The Complexity of Distinguishing Markov Random Fields

Abstract. Markov random fields are often used to model high dimensional distributions in a number of applied areas. A number of recent papers have studied the problem of reconstructing a dependency graph of bounded degree from independent samples from the Markov random field. These results require observing samples of the distribution at all nodes of the graph. It was heuristically recognized that the problem of reconstructing the model where there are hidden variables (some of the variables are not observed) is much harder. Here we prove that the problem of reconstructing bounded-degree models with hidden nodes is hard. Specifically, we show that unless NP = RP,

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: APPROX
• Authors: Andrej Bogdanov, Elchanan Mossel, Salil P. Vadhan
• Keywords: Algorithms, APPROX 2008, Independent Samples, Markov Random Field, Randomized Polynomial Time