1 Introduction
The recent decades have witnessed a rapid development of graphical models, since they provide a refined language to describe complicated systems and further facilitate the derivation of efficient inference algorithms [2]. While an extensive literature revolves around learning static graphical models that are time-invariant (see [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11] and references therein), the change of interdependencies with a covariate (e.g., time or space) is often the rule rather than the exception for real-world data, such as friendships between individuals in a social community, communications between genes in a cell, equity trading between companies, and computer network traffic. Furthermore, such dynamic graphical models can be leveraged to spot trends, detect anomalies, classify events, evaluate the impact of interventions, and predict future behaviors of the systems. For instance, estimating time-varying functional brain networks during epileptic seizures can show how the dysrhythmia of the brain propagates, and analyzing the network evolution can help to detect epilepsy and assess the treatment of epilepsy [12]. We therefore focus on learning dynamic graphical models in this study.