An Analytic Solution to the Inverse Ising Problem in the Tree-reweighted Approximation

TL;DR

This paper presents a non-iterative, analytic solution for the inverse Ising problem using the tree-reweighted approximation, enabling efficient and accurate reconstruction of interaction matrices from data.

Contribution

The authors derive an explicit analytic formula for the inverse Ising problem within the tree-reweighted approximation, eliminating the need for iterative algorithms.

Findings

The proposed formula outperforms existing methods in strongly-attractive regions.

It provides the closest estimates to gradient ascent results with much less computation.

Effective application to biological data demonstrates practical utility.

Abstract

Many iterative and non-iterative methods have been developed for inverse problems associated with Ising models. Aiming to derive an accurate non-iterative method for the inverse problems, we employ the tree-reweighted approximation. Using the tree-reweighted approximation, we can optimize the rigorous lower bound of the objective function. By solving the moment-matching and self-consistency conditions analytically, we can derive the interaction matrix as a function of the given data statistics. With this solution, we can obtain the optimal interaction matrix without iterative computation. To evaluate the accuracy of the proposed inverse formula, we compared our results to those obtained by existing inverse formulae derived with other approximations. In an experiment to reconstruct the interaction matrix, we found that the proposed formula returns the best estimates in strongly-attractive regions for various graph structures. We also performed an experiment using real-world biological data. When applied to finding the connectivity of neurons from spike train data, the proposed formula gave the closest result to that obtained by a gradient ascent algorithm, which typically requires thousands of iterations.