Release 6.1

On April 15th, 2002 - we have released new versions of all HUGIN products. The new version of the HUGIN Graphical User Interface is 6.1 and the new version of the HUGIN Decision Engine is v5.4.

The main features of this release are: The introduction of a Learning Wizard including database connectivity in the Graphical User Interface, optimal triangulation and faster inference, adaptation in influence diagrams in the Graphical User Interface, and improved stability of the Graphical User Interface.

The functionality of the Hugin Graphical User Interface has been extended with a Learning Wizard. The Learning Wizard provides increased support for learning Bayesian networks from data. The Learning Wizard includes support for data acquisition (database connectivity via ODBC, interface to Oracle databases, and plain text files), data pre-processing, specification of domain expert knowledge (i.e., structural constraints and prior distributions), a data dependency slider to detect the relative strengths of links as found in the data, generation of randomised conditional probability distributions, etc.

A new triangulation method has been implemented. This method makes it possible to find a (minimal) triangulation that has the minimum sum of clique state space sizes (i.e., an optimal triangulation). For large networks, this method can improve time complexity of inference by an order of magnitude (sometimes even more), compared to the heuristic methods provided by earlier versions of the HUGIN Decision Engine. The new triangulation method is available in both the HUGIN APIs and in the HUGIN Graphical User Interface.

The computations performed by the HUGIN Decision Engine during the inference process have been reorganized to make better use of the caches in modern CPUs. The result is faster inference.

The functionality of the Graphical User Interface with respect to adaptation has been extended to include adaptation on the chance variables of an influence diagram.

Finally, a large effort has been put into increasing the stability of the HUGIN Graphical User Interface.