EE Graduate Seminar

Stochastic Graph Grammars

Prof. Tim Oates
Associate Professor of Computer Science
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, UMBC

11:30am Friday November 11, ITE 231, UMBC

Many important domains are naturally described relationally, often using graphs in which nodes correspond to entities and edges to relations. Stochastic graph grammars compactly represent probability distributions over graphs and can be learned from data, such as a set of graphs corresponding to proteins that have the same function.

In this talk we consider the problem of learning the parameters (i.e., the production probabilities) of stochastic graph grammars and the structure of the grammar (i.e., the productions) given a representative sample of graphs taken from the underlying distribution. We also present efficient algorithms for computing properties of the distribution over graphs defined by a graph grammar such as expectations of graph size, node degree, and number of edges.

Dr. Tim Oates is an Associate Professor in the CSEE Department at UMBC. He received B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University in 1989, and M.S. and PhD degrees from the Univ of Massachusetts Amherst in 1997 and 2000, respectively. Prior to coming to UMBC in Fall 2001, Prof. Oates spent a year as a postdoc in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris