Abstraction Sampling in Graphical Models

2018-02-08

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 32

Volume

Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2018

Doctoral Consortium

We present a new sampling scheme for approximating hard to compute queries over graphical models, such as computing the partition function. The scheme builds upon exact algorithms that traverse a weighted directed state-space graph representing a global function over a graphical model (e.g., probability distribution). With the aid of an abstraction function and randomization, the state space can be compacted (trimmed) to facilitate tractable computation, yielding a Monte Carlo estimate that is unbiased. We present the general idea and analyze its properties analytically and empirically.

10.1609/aaai.v32i1.11365