Daphne Koller

Papers

Daphne Koller Publications

Structured representation of complex stochastic systems (1998)

by N. Friedman, D. Koller, and A. Pfeffer

Abstract: This paper considers the problem of representing complex systems that evolve stochastically over time. Dynamic Bayesian networks provide a compact representation for stochastic processes. Unfortunately, they are often unwieldy since they cannot explicitly model the complex organizational structure of many real life systems: the fact that processes are typically composed of several interacting subprocesses, each of which can, in turn, be further decomposed. We propose a hierarchically structured representation language which extends both dynamic Bayesian networks and the object-oriented Bayesian network framework of [Koller & Pfeffer, 1997], and show that our language allows us to describe such systems in a natural and modular way. Our language supports a natural representation for certain system characteristics that are hard to capture using more traditional frameworks. For example, it allows us to represent systems where some processes evolve at a different rate than others, or systems where the processes interact only intermittently. We provide a simple inference mechanism for our representation via translation to Bayesian networks, and suggest ways in which the inference algorithm can exploit the additional structure encoded in our representation.

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N. Friedman, D. Koller, and A. Pfeffer (1998). "Structured representation of complex stochastic systems." Proceedings of the 15th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (pp. 157-164).

Bibtex citation

@inproceedings{Friedman+al:AAAI98,
  author =       "N. Friedman and D. Koller and A. Pfeffer",
  booktitle =    "Proceedings of the 15th National Conference on
                 Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)",
  title =        "Structured representation of complex stochastic
                 systems",
  pages =        "157--164",
  year =         "1998",
}

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