Fast Factored Density Estimation and Compression with Bayesian Networks

Many important data analysis tasks can be addressed by formulating them as probability estimation problems. For example, a popular general approach to automatic classication problems is to learn a probabilistic model of each class from data in which the classes are known, and then use Bayes's rule with these models to predict the correct classes of other data for which they are not known. Anomaly detection and scientic discovery tasks can often be addressed by learning probability models over possible events and then looking for events to which these models assign low probabilities. Many data compression algorithms such as Human coding and arithmetic coding rely on probabilistic models of the dat