In this chapter, we introduced ourselves to one of the very active areas of research in machine learning, namely the field of probabilistic graphical models. These models involve using a graphical structure to encode conditional independence relations between random variables. We saw how Bayes' theorem, a very simple formula that essentially tells us how we can predicate cause by observing effect, can be used to build a simple classifier known as the Naïve Bayes classifier. This is a simple model where we are trying to predict an output class that best explains a set of observed features, all of which are assumed to be independent of each other given the output class.
We used this model to predict user sentiment on a set of movie reviews where the features were the words that were present in the reviews. Although we obtained reasonable accuracy, we found that the assumptions in our model are quite strict and prevent us from doing substantially better. Often, a Naïve Bayes model is...