Efficient Parameter Learning of Bayesian Network with Latent Variables from High-Dimensional Data

Xinran Wu, Xiang Chen, Kun Yue

Abstract: Bayesian network with latent variables (BNLV) plays an important role in the representation of dependence relations and inference of uncertain knowledge with unobserved variables. The variables with large cardinalities in high-dimensional data make it challenging to efficiently learn the large-scaled probability parameters as the conditional probability distributions (CPDs) of BNLV. In this paper, we first propose the multinomial parameter network to parameterize the CPDs w.r.t. latent variables. Then, we extend the M-step of the classic EM algorithm and give the efficient algorithm for parameter learning of BNLV. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms some state-of-the-art competitors.