A novel approach for Markov Random Field with intractable normalising constant on large lattices W. Zhu ∗ and Y. Fany February 19, 2018 Abstract The pseudo likelihood method of Besag (1974), has remained a popular method for estimating Markov random field on a very large lattice, despite various documented deficiencies. This is partly because it remains the only computationally tractable method for large lattices. We introduce a novel method to estimate Markov random fields defined on a regular lattice. The method takes advantage of conditional independence structures and recur- sively decomposes a large lattice into smaller sublattices. An approximation is made at each decomposition. Doing so completely avoids the need to com- pute the troublesome normalising constant. The computational complexity arXiv:1601.02410v1 [stat.ME] 11 Jan 2016 is O(N), where N is the the number of pixels in lattice, making it computa- tionally attractive for very large lattices. We show through simulation, that the proposed method performs well, even when compared to the methods using exact likelihoods. Keywords: Markov random field, normalizing constant, conditional indepen- dence, decomposition, Potts model. ∗School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052 Australia. Communicating Author Wanchuang Zhu: Email
[email protected]. ySchool of Mathematics and Statistics, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052 Australia. Email
[email protected]. 1 1 Introduction Markov random field (MRF) models have an important role in modelling spa- tially correlated datasets. They have been used extensively in image and texture analyses ( Nott and Ryden´ 1999, Hurn et al. 2003), image segmentation (Pal and Pal 1993, Van Leemput et al.