Reverend Bayes on Inference Engines: A Distributed Hierarchical Approach

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2

Problem Solving and Search

This paper presents generalizations of Bayes likelihood-ratio updating rule which facilitate an asynchronous propagation of the impacts of new beliefs and/or new evidence in hierarchically organized inference structures with multi-hypotheses variables. The computational scheme proposed specifies a set of belief parameters, communication messages and updating rules which guarantee that the diffusion of updated beliefs is accomplished in a single pass and complies with the tenets of Bayes calculus.