On April 15th, 2002 - we have released new versions of all Hugin products. The new version of the Hugin Graphical User Interface is 6.1 and the new version of the Hugin Decision Engine is v5.4.
The main features of this release are:
The introduction of a Learning Wizard
including database connectivity in the Graphical User Interface, optimal
triangulation and faster inference, adaptation in influence diagrams in the
Graphical User Interface, and improved stability of the Graphical User
Interface.
- The functionality of the Hugin Graphical User Interface has been extended with
a Learning Wizard. The Learning Wizard provides increased support for learning
Bayesian networks from data. The Learning
Wizard includes support for data acquisition (database connectivity via
ODBC, interface to Oracle databases, and plain text files), data pre-processing,
specification of domain expert knowledge (i.e., structural constraints and prior
distributions), a data dependency slider to detect the relative strengths of
links as found in the data, generation of randomised conditional probability
distributions, etc.
- A new triangulation method has been implemented. This method makes it possible
to find a (minimal) triangulation that has the minimum sum of clique state space
sizes (i.e., an optimal triangulation). For large networks, this method can
improve time complexity of inference by an order of magnitude (sometimes even
more), compared to the heuristic methods provided by earlier versions of the
Hugin Decision Engine. The new triangulation method is available in both the
Hugin APIs and in the Hugin Graphical User Interface.
- The computations performed by the Hugin Decision Engine during the inference
process have been reorganized to make better use of the caches in modern CPUs.
The result is faster inference.
- The functionality of the Graphical User Interface with respect to adaptation
has been extended to include adaptation on the chance variables of an influence
diagram.
- Finally, a large effort has been put into increasing the stability of the
Hugin Graphical User Interface.