Inter-causal Independence and Heterogeneous Factorization

02/27/2013

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by   Nevin Lianwen Zhang, et al.

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It is well known that conditional independence can be used to factorize a joint probability into a multiplication of conditional probabilities. This paper proposes a constructive definition of inter-causal independence, which can be used to further factorize a conditional probability. An inference algorithm is developed, which makes use of both conditional independence and inter-causal independence to reduce inference complexity in Bayesian networks.