A Scheme for Approximating Probabilistic Inference

This paper describes a class of probabilistic approximation algorithms based on bucket elimination which offer adjustable levels of accuracy and efficiency. We analyze the approximation for several tasks: finding the most probable explanation, belief updating and finding the maximum a posteriori hypothesis. We identify regions of completeness and provide preliminary empirical evaluation on randomly generated networks. 1 Overview Bucket elimination, is a unifying algorithmic framework that generalizes dynamic programming to enable many complex problem-solving and reasoning activities. Among the algorithms that can be accommodated within this framework are directional resolution for propositional satisfiability, adaptive consistency for constraint satisfaction, Fourier and Gaussian elimination for linear equalities and inequalities, and dynamic programming for combinatorial optimization [ 7 ] . Many algorithms for probabilistic inference, such as belief updating, finding the most proba..