Computer implemented method for determining all markov boundaries and its application for discovering multiple maximally accurate and non-redundant predictive models

Abstract

Methods for discovery of a Markov boundary from data constitute one of the most important recent developments in pattern recognition and applied statistics, primarily because they offer a principled solution to the variable/feature selection problem and give insight about local causal structure. Even though there is always a single Markov boundary of the response variable in faithful distributions, distributions with violations of the intersection property of probability theory may have multiple Markov boundaries. Such distributions are abundant in practical data-analytic applications, and there are several reasons why it is important to discover all Markov boundaries from such data. The present invention is a novel computer implemented generative method (termed TIE*) that can discover all Markov boundaries from a data sample drawn from a distribution. TIE* can be instantiated to discover all and only Markov boundaries independent of data distribution. TIE* has been tested with simulated and re-simulated data and then applied to (a) identify the set of maximally accurate and non-redundant molecular signatures and to (b) discover Markov boundaries in datasets from several application domains including but not limited to: biology, medicine, economics, ecology, digit recognition, text categorization, and computational biology.

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