The Power of (Statistical) Relational Thinking

Taking into account relational structure during data mining can lead to better results, both in terms of quality and computational efficiency. This structure may be captured in the schema, in links between entities (e.g., graphs) or in rules describing the domain (e.g., knowledge graphs). Further, for richly structured prediction problems, there is often a need for a mix of both logical reasoning and statistical inference. In this talk, I will give an introduction to the field of Statistical Relational Learning (SRL), and I'll identify useful tips and tricks for exploiting structure in both the input and output space. I'll describe our recent work on highly scalable approaches for statistical relational inference. I'll close by introducing a broader interpretation of relational thinking that reveals new research opportunities (and challenges!).