8,613 research outputs found
Learning Bayesian Networks with the bnlearn R Package
bnlearn is an R package which includes several algorithms for learning the
structure of Bayesian networks with either discrete or continuous variables.
Both constraint-based and score-based algorithms are implemented, and can use
the functionality provided by the snow package to improve their performance via
parallel computing. Several network scores and conditional independence
algorithms are available for both the learning algorithms and independent use.
Advanced plotting options are provided by the Rgraphviz package.Comment: 22 pages, 4 picture
Learning Bayesian Networks with the bnlearn R Package
bnlearn is an R package (R Development Core Team 2010) which includes several algorithms for learning the structure of Bayesian networks with either discrete or continuous variables. Both constraint-based and score-based algorithms are implemented, and can use the functionality provided by the snow package (Tierney et al. 2008) to improve their performance via parallel computing. Several network scores and conditional independence algorithms are available for both the learning algorithms and independent use. Advanced plotting options are provided by the Rgraphviz package (Gentry et al. 2010).
Discovering robust dependencies from data
Science revolves around forming hypotheses, designing experiments, collecting data, and tests. It was not until recently, with the advent of modern hardware and data analytics, that science shifted towards a big-data-driven paradigm that led to an unprecedented success across various fields. What is perhaps the most astounding feature of this new era, is that interesting hypotheses can now be automatically discovered from observational data. This dissertation investigates knowledge discovery procedures that do exactly this. In particular, we seek algorithms that discover the most informative models able to compactly “describe” aspects of the phenomena under investigation, in both supervised and unsupervised settings. We consider interpretable models in the form of subsets of the original variable set. We want the models to capture all possible interactions, e.g., linear, non-linear, between all types of variables, e.g., discrete, continuous, and lastly, we want their quality to be meaningfully assessed. For this, we employ information-theoretic
measures, and particularly, the fraction of information for the supervised setting, and the normalized total correlation for the unsupervised. The former measures the uncertainty reduction of the target variable conditioned on a model, and the latter measures the information overlap of the variables included in a model.
Without access to the true underlying data generating process, we estimate the aforementioned measures from observational data. This process is prone to statistical errors, and in our case, the errors manifest as biases towards larger models. This can lead to situations where the results are utterly random, hindering
therefore further analysis. We correct this behavior with notions from statistical learning theory. In particular, we propose regularized estimators that are unbiased under the hypothesis of independence, leading to robust estimation from limited data samples and arbitrary dimensionalities. Moreover, we do this for models
consisting of both discrete and continuous variables. Lastly, to discover the top scoring models, we derive effective optimization algorithms for exact, approximate, and heuristic search. These algorithms are
powered by admissible, tight, and efficient-to-compute bounding functions for our proposed estimators that can be used to greatly prune the search space. Overall, the products of this dissertation can successfully assist data analysts with data exploration, discovering powerful description models, or concluding that
no satisfactory models exist, implying therefore new experiments and data are required for the phenomena under investigation. This statement is supported by Materials Science researchers who corroborated our discoveries.In der Wissenschaft geht es um Hypothesenbildung, Entwerfen von Experimenten, Sammeln von Daten und Tests. Jüngst hat sich die Wissenschaft, durch das Aufkommen moderner Hardware und Datenanalyse, zu einem Big-Data-basierten Paradigma hin entwickelt, das zu einem beispiellosen Erfolg in verschiedenen Bereichen geführt hat. Ein erstaunliches Merkmal dieser neuen ra ist, dass interessante Hypothesen jetzt automatisch aus Beobachtungsdaten entdeckt werden k nnen. In dieser Dissertation werden Verfahren zur Wissensentdeckung untersucht, die genau dies tun. Insbesondere suchen wir nach Algorithmen, die Modelle identifizieren, die in der Lage sind, Aspekte der untersuchten Ph nomene sowohl in beaufsichtigten als auch in unbeaufsichtigten Szenarien kompakt zu “beschreiben”. Hierzu betrachten wir interpretierbare Modelle in Form von Untermengen der ursprünglichen Variablenmenge. Ziel ist es, dass diese Modelle alle m glichen Interaktionen erfassen (z.B. linear, nicht-lineare), zwischen allen Arten von Variablen unterscheiden (z.B. diskrete, kontinuierliche) und dass schlussendlich ihre Qualit t sinnvoll bewertet wird. Dazu setzen wir informationstheoretische Ma e ein, insbesondere den Informationsanteil für das überwachte und die normalisierte Gesamtkorrelation für das unüberwachte Szenario. Ersteres misst die Unsicherheitsreduktion der Zielvariablen, die durch ein Modell bedingt ist, und letztere misst die Informationsüberlappung der enthaltenen Variablen. Ohne Kontrolle des Datengenerierungsprozesses werden die oben genannten Ma e aus Beobachtungsdaten gesch tzt. Dies ist anf llig für statistische Fehler, die zu Verzerrungen in gr eren Modellen führen. So entstehen Situationen, wobei die Ergebnisse v llig zuf llig sind und somit weitere Analysen st ren. Wir korrigieren dieses Verhalten mit Methoden aus der statistischen Lerntheorie. Insbesondere schlagen wir regularisierte Sch tzer vor, die unter der Hypothese der Unabh ngigkeit nicht verzerrt sind und somit zu einer robusten Sch tzung aus begrenzten Datenstichproben und willkürlichen-Dimensionalit ten führen. Darüber hinaus wenden wir dies für Modelle an, die sowohl aus diskreten als auch aus kontinuierlichen Variablen bestehen. Um die besten Modelle zu entdecken, leiten wir effektive Optimierungsalgorithmen mit verschiedenen Garantien ab. Diese Algorithmen basieren auf speziellen Begrenzungsfunktionen der vorgeschlagenen Sch tzer und erlauben es den Suchraum stark einzuschr nken. Insgesamt sind die Produkte dieser Arbeit sehr effektiv für die Wissensentdeckung. Letztere Aussage
wurde von Materialwissenschaftlern best tigt
Distinguishing cause from effect using observational data: methods and benchmarks
The discovery of causal relationships from purely observational data is a
fundamental problem in science. The most elementary form of such a causal
discovery problem is to decide whether X causes Y or, alternatively, Y causes
X, given joint observations of two variables X, Y. An example is to decide
whether altitude causes temperature, or vice versa, given only joint
measurements of both variables. Even under the simplifying assumptions of no
confounding, no feedback loops, and no selection bias, such bivariate causal
discovery problems are challenging. Nevertheless, several approaches for
addressing those problems have been proposed in recent years. We review two
families of such methods: Additive Noise Methods (ANM) and Information
Geometric Causal Inference (IGCI). We present the benchmark CauseEffectPairs
that consists of data for 100 different cause-effect pairs selected from 37
datasets from various domains (e.g., meteorology, biology, medicine,
engineering, economy, etc.) and motivate our decisions regarding the "ground
truth" causal directions of all pairs. We evaluate the performance of several
bivariate causal discovery methods on these real-world benchmark data and in
addition on artificially simulated data. Our empirical results on real-world
data indicate that certain methods are indeed able to distinguish cause from
effect using only purely observational data, although more benchmark data would
be needed to obtain statistically significant conclusions. One of the best
performing methods overall is the additive-noise method originally proposed by
Hoyer et al. (2009), which obtains an accuracy of 63+-10 % and an AUC of
0.74+-0.05 on the real-world benchmark. As the main theoretical contribution of
this work we prove the consistency of that method.Comment: 101 pages, second revision submitted to Journal of Machine Learning
Researc
The WHY in Business Processes: Discovery of Causal Execution Dependencies
A crucial element in predicting the outcomes of process interventions and
making informed decisions about the process is unraveling the genuine
relationships between the execution of process activities. Contemporary process
discovery algorithms exploit time precedence as their main source of model
derivation. Such reliance can sometimes be deceiving from a causal perspective.
This calls for faithful new techniques to discover the true execution
dependencies among the tasks in the process. To this end, our work offers a
systematic approach to the unveiling of the true causal business process by
leveraging an existing causal discovery algorithm over activity timing. In
addition, this work delves into a set of conditions under which process mining
discovery algorithms generate a model that is incongruent with the causal
business process model, and shows how the latter model can be methodologically
employed for a sound analysis of the process. Our methodology searches for such
discrepancies between the two models in the context of three causal patterns,
and derives a new view in which these inconsistencies are annotated over the
mined process model. We demonstrate our methodology employing two open process
mining algorithms, the IBM Process Mining tool, and the LiNGAM causal discovery
technique. We apply it on a synthesized dataset and on two open benchmark data
sets.Comment: 20 pages, 19 figure
The FEDHC Bayesian network learning algorithm
The paper proposes a new hybrid Bayesian network learning algorithm, termed
Forward Early Dropping Hill Climbing (FEDHC), devised to work with either
continuous or categorical variables. Specifically for the case of continuous
data, a robust to outliers version of FEDHC, that can be adopted by other BN
learning algorithms, is proposed. Further, the paper manifests that the only
implementation of MMHC in the statistical software \textit{R}, is prohibitively
expensive and a new implementation is offered. The FEDHC is tested via Monte
Carlo simulations that distinctly show it is computationally efficient, and
produces Bayesian networks of similar to, or of higher accuracy than MMHC and
PCHC. Finally, an application of FEDHC, PCHC and MMHC algorithms to real data,
from the field of economics, is demonstrated using the statistical software
\textit{R}
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