Abstract

Undirected graphical models encode in a graph G the dependency structure of a random vector Y . In many applications, it is of interest to model Y given another random vector X as input. We refer to the problem of estimating the graph G(x) of Y conditioned on X = x as “graph-valued regression”. In this paper, we propose a semiparametric method for estimating G(x) that builds a tree on the X space just as in CART (classification and regression trees), but at each leaf of the tree estimates a graph. We call the method “Graph-optimized CART”, or GoCART. We study the theoretical properties of Go-CART using dyadic partitioning trees, establishing oracle inequalities on risk minimization and tree partition consistency. We also demonstrate the application of Go-CART to a meteorological dataset, showing how graph-valued regression can provide a useful tool for analyzing complex data.