| Abstract | Sum-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.
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