The Binary Space Partitioning-Tree Process

Abstract

The Mondrian process represents an elegant and powerful approach for space partition modelling. However, as it restricts the partitions to be axis-aligned, its modelling flexibility is limited. In this work, we propose a self-consistent Binary Space Partitioning (BSP)-Tree process to generalize the Mondrian process. The BSP-Tree process is an almost surely right continuous Markov jump process that allows uniformly distributed oblique cuts in a two-dimensional convex polygon. The BSP-Tree process can also be extended using a non-uniform probability measure to generate direction differentiated cuts. The process is also self-consistent, maintaining distributional invariance under a restricted subdomain. We use Conditional-Sequential Monte Carlo for inference using the tree structure as the high-dimensional variable. The BSP-Tree process's performance on synthetic data partitioning and relational modelling demonstrates clear inferential improvements over the standard Mondrian process and other related methods.