Learning Markov Network Structure with Decision Trees

Traditional Markov network structure learning algorithms perform a search for globally useful features. However, these algorithms are often slow and prone to finding local optima due to the large space of possible structures. Ravikumar et al. [1] recently proposed the alternative idea of applying L1 logistic regression to learn a set of pairwise features for each variable, which are then combined into a global model. This paper presents the DTSL algorithm, which uses probabilistic decision trees as the local model. Our approach has two significant advantages: it is more efficient, and it is able to discover features that capture more complex interactions among the variables. Our approach can also be seen as a method for converting a dependency network into a consistent probabilistic model. In an extensive empirical evaluation on 13 datasets, our algorithm obtains comparable accuracy to three standard structure learning algorithms while running 1-4 orders of magnitude faster. Keywords-M...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICDM
• Authors: Daniel Lowd, Jesse Davis
• Keywords: Algorithms, Consistent Probabilistic Model, Data Mining, ICDM 2010, Probabilistic Decision Trees