Context-Specific Approximation in Probabilistic Inference
This work addresses the challenge of computational complexity in probabilistic inference for AI and machine learning applications, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing concepts like probabilistic partial evaluation.
The paper tackles the problem of simplifying probabilistic models by ignoring distinctions with similar probabilities in specific contexts, resulting in a method that provides error bounds and preliminary empirical results on simple networks.
There is evidence that the numbers in probabilistic inference don't really matter. This paper considers the idea that we can make a probabilistic model simpler by making fewer distinctions. Unfortunately, the level of a Bayesian network seems too coarse; it is unlikely that a parent will make little difference for all values of the other parents. In this paper we consider an approximation scheme where distinctions can be ignored in some contexts, but not in other contexts. We elaborate on a notion of a parent context that allows a structured context-specific decomposition of a probability distribution and the associated probabilistic inference scheme called probabilistic partial evaluation (Poole 1997). This paper shows a way to simplify a probabilistic model by ignoring distinctions which have similar probabilities, a method to exploit the simpler model, a bound on the resulting errors, and some preliminary empirical results on simple networks.