen Dong, Tong Guan, Chunming Qiao
Technological breakthroughs allow us to collect data with increasing spatio-temporal resolution from complex interaction systems. The combination of high-resolution observations, expressive dynamic models, and efficient machine learning algorithms can lead to crucial insights into complex interaction dynamics and the functions of these systems. In this paper, we formulate the dynamics of a complex interacting network as a stochastic process driven by a sequence of events, and develop expectation propagation algorithms to make inferences from noisy observations. To avoid getting stuck at a local optimum, we formulate the problem of minimizing Bethe free energy as a constrained primal problem and take advantage of the concavity of dual problem in the feasible domain of dual variables guaranteed by duality theorem. Our expectation propagation algorithms demonstrate better performance in inferring the interaction dynamics in complex transportation networks than competing models such as particle filter, extended Kalman filter, and deep neural networks.