High-dimensional probability density estimation with randomized ensembles of tree structured bayesian networks

International audienceIn this work we explore the Perturb and Combine idea, celebrated in supervised learning, in the context of probability density estimation in high-dimensional spaces with graphical probabilistic models. We propose a new family of unsupervised learning methods of mixtures of large ensembles of randomly generated tree or poly-tree structures. The specific feature of these methods is their scalability to very large numbers of variables and training instances. We explore various simple variants of these methods empirically on a set of discrete test problems of growing complexity