Decomposing Uncertainty in Probabilistic Knowledge Graph Embeddings: Why Entity Variance Is Not Enough

Abstract

Probabilistic knowledge graph embeddings represent entities as distributions, using learned variances to quantify epistemic uncertainty. We identify a fundamental limitation: these variances are relation-agnostic, meaning an entity receives identical uncertainty regardless of relational context. This conflates two distinct out-of-distribution phenomena that behave oppositely: emerging entities (rare, poorly-learned) and novel relational contexts (familiar entities in unobserved relationships). We prove an impossibility result: any uncertainty estimator using only entity-level statistics independent of relation context achieves near-random OOD detection on novel contexts. We empirically validate this on three datasets, finding 100 percent of novel-context triples have frequency-matched in-distribution counterparts. This explains why existing probabilistic methods achieve 0.99 AUROC on random corruptions but only 0.52-0.64 on temporal distribution shift. We formalize uncertainty decomposition into complementary components: semantic uncertainty from entity embedding variance (detecting emerging entities) and structural uncertainty from entity-relation co-occurrence (detecting novel contexts). Our main theoretical result proves these signals are non-redundant, and that any convex combination strictly dominates either signal alone. Our method (CAGP) combines semantic and structural uncertainty via learned weights, achieving 0.94-0.99 AUROC on temporal OOD detection across multiple benchmarks, a 60-80 percent relative improvement over relation-agnostic baselines. Empirical validation confirms complete frequency overlap on three datasets (FB15k-237, WN18RR, YAGO3-10). On selective prediction, our method reduces errors by 43 percent at 85 percent answer rate.