Spring 2007 Seminar

 
 
       
  Machine Learning Seminar Series
 
 
  Seminar Schedule (Seminar Organizer: Prof. Ziv Bar-Joseph)
 

 

ML/Google Seminars

Machine Learning Lunchtime Chats

 

 

Date: April 24, 2007
Time: 09:30 AM - 10:30 AM
Location: 1507 Newell-Simon Hall
Speaker: Brian Ziebart PhD Candidate
Title: Learning Selectively Conditioned Forest Structures with Applications to DBNs and Classification
Abstract: Dealing with uncertainty in Bayesian Network structures using maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation or Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) is often intractable due to the superexponential number of possible directed, acyclic graphs. When the prior is decomposable, two classes of graphs where efficient learning can take place are tree-structures, and fixed-orderings with limited in-degree. We show how MAP estimates and BMA for selectively conditioned forests (SCF), a combination of these two classes, can be computed efficiently for ordered sets of variables. We apply SCFs to temporal data to learn Dynamic Bayesian Networks having an intra-timestep forest and inter-timestep limited in-degree structure, improving model accuracy over DBNs without the combination of structures. We also apply SCFs to Bayes Net classification to learn selective forest-augmented Nave Bayes classifiers. We argue that the built-in feature selection of selective augmented Bayes classifiers makes them preferable to similar non-selective classifiers based on empirical evidence.