32,786 research outputs found
On the Complexity and Approximation of Binary Evidence in Lifted Inference
Lifted inference algorithms exploit symmetries in probabilistic models to
speed up inference. They show impressive performance when calculating
unconditional probabilities in relational models, but often resort to
non-lifted inference when computing conditional probabilities. The reason is
that conditioning on evidence breaks many of the model's symmetries, which can
preempt standard lifting techniques. Recent theoretical results show, for
example, that conditioning on evidence which corresponds to binary relations is
#P-hard, suggesting that no lifting is to be expected in the worst case. In
this paper, we balance this negative result by identifying the Boolean rank of
the evidence as a key parameter for characterizing the complexity of
conditioning in lifted inference. In particular, we show that conditioning on
binary evidence with bounded Boolean rank is efficient. This opens up the
possibility of approximating evidence by a low-rank Boolean matrix
factorization, which we investigate both theoretically and empirically.Comment: To appear in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26
(NIPS), Lake Tahoe, USA, December 201
The IBMAP approach for Markov networks structure learning
In this work we consider the problem of learning the structure of Markov
networks from data. We present an approach for tackling this problem called
IBMAP, together with an efficient instantiation of the approach: the IBMAP-HC
algorithm, designed for avoiding important limitations of existing
independence-based algorithms. These algorithms proceed by performing
statistical independence tests on data, trusting completely the outcome of each
test. In practice tests may be incorrect, resulting in potential cascading
errors and the consequent reduction in the quality of the structures learned.
IBMAP contemplates this uncertainty in the outcome of the tests through a
probabilistic maximum-a-posteriori approach. The approach is instantiated in
the IBMAP-HC algorithm, a structure selection strategy that performs a
polynomial heuristic local search in the space of possible structures. We
present an extensive empirical evaluation on synthetic and real data, showing
that our algorithm outperforms significantly the current independence-based
algorithms, in terms of data efficiency and quality of learned structures, with
equivalent computational complexities. We also show the performance of IBMAP-HC
in a real-world application of knowledge discovery: EDAs, which are
evolutionary algorithms that use structure learning on each generation for
modeling the distribution of populations. The experiments show that when
IBMAP-HC is used to learn the structure, EDAs improve the convergence to the
optimum
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