Paper on Machine Learning for Mechanics published in Nature Communications
Our work on a novel probabilistic approach for inferring heterogeneous interactions between interactive entities was recently published in Nature Communications.
Interacting systems are ubiquitous in nature and engineering, ranging from particle dynamics in physics to functionally connected brain regions. Revealing interaction laws is of fundamental importance but also particularly challenging. These challenges become exacerbated for heterogeneous systems that are prevalent in reality, where multiple interaction types coexist simultaneously and relational inference is required. Here, we propose a probabilistic method for relational inference, which possesses two distinctive characteristics compared to existing methods. First, it infers the interaction types of different edges collectively by explicitly encoding the correlation among incoming interactions with a joint distribution, and second, it allows handling systems with variable topological structure over time. We evaluate the proposed methodology across several benchmark datasets and demonstrate that it outperforms existing methods in accurately inferring interaction types. The developed methodology constitutes a key element for understanding heterogeneous interacting systems.