1 research outputs found
Learning accurate cutset networks by exploiting decomposability
The rising interest around tractable Probabilistic Graphical
Models is due to the guarantees on inference feasibility they provide.
Among them, Cutset Networks (CNets) have recently been introduced
as models embedding Pearl’s cutset conditioning algorithm in the form of
weighted probabilistic model trees with tree-structured models as leaves.
Learning the structure of CNets has been tackled as a greedy search
leveraging heuristics from decision tree learning. Even if efficient, the
learned models are far from being accurate in terms of likelihood. Here,
we exploit the decomposable score of CNets to learn their structure and
parameters by directly maximizing the likelihood, including the BIC criterion
and informative priors on smoothing parameters. In addition, we
show how to create mixtures of CNets by adopting a well known bagging
method from the discriminative framework as an effective and cheap
alternative to the classical EM. We compare our algorithms against the
original variants on a set of standard benchmarks for graphical model
structure learning, empirically proving our claims.The rising interest around tractable Probabilistic Graphical Models is due to the guarantees on inference feasibility they provide. Among them, Cutset Networks (CNets) have recently been introduced as models embedding Pearl’s cutset conditioning algorithm in the form of weighted probabilistic model trees with tree-structured models as leaves. Learning the structure of CNets has been tackled as a greedy search leveraging heuristics from decision tree learning. Even if efficient, the learned models are far from being accurate in terms of likelihood. Here, we exploit the decomposable score of CNets to learn their structure and parameters by directly maximizing the likelihood, including the BIC criterion and informative priors on smoothing parameters. In addition, we show how to create mixtures of CNets by adopting a well known bagging method from the discriminative framework as an effective and cheap alternative to the classical EM. We compare our algorithms against the original variants on a set of standard benchmarks for graphical model structure learning, empirically proving our claims