We describe expectation propagation for approximate inference in dynamic Bayesian networks as a natural extension of Pearl s exact belief propagation.Expectation propagation IS a greedy algorithm, converges IN many practical cases, but NOT always.We derive a DOUBLE - loop algorithm, guaranteed TO converge TO a local minimum OF a Bethe free energy.Furthermore, we show that stable fixed points OF (damped) expectation propagation correspond TO local minima OF this free energy, but that the converse need NOT be the CASE .We illustrate the algorithms BY applying them TO switching linear dynamical systems AND discuss implications FOR approximate inference IN general Bayesian networks.

Intuitively, the concept of similarity is the notion to measure an inexact matching between two entities of the same reference set. The notions of similarity and its close relative dissimilarity are widely used in many fields of Artificial Intelligence. Yet they have many different and often partial definitions or properties, usually restricted to one field of application and thus incompatible with other uses. This paper contributes to the design and understanding of similarity and dissimilarity measures for Artificial Intelligence. A formal dual definition for each concept is proposed, joined with a set of fundamental properties. The behavior of the properties under several transformations is studied and revealed as an important matter to bear in mind. We also develop several practical examples that work out the proposed approach.

We propose a formal treatment of scenarios in the context of a dialectical argumentation formalism for qualitative reasoning about uncertain propositions. Our formalism extends prior work in which arguments for and against uncertain propositions were presented and compared in interaction spaces called Agoras. We now define the notion of a scenario in this framework and use it to define a set of qualitative uncertainty labels for propositions across a collection of scenarios. This work is intended to lead to a formal theory of scenarios and scenario analysis.

Iterative Proportional Fitting (IPF), combined with EM, is commonly used as an algorithm for likelihood maximization in undirected graphical models. In this paper, we present two iterative algorithms that generalize upon IPF. The first one is for likelihood maximization in discrete chain factor graphs, which we define as a wide class of discrete variable models including undirected graphical models and Bayesian networks, but also chain graphs and sigmoid belief networks. The second one is for conditional likelihood maximization in standard undirected models and Bayesian networks. In both algorithms, the iteration steps are expressed in closed form. Numerical simulations show that the algorithms are competitive with state of the art methods.

In this paper, we continue our research on the algorithmic aspects of Halpern and Pearl's causes and explanations in the structural-model approach. To this end, we present new characterizations of weak causes for certain classes of causal models, which show that under suitable restrictions deciding causes and explanations is tractable. To our knowledge, these are the first explicit tractability results for the structural-model approach.

In machine learning, Domain Adaptation (DA) arises when the distribution gen- erating the test (target) data differs from the one generating the learning (source) data. It is well known that DA is an hard task even under strong assumptions, among which the covariate-shift where the source and target distributions diverge only in their marginals, i.e. they have the same labeling function. Another popular approach is to consider an hypothesis class that moves closer the two distributions while implying a low-error for both tasks. This is a VC-dim approach that restricts the complexity of an hypothesis class in order to get good generalization. Instead, we propose a PAC-Bayesian approach that seeks for suitable weights to be given to each hypothesis in order to build a majority vote. We prove a new DA bound in the PAC-Bayesian context. This leads us to design the first DA-PAC-Bayesian algorithm based on the minimization of the proposed bound. Doing so, we seek for a \rho-weighted majority vote that takes into account a trade-off between three quantities. The first two quantities being, as usual in the PAC-Bayesian approach, (a) the complexity of the majority vote (measured by a Kullback-Leibler divergence) and (b) its empirical risk (measured by the \rho-average errors on the source sample). The third quantity is (c) the capacity of the majority vote to distinguish some structural difference between the source and target samples.

We consider the problem of learning the structure of undirected graphical models with bounded treewidth, within the maximum likelihood framework. This is an NP-hard problem and most approaches consider local search techniques. In this paper, we pose it as a combinatorial optimization problem, which is then relaxed to a convex optimization problem that involves searching over the forest and hyperforest polytopes with special structures, independently. A supergradient method is used to solve the dual problem, with a run-time complexity of $O(k^3 n^{k+2} \log n)$ for each iteration, where $n$ is the number of variables and $k$ is a bound on the treewidth. We compare our approach to state-of-the-art methods on synthetic datasets and classical benchmarks, showing the gains of the novel convex approach.

In their nature configuration problems are combinatorial (optimization) problems. In order to find a configuration a solver has to instantiate a number of components of a some type and each of these components can be used in a relation defined for a type. Therefore, many solutions of a configuration problem have symmetric ones which can be obtained by replacing some component of a solution by another one of the same type. These symmetric solutions decrease performance of optimization algorithms because of two reasons: a) they satisfy all requirements and cannot be pruned out from the search space; and b) existence of symmetric optimal solutions does not allow to prove the optimum in a feasible time.

Tree projections provide a mathematical framework that encompasses all the various (purely) structural decomposition methods that have been proposed in the literature to single out classes of nearly-acyclic (hyper)graphs, such as the tree decomposition method, which is the most powerful decomposition method on graphs, and the (generalized) hypertree decomposition method, which is its natural counterpart on arbitrary hypergraphs. The paper analyzes this framework, by focusing in particular on "minimal" tree projections, that is, on tree projections without useless redundancies. First, it is shown that minimal tree projections enjoy a number of properties that are usually required for normal form decompositions in various structural decomposition methods. In particular, they enjoy the same kind of connection properties as (minimal) tree decompositions of graphs, with the result being tight in the light of the negative answer that is provided to the open question about whether they enjoy a slightly stronger notion of connection property, defined to speed-up the computation of hypertree decompositions. Second, it is shown that tree projections admit a natural game-theoretic characterization in terms of the Captain and Robber game. In this game, as for the Robber and Cops game characterizing tree decompositions, the existence of winning strategies implies the existence of monotone ones. As a special case, the Captain and Robber game can be used to characterize the generalized hypertree decomposition method, where such a game-theoretic characterization was missing and asked for. Besides their theoretical interest, these results have immediate algorithmic applications both for the general setting and for structural decomposition methods that can be recast in terms of tree projections.

We use princiles of fuzzy logic to develop a general model representing several processes in a system's operation characterized by a degree of vagueness and/or uncertainy. Further, we introduce three altenative measures of a fuzzy system's effectiveness connected to the above model. An applcation is also developed for the Mathematical Modelling process illustrating our results.