Efficient Localized Inference for Large Graphical Models

Efficient Localized Inference for Large Graphical Models

Jinglin Chen, Jian Peng, Qiang Liu

Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 4987-4993. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2018/692

We propose a new localized inference algorithm for answering marginalization queries in large graphical models with the correlation decay property. Given a query variable and a large graphical model, we define a much smaller model in a local region around the query variable in the target model so that the marginal distribution of the query variable can be accurately approximated. We introduce two approximation error bounds based on the Dobrushin’s comparison theorem and apply our bounds to derive a greedy expansion algorithm that efficiently guides the selection of neighbor nodes for localized inference. We verify our theoretical bounds on various datasets and demonstrate that our localized inference algorithm can provide fast and accurate approximation for large graphical models.
Keywords:
Uncertainty in AI: Approximate Probabilistic Inference
Uncertainty in AI: Graphical Models