2012/10/19 by Fahiem Bacchus, Bacchus, Fahiem, Shannon Dalmao +3
Computer Science · #AI-based Problem Solving and Planning #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Bayesian Modeling and Causal Inference #Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization #FOS: Computer and information sciences #cs.AI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1212.2452
Appears in Proceedings of the Nineteenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2003)
arxiv created 2012/10/19 · openalex publication_date 2012/10/19 · arxiv updated 2012/12/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Backtracking search is a powerful algorithmic paradigm that can be used to solve many problems. It is in a certain sense the dual of variable elimination; but on many problems, e.g., SAT, it is vastly superior to variable elimination in practice. Motivated by this we investigate the application of backtracking search to the problem of Bayesian inference (Bayes). We show that natural generalizations of known techniques allow backtracking search to achieve performance guarantees similar to standard algorithms for Bayes, and that there exist problems on which backtracking can in fact do much better. We also demonstrate that these ideas can be applied to implement a Bayesian inference engine whose performance is competitive with standard algorithms. Since backtracking search can very naturally take advantage of context specific structure, the potential exists for performance superior to standard algorithms on many problems.