Hidden Markov Model Induction by Bayesian Model Merging

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 5 (NIPS 1992)

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Authors

Andreas Stolcke, Stephen Omohundro

Abstract

This paper describes a technique for learning both the number of states and the topology of Hidden Markov Models from examples. The induction process starts with the most specific model consistent with the training data and generalizes by successively merging states. Both the choice of states to merge and the stopping criterion are guided by the Bayesian posterior probability. We compare our algorithm with the Baum-Welch method of estimating fixed-size models, and find that it can induce minimal HMMs from data in cases where fixed estimation does not converge or requires redundant parameters to converge.

1 INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are a well-studied approach to the modelling of sequence data. HMMs can be viewed as a stochastic generalization of finite-state automata, where both the transitions between states and the generation of output symbols are governed by probability distributions. HMMs have been important in speech recognition (Rabiner & Juang, 1986), cryptography, and more recently in other areas such as protein classification and alignment (Haussler, Krogh, Mian & SjOlander, 1992; Baldi, Chauvin, Hunkapiller & McClure, 1993).

Practitioners have typically chosen the HMM topology by hand, so that learning the HMM from sample data means estimating only a fixed number of model parameters. The standard approach is to find a maximum likelihood (ML) or maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) estimate of the HMM parameters. The Baum-Welch algorithm uses dynamic programming