Multi-Domain Sampling With Applications to Structural Inference of Bayesian Networks

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Zhou, Qing
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Los Angeles
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0162-1459
• DOI: 10.1198/jasa.2011.ap10346
• 发表日期: 2011
• 页码: 1317-1330
• 关键词: wang-landau algorithm; monte-carlo; stochastic-approximation; potential-energy; Causal Inference; distributions; optimization; CONVERGENCE

摘要

When a posterior distribution has multiple modes, unconditional expectations, such as the posterior mean, may not offer informative summaries of the distribution. Motivated by this problem, we propose to decompose the sample space of a multimodal distribution into domains of attraction of local modes. Domain-based representations are defined to summarize the probability masses of and conditional expectations on domains of attraction, which are much more informative than the mean and other unconditional expectations. A computational method, the multi-domain sampler, is developed to construct domain-based representations for an arbitrary multimodal distribution. The multi-domain sampler is applied to structural learning of protein-signaling networks from high-throughput single-cell data, where a signaling network is modeled as a causal Bayesian network. Not only does our method provide a detailed landscape of the posterior distribution but also improves the accuracy and the predictive power of estimated networks. This article has supplementary material online.