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Lecture

Graphical Models: Representing Probabilistic Distributions

In courses (2)

PHYS-467: Machine learning for physicists

Machine learning and data analysis are becoming increasingly central in sciences including physics. In this course, fundamental principles and methods of machine learning will be introduced and practised. ...

PHYS-512: Statistical physics of computation

The students understand tools from the statistical physics of disordered systems, and apply them to study computational and statistical problems in graph theory, discrete optimisation, inference and machine learning. ...

Description

This lecture introduces graphical models as graphical representations of probabilistic distributions, starting with graphs, nodes, edges, and adjacency matrices. It covers factor graphs, computational problems, and statistical physics applications.

Instructors (3)

Vittorio Erba

Florent Gérard Krzakala

Lenka Zdeborová

Lenka Zdeborová is a Professor of Physics and of Computer Science in École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where she leads the Statistical Physics of Computation Laboratory. She received a PhD in physics from University Paris-Sud and from Charles University in Prague in 2008. She spent two years in the Los Alamos National Laboratory as the Director's Postdoctoral Fellow. Between 2010 and 2020 she was a researcher at CNRS working in the Institute of Theoretical Physics in CEA Saclay, France. In 2014, she was awarded the CNRS bronze medal, in 2016 Philippe Meyer prize in theoretical physics and an ERC Starting Grant, in 2018 the Irène Joliot-Curie prize, in 2021 the Gibbs lectureship of AMS. She is an editorial board member for Journal of Physics A, Physical Review E, Physical Review X, SIMODS, Machine Learning: Science and Technology, and Information and Inference. Lenka's expertise is in applications of concepts from statistical physics, such as advanced mean field methods, replica method and related message-passing algorithms, to problems in machine learning, signal processing, inference and optimization. She enjoys erasing the boundaries between theoretical physics, mathematics and computer science.

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Mathematics

Discrete mathematics: Graph theory

Statistics

Statistical inference: Mathematical statistics

Related concepts (32)

Adjacency matrix

In graph theory and computer science, an adjacency matrix is a square matrix used to represent a finite graph. The elements of the matrix indicate whether pairs of vertices are adjacent or not in the graph. In the special case of a finite simple graph, the adjacency matrix is a (0,1)-matrix with zeros on its diagonal. If the graph is undirected (i.e. all of its edges are bidirectional), the adjacency matrix is symmetric. The relationship between a graph and the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of its adjacency matrix is studied in spectral graph theory.

Adjacency list

In graph theory and computer science, an adjacency list is a collection of unordered lists used to represent a finite graph. Each unordered list within an adjacency list describes the set of neighbors of a particular vertex in the graph. This is one of several commonly used representations of graphs for use in computer programs. An adjacency list representation for a graph associates each vertex in the graph with the collection of its neighbouring vertices or edges.

Chordal graph

In the mathematical area of graph theory, a chordal graph is one in which all cycles of four or more vertices have a chord, which is an edge that is not part of the cycle but connects two vertices of the cycle. Equivalently, every induced cycle in the graph should have exactly three vertices. The chordal graphs may also be characterized as the graphs that have perfect elimination orderings, as the graphs in which each minimal separator is a clique, and as the intersection graphs of subtrees of a tree.

Bipartite graph

In the mathematical field of graph theory, a bipartite graph (or bigraph) is a graph whose vertices can be divided into two disjoint and independent sets and , that is, every edge connects a vertex in to one in . Vertex sets and are usually called the parts of the graph. Equivalently, a bipartite graph is a graph that does not contain any odd-length cycles. The two sets and may be thought of as a coloring of the graph with two colors: if one colors all nodes in blue, and all nodes in red, each edge has endpoints of differing colors, as is required in the graph coloring problem.

Graph (discrete mathematics)

In discrete mathematics, and more specifically in graph theory, a graph is a structure amounting to a set of objects in which some pairs of the objects are in some sense "related". The objects correspond to mathematical abstractions called vertices (also called nodes or points) and each of the related pairs of vertices is called an edge (also called link or line). Typically, a graph is depicted in diagrammatic form as a set of dots or circles for the vertices, joined by lines or curves for the edges.

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