Loop Series and Bethe Variational Bounds in Attractive Graphical Models

Variational methods are frequently used to approximate or bound the partition or likelihood function of a Markov random field. Methods based on mean field theory are guaranteed to provide lower bounds, whereas certain types of convex relaxations provide upper bounds. In general, loopy belief propagation (BP) provides (often accurate) approximations, but not bounds. We prove that for a class of attractive binary models, the value specified by any fixed point of loopy BP always provides a lower bound on the true likelihood. Empirically, this bound is much better than the naive mean field bound, and requires no further work than running BP.