Dynamic Sum Product Networks for Tractable Inference on Sequence Data (Extended Version)

Sum-Product Networks (SPN) have recently emerged as a new class of tractable probabilistic graphical models. Unlike Bayesian networks and Markov networks where inference may be exponential in the size of the network, inference in SPNs is in time linear in the size of the network. Since SPNs represent distributions over a fixed set of variables only, we propose dynamic sum product networks (DSPNs) as a generalization of SPNs for sequence data of varying length. A DSPN consists of a template network that is repeated as many times as needed to model data sequences of any length. We present a local search technique to learn the structure of the template network. In contrast to dynamic Bayesian networks for which inference is generally exponential in the number of variables per time slice, DSPNs inherit the linear inference complexity of SPNs. We demonstrate the advantages of DSPNs over DBNs and other models on several datasets of sequence data.

On the Relationship between Sum-Product Networks and Bayesian Networks

In this paper, we establish some theoretical connections between Sum-Product Networks (SPNs) and Bayesian Networks (BNs). We prove that every SPN can be converted into a BN in linear time and space in terms of the network size. The key insight is to use Algebraic Decision Diagrams (ADDs) to compactly represent the local conditional probability distributions at each node in the resulting BN by exploiting context-specific independence (CSI). The generated BN has a simple directed bipartite graphical structure. We show that by applying the Variable Elimination algorithm (VE) to the generated BN with ADD representations, we can recover the original SPN where the SPN can be viewed as a history record or caching of the VE inference process. To help state the proof clearly, we introduce the notion of {\em normal} SPN and present a theoretical analysis of the consistency and decomposability properties. We conclude the paper with some discussion of the implications of the proof and establish a connection between the depth of an SPN and a lower bound of the tree-width of its corresponding BN.