Papers › Generalized Root Models: Beyond Pairwise Graphical Models for Univariate Exponential Families
Generalized Root Models: Beyond Pairwise Graphical Models for Univariate Exponential Families
David I. Inouye, Pradeep Ravikumar, Inderjit S. Dhillon
We present a novel k-way high-dimensional graphical model called the Generalized Root Model (GRM) that explicitly models dependencies between variable sets of size k > 2---where k = 2 is the standard pairwise graphical model. This model is based on taking the k-th root of the original sufficient statistics of any univariate exponential family with positive sufficient statistics, including the Poisson and exponential distributions. As in the recent work with square root graphical (SQR) models [Inouye et al. 2016]---which was restricted to pairwise dependencies---we give the conditions of the parameters that are needed for normalization using the radial conditionals similar to the pairwise case [Inouye et al. 2016]. In particular, we show that the Poisson GRM has no restrictions on the parameters and the exponential GRM only has a restriction akin to negative definiteness. We develop a simple but general learning algorithm based on L1-regularized node-wise regressions. We also present a general way of numerically approximating the log partition function and associated derivatives of the GRM univariate node conditionals---in contrast to [Inouye et al. 2016], which only provided algorithm for estimating the exponential SQR. To illustrate GRM, we model word counts with a Poisson GRM and show the associated k-sized variable sets. We finish by discussing methods for reducing the parameter space in various situations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections