Publications & Technical Reports | |
R257 | |
A Weighted Mini-Bucket Bound for Solving Influence Diagrams
Junkyu Lee, Radu Marinescu, Alexander Ihler, and Rina Dechter.
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Abstract
Influence diagrams provide a modeling and inference framework for sequential
decision problems, representing the probabilistic knowledge by a Bayesian
network and the preferences of an agent by utility functions over the random
variables and decision variables. The time and space complexity of computing
the maximum expected utility (MEU) and its maximizing policy is exponential in
the induced width of the underlying graphical model, which is often
prohibitively large due to the growth of the requisite information for making a
sequence of decisions. In this paper, we develop a weighted mini-bucket
approach for bounding the MEU. These bounds can be used as a stand-alone
approximation that can be improved as a function of a controlling i-bound
parameter, or as a heuristic function to guide subsequent search. We
evaluate the scheme empirically against the current state of the art, illustrating its
potential.
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