Modeling And Reasoning With Bayesian Networks

This book provides a thorough introduction to the formal foundations and practical applications of Bayesian networks. It provides an extensive discussion of techniques for building Bayesian networks that model real-world situations, including techniques for synthesizing models from design, learning models from data, and debugging models using sensitivity analysis. It also treats exact and approximate inference algorithms at both theoretical and practical levels. The author assumes very little background on the covered subjects, supplying in-depth discussions for theoretically inclined readers and enough practical details to provide an algorithmic cookbook for the system developer.

This book is a thorough introduction to the formal foundations and practical applications of Bayesian networks. It provides an extensive discussion of techniques for building Bayesian networks that model real-world situations, including techniques for synthesizing models from design, learning models from data, and debugging models using sensitivity analysis. It also treats exact and approximate inference algorithms at both theoretical and practical levels. The treatment of exact algorithms covers the main inference paradigms based on elimination and conditioning and includes advanced methods for compiling Bayesian networks, time-space tradeoffs, and exploiting local structure of massively connected networks. The treatment of approximate algorithms covers the main inference paradigms based on sampling and optimization and includes influential algorithms such as importance sampling, MCMC, and belief propagation. The author assumes very little background on the covered subjects, supplying in-depth discussions for theoretically inclined readers and enough practical details to provide an algorithmic cookbook for the system developer.

This 2002 book investigates the opportunities in building intelligent decision support systems offered by multi-agent distributed probabilistic reasoning. Probabilistic reasoning with graphical models, also known as Bayesian networks or belief networks, has become increasingly an active field of research and practice in artificial intelligence, operations research and statistics. The success of this technique in modeling intelligent decision support systems under the centralized and single-agent paradigm has been striking. Yang Xiang extends graphical dependence models to the distributed and multi-agent paradigm. He identifies the major technical challenges involved in such an endeavor and presents the results. The framework developed in the book allows distributed representation of uncertain knowledge on a large and complex environment embedded in multiple cooperative agents, and effective, exact and distributed probabilistic inference.

This research monograph is highly contextual in the present era of spatial/spatio-temporal data explosion. The overall text contains many interesting results that are worth applying in practice, while it is also a source of intriguing and motivating questions for advanced research on spatial data science. The monograph is primarily prepared for graduate students of Computer Science, who wish to employ probabilistic graphical models, especially Bayesian networks (BNs), for applied research on spatial/spatio-temporal data. Students of any other discipline of engineering, science, and technology, will also find this monograph useful. Research students looking for a suitable problem for their MS or PhD thesis will also find this monograph beneficial. The open research problems as discussed with sufficient references in Chapter-8 and Chapter-9 can immensely help graduate researchers to identify topics of their own choice. The various illustrations and proofs presented throughout the monograph may help them to better understand the working principles of the models. The present monograph, containing sufficient description of the parameter learning and inference generation process for each enhanced BN model, can also serve as an algorithmic cookbook for the relevant system developers.

Bayesian Networks and Influence Diagrams: A Guide to Construction and Analysis, Second Edition, provides a comprehensive guide for practitioners who wish to understand, construct, and analyze intelligent systems for decision support based on probabilistic networks. This new edition contains six new sections, in addition to fully-updated examples, tables, figures, and a revised appendix. Intended primarily for practitioners, this book does not require sophisticated mathematical skills or deep understanding of the underlying theory and methods nor does it discuss alternative technologies for reasoning under uncertainty. The theory and methods presented are illustrated through more than 140 examples, and exercises are included for the reader to check his or her level of understanding. The techniques and methods presented for knowledge elicitation, model construction and verification, modeling techniques and tricks, learning models from data, and analyses of models have all been developed and refined on the basis of numerous courses that the authors have held for practitioners worldwide.

A general framework for constructing and using probabilistic models of complex systems that would enable a computer to use available information for making decisions. Most tasks require a person or an automated system to reason—to reach conclusions based on available information. The framework of probabilistic graphical models, presented in this book, provides a general approach for this task. The approach is model-based, allowing interpretable models to be constructed and then manipulated by reasoning algorithms. These models can also be learned automatically from data, allowing the approach to be used in cases where manually constructing a model is difficult or even impossible. Because uncertainty is an inescapable aspect of most real-world applications, the book focuses on probabilistic models, which make the uncertainty explicit and provide models that are more faithful to reality. Probabilistic Graphical Models discusses a variety of models, spanning Bayesian networks, undirected Markov networks, discrete and continuous models, and extensions to deal with dynamical systems and relational data. For each class of models, the text describes the three fundamental cornerstones: representation, inference, and learning, presenting both basic concepts and advanced techniques. Finally, the book considers the use of the proposed framework for causal reasoning and decision making under uncertainty. The main text in each chapter provides the detailed technical development of the key ideas. Most chapters also include boxes with additional material: skill boxes, which describe techniques; case study boxes, which discuss empirical cases related to the approach described in the text, including applications in computer vision, robotics, natural language understanding, and computational biology; and concept boxes, which present significant concepts drawn from the material in the chapter. Instructors (and readers) can group chapters in various combinations, from core topics to more technically advanced material, to suit their particular needs.

This is a brand new edition of an essential work on Bayesian networks and decision graphs. It is an introduction to probabilistic graphical models including Bayesian networks and influence diagrams. The reader is guided through the two types of frameworks with examples and exercises, which also give instruction on how to build these models. Structured in two parts, the first section focuses on probabilistic graphical models, while the second part deals with decision graphs, and in addition to the frameworks described in the previous edition, it also introduces Markov decision process and partially ordered decision problems.

The increasing complexity of our world demands new perspectives on the role of technology in decision making. Human decision making has its li- tations in terms of information-processing capacity. We need new technology to cope with the increasingly complex and information-rich nature of our modern society. This is particularly true for critical environments such as crisis management and tra?c management, where humans need to engage in close collaborations with arti?cial systems to observe and understand the situation and respond in a sensible way. We believe that close collaborations between humans and arti?cial systems will become essential and that the importance of research into Interactive Collaborative Information Systems (ICIS) is self-evident. Developments in information and communication technology have ra- cally changed our working environments. The vast amount of information available nowadays and the wirelessly networked nature of our modern so- ety open up new opportunities to handle di?cult decision-making situations such as computer-supported situation assessment and distributed decision making. To make good use of these new possibilities, we need to update our traditional views on the role and capabilities of information systems. The aim of the Interactive Collaborative Information Systems project is to develop techniques that support humans in complex information en- ronments and that facilitate distributed decision-making capabilities. ICIS emphasizes the importance of building actor-agent communities: close c- laborations between human and arti?cial actors that highlight their comp- mentary capabilities, and in which task distribution is ?exible and adaptive.