Date of Award

5-17-2016

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

Latent tree models are tree structured graphical models where some random variables are observable while others are latent. These models are used to model data in many areas, such as bioinformatics, phylogenetics, computer vision among others. This work contains some background on latent tree models and algebraic geometry with the goal of estimating the volume of the latent tree model known as the 3-leaf model M₂ (where the root is a hidden variable with 2 states, and is the parent of three observable variables with 2 states) in the probability simplex Δ₇, and to estimate the volume of the latent tree model known as the 3-leaf model M₃ (where the root is a hidden variable with 3 states, and is the parent of two observable variables with 3 states and one observable variable with 2 states) in the probability simplex Δ₁₇. For the model M₃, we estimate that the rough percentage of distributions that arise from stochastic parameters is 0:015%, the rough percentage of distributions that arise from real parameters is 64:742% and the rough percentage of distributions that arise from complex parameters is 35:206%. We will also discuss the algebraic boundary of these models and we observe the behavior of the estimates of the Expectation Maximization algorithm (EM algorithm), an iterative method typically used to try to find a maximum likelihood estimator.

Handle

http://hdl.handle.net/11122/6600

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