Sourour Ammar

Probability Density Estimation by Perturbing and Combining Tree Structured Markov Networks

To explore the Perturb and Combine idea for estimating probability densities, we study mixtures of tree structured Markov networks derived by bagging combined with the Chow and Liu maximum weight spanning tree algorithm, or by pure random sampling. We empirically assess the performances of these methods in terms of accuracy, with respect to mixture models derived by EM-based learning of Naive Bayes models, and EM-based learning of mixtures of trees. We find that the bagged ensembles outperform all other methods while the random ones perform also very well. Since the computational complexity of the former is quadratic and that of the latter is linear in the number of variables of interest, this paves the way towards the design of efficient density estimation methods that may be applied to problems with very large numbers of variables and comparatively very small sample sizes.

Efficiently approximating Markov tree bagging for high-dimensional density estimation

We consider algorithms for generating Mixtures of Bagged Markov Trees, for density estimation. In problems defined over many variables and when few observations are available, those mixtures generally outperform a single Markov tree maximizing the data likelihood, but are far more expensive to compute. In this paper, we describe new algorithms for approximating such models, with the aim of speeding up learning without sacrificing accuracy. More specifically, we propose to use a filtering step obtained as a by-product from computing a first Markov tree, so as to avoid considering poor candidate edges in the subsequently generated trees. We compare these algorithms (on synthetic data sets) to Mixtures of Bagged Markov Trees, as well as to a single Markov tree derived by the classical Chow-Liu algorithm and to a recently proposed randomized scheme used for building tree mixtures.