Iterative Structural Inference of Directed Graphs

In this paper, we propose a variational model, iterative Structural Inference of Directed Graphs (iSIDG), to infer the existence of directed interactions from observational agents’ features over a time period in a dynamical system. First, the iterative process in our model feeds the learned interactions back to encourage our model to eliminate indirect interactions and to emphasize directional representation during learning. Second, we show that extra regularization terms in the objective function for smoothness, connectiveness, and sparsity prompt our model to infer a more realistic structure and to further eliminate indirect interactions. We evaluate iSIDG on various datasets including biological networks, simulated fMRI data, and physical simulations to demonstrate that our model is able to precisely infer the existence of interactions, and is significantly superior to baseline models.