Guaranteed Scalable Learning of Latent Tree Models

Understand

We present an integrated approach for structure and parameter estimation in latent tree graphical models.

• Our overall approach follows a "divide-and-conquer" strategy that learns models over small groups of variables and iteratively merges onto a global solution.
• The structure learning involves combinatorial operations such as minimum spanning tree construction and local recursive grouping; the parameter learning is based on the method of moments and on tensor decompositions.
• Our method is guaranteed to correctly recover the unknown tree structure and the model parameters with low sample complexity for the class of linear multivariate latent tree models which includes discrete and Gaussian distributions, and Gaussian mixtures.