Estimating maximum likelihood parameters for stochastic context-free graph grammars

Abstract

Given a sample from an unknown probability distribution over strings, there exist algorithms for inferring the structure and parameters of stochastic grammatical representations of the unknown distribution, i.e. string grammars. Despite the fact that research on grammatical representations of sets of graphs has been conducted since the late 1960's, almost no work has considered the possibility of stochastic graph grammars and no algorithms exist for inferring stochastic graph grammars from data. This paper presents PEGG, an algorithm for estimating the parameters of stochastic context-free graph grammars given a sample from an unknown probability distribution over graphs. It is established formally that for a certain class of graph grammars PEGG finds parameter estimates in polynomial time that maximize the likelihood of the data, and preliminary empirical results demonstrate that the algorithm performs well in practice.