Probabilistic Arc Consistency: A Connection between Constraint Reasoning and Probabilistic Reasoning

01/16/2013

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by   Michael C. Horsch, et al.

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We document a connection between constraint reasoning and probabilistic reasoning. We present an algorithm, called em probabilistic arc consistency, which is both a generalization of a well known algorithm for arc consistency used in constraint reasoning, and a specialization of the belief updating algorithm for singly-connected networks. Our algorithm is exact for singly- connected constraint problems, but can work well as an approximation for arbitrary problems. We briefly discuss some empirical results, and related methods.