Advances in Learning Bayesian Networks of Bounded Treewidth

This work presents novel algorithms for learning Bayesian network structures with bounded treewidth. Both exact and approximate methods are developed. The exact method combines mixed-integer linear programming formulations for structure learning and treewidth computation. The approximate method consists in uniformly sampling $k$-trees (maximal graphs of treewidth $k$), and subsequently selecting, exactly or approximately, the best structure whose moral graph is a subgraph of that $k$-tree. Some properties of these methods are discussed and proven. The approaches are empirically compared to each other and to a state-of-the-art method for learning bounded treewidth structures on a collection of public data sets with up to 100 variables. The experiments show that our exact algorithm outperforms the state of the art, and that the approximate approach is fairly accurate.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figures, 3 table

Learning Bounded Treewidth Bayesian Networks with Thousands of Variables

We present a method for learning treewidth-bounded Bayesian networks from data sets containing thousands of variables. Bounding the treewidth of a Bayesian greatly reduces the complexity of inferences. Yet, being a global property of the graph, it considerably increases the difficulty of the learning process. We propose a novel algorithm for this task, able to scale to large domains and large treewidths. Our novel approach consistently outperforms the state of the art on data sets with up to ten thousand variables

Tractability through Exchangeability: A New Perspective on Efficient Probabilistic Inference

Exchangeability is a central notion in statistics and probability theory. The assumption that an infinite sequence of data points is exchangeable is at the core of Bayesian statistics. However, finite exchangeability as a statistical property that renders probabilistic inference tractable is less well-understood. We develop a theory of finite exchangeability and its relation to tractable probabilistic inference. The theory is complementary to that of independence and conditional independence. We show that tractable inference in probabilistic models with high treewidth and millions of variables can be understood using the notion of finite (partial) exchangeability. We also show that existing lifted inference algorithms implicitly utilize a combination of conditional independence and partial exchangeability.Comment: In Proceedings of the 28th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligenc

Learning tractable multidimensional Bayesian network classifiers

Multidimensional classification has become one of the most relevant topics in view of the many domains that require a vector of class values to be assigned to a vector of given features. The popularity of multidimensional Bayesian network classifiers has increased in the last few years due to their expressive power and the existence of methods for learning different families of these models. The problem with this approach is that the computational cost of using the learned models is usually high, especially if there are a lot of class variables. Class-bridge decomposability means that the multidimensional classification problem can be divided into multiple subproblems for these models. In this paper, we prove that class-bridge decomposability can also be used to guarantee the tractability of the models. We also propose a strategy for efficiently bounding their inference complexity, providing a simple learning method with an order-based search that obtains tractable multidimensional Bayesian network classifiers. Experimental results show that our approach is competitive with other methods in the state of the art and ensures the tractability of the learned models

Applications of MaxSAT in Data Analysis

Peer reviewe