Publications & Technical Reports | |
R144 | ||
Best-First AND/OR Search for Most Probable Explanations
Radu Marinescu and Rina Dechter |
Abstract
The paper evaluates the power of best-first search
over AND/OR search spaces for solving theMost
Probable Explanation (MPE) task in Bayesian
networks. The main virtue of the AND/OR
representation of the search space is its sensitivity
to the structure of the problem, which
can translate into significant time savings. In
recent years depth-first AND/OR Branch-and-
Bound algorithms were shown to be very effective
when exploring such search spaces, especially
when using caching. Since best-first strategies
are known to be superior to depth-first when
memory is utilized, exploring the best-first control
strategy is called for. The main contribution
of this paper is in showing that a recent extension
of AND/OR search algorithms from depth-first
Branch-and-Bound to best-first is indeed very effective
for computing the MPE in Bayesian networks.
We demonstrate empirically the superiority
of the best-first search approach on various
probabilistic networks.
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