> I am looking for a free package (for student use) for developing and
> solving influence diagrams.
> Thanks,
> Rich
If you're looking for a graphical interface, DSL has developed GeNIe
(Grapichal Network Interface) a pretty nice program for building and
reasoning about BN's and influence diagrams in Win 95/NT environments.
We've spent considerable effort in making the interface pleasant and
robust. It is free for educational and personal (non-commercial) use.
The program can be downloaded from:
http://www2.sis.pitt.edu/~genie
There's an extensive on-line help system, and a detailed tutorial for
creating and performing inference on BN's and influence diagrams. Also,
we would be glad to help if you or your students have any specific problems
not covered in the help system.
If you're interested in lower-level development, the engine that GeNIe is
based on, SMILE (Structural Modeling, Inference, and Learning Engine) is
also available free for non-commercial use. SMILE is a library of
C++ classes that can be embedded in your own applications for structural
reasoning. SMILE can also be downloaded at the above address, compiled
for both UNIX and PC environments. The code is portable, and we will
consider compiling in other environments if we have sufficient demand.
We do ask authors of publications in which GeNIe or SMILE played a role
to acknowledge that fact :)
I've included below a copy of the GeNIe 1.0 release announcement from
last month for more details about the capabilities of these two programs.
Also feel free to contact any of us directly if you have questions.
Best Regards,
Denver.
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Friends in Uncertainty,
We are pleased to announce GeNIe 1.0, a free development
environment for graphical decision-theoretic models. At the
moment it implements Bayesian networks and influence diagrams
with, what we believe to be, a pleasant and reliable user interface.
It has hierarchical submodels, a Windows-style tree view,
Noisy-OR nodes, deterministic nodes, multiple decision nodes,
relevance reasoning that includes designating nodes as targets,
multiple utility nodes, linearly-additive Multi-Attribute
utility nodes (we will have generalized MAU nodes in the future),
value of information computation, several Bayesian networks
algorithms to choose from, on-screen comments, HTML-based help
system, and many other useful features that one would want from
a development environment for graphical models.
GeNIe is our research and teaching vehicle, so naturally
it will evolve as time goes.
One feature that may contribute to sharing research results in
the UAI community is that GeNIe is able to read and write several
file formats, including old Ergo format, Netica, Hugin, and the
version of the interchange format implemented by Microsoft's MSBN
package. It can thus be used as a conversion program.
GeNIe runs on Windows 95/NT computers. We will soon release its
portable inference engine, SMILE, with C/C++ inferface. SMILE
can be embedded in applications that use models developed using
GeNIe. Stay tuned!
GeNIe is free for the taking (for non-commercial use, such as
basic research, teaching, and personal use). You can download
it from the following location:
http://www2.sis.pitt.edu/~genie
We believe that the program will prove useful for the community.
May GeNIe grant you your three wishes :-).
Marek Druzdzel
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