Latent Tree Models and Approximate Inference in Bayesian Networks

Abstract

We propose a novel method for approximate inference in Bayesian networks (BNs). The idea is to sample data from a BN, learn a latent tree model (LTM) from the data offline, and when online, make inference with the LTM instead of the original BN. Because LTMs are tree-structured, inference takes linear time. In the meantime, they can represent complex relationship among leaf nodes and hence the approximation accuracy is often good. Empirical evidence shows that our method can achieve good approximation accuracy at low online computational cost.

Cite

Text

Wang et al. "Latent Tree Models and Approximate Inference in Bayesian Networks." Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2008. doi:10.1613/JAIR.2530

Markdown

[Wang et al. "Latent Tree Models and Approximate Inference in Bayesian Networks." Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2008.](https://mlanthology.org/jair/2008/wang2008jair-latent/) doi:10.1613/JAIR.2530

BibTeX

@article{wang2008jair-latent,
  title     = {{Latent Tree Models and Approximate Inference in Bayesian Networks}},
  author    = {Wang, Yi and Zhang, Nevin Lianwen and Chen, Tao},
  journal   = {Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research},
  year      = {2008},
  pages     = {879-900},
  doi       = {10.1613/JAIR.2530},
  volume    = {32},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/jair/2008/wang2008jair-latent/}
}