Related papers: MAP Complexity Results and Approximation Methods
This paper combines two ingredients in order to get a rather surprising result on one of the most studied, elegant and powerful tools for solving convex feasibility problems, the method of alternating projections (MAP). Going back to names…
We present a new algorithm for finding maximum a-posterior) (MAP) assignments of values to belief networks. The belief network is compiled into a network consisting only of nodes with boolean (i.e. only 0 or 1) conditional probabilities.…
Computing the conditional mode of a distribution, better known as the $\mathit{maximum\ a\ posteriori}$ (MAP) assignment, is a fundamental task in probabilistic inference. However, MAP estimation is generally intractable, and remains hard…
Given a redundant dictionary $\Phi$, represented by an $M \times N$ matrix ($\Phi \in \mathbb{R}^{M \times N}$) and a target signal $y \in \mathbb{R}^M$, the \emph{sparse approximation problem} asks to find an approximate representation of…
Exact inference of the most probable explanation (MPE) in Bayesian networks is known to be NP-complete. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for approximate MPE inference that is based on the incremental build-infer-approximate (IBIA)…
Efficiently finding the maximum a posteriori (MAP) configuration of a graphical model is an important problem which is often implemented using message passing algorithms. The optimality of such algorithms is only well established for…
Sparse structure learning in high-dimensional Gaussian graphical models is an important problem in multivariate statistical signal processing; since the sparsity pattern naturally encodes the conditional independence relationship among…
Belief Propagation (BP) is a popular, distributed heuristic for performing MAP computations in Graphical Models. BP can be interpreted, from a variational perspective, as minimizing the Bethe Free Energy (BFE). BP can also be used to solve…
In the following article we consider approximate Bayesian parameter inference for observation driven time series models. Such statistical models appear in a wide variety of applications, including econometrics and applied mathematics. This…
A demanding challenge in Bayesian inversion is to efficiently characterize the posterior distribution. This task is problematic especially in high-dimensional non-Gaussian problems, where the structure of the posterior can be very chaotic…
Approximate algorithms for structured prediction problems---such as LP relaxations and the popular alpha-expansion algorithm (Boykov et al. 2001)---typically far exceed their theoretical performance guarantees on real-world instances. These…
Belief propagation (BP) can do exact inference in loop-free graphs, but its performance could be poor in graphs with loops, and the understanding of its solution is limited. This work gives an interpretable belief propagation rule that is…
The Bayes-Adaptive Markov Decision Process (BAMDP) formalism pursues the Bayes-optimal solution to the exploration-exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning. As the computation of exact solutions to Bayesian reinforcement-learning…
Given a belief network with evidence, the task of finding the I most probable explanations (MPE) in the belief network is that of identifying and ordering the I most probable instantiations of the non-evidence nodes of the belief network.…
We present a new approach to Bayesian inference that entirely avoids Markov chain simulation, by constructing a map that pushes forward the prior measure to the posterior measure. Existence and uniqueness of a suitable measure-preserving…
Belief Propagation (BP) is a widely used approximation for exact probabilistic inference in graphical models, such as Markov Random Fields (MRFs). In graphs with cycles, however, no exact convergence guarantees for BP are known, in general.…
Maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation, like all Bayesian methods, depends on prior assumptions. These assumptions are often chosen to promote specific features in the recovered estimate. The form of the chosen prior determines the shape of…
We consider in this paper the formulation of approximate inference in Bayesian networks as a problem of exact inference on an approximate network that results from deleting edges (to reduce treewidth). We have shown in earlier work that…
In unconstrained maximum a posteriori (MAP) and maximum likelihood estimation, the inverse of minus the merit-function Hessian matrix is an approximation of the estimate covariance matrix. In the Bayesian context of MAP estimation, it is…
It was recently shown that the problem of decoding messages transmitted through a noisy channel can be formulated as a belief updating task over a probabilistic network [McEliece]. Moreover, it was observed that iterative application of the…