Novel Bounds on Marginal Probabilities

dc.creatorMooij, Joris M.
dc.creatorKappen, Hilbert J.
dc.date2008-01-24
dc.date.accessioned2026-07-07T08:56:13Z
dc.date.available2026-07-07T08:56:13Z
dc.descriptionWe derive two related novel bounds on single-variable marginal probability distributions in factor graphs with discrete variables. The first method propagates bounds over a subtree of the factor graph rooted in the variable, and the second method propagates bounds over the self-avoiding walk tree starting at the variable. By construction, both methods not only bound the exact marginal probability distribution of a variable, but also its approximate Belief Propagation marginal (``belief''). Thus, apart from providing a practical means to calculate bounds on marginals, our contribution also lies in an increased understanding of the error made by Belief Propagation. Empirically, we show that our bounds often outperform existing bounds in terms of accuracy and/or computation time. We also show that our bounds can yield nontrivial results for medical diagnosis inference problems.
dc.description33 pages. Submitted to Journal of Machine Learning Research
dc.identifierhttps://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3797
dc.identifierhttp://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3797
dc.identifier.urihttp://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/146535
dc.subjectProbability
dc.subject65C50
dc.titleNovel Bounds on Marginal Probabilities
dc.typetext

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