Structured probabilistic inference

AbstractProbabilistic inference is among the main topics with reasoning in uncertainty in AI. For this purpose, Bayesian Networks (BNs) is one of the most successful and efficient Probabilistic Graphical Model (PGM) so far. Since the mid-90s, a growing number of BNs extensions have been proposed. Object-oriented, entity-relationship and first-order logic are the main representation paradigms used to extend BNs. While entity-relationship and first-order models have been successfully used for machine learning in defining lifted probabilistic inference, object-oriented models have been mostly underused. Structured inference, which exploits the structural knowledge encoded in an object-oriented PGM, is a surprisingly unstudied technique. In this paper we propose a full object-oriented framework for PRM and propose two extensions of the state-of-the-art structured inference algorithm: SPI which removes the major flaws of existing algorithms and SPISBB which largely enhances SPI by using d-separation

Patterns Discovery for Efficient Structured Probabilistic Inference

International audienceIn many domains where experts are the main source of knowledge, e.g., in reliability and risk management, a framework well suited for the modelisation, maintenance and exploitation of complex probabilistic systems is essential. In these domains, models usually define closed-world systems and result from the aggregation of multiple patterns repeated many times. Object Oriented-based Frameworks (OOF) such as Probabilistic Relational Models thus offer an effective way to represent such systems. OOFs define patterns as classes and substitute large Bayesian networks (BN) by graphs of instances of these classes. In this framework, Structured Inference avoids many computation redundancies by exploiting class knowledge, hence reducing BN inference times by orders of magnitude. However, to keep modeling and maintenance costs low, OOF classes often encode only generic situations. More complex situations, even those repeated many times, are only represented by combinations of instances. In this paper, we propose to determine such combination patterns and exploit them as classes to speed-up Structured Inference. We prove that determining an optimal set of patterns is NP-hard. We also provide an efficient algorithm to approximate this set and show numerical experiments that highlight its practical efficiency