Exploiting Tractable Substructures in Intractable Networks

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 8 (NIPS 1995)

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Authors

Lawrence Saul, Michael Jordan

Abstract

We develop a refined mean field approximation for inference and learning in probabilistic neural networks. Our mean field theory, unlike most, does not assume that the units behave as independent degrees of freedom; instead, it exploits in a principled way the existence of large substructures that are computationally tractable. To illustrate the advantages of this framework, we show how to incorporate weak higher order interactions into a first-order hidden Markov model, treating the corrections (but not the first order structure) within mean field theory.