New Release - HUGIN 7.4

Today we are releasing a new version of the HUGIN software (v7.4). The main new feature of this release is functionality in the HUGIN Graphical User Interface (GUI) to import the specification of a Bayesian network from a set of primitive tables. In addition, the support for solving influence diagrams has been improved with new features.

The new functionality to import a Bayesian network from a set of primitive tables gives the user an alternative to using the traditional HUGIN Network Specification language for specifying a Bayesian network model.

The development of the functionality concerning importing a Bayesian network from a set of primitive tables (introduced in HUGIN 7.4) has been sponsored by Danish mortgage credit institution NykreditRealkredit (www.nykredit.dk).

HUGIN Graphical User Interface v7.4

The HUGIN Graphical User Interface has been improved with various new features. This includes:

• The JointDialog is enabled for LIMIDs and supports decisions.
• The CorrelationDialog is enabled for LIMIDs and supports decisions.
• It is possible to initialize policies for decision nodes in Run-mode. This enables the user to initialize policies without returning to Edit-mode, for instance, when performing Single Policy Updating under different evidence scenarios.
• It is possible to display the requisite ancestors for decision nodes. This is, for instance, useful for solving a network with decisions and utlity functions as a traditional influence diagram.
• Switching node class (e.g., switching the node class from decision to chance and vice versa).
• The Adaptation Wizard has been expanded with extra recording and logging features.
• Case counts enabled for data files in the Adaptation Wizard.
• The Sensitivity to Evidence Dialog can now be open from the cases/beliefs tab in the Analysis Wizard. This is useful for explaining the results of belief update in the Analysis Wizard.
• A new option to specify additional optimal triangulation parameters has been introduced.
• Support for native printing using lpstat/lpr and PostScript on Unix-like systems (e.g., Linux, Solaris, Mac).
• The speed of resetting, normalizing and randomizing probability, experience and fading tables has been improved.
• Internationalization of HUGIN Graphical User Interface (buttons and menus now include support for English, French and Japanese languages)
• The HUGIN Graphical User Interface has been extended with a Code Wizard to generate C, C# and Java code for runtime models. This enables the user to generate code constructing a model using the corresponding HUGIN API.
• Other minor improvements.

Finally, efforts have been put into improving the performance of the HUGIN Graphical User Interface.

HUGIN Decision Engine v7.3

The HUGIN Decision Engine has been extended with the following features:

• Hugin API libraries for the Windows platforms are now provided for Visual Studio 2010 (in addition to Visual Studio 6.0, Visual Studio .NET 2003, Visual Studio 2005, and Visual Studio 2008).
• A function for identifying the "requisite ancestors" of a decision node is now provided.  This is useful for identifying the relevant past observations and decisions in traditional influence diagrams (i.e., influence diagrams obeying the "no-forgetting" rule).
• It is now possible to convert a decision node to a chance node (or vice versa) -- while preserving all other attributes of the node unchanged.
• The compression feature is now supported for LIMIDs.
• The data type used for table indexes within the data structures of compressed domains is now a 32-bit integer type (this used to be a 16-bit type).  This change allows the construction of much larger compressed tables (at the cost of a higher memory consumption).
• Because of this, HKB files containing compressed domains use a new revision of the file format (but other HKB files use the same revision as Hugin API version 7.3).