A method is presented to approximate optimally an n-dimensional discrete probability distribution by a product of second-order distributions, or the distribution of the first-order tree dependence. The problem is to find an optimum set of n - 1 first order dependence relationship among the n variables. It is shown that the procedure derived in this paper yields an approximation of a minimum difference in information. It is further shown that when this procedure is applied to empirical observations from an unknown distribution of tree dependence, the procedure is the maximum-likelihood estimate of the distribution. © 1968 IEEE. All rights reserved.
CITATION STYLE
Chow, C. K., & Liu, C. N. (1968). Approximating Discrete Probability Distributions with Dependence Trees. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 14(3), 462–467. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.1968.1054142
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