Working papers of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment on research in progress. They may not have been subject to the formal editorial review accorded offi cial Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland publications. The views stated herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Ban...

The specification of conditional probability tables (CPTs) is a difficult task in the construction of probabilistic graphical models. Several types of canonical models have been proposed to ease that difficulty. Noisy-threshold models generalize the two most popular canonical models: the noisy-or and the noisy-and. When using the standard inference techniques the inference complexity is exponen...

Cohort analysis is a widespread tool for computing expected costs and quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) in Markov models for medical cost-effectiveness analyses. Although not always explicitly identified, such models commonly have multiple simple factors, or components. In these, a health state consists of a multiple component vector, one component for each factor, and arbitrary combinations ...

Oftentimes business processes exist not as singular entities that can be managed in isolation, but as families of variants that need to be managed together. When it comes to modelling these variants, analysts are faced with the dilemma of whether to model each variant separately or to model multiple or all variants as a single model. The former option leads to a proliferation of models that sha...

We propose a novel approach to the decomposition of large probabilistic models. The goal of our method is to avoid the evaluation of the subnetworks obtained by decomposition for all values of the state description vector, as would be necessary with a standard aggregation and decomposition approach. Instead, we propose a fixed-point iteration that requires the evaluation of the subnetwork for o...

OF THE DISSERTATION Decomposition Techniques for Learning Graphical Models

To the Editor: Cryptococcus neo-formans is an opportunistic fungus that causes meningoencephalitis, primarily in immunocompromised patients. However, C. neoformans can also cause illness in apparently normal hosts. The yeast is a heterothallic basidiomycete with two mating types, MATa and MATα identified in all the four serotypes, A, B, C, and D. However, the mating type a of serotype A is a ra...

It is my belief that the people in charge of the development of large and complex computer systems must adopt a point of view shared by all mature engineering disciplines, namely that of using an artifact to reason about their future system during its construction. In these disciplines, people use blue-prints (in the wider sense of the term) which allows them to reason formally during the very ...

We provide an exposition of the hypergraph models for parallel sparse matrix-vector multiplies based on one-dimensional (1D) matrix partitioning. Our aim is to emphasize the expressive power of the hypergraph models. We first set forth an elementary hypergraph model in which vertices represent the data elements of a matrix-vector multiply operation and nets encode data dependencies. We then app...