alexflint comments on Two Challenges - Less Wrong

14 Post author: Daniel_Burfoot 14 February 2010 08:31AM

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Comment author: alexflint 14 February 2010 09:25:36PM *  2 points [-]

In their original formulation, Bayes nets were a way to capture conditional independence properties of probabilistic models. That is, given any probabilistic model for P(Y|X1,X2,X2,...), there is a Bayes net that captures some of the conditional independence relations in your model. Bayes nets certainly cannot capture all possible conditional independence relations: undirected graphical models, for example, capture a different class of independence relations, while factor graphs capture a superset of the independence relations expressible by Bayes nets.

In this light, I'm not sure that your challenge makes sense. Bayes nets are a way of expressing a properties of probabilistic models, rather than a model unto themselves. "Bayes nets" alone is as meaningless a choice of model as "models expressible in Portuguese".

Perhaps a particular Bayes net together with a certain choice of conditional probability function for each arc and a certain choice of inference algorithm would constitute a model.

Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 18 February 2010 03:19:00AM 0 points [-]

In this light, I'm not sure that your challenge makes sense. Bayes nets are a way of expressing a properties of probabilistic models, rather than a model unto themselves.

Valid point, but I think in practice it's possible to identify a model as one of some specific family such as "Bayes Net", "Neural Network", "MaxEnt", etc.

Perhaps a particular Bayes net together with a certain choice of conditional probability function for each arc and a certain choice of inference algorithm would constitute a model.

Right, the point is that the challenger can make any reasonable choice for these unspecified components. Ideally someone would say: here is the data set; I'm modeling it using the method described in such-and-such paper; here are some minor revisions to the method of the paper to make it useful in this case; here are the results.