New JAIR paper

[Steve Minton]

It was suggested to me that members of this mailing list may be interested
in the following announcement:

Bhattacharyya, C. and Keerthi, S.S. (2001)
  "Mean Field Methods for a Special Class of Belief Networks", 
   Volume 15, pages 91-114.

   Available in PDF, PostScript and compressed PostScript.
   For quick access via your WWW browser, use this URL:
     http://www.jair.org/abstracts/bhattacharyya01a.html
   More detailed instructions are below.

   Abstract: The chief aim of this paper is to propose mean-field
   approximations for a broad class of Belief networks, of which sigmoid
   and noisy-or networks can be seen as special cases.  The 
   approximations are based on a powerful mean-field theory suggested by
   Plefka.  We show that Saul, Jaakkola and Jordan' s approach is the
   first order approximation in Plefka's approach, via a variational
   derivation.  The application of Plefka's theory to belief networks is
   not computationally tractable.  To tackle this problem we propose new
   approximations based on Taylor series.  Small scale experiments show
   that the proposed schemes are attractive.

The article is available via:
   
 -- comp.ai.jair.papers (also see comp.ai.jair.announce)

 -- World Wide Web: The URL for our World Wide Web server is
       http://www.jair.org/
    For direct access to this article and related files try:
       http://www.jair.org/abstracts/bhattacharyya01a.html

 -- Anonymous FTP from either of the two sites below.

    Carnegie-Mellon University (USA):
	ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/project/jair/volume15/bhattacharyya01a.ps
    The University of Genoa (Italy):
	
ftp://ftp.mrg.dist.unige.it/pub/jair/pub/volume15/bhattacharyya01a.ps

    The compressed PostScript file is named bhattacharyya01a.ps.Z (159K)

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