Structural Learning of Multivariate Regression Chain Graphs via Decomposition
We extend the decomposition approach for learning Bayesian networks (BN) proposed by (Xie et al., 2006) to learning multivariate regression chain graphs (MVR CGs), which include BNs as a special case. The same advantages of this decomposition approach hold in the more general setting: reduces complexity and increased power of computational independence tests. Moreover, latent (hidden) variables can be represented in MVR CGs by using bidirected edges, and our algorithm correctly recovers any independence structure that is faithful to a MVR CG, thus greatly extending the range of applications of decomposition-based model selection techniques. While our new algorithm has the same complexity as the one in (Xie et al., 2006) for BNs, it requires larger components for general MVR CGs, to insure that sufficient data is present to estimate parameters.
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