Inference Algorithms: Introduction

From DSL

While GeNIe is a general purpose decision modeling environment, it has been written with research and teaching environments in mind. Historically, several academic and commercial environments have been developed with the purpose of decision modeling and each of these introduced its own file format. At some point, researchers in the Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence community realized that it would be beneficial for everybody if models developed using different systems could be shared. In order to facilitate sharing and exchanging models, a standard has been under development, known as Bayesian Networks Interchange Format (BNIF). Unfortunately, while the core of the BNIF has been developed and made available on the World Wide Web, there has not been sufficient agreement as to what elements it should contain. Effectively, none of the commercial nor academic programs implement the standard, with a notable exception of MSBN, a Bayesian network package developed at Microsoft Corporation and made available free of charge to the scientific community.

We believe that the idea of exchanging models among various researchers is excellent and we support it by implementing several popular file formats in addition to the format designed by the Decision Systems Laboratory for our models. GeNIe is able to read and write files in the following formats:

Ergo Version 1.0, most recent version of the BNIF format implemented in the Microsoft MSBN package, Hugin, Netica, KI and Equation.

With the exception of the Ergo format, that became popular in the academia because of its simplicity, the syntax of all formats is described on the WWW. In particular, specifications of the Hugin and Netica formats have been generously contributed to the community by Hugin A.G. and Norsys Inc. respectively.

GeNIe can read models created by other programs. It can be used also as a conversion program between different formats. In particular, models developed in GeNIe can be saved in Hugin or Netica format and used by users of these programs. The user should keep in mind that various programs may have extensions and functionalities that do not supported by other programs. In this case, each conversion will lead to loss of information.

You can use the Loading and Saving Files tutorial in the Tutorials section to learn how to load and save files in different formats.