Modelling sequential data is important in many areas of science and engineering. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) and Kalman filter models (KFMs) are popular for this because they are simple and flexible. For example, HMMs have been used for speech recognition and bio-sequence analysis, and KFMs have been used for problems ranging from tracking planes and missiles to predicting the economy. However, HMMs and KFMs are limited in their “expressive power”. Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs) generalize HMMs by allowing the state space to be represented in factored form, instead of as a single discrete random variable. DBNs generalize KFMs by allowing arbitrary probability distributions, not just (unimodal) linear-Gaussian. In this thesis, I will discuss how to represent many different kinds of models as DBNs, how to perform exact and approximate inference in DBNs, and how to learn DBN models from sequential data. In particular, the main novel technical contributions of this thesis are as follows: a way of representing Hierarchical HMMs as DBNs, which enables inference to be done in O(T) time instead of O(T 3), where T is the length of the sequence; an exact smoothing algorithm that takes O(log T) space instead of O(T); a simple way of using the junction tree algorithm for online inference in DBNs; new complexity bounds on exact online inference in DBNs; a new deterministic approximate inference algorithm called factored frontier; an analysis of the relationship between the BK algorithm and loopy belief propagation; a way of applying Rao-Blackwellised particle filtering to DBNs in general, and the SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) problem in particular; a way of extending the structural EM algorithm to DBNs; and a variety of different applications of DBNs. However, perhaps the main value of the thesis is its catholic presentation of the field of sequential data modelling.

This literature review discusses different methods under the general rubric of learning Bayesian networks from data, and includes some overlapping work on more general probabilistic networks. Connections are drawn between the statistical, neural network, and uncertainty communities, and between the different methodological communities, such as Bayesian, description length, and classical statistics. Basic concepts for learning and Bayesian networks are introduced and methods are then reviewed. Methods are discussed for learning parameters of a probabilistic network, for learning the structure, and for learning hidden variables. The presentation avoids formal definitions and theorems, as these are plentiful in the literature, and instead illustrates key concepts with simplified examples. Keywords--- Bayesian networks, graphical models, hidden variables, learning, learning structure, probabilistic networks, knowledge discovery. I. Introduction Probabilistic networks or probabilistic gra...

We examine methods for clustering in high dimensions. In the first part of the paper, we perform an experimental comparison between three batch clustering algorithms: the Expectation–Maximization (EM) algorithm, a “winner take all ” version of the EM algorithm reminiscent of the K-means algorithm, and model-based hierarchical agglomerative clustering. We learn naive-Bayes models with a hidden root node, using high-dimensional discrete-variable data sets (both real and synthetic). We find that the EM algorithm significantly outperforms the other methods, and proceed to investigate the effect of various initialization schemes on the final solution produced by the EM algorithm. The initializations that we consider are (1) parameters sampled from an uninformative prior, (2) random perturbations of the marginal distribution of the data, and (3) the output of hierarchical agglomerative clustering. Although the methods are substantially different, they lead to learned models that are strikingly similar in quality. 1

This paper re-examines the problem of parameter estimation in Bayesian networks with missing values and hidden variables from the perspective of recent work in on-line learning [12]. We provide a unified framework for parameter estimation that encompasses both on-line learning, where the model is continuously adapted to new data cases as they arrive, and the more traditional batch learning, where a pre-accumulated set of samples is used in a one-time model selection process. In the batch case, our framework encompassesboth the gradient projection algorithm [2, 3] and the EM algorithm [14] for Bayesian networks. The framework also leads to new on-line and batch parameter update schemes, including a parameterized version of EM. We provide both empirical and theoretical results indicating that parameterized EM allows faster convergence to the maximum likelihood parameters than does standard EM. 1 Introduction Over the past few years, there has been a growing interest in the problem of le...

Data mining is an interdisciplinary research area spanning severals disciplines such as database systems, machine learning, intelligent information systems, statistics, and expert systems. Data mining has evolved into an important and active area of research because of theoretical challenges and practical applications associated with the problem of discovering (or extracting) interesting and previously unknown knowledge from very large real-world databases. Many aspects of data mining have been investigated in several related fields. A unique but important aspect of the problem lies in the significance of needs to extend these studies to include the nature of the contents of the real-world databases. In this chapter, we discuss the theory and foundational issues in data mining, describe data mining methods and algorithms, and review data mining applications. Since a major focus of this book is on rough sets and its applications to database mining, one full section is devoted to summari...

Copyright by

This paper describes a method for parameter learning in Object-Oriented Bayesian Networks (OOBNs). We propose a methodology for learning parameters in OOBNs, and prove that maintaining the object orientation imposed by the prior model will increase the learning speed in object-oriented domains. We also propose a method to efficiently estimate the probability parameters in domains that are not strictly object oriented. Finally, we attack type uncertainty, a special case of model uncertainty typical to object-oriented domains

We present a collective approach to learning a Bayesian network from distributed heterogenous data. In this approach, we first learn a local Bayesian network at each site using the local data. Then each site identifies the observations that are most likely to be evidence of coupling between local and non-local variables and transmits a subset of these observations to a central site. Another Bayesian network is learnt at the central site using the data transmitted from the local site. The local and central Bayesian networks are combined to obtain a collective Bayesian network, that models the entire data. Experimental results and theoretical justification that demonstrate the feasibility of our approach are presented.

Discriminative learning of the parameters in the naive Bayes model is known to be equivalent to a logistic regression problem. Here we show that the same fact holds for much more general Bayesian network models, as long as the corresponding network structure satisfies a certain graph-theoretic property. The property holds for naive Bayes but also for more complex structures such as tree-augmented naive Bayes (TAN) as well as for mixed diagnostic-discriminative structures. Our results imply that for networks satisfying our property, the conditional likelihood cannot have local maxima so that the global maximum can be found by simple local optimization methods. We also show that if this property does not hold, then in general the conditional likelihood can have local, non-global maxima. We illustrate our theoretical results by empirical experiments with local optimization in a conditional naive Bayes model. Furthermore, we provide a heuristic strategy for pruning the number of parameters and relevant features in such models. For many data sets, we obtain good results with heavily pruned submodels containing many fewer parameters than the original naive Bayes model.

We illustrate two different methodologies for learning Hybrid Bayesian networks, that is, Bayesian networks containing both continuous and discrete variables, from data. The two methodologies differ in the way of handling continuous data when learning the Bayesian network structure. The first methodology uses discretized data to learn the Bayesian network structure, and the original non-discretized data for the parameterization of the learned structure. The second methodology uses non-discretized data both to learn the Bayesian network structure and its parameterization. For the direct handling of continuous data, we propose the use of artificial neural networks as probability estimators, to be used as an integral part of the scoring metric defined to search the space of Bayesian network structures. With both methodologies, we assume the availability of a complete dataset, with no missing values or hidden variables. We report experimental results aimed at comparing the two methodologies. These results provide evidence that learning with discretized data presents advantages both in terms of efficiency and in terms of accuracy of the learned models over the alternative approach of using non-discretized data.