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Supplementary Material for the Paper " Joints in Random Forests "

Neural Information Processing Systems

Then f (x) = p( Y | x), provided that p (x) > 0. Proof. Since the GeDT is deterministic, it has at most one non-zero child. Before proving Theorem 2 we need to introduce some background. We are now ready to prove Theorem 2. Proof. (see also proof of Theorem 1). Here, we assume for simplicity that all variables are continuous.


Soft Learning Probabilistic Circuits

Ghandi, Soroush, Quost, Benjamin, de Campos, Cassio

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Probabilistic Circuits (PCs) are prominent tractable probabilistic models, allowing for a range of exact inferences. This paper focuses on the main algorithm for training PCs, LearnSPN, a gold standard due to its efficiency, performance, and ease of use, in particular for tabular data. We show that LearnSPN is a greedy likelihood maximizer under mild assumptions. While inferences in PCs may use the entire circuit structure for processing queries, LearnSPN applies a hard method for learning them, propagating at each sum node a data point through one and only one of the children/edges as in a hard clustering process. We propose a new learning procedure named SoftLearn, that induces a PC using a soft clustering process. We investigate the effect of this learning-inference compatibility in PCs. Our experiments show that SoftLearn outperforms LearnSPN in many situations, yielding better likelihoods and arguably better samples. We also analyze comparable tractable models to highlight the differences between soft/hard learning and model querying.


Probabilistic Circuits with Constraints via Convex Optimization

Ghandi, Soroush, Quost, Benjamin, de Campos, Cassio

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

PCs are a class of tractable models that allow efficient computations (such as conditional and marginal probabilities) while achieving state-of-the-art performance in some domains. The proposed approach takes both a PC and constraints as inputs, and outputs a new PC that satisfies the constraints. This is done efficiently via convex optimization without the need to retrain the entire model. Empirical evaluations indicate that the combination of constraints and PCs can have multiple use cases, including the improvement of model performance under scarce or incomplete data, as well as the enforcement of machine learning fairness measures into the model without compromising model fitness. We believe that these ideas will open possibilities for multiple other applications involving the combination of logics and deep probabilistic models.


Joints in Random Forests

Correia, Alvaro H. C., Peharz, Robert, de Campos, Cassio P.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Decision Trees (DTs) and Random Forests (RFs) are powerful discriminative learners and tools of central importance to the everyday machine learning practitioner and data scientist. Due to their discriminative nature, however, they lack principled methods to process inputs with missing features or to detect outliers, which requires pairing them with imputation techniques or a separate generative model. In this paper, we demonstrate that DTs and RFs can naturally be interpreted as generative models, by drawing a connection to Probabilistic Circuits, a prominent class of tractable probabilistic models. This reinterpretation equips them with a full joint distribution over the feature space and leads to Generative Decision Trees (GeDTs) and Generative Forests (GeFs), a family of novel hybrid generative-discriminative models. This family of models retains the overall characteristics of DTs and RFs while additionally being able to handle missing features by means of marginalisation. Under certain assumptions, frequently made for Bayes consistency results, we show that consistency in GeDTs and GeFs extend to any pattern of missing input features, if missing at random. Empirically, we show that our models often outperform common routines to treat missing data, such as K-nearest neighbour imputation, and moreover, that our models can naturally detect outliers by monitoring the marginal probability of input features.


Sum-product networks: A survey

París, Iago, Sánchez-Cauce, Raquel, Díez, Francisco Javier

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A sum-product network (SPN) is a probabilistic model, based on a rooted acyclic directed graph, in which terminal nodes represent univariate probability distributions and non-terminal nodes represent convex combinations (weighted sums) and products of probability functions. They are closely related to probabilistic graphical models, in particular to Bayesian networks with multiple context-specific independencies. Their main advantage is the possibility of building tractable models from data, i.e., models that can perform several inference tasks in time proportional to the number of links in the graph. They are somewhat similar to neural networks and can address the same kinds of problems, such as image processing and natural language understanding. This paper offers a survey of SPNs, including their definition, the main algorithms for inference and learning from data, the main applications, a brief review of software libraries, and a comparison with related models


Random Sum-Product Forests with Residual Links

Ventola, Fabrizio, Stelzner, Karl, Molina, Alejandro, Kersting, Kristian

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Tractable yet expressive density estimators are a key building block of probabilistic machine learning. While sum-product networks (SPNs) offer attractive inference capabilities, obtaining structures large enough to fit complex, high-dimensional data has proven challenging. In this paper, we present random sum-product forests (RSPFs), an ensemble approach for mixing multiple randomly generated SPNs. We also introduce residual links, which reference specialized substructures of other component SPNs in order to leverage the context-specific knowledge encoded within them. Our empirical evidence demonstrates that RSPFs provide better performance than their individual components. Adding residual links improves the models further, allowing the resulting ResSPNs to be competitive with commonly used structure learning methods.


A Minimalistic Approach to Sum-Product Network Learning for Real Applications

Krakovna, Viktoriya, Looks, Moshe

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Sum-Product Networks (SPNs) are a class of expressive yet tractable hierarchical graphical models. LearnSPN is a structure learning algorithm for SPNs that uses hierarchical co-clustering to simultaneously identifying similar entities and similar features. The original LearnSPN algorithm assumes that all the variables are discrete and there is no missing data. We introduce a practical, simplified version of LearnSPN, MiniSPN, that runs faster and can handle missing data and heterogeneous features common in real applications. We demonstrate the performance of MiniSPN on standard benchmark datasets and on two datasets from Google's Knowledge Graph exhibiting high missingness rates and a mix of discrete and continuous features.


Learning Relational Sum-Product Networks

Nath, Aniruddh (University of Washington) | Domingos, Pedro M. (University of Washington)

AAAI Conferences

Sum-product networks (SPNs) are a recently-proposed deep architecture that guarantees tractable inference, even on certain high-treewidth models. SPNs are a propositional architecture, treating the instances as independent and identically distributed. In this paper, we introduce Relational Sum-Product Networks (RSPNs), a new tractable first-order probabilistic architecture. RSPNs generalize SPNs by modeling a set of instances jointly, allowing them to influence each other's probability distributions, as well as modeling probabilities of relations between objects. We also present LearnRSPN, the first algorithm for learning high-treewidth tractable statistical relational models. LearnRSPN is a recursive top-down structure learning algorithm for RSPNs, based on Gens and Domingos' LearnSPN algorithm for propositional SPN learning. We evaluate the algorithm on three datasets; the RSPN learning algorithm outperforms Markov Logic Networks in both running time and predictive accuracy.