Learning conditional probabilities from incomplete databases - An experimental comparison

This paper compares three methods | em algorithm, Gibbs sampling, and Bound and Collapse (bc) | to estimate conditional probabilities from incomplete databases in a controlled experiment. Results show a substantial equivalence of the estimates provided by the three methods and a dramatic gain in e ciency using bc. Reprinted from: Proceedings of Uncertainty 99: Seventh International Workshop on Arti cial Intelligence and Statistics, Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, 1999. Address: Marco Ramoni, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom MK7 6AA. phone: +44 (1908) 655721, fax: +44 (1908) 653169, email: m.ramoni@open.ac.uk, url: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/marco. Learning Conditional Probabilities from Incomplete Data: An Experimental Comparison Marco Ramoni Knowledge Media Institute The Open University Paola Sebastiani Statistics Department The Open University Abstract This paper compares three methods | em algorithm, Gibbs sampling, and Bound and Collapse (bc) | to estimate conditional probabilities from incomplete databases in a controlled experiment. Results show a substantial equivalence of the estimates provided by the three methods and a dramatic gain in e ciency using bc.