Throwing Vines at the Wall: Structure Learning via Random Search

Abstract

Vine copulas offer flexible multivariate dependence modeling and have become widely used in machine learning. Yet, structure learning remains a key challenge. Early heuristics, such as Dissmann's greedy algorithm, are still considered the gold standard but are often suboptimal. We propose random search algorithms and a statistical framework based on model confidence sets, to improve structure selection, provide theoretical guarantees on selection probabilities and excess risk, as well as serve as a foundation for ensembling. Empirical results on real-world data sets show that our methods consistently outperform state-of-the-art approaches.