Learning multivariate distributions by competitive assembly of marginals

We present a new framework for learning high-dimensional multivariate probability distributions from estimated marginals. The approach is motivated by compositional models and Bayesian networks, and designed to adapt to small sample sizes. We start with a large, overlapping set of elementary statist...

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Détails bibliographiques
Publié dans:IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence. - 1979. - 35(2013), 2 vom: 01. Feb., Seite 398-410
Auteur principal: Sánchez-Vega, Francisco (Auteur)
Autres auteurs: Younes, Laurent, Geman, Donald
Format: Article en ligne
Langue:English
Publié: 2013
Accès à la collection:IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence
Sujets:Journal Article Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.
Description
Résumé:We present a new framework for learning high-dimensional multivariate probability distributions from estimated marginals. The approach is motivated by compositional models and Bayesian networks, and designed to adapt to small sample sizes. We start with a large, overlapping set of elementary statistical building blocks, or "primitives," which are low-dimensional marginal distributions learned from data. Each variable may appear in many primitives. Subsets of primitives are combined in a Lego-like fashion to construct a probabilistic graphical model; only a small fraction of the primitives will participate in any valid construction. Since primitives can be precomputed, parameter estimation and structure search are separated. Model complexity is controlled by strong biases; we adapt the primitives to the amount of training data and impose rules which restrict the merging of them into allowable compositions. The likelihood of the data decomposes into a sum of local gains, one for each primitive in the final structure. We focus on a specific subclass of networks which are binary forests. Structure optimization corresponds to an integer linear program and the maximizing composition can be computed for reasonably large numbers of variables. Performance is evaluated using both synthetic data and real datasets from natural language processing and computational biology
Description:Date Completed 13.08.2013
Date Revised 01.04.2013
published: Print
Citation Status MEDLINE
ISSN:1939-3539