Improved Acyclicity Reasoning for Bayesian Network Structure Learning with Constraint Programming
Improved Acyclicity Reasoning for Bayesian Network Structure Learning with Constraint Programming
Fulya Trösser, Simon de Givry, George Katsirelos
Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4250-4257.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/584
Bayesian networks are probabilistic graphical models with a wide
range of application areas including gene regulatory networks inference, risk
analysis and image processing. Learning the structure of a Bayesian
network (BNSL) from discrete data is known to be an NP-hard task with
a superexponential search space of directed acyclic graphs. In this
work, we propose a new polynomial time algorithm for discovering a
subset of all possible cluster cuts, a greedy algorithm for
approximately solving the resulting linear program, and a generalized
arc consistency algorithm for the acyclicity constraint. We embed
these in the constraint programming-based branch-and-bound solver
CPBayes and show that, despite being suboptimal, they improve
performance by orders of magnitude. The resulting solver also compares
favorably with GOBNILP, a state-of-the-art solver for the BNSL
problem which solves an NP-hard problem to discover each cut and
solves the linear program exactly.
Keywords:
Uncertainty in AI: Bayesian Networks
Constraints and SAT: Constraint Optimization