English

Hierarchical Multinomial-Dirichlet model for the estimation of conditional probability tables

Machine Learning 2020-08-05 v1

Abstract

We present a novel approach for estimating conditional probability tables, based on a joint, rather than independent, estimate of the conditional distributions belonging to the same table. We derive exact analytical expressions for the estimators and we analyse their properties both analytically and via simulation. We then apply this method to the estimation of parameters in a Bayesian network. Given the structure of the network, the proposed approach better estimates the joint distribution and significantly improves the classification performance with respect to traditional approaches.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1708.06935,
  title  = {Hierarchical Multinomial-Dirichlet model for the estimation of conditional probability tables},
  author = {L. Azzimonti and G. Corani and M. Zaffalon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.06935},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:21:32.000Z