New Release - Hugin 6.3

Today - June 23rd, 2003 - we have released new versions of the Hugin

Graphical User Interface (v6.3) and Hugin Decision Engine (v6.1).

Today - June 23rd, 2003 - we have released new versions of the Hugin

Graphical User Interface (v6.3) and Hugin Decision Engine (v6.1).

The main new features of this release are:

* Data conflict analysis

* Case files

* Thread-safe Hugin Decision Engine

* User specified data preprocessing plugins

* Parameter learning wizard

* Various improvements of Hugin Graphical User Interface

Data conflict analysis is the activity of detecting, tracing, and

resolving possible conflicts among observations of variable values.

The Hugin Graphical User Interface and Hugin Decision Engine now

support identification of potential conflicts in observations and

hypothesis driven conflict resolution.

The Hugin Graphical User Interface and Hugin Decision Engine now

support the use of case files. Case files make it possible for the

user to save evidence entered in a domain in a case file for easy

reload.

The Hugin Decision Engine has been extended to support safe usage in a

multi-threaded application. It is now possible to safely use the Hugin

Decision Engine in multi-threaded applications where threads process

their own local domains or applications where threads access a common

domain. In the last scenario, it is necessary to explicitly ensure

mutual exclusion.

Support for loading user specified preprocessing plugins have been

included in the learning wizards of the Hugin Graphical User

Interface. This enables the user to use her own data preprocessing

functionality directly in the Hugin Graphical User Interface.

The functionality of the Hugin Graphical User Interface has been

extended with an additional Learning Wizard - the EM Learning Wizard.

The EM Learning Wizard increases the user support for learning the

parameters of Bayesian networks from data. The EM Learning Wizard

includes support for data acquisition (database connectivity via ODBC,

interface to Oracle databases, and plain text files), data

preprocessing, specification of domain expert knowledge on parameters,

generation of randomized conditional probability distributions, etc.

The Hugin Graphical User Interface has been improved with various new

features. This includes:

* Import of network information (groups, colors, node sizes, etc).

This is very useful in documentation of networks, but also for

structural learning of Bayesian networks, where loading and saving

structural constraints is now supported.

* Curved and piecewise linear arrows between nodes. This makes it

possible to avoid having arrows and nodes overlap.

* View the junction tree structure (useful for conflict analysis).

* Individual node sizes

* Improved print functionalities (e.g multi-page networks and

selection of printer).

Finally, the heuristic measure used by the Hugin Decision Engine as

part of the total-weight triangulation has been improved to give

better results on large networks.

User feedback form

Hugin Expert A/S has a continuous interest in the opinion of the users

of Hugin software and we wish to improve our software in line with our

customers needs. For this reason the Hugin Graphical User Interface

has been extended with a questionnaire, which we kindly ask our users

to complete. The user feedback will help us to improve our software

and to guide the development of the software and keep it exciting to

use. We sincerely hope that many of you will spend a few minutes in

helping us improving ourselves.