Related papers: Conditions Under Which Conditional Independence an…
This article deals with the problem of testing conditional independence between two random vectors ${\bf X}$ and ${\bf Y}$ given a confounding random vector ${\bf Z}$. Several authors have considered this problem for multivariate data.…
Relational query optimisers rely on cost models to choose between different query execution plans. Selectivity estimates are known to be a crucial input to the cost model. In practice, standard selectivity estimation procedures are prone to…
The very expressiveness of Bayesian networks can introduce fresh challenges due to the large number of relationships they often model. In many domains, it is thus often essential to supplement any available data with elicited expert…
Constraint-based structure learning algorithms infer the causal structure of multivariate systems from observational data by determining an equivalent class of causal structures compatible with the conditional independencies in the data.…
Hypothesis testing and model choice are quintessential questions for statistical inference and while the Bayesian paradigm seems ideally suited for answering these questions, it faces difficulties of its own ranging from prior modelling to…
Usually one compares the accuracy of two competing classifiers via null hypothesis significance tests (nhst). Yet the nhst tests suffer from important shortcomings, which can be overcome by switching to Bayesian hypothesis testing. We…
In public opinion studies, the relationships between opinions on different topics are likely to shift based on the characteristics of the respondents. Thus, understanding the complexities of public opinion requires methods that can account…
We propose the conditional predictive impact (CPI), a consistent and unbiased estimator of the association between one or several features and a given outcome, conditional on a reduced feature set. Building on the knockoff framework of…
Independence testing plays a central role in statistical and causal inference from observational data. Standard independence tests assume that the data samples are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) but that assumption is…
We address the problem of Bayesian structure learning for domains with hundreds of variables by employing non-parametric bootstrap, recursively. We propose a method that covers both model averaging and model selection in the same framework.…
We show that the d -separation criterion constitutes a valid test for conditional independence relationships that are induced by feedback systems involving discrete variables.
Estimating causal interactions in complex dynamical systems is an important problem encountered in many fields of current science. While a theoretical solution for detecting the causal interactions has been previously formulated in the…
We propose a general new method, the conditional permutation test, for testing the conditional independence of variables $X$ and $Y$ given a potentially high-dimensional random vector $Z$ that may contain confounding factors. The proposed…
We propose a method for learning Markov network structures for continuous data without invoking any assumptions about the distribution of the variables. The method makes use of previous work on a non-parametric estimator for mutual…
This paper develops new insights into quantitative methods for the validation of computational model prediction. Four types of methods are investigated, namely classical and Bayesian hypothesis testing, a reliability-based method, and an…
We extend the theory of d-separation to cases in which data instances are not independent and identically distributed. We show that applying the rules of d-separation directly to the structure of probabilistic models of relational data…
This paper presents an approximate method for performing Bayesian inference in models with conditional independence over a decentralized network of learning agents. The method first employs variational inference on each individual learning…
We study the problem of testing \emph{conditional independence} for discrete distributions. Specifically, given samples from a discrete random variable $(X, Y, Z)$ on domain $[\ell_1]\times[\ell_2] \times [n]$, we want to distinguish, with…
It is well understood that Bayesian decision theory and average case analysis are essentially identical. However, if one is interested in performing uncertainty quantification for a numerical task, it can be argued that standard approaches…
In this paper, we propose a model for building natural language explanations for Bayesian Network Reasoning in terms of factor arguments, which are argumentation graphs of flowing evidence, relating the observed evidence to a target…