Bethe and related pairwise entropy approximations
Adrian Weller · 2015
For undirected graphical models, belief propaga-tion often performs remarkably well for approxi-mate marginal inference, and may be viewed as a heuristic to minimize the Bethe free energy. Fo-cusing on binary pairwise models, we demon-strate that several recent results on the Bethe ap-proximation may be generalized to a broad fam-ily of related pairwise free energy approxima-tions with arbitrary counting numbers. We ex-plore approximation error and shed light on the empirical success of the Bethe approximation. 1