440 Incremental Dynamic Construction of Layered Polytree Networks Keung-Chi N g Tod S. Levitt lET Inc., lET Inc., 14 Research Way, Suite 3 14 Research Way, Suite 3 E. Setauket, NY 11733 E. Setauket , NY 11733
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract Many exact probabilistic inference algorithms1 have been developed and refined. Among the earlier meth ods, the polytree algorithm (Kim and Pearl 1983, Certain classes of problems, including per Pearl 1986) can efficiently update singly connected ceptual data understanding, robotics, discov belief networks (or polytrees) , however, it does not ery, and learning, can be represented as incre work ( without modification) on multiply connected mental, dynamically constructed belief net networks. In a singly connected belief network, there is works. These automatically constructed net at most one path (in the undirected sense) between any works can be dynamically extended and mod pair of nodes; in a multiply connected belief network, ified as evidence of new individuals becomes on the other hand, there is at least one pair of nodes available. The main result of this paper is the that has more than one path between them. Despite incremental extension of the singly connect the fact that the general updating problem for mul ed polytree network in such a way that the tiply connected networks is NP-hard (Cooper 1990), network retains its singly connected polytree many propagation algorithms have been applied suc structure after the changes. The algorithm cessfully to multiply connected networks, especially on is deterministic and is guaranteed to have networks that are sparsely connected. These methods a complexity of single node addition that is include clustering (also known as node aggregation) at most of order proportional to the number (Chang and Fung 1989, Pearl 1988), node elimination of nodes (or size) of the network.