UC San Diego

In dyadic prediction, the input consists of a pair of items (a dyad), and the goal is to predict the value of an observation related to the dyad. Special cases of dyadic prediction include collaborative filtering, where the goal is to predict ratings associated with (user, movie) pairs, and link prediction, where the goal is to predict the presence or absence of an edge between two nodes in a graph. In this paper, we study the problem of predicting labels associated with dyad members. Special cases of this problem include predicting characteristics of users in a collaborative filtering scenario, and predicting the label of a node in a graph, which is a task sometimes called within-network classification or relational learning. This paper shows how to extend a recent dyadic prediction method to predict labels for nodes and labels for edges simultaneously. The new method learns latent features within a log-linear model in a supervised way, to maximize predictive accuracy for both dyad observations and item labels. We compare the new approach to existing methods for within-network classification, both experimentally and analytically. The experiments show, surprisingly, that learning latent features in an unsupervised way is superior for some applications to learning them in a supervised way.