  A graphical model is a statistical model that is associated to a graph whose
nodes correspond to variables of interest. The edges of the graph reflect
allowed conditional dependencies among the variables. Graphical models admit
computationally convenient factorization properties and have long been a
valuable tool for tractable modeling of multivariate distributions. More
recently, applications such as reconstructing gene regulatory networks from
gene expression data have driven major advances in structure learning, that is,
estimating the graph underlying a model. We review some of these advances and
discuss methods such as the graphical lasso and neighborhood selection for
undirected graphical models (or Markov random fields), and the PC algorithm and
score-based search methods for directed graphical models (or Bayesian
networks). We further review extensions that account for effects of latent
variables and heterogeneous data sources.
