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Khaled Refaat

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2

NeurIPS Conference 2014 Conference Paper

Decomposing Parameter Estimation Problems

  • Khaled Refaat
  • Arthur Choi
  • Adnan Darwiche

We propose a technique for decomposing the parameter learning problem in Bayesian networks into independent learning problems. Our technique applies to incomplete datasets and exploits variables that are either hidden or observed in the given dataset. We show empirically that the proposed technique can lead to orders-of-magnitude savings in learning time. We explain, analytically and empirically, the reasons behind our reported savings, and compare the proposed technique to related ones that are sometimes used by inference algorithms.

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NeurIPS Conference 2013 Conference Paper

EDML for Learning Parameters in Directed and Undirected Graphical Models

  • Khaled Refaat
  • Arthur Choi
  • Adnan Darwiche

EDML is a recently proposed algorithm for learning parameters in Bayesian networks. It was originally derived in terms of approximate inference on a meta-network, which underlies the Bayesian approach to parameter estimation. While this initial derivation helped discover EDML in the first place and provided a concrete context for identifying some of its properties (e. g. , in contrast to EM), the formal setting was somewhat tedious in the number of concepts it drew on. In this paper, we propose a greatly simplified perspective on EDML, which casts it as a general approach to continuous optimization. The new perspective has several advantages. First, it makes immediate some results that were non-trivial to prove initially. Second, it facilitates the design of EDML algorithms for new graphical models, leading to a new algorithm for learning parameters in Markov networks. We derive this algorithm in this paper, and show, empirically, that it can sometimes learn better estimates from complete data, several times faster than commonly used optimization methods, such as conjugate gradient and L-BFGS.

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