TurboReg: a framework for scaling up spatial logistic regression models

Predicting the presence or absence of spatial phenomena has been of great interest to scientists pursuing research in several applications including epidemic diseases detection, species occurrence prediction and earth observation. In this operation, a geographical space is divided by a two-dimensional grid, where the prediction (i.e, either 0 or 1) is performed at each cell in the grid. A common approach to solve this problem is to build spatial logistic regression models (a.k.a autologistic models) that estimate the prediction at any location based on a set of predictors (i.e., features) at this location and predictions from neighboring locations. Unfortunately, existing methods to build autologistic models are computationally expensive and do not scale up for large-scale grid data (e.g., fine-grained satellite images). This paper introduces TurboReg, a scalable framework to build autologistic models for predicting large-scale spatial phenomena. TurboReg considers both the accuracy and efficiency aspects when learning the regression model parameters. TurboReg is built on top of Markov Logic Network (MLN), a scalable statistical learning framework, where its internals and data structures are optimized to process spatial data. A set of experiments using large real and synthetic data show that TurboReg achieves at least three orders of magnitude performance gain over existing methods while preserving the model accuracy.