Distributed revision of belief commitment in multi-hypotheses interpretation
Judea Pearl · arXiv (Cornell University) · 1986
This paper extends the applications of belief-networks models to include the revision of belief commitments, i.e., the categorical instantiation of a subset of hypotheses which constitute the most satisfactory explanation of the evidence at hand. We show that, in singly-connected networks, the most satisfactory explanation can be found in linear time by a message-passing algorithm similar to the one used in belief updating. In multiply-connected networks, the problem may be exponentially hard but, if the network is sparse, topological considerations can be used to render the interpretation task tractable. In general, finding the most probable combination of hypotheses is no more complex than computing the degree of belief for any individual hypothesis.