Programming Assignment 5

Due dates:
Interim report: Tuesday 11/20/2012, 11:59pm
Full assignment: Tuesday 11/27/2012, 11:59pm.

Summary

The goal in this assignment is to get practice on designing Bayesian networks, estimating probability distributions in Bayesian networks, and implementing Bayesian networks.


Part 1: Designing a Bayesian network graph

20 points

George doesn't watch much TV in the evening, unless there is a baseball game on. When there is baseball on TV, George is very likely to watch. George has a cat that he feeds most evenings, although he forgets every now and then. He's much more likely to forget when he's watching TV. He's also very unlikely to feed the cat if he has run out of cat food (although sometimes he gives the cat some of his own food). Design a Bayesian network for modeling the relations between these four events:

Your task is to connect these nodes with arrows pointing from causes to effects. No programming is needed for this part, just include an electronic document (PDF, Word file, or OpenOffice document) showing your Bayesian network design.


Part 2: Learning Probabilities from Training Data

20 points

For the Bayesian network of Part 1, the text file at this link contains training data from every evening of an entire year. Every line in this text file corresponds to an evening, and contains four numbers. Each number is a 0 or a 1. In more detail:

Based on the data in this file, determine the probability table for each node in the Bayesian network you have designed for Part 1. You need to include these four tables in the drawing that you produce for question 1. You also need to submit the code/script that computes these probabilities.


Figure 1: A Bayesian network establishing relations between events on the burglary-earthquake-alarm domain, together with complete specifications of all probability distributions.

Part 3: Implementing a Bayesian Network

60 points

For the Bayesian network of Figure 1, implement a program that computes and prints out the probability of any combination of events given any other combination of events. If the executable is called bnet, here are some example invocations of the program:

  1. To print out the probability P(Burglary=true and Alarm=false | MaryCalls=false).
    bnet Bt Af given Mf
  2. To print out the probability P(Alarm=false and Earthquake=true).
    bnet Af Et
  3. To print out the probability P(JohnCalls=true and Alarm=false | Burglary=true and Earthquake=false).
    bnet Jt Af given Bt Ef
  4. To print out the probability P(Burglary=true and Alarm=false and MaryCalls=false and JohnCalls=true and Earthquake=true).
    bnet Bt Af Mf Jt Et
In general, bnet takes 1 to 6(no more, no fewer) command line arguments, as follows: The implementation should not contain hardcoded values for all combinations of arguments. Instead, your code should use the tables shown on Figure 1 and the appropriate formulas to evaluate the probability of the specified event. It is OK to hardcode values from the tables on Figure 1 in your code, but it is not OK to hard code values for all possible command arguments, or probability values for all possible atomic events. More specifically, for full credit, the code should include and use a Bayesian network class. The class should include a member function called computeProbability(b, e, a, j, m), where each argument is a boolean, specifying if the corresponding event (burglary, earthquake, alarm, john-calls, mary-calls) is true or false. This function should return the joint probability of the five events.

Interim report

The interim report should be submitted via e-mail to the instructor and the TA, and should contain the following: For purposes of grading, it is absolutely fine if your interim report simply states that you have done nothing so far (you still get the 10 points allocated for the interim report, AS LONG AS YOU SUBMIT THE REPORT ON TIME). At the same time, starting early and identifying potential bottlenecks by the deadline for the interim report is probably a good strategy for doing well in this assignment


Grading

Each part will be graded as follows:

How to submit

Submissions should be made using
Blackboard.

Submit a ZIPPED directory called programming5.zip (no other forms of compression accepted, contact the instructor or TA if you do not know how to produce .zip files). The directory should contain source code, the answer for part 1 in a document, the answer (and code) for part 2, and the code for part 3. The submission should also contain a file called readme.txt, which should specify precisely:

Insufficient or unclear instructions will be penalized by up to 20 points. Code that does not run on omega machines gets AT MOST half credit (50 points).

Submission checklist