Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Scalable Probabilistic Databases With Factor Graphs And Mcmc, Michael Wick, Andrew Mccallum, Gerome Miklau

Andrew McCallum

Probabilistic databases play a crucial role in the management and understanding of uncertain data. However, incorporating probabilities into the semantics of incomplete databases has posed many challenges, forcing systems to sacrifice modeling power, scalability, or restrict the class of relational algebra formula under which they are closed. We propose an alternative approach where the underlying relational database always represents a single world, and an external factor graph encodes a distribution over possible worlds; Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) inference is then used to recover this uncertainty to a desired level of fidelity. Our approach allows the efficient evaluation of arbitrary …