An anytime scheme for bounding posterior beliefs

Abstract

This paper presents an any-time scheme for computing lower and upper bounds on posterior marginals in Bayesian networks. The scheme draws from two previously proposed methods, bounded conditioning (Horvitz, Suermondt, & Cooper 1989) and bound propagation (Leisink & Kappen 2003). Following the principles of cutset conditioning (Pearl 1988), our method enumerates a subset of cutset tuples and applies exact reasoning in the network instances conditioned on those tuples. The probability mass of the remaining tuples is bounded using a variant of bound propagation. We show that our new scheme improves on the earlier schemes.