Tractable Operations for Arithmetic Circuits of Probabilistic Models

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29 (NIPS 2016)

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Authors

Yujia Shen, Arthur Choi, Adnan Darwiche

Abstract

We consider tractable representations of probability distributions and the polytime operations they support. In particular, we consider a recently proposed arithmetic circuit representation, the Probabilistic Sentential Decision Diagram (PSDD). We show that PSDD supports a polytime multiplication operator, while they do not support a polytime operator for summing-out variables. A polytime multiplication operator make PSDDs suitable for a broader class of applications compared to arithmetic circuits, which do not in general support multiplication. As one example, we show that PSDD multiplication leads to a very simple but effective compilation algorithm for probabilistic graphical models: represent each model factor as a PSDD, and then multiply them.