Much of the data in the world is relational in nature, involving multiple objects, related to each other in a variety of ways. Examples include both structured databases such as customer transaction data, semi-structured data such as hyperlinked pages on the world-wide web or networks of interacting genes, and unstructured data such as text. In this talk, I will describe a statistical framework for learning from relational data. The approach is based on probabilistic models, which have been applied with great success to a variety of machine learning tasks. Generally, this framework has been applied to data represented as fixed-length attribute-value vectors, or to sequence data. I will describe the language of probabilistic relational models (PRMs), which extend probabilistic graphical models with the expressive power of object-relational languages. PRMs model the uncertainty over the attributes of objects in the domain as well as uncertainty over the existence of relations between objects. I will present techniques for automatically learning PRMs directly from a relational data set, and applications of these techniques to various tasks, such as: collective classification of an entire set of related entities; clustering a set of linked entities into coherent groups; and even predicting the existence of links between entities. The talk will demonstrate the applicability of the techniques on several domains, such as web data and biological data.

Daphne Koller received her PhD from Stanford University in 1994. After a two-year postdoc at Berkeley, she returned to Stanford, where she is now an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department. Her main research interest is in creating large-scale systems that reason and act under uncertainty, using techniques fro decision theory and economics. Daphne Koller is the author of over 70 refereed publications, which have appeared in AI, theoretical computer science, and economics venues. She was the co-chair of the recent UAI 2001 conference, has served on numerous program committees, and as associate editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and of the Machine Learning Journal. She was awarded the Arthur Samuel Thesis Award in 1994, the Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship in 1996, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 1998, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 1999, and the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award at the IJCAI 2001 conference.