TY - JOUR
T1 - A fuzzy graph matching approach in intelligence analysis and maintenance of continuous situational awareness
AU - Gross, Geoff
AU - Nagi, Rakesh
AU - Sambhoos, Kedar
N1 - Funding Information:
This work has been supported by a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Grant (Number W911NF-09-1-0392 ) for “Unified Research on Network-based Hard/Soft Information Fusion”, issued by the US Army Research Office (ARO) under the program management of Dr. John Lavery. We gratefully appreciate this support. The authors would also like to acknowledge Dr. Adam Stotz for providing existing incremental graph matching code.
PY - 2014/7
Y1 - 2014/7
N2 - In intelligence analysis a situation of interest is commonly obscured by the more voluminous amount of unimportant data. This data can be broadly divided into two categories, hard or physical sensor data and soft or human observed data. Soft intelligence data is collected by humans through human interaction, or human intelligence (HUMINT). The value and difficulty in manual processing of these observations due to the volume of available data and cognitive limitations of intelligence analysts necessitate an information fusion approach toward their understanding. The data representation utilized in this work is an attributed graphical format. The uncertainties, size and complexity of the connections within this graph make accurate assessments difficult for the intelligence analyst. While this graphical form is easier to consider for an intelligence analyst than disconnected multi-source human and sensor reports, manual traversal for the purpose of obtaining situation awareness and accurately answering priority information requests (PIRs) is still infeasible. To overcome this difficulty an automated stochastic graph matching approach is developed. This approach consists of three main processes: uncertainty alignment, graph matching result initialization and graph matching result maintenance. Uncertainty alignment associates with raw incoming observations a bias adjusted uncertainty representation representing the true value containing spread of the observation. The graph matching initialization step provides template graph to data graph matches for a newly initialized situation of interest (template graph). Finally, the graph matching result maintenance algorithm continuously updates graph matching results as incoming observations augment the cumulative data graph. Throughout these processes the uncertainties present in the original observations and the template to data graph matches are preserved, ultimately providing an indication of the uncertainties present in the current situation assessment. In addition to providing the technical details of this approach, this paper also provides an extensive numerical testing section which indicates a significant performance improvement of the proposed algorithm over a leading commercial solver.
AB - In intelligence analysis a situation of interest is commonly obscured by the more voluminous amount of unimportant data. This data can be broadly divided into two categories, hard or physical sensor data and soft or human observed data. Soft intelligence data is collected by humans through human interaction, or human intelligence (HUMINT). The value and difficulty in manual processing of these observations due to the volume of available data and cognitive limitations of intelligence analysts necessitate an information fusion approach toward their understanding. The data representation utilized in this work is an attributed graphical format. The uncertainties, size and complexity of the connections within this graph make accurate assessments difficult for the intelligence analyst. While this graphical form is easier to consider for an intelligence analyst than disconnected multi-source human and sensor reports, manual traversal for the purpose of obtaining situation awareness and accurately answering priority information requests (PIRs) is still infeasible. To overcome this difficulty an automated stochastic graph matching approach is developed. This approach consists of three main processes: uncertainty alignment, graph matching result initialization and graph matching result maintenance. Uncertainty alignment associates with raw incoming observations a bias adjusted uncertainty representation representing the true value containing spread of the observation. The graph matching initialization step provides template graph to data graph matches for a newly initialized situation of interest (template graph). Finally, the graph matching result maintenance algorithm continuously updates graph matching results as incoming observations augment the cumulative data graph. Throughout these processes the uncertainties present in the original observations and the template to data graph matches are preserved, ultimately providing an indication of the uncertainties present in the current situation assessment. In addition to providing the technical details of this approach, this paper also provides an extensive numerical testing section which indicates a significant performance improvement of the proposed algorithm over a leading commercial solver.
KW - Fuzzy systems
KW - Graph matching
KW - Incremental graph matching
KW - Situational awareness
KW - Stochastic graphical methods
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U2 - 10.1016/j.inffus.2013.05.006
DO - 10.1016/j.inffus.2013.05.006
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84892364695
VL - 18
SP - 43
EP - 61
JO - Information Fusion
JF - Information Fusion
SN - 1566-2535
IS - 1
ER -