Scaling Up Bayesian DAG Sampling

Abstract

Bayesian inference of Bayesian network structures is often performed by sampling directed acyclic graphs along an appropriately constructed Markov chain. We present two techniques to improve sampling. First, we give an efficient implementation of basic moves, which add, delete, or reverse a single arc. Second, we expedite summing over parent sets, an expensive task required for more sophisticated moves: we devise a preprocessing method to prune possible parent sets so as to approximately preserve the sums. Our empirical study shows that our techniques can yield substantial efficiency gains compared to previous methods.