Chapter 10. Probabilistic Graphical Models

Probabilistic graphical models, or simply graphical models as we will refer to them in this chapter, are models that use the representation of a graph to describe the conditional independence relationships between a series of random variables. This topic has received an increasing amount of attention in recent years and probabilistic graphical models have been successfully applied to tasks ranging from medical diagnosis to image segmentation. In this chapter, we'll present some of the necessary background that will pave the way to understanding the most basic graphical model, the Naïve Bayes classifier. We will then look at a slightly more complicated graphical model, known as the Hidden Markov Model (HMM). To get started in this field, we must first learn about graphs and why they are useful.