Customer Reviews

Modeling and Reasoning with Bayesian Networks

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While pursuing my PhD at UCLA, I took Professor Darwiche's classes and had the privilege of using the pre-release version of this book. Before taking professor Darwiche's class, I had spent a good deal of time while working on my masters degree working on Bayesian networks. I found that much of the literature on Bayesian networks was inaccessible to someone new to the field. There simply was not a comprehensive resource that would explain Bayesian networks from the beginning in a through and clear manner. I say with confidence that this has now changed.

The book begins with the fundamentals of logic. It continues on to describe the properties of the Bayesian network graph such as independence relationships and d-separation as well as how the parameters of a Bayesian network work.

There are then in depth discussions of the various queries we are able to perform on Bayesian networks and the algorithms for accomplishing them. These include queries such as probability of evidence, most probable explanation and probabilistic inference. Techniques such as summing out, pearl's polytree algorithm and belief propagation are described elogently and clearly.

The book also contains information on the current state of the art research going on in the field. This book is a valuable resource for anyone new to or ingrained in the use of Bayesian Networks. A book of this scope and target was sorely needed and I for one am glad it has arrived. I would and have recommended this to any of my peers in the field.

Having taken Professor Darwiche's course on Bayesian Networks, I was excited to get my hands on this book, which is a culmination of the notes from that class and his research on the subject.

This is an excellent text, with very clear explanations and step by step descriptions in pseudo code of the important algorithms in the text.

The first few chapters lay the probabilistic foundations needed for understanding Bayesian Networks and the conditional independences such networks encode.

Chapter 5 gives examples in several different domains of using Bayesian Networks to model different systems and answer queries about them.

After this, the book gets into the meat of its primary focus, efficient probabilistic inference in the context of Bayesian Networks.

It lays out various algorithms for exact inference using jointrees or recursive conditioning, and the complexity and trade-offs of the different approaches.

It further details further refinements that can reduce networks in some cases for even better performance.

After this, it details approximate inference techniques including sampling and belief propagation.

Chapter 14 on belief propagation is especially good, with its discussions on the semantics of belief propagation, generalized belief propagation, and an alternative formulation of generalized belief propagation edge deletion belief propagation.

The last few chapters also delve into learning Bayesian Networks structure and parameters.

All in all, this book will give an in depth knowledge of exact and approximate inference in Bayesian networks and a good overview of learning and applying these models to various domains.

It's an excellent book on Bayesian Networks. After reading it I gained a solid understanding on how Bayesian Networks work as well as how to design and use them to solve real probabilistic problems. This book is accompanied by a tool for modelling and reasoning with Bayesian Network, which was created by the Automated Reasoning Group of Professor Adnan Darwiche at UCLA. I'm planning to adopt Bayesian Networks in analyzing betting exchange markets and reading such a great book gave me all I needed to apply Bayesian Networks in my research.