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