Learning the Structure of Sum-Product Networks

TitleLearning the Structure of Sum-Product Networks
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2013
AuthorsGens R, Domingos P
Conference NameInternational Conference on Machine Learning
Date or Month PublishedJune
PublisherOmnipress
Conference LocationAtlanta, GA
AbstractSum-product networks (SPNs) are a new class of deep probabilistic models. SPNs can have unbounded treewidth but inference in them is always tractable. An SPN is either a univariate distribution, a product of SPNs over disjoint variables, or a weighted sum of SPNs over the same variables. We propose the first algorithm for learning the structure of SPNs that takes full advantage of their expressiveness. At each step, the algorithm attempts to divide the current variables into approximately independent subsets. If successful, it returns the product of recursive calls on the subsets; otherwise it returns the sum of recursive calls on subsets of similar instances from the current training set. A comprehensive empirical study shows that the learned SPNs are typically comparable to graphical models in likelihood but superior in inference speed and accuracy.
DownloadsPDF
Citation Key9102
Last changed Mon, 2013-04-29 15:53