Learning Gaussian Graphical Models by symmetric parallel regression technique

Abstract: In this contribution we deal with the problem of learning an undirected graph which encodes the conditional dependence relationship between variables of a complex system, given a set of observations of this system. This is a very central problem of modern data analysis and it comes out every time we want to investigate a deeper relationship between random variables, which is different from the classical dependence usually measured by the covariance. In particular, in this contribution we deal with the case of Gaussian Graphical Models (GGMs) for which the system of variables has a multivariate gaussian distribution. We study all the existing techniques for such a problem and propose a smart implementation of the symmetric parallel regression technique which turns out to be very competitive for learning sparse GGMs under high dimensional data regime.