Parameter identifiability of discrete Bayesian networks with hidden variables

Identifiability of parameters is an essential property for a statistical model to be useful in most settings. However, establishing parameter identifiability for Bayesian networks with hidden variables remains challenging. In the context of finite state spaces, we give algebraic arguments establishing identifiability of some special models on small DAGs. We also establish that, for fixed state spaces, generic identifiability of parameters depends only on the Markov equivalence class of the DAG. To illustrate the use of these results, we investigate identifiability for all binary Bayesian networks with up to five variables, one of which is hidden and parental to all observable ones. Surprisingly, some of these models have parameterizations that are generically 4-to-one, and not 2-to-one as label swapping of the hidden states would suggest. This leads to interesting difficulties in interpreting causal effects.Comment: 23 page

Identifiability of parameters in latent structure models with many observed variables

While hidden class models of various types arise in many statistical applications, it is often difficult to establish the identifiability of their parameters. Focusing on models in which there is some structure of independence of some of the observed variables conditioned on hidden ones, we demonstrate a general approach for establishing identifiability utilizing algebraic arguments. A theorem of J. Kruskal for a simple latent-class model with finite state space lies at the core of our results, though we apply it to a diverse set of models. These include mixtures of both finite and nonparametric product distributions, hidden Markov models and random graph mixture models, and lead to a number of new results and improvements to old ones. In the parametric setting, this approach indicates that for such models, the classical definition of identifiability is typically too strong. Instead generic identifiability holds, which implies that the set of nonidentifiable parameters has measure zero, so that parameter inference is still meaningful. In particular, this sheds light on the properties of finite mixtures of Bernoulli products, which have been used for decades despite being known to have nonidentifiable parameters. In the nonparametric setting, we again obtain identifiability only when certain restrictions are placed on the distributions that are mixed, but we explicitly describe the conditions.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AOS689 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Exploring dependence between categorical variables: benefits and limitations of using variable selection within Bayesian clustering in relation to log-linear modelling with interaction terms

This manuscript is concerned with relating two approaches that can be used to explore complex dependence structures between categorical variables, namely Bayesian partitioning of the covariate space incorporating a variable selection procedure that highlights the covariates that drive the clustering, and log-linear modelling with interaction terms. We derive theoretical results on this relation and discuss if they can be employed to assist log-linear model determination, demonstrating advantages and limitations with simulated and real data sets. The main advantage concerns sparse contingency tables. Inferences from clustering can potentially reduce the number of covariates considered and, subsequently, the number of competing log-linear models, making the exploration of the model space feasible. Variable selection within clustering can inform on marginal independence in general, thus allowing for a more efficient exploration of the log-linear model space. However, we show that the clustering structure is not informative on the existence of interactions in a consistent manner. This work is of interest to those who utilize log-linear models, as well as practitioners such as epidemiologists that use clustering models to reduce the dimensionality in the data and to reveal interesting patterns on how covariates combine.Comment: Preprin