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