patterns/trend of the source’s impact on the observed
opinion change.
Bayesian approaches have been widely used to
represent belief and opinions (Garg et al., 2004,
Santos Jr. et al., 2011a). Among those, Bayesian
Networks (BNs) (Pearl, 1988) are a popular
probabilistic model due to its sound theoretical
foundations in probability theory combined with
efficient reasoning. For example, (Garg et al., 2004)
introduces a BN based divergence minimization
framework to integrate opinions from different
sources in order to solve the problem of standard
opinion pooling. However, people’s belief,
structured as a knowledge-based system, is
necessarily associated with some degree of
incompleteness, which turns out to be problematical
to BNs, as they require a completely specified
conditional probability table (CPT). BNs also
require that information be topologically ordered
which further restricts their general applicability to
real-world situations. In this work, we build our
model based on Bayesian Knowledge Bases (BKBs)
(Santos and Santos, 1999), as it has been extensively
used to model complex intent-driven scenarios
(Santos et al., 2011a; Santos et al., 2011b).
At each time period, the formation of individual
belief can be viewed as a process of aggregating
opinion/information from different sources. The goal
is to arrive at a single probability distribution that
represents the integrated knowledge base. Santos et
al. (2011c) proposed an algorithm to encode and
fuse a set of belief networks from different sources
into one unified BKB. Due to the nature of BKBs
and the mathematical foundations of fusion, we
derive a new modelling approach called a Finite
Belief Fusion Model (FFM) to capture the
characteristics of opinion-changing behavior. We
can then show how to detect underlying hidden
sources of change together with the corresponding
influential factors through a non-linear optimization
problem.
2 BELIEF FUSING MODEL
2.1 Related Work
Anomaly detection has been applied to detect the
presence of any observations or patterns that are
different from the normal behavior of the data (Das
et al., 2008). Works based on Bayesian Networks
include detecting anomalies in network intrusion
detection (García-Teodoro et al., 2009) and disease
outbreak detection (Wong et al., 2003). The typical
approach of BN-based anomaly detection is to
compute the likelihood of each record in the dataset
and report records with unusually low likelihoods as
potential anomalies. Different from these approaches
whose main goals are to achieve early detection and
identify anomalous change in terms of a probability
distribution (Das et al., 2008), we focus on detecting
the reasons behind the behavior change. Moreover,
many statistics-based anomaly detection methods
only focus on detecting events whose patterns are
anomalous enough to be distinguishable from
normal data. Furthermore, they overlook the
situation when certain external opinion sources that
have subtle influences at present, may cause a
butterfly effect later, as triggered by other events.
We show that our work overcomes the above
limitations by being able to detect less substantial
influencing sources.
There are some other techniques that attempt to
handle changing belief networks. Methods based on
learning Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs)
(Dean and Kanazawa 1989) have provided
mechanisms for identifying conditional
dependencies in time-series data, such as for
reconstructing transcriptional regulatory networks
from gene expression data (Robinson and
Hartemink, 2010) and speech recognition using
HMM (Gale and Young, 2008). Nevertheless, most
DBN implementations assume for the sake of
efficiency that the Markov property holds for the
domain they represent, which restricts knowledge
engineering by requiring that the probability
distribution of variables at time depends solely on
the single snapshot at time 1. Thus, for real
world cases when the future outcomes are highly
dependent on the hidden factors whose prior
information is unidentified, we need another model
that can easily express such abstract temporal
relationships.
For each of the opinion sources, we would
expect the probability of generating a series of
responses follows a particular type of pattern.
Similarly, the reliability of an opinion is also likely
to vary across sources. This results in a natural
expectation that we need a model that is capable of
mixing belief networks from different sources
together. Hill and Kriesi (2001) apply a Finite
Mixture Model to support their theory of opinion-
changing behavior, where the attitude of each of the
group is represented by a distribution and the mixed
distribution is described by a weighted aggregation
of different distributions. However, the
Expectation-maximization (EM) based mixture
decomposition methods show propensity to identify
KDIR2012-InternationalConferenceonKnowledgeDiscoveryandInformationRetrieval
18