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Unpublished Paper
Improved Dynamic Schedules for Belief Propagation
(2007)
  • Charles Sutton
  • Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Abstract
Belief propagation and its variants are popular methods for approximate inference, but their running time and even their convergence depend greatly on the schedule used to send the messages. Recently, dynamic update schedules have been shown to converge much faster on hard networks than static schedules, namely the residual BP schedule of Elidan et al. [2006]. But that RBP algorithm wastes message updates: many messages are computed solely to determine their priority, and are never actually performed. In this paper, we show that estimating the residual, rather than calculating it directly, leads to significant decreases in the number of messages required for convergence, and in the total running time. The residual is estimated using an upper bound based on recent work on message errors in BP. On both synthetic and real-world networks, this dramatically decreases the running time of BP, in some cases by a factor of five, without affecting the quality of the solution.
Disciplines
Publication Date
2007
Comments
This is the pre-published version harvested from arXiv.
Citation Information
Charles Sutton and Andrew McCallum. "Improved Dynamic Schedules for Belief Propagation" (2007)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/andrew_mccallum/19/