This work reports the most relevant technical aspects in the problem of
learning the \emph{Markov network structure} from data. Such problem has become
increasingly important in machine learning, and many other application fields
of machine learning. Markov networks, together with Bayesian networks, are
probabilistic graphical models, a widely used formalism for handling
probability distributions in intelligent systems. Learning graphical models
from data have been extensively applied for the case of Bayesian networks, but
for Markov networks learning it is not tractable in practice.
This work introduces the IB-score, a family of independence-based score
functions for robust learning of Markov networks independence structures.
Markov networks are a widely used graphical representation of probability
distributions, with many applications in several fields of science. The main
advantage of the IB-score is the possibility of computing it without the need
of estimation of the numerical parameters, an NP-hard problem, usually solved
through an approximate, data-intensive, iterative optimization.