Space-efficient inference in dynamic probabilistic networks
John Binder, Kevin J. Murphy, Stuart Russell · 1997
Dynamic probabilistic networks (DPNs) are a useful tool for modeling complex stochastic processes. The simplest inference task in DPNs is monitoring --- that is, computing a posterior distribution for the state variables at each time step given all observations up to that time. Recursive, constant-space algorithms are well-known for monitoring in DPNs and other models. This paper is concerned with hindsight --- that is, computing a posterior distribution given both past and future observations. Hindsight is an essential subtask of learning DPN models from data. Existing algorithms for hindsight in DPNs use O(SN ) space and time, where N is the total length of the observation sequence and S is the state space size for each time step. They are therefore impractical for hindsight in complex models with long observation sequences. This paper presents an O(S log N ) space, O(SN log N ) time hindsight algorithm. We demonstrates the effectiveness of the algorithm in two real-world DPN learn...