CS-295 Reasoning and Modeling with Graphical Models: Sampling and Parallel computation, Spring 2008

Resources

Classroom: DBH 1423 Day: Tuesday Time: 2:00 - 4:20pm Instructor: Rina Dechter - dechter@ics.uci.edu The seminar will focus on recent advances in graphical models reasoning and knowledge representation, as well as on exploring some application areas. The focus this year is on Sampling and parallel computation: Sampling and its application to graphical model. We will cover chapters from the book Monte Carlo Strategies in Scientific Computing by J. S. Liu. Elizabeth Thompson's tutorial and relevant recent papers on sampling for graphical models. Parallelizing graphical models algorithms. We will delve into parallel computation principles and their potential for exact and approximate reasoning. We will look into two frameworks. The first is the parallel model used by the genetic linkage tool of Superlink online. The parallel PRAM machine developed at university of Maryland and explore the feasibility of programming NP-complete tasks such as constraint satisfaction and satisfiability. See http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/users/vishkin/index.html We will continue to look at applications from bioinformatics such as linkage analysis. Each student will be involved in presenting papers/chapters and will be encouraged to focus on a project of interest. Students will write a final report for their research project. Schedule

Week	Date	Topic	Readings
Week 1	4/1	Importance Sampling, Sequential Monte Carlo and its advances. Slides	Liu's book,  Chapters 2 and 3.
Week 2	4/8	Markov Chain Monte Carlo theory and Gibbs Sampling. Slides	Liu's book, Chapter 12 and 6.
Week 3	4/15	Parallel Architectures and Applications to Bayesian Networks. Slides	Paper by X. Wen and U. Vishkin
Week 4	4/22	Efficient Computation of Sum-Products on GPUs Slides	Paper by M. Silberstein et al.
Week 5	4/29	Linkage Analysis Slides
Week 6	5/6	Linkage Analysis. Papers by Mark Silberstein Slides1 Slides2
Week 7	5/13	Class notes by Uzi Vishkin Slides
Week 8	5/20	Montanari's 1971 paper: On the Optimal Approximation of Discrete Functions with Low-dimensional Tables Slides
Week 9	5/27	TBA
Week 10	6/3	TBA