English

Disintegration and Bayesian Inversion via String Diagrams

Artificial Intelligence 2019-07-31 v3

Abstract

The notions of disintegration and Bayesian inversion are fundamental in conditional probability theory. They produce channels, as conditional probabilities, from a joint state, or from an already given channel (in opposite direction). These notions exist in the literature, in concrete situations, but are presented here in abstract graphical formulations. The resulting abstract descriptions are used for proving basic results in conditional probability theory. The existence of disintegration and Bayesian inversion is discussed for discrete probability, and also for measure-theoretic probability --- via standard Borel spaces and via likelihoods. Finally, the usefulness of disintegration and Bayesian inversion is illustrated in several examples.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1709.00322,
  title  = {Disintegration and Bayesian Inversion via String Diagrams},
  author = {Kenta Cho and Bart Jacobs},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.00322},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in Mathematical Structures in Computer Science

R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:30:26.841Z