Computing Sobol indices in probabilistic graphical models

We show how to apply Sobol’s method of global sensitivity analysis to measure the influence exerted by a set of nodes’ evidence on a quantity of interest expressed by a Bayesian network. Our method exploits the network structure so as to transform the problem of Sobol index estimation into that of m...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Ballester Ripoll, Rafael, Leonelli, Manuele
Format: article
Publication Date:2022
Country:España
Institution:IE
Repository:Repositorio IE
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.ie.edu:20.500.14417/3897
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ress.2022.108573
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14417/3897
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0951832022002204
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:33 Ciencias Tecnológicas
ODS 9 - Industria, innovación e infraestructura
Description
Summary:We show how to apply Sobol’s method of global sensitivity analysis to measure the influence exerted by a set of nodes’ evidence on a quantity of interest expressed by a Bayesian network. Our method exploits the network structure so as to transform the problem of Sobol index estimation into that of marginalization inference and, unlike Monte Carlo based estimators for variance-based sensitivity analysis, it gives exact results when exact inference is used. Moreover, the method supports the case of correlated inputs and it is efficient as long as eliminating the inputs’ ancestors is computationally affordable. The proposed algorithms are inspired by the field of tensor networks and generalize earlier tensor sensitivity techniques from the acyclic to the cyclic case. We demonstrate our method on three medium to large Bayesian networks in the areas of structural reliability and project risk management.