Modeling and Reasoning with Bayesian Networks

This book introduces the formal foundations and practical applications of Bayesian networks.

Adnan Darwiche (Author)

9780521884389, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 April 2009

562 pages, 246 b/w illus. 64 tables 342 exercises
25.4 x 17.8 x 3 cm, 1.16 kg

'[This] book will make an excellent textbook; it covers topics suitable for both undergraduate and graduate courses. It will also help practitioners get a firm grasp of the fundamentals of modeling and inference with BNs, as well as some recent advances.' ACM Computing Reviews

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.

1. Introduction
2. Propositional logic
3. Probability calculus
4. Bayesian networks
5. Building Bayesian networks
6. Inference by variable elimination
7. Inference by factor elimination
8. Inference by conditioning
9. Models for graph decomposition
10. Most likely instantiations
11. The complexity of probabilistic inference
12. Compiling Bayesian networks
13. Inference with local structure
14. Approximate inference by belief propagation
15. Approximate inference by stochastic sampling
16. Sensitivity analysis
17. Learning: the maximum likelihood approach
18. Learning: the Bayesian approach
Appendix A: notation
Appendix B: concepts from information theory
Appendix C: fixed point iterative methods
Appendix D: constrained optimization.

Subject Areas: Mathematical theory of computation [UYA], Probability & statistics [PBT]