Tutorial on Exact Belief Propagation in Bayesian Networks: from Messages to Algorithms

Abstract

In Bayesian networks, exact belief propagation is achieved through message passing algorithms. These algorithms (ex: inward and outward) provide only a recursive definition of the corresponding messages. In contrast, when working on hidden Markov models and variants, one classically first defines explicitly these messages (forward and backward quantities), and then derive all results and algorithms. In this paper, we generalize the hidden Markov model approach by introducing an explicit definition of the messages in Bayesian networks, from which we derive all the relevant properties and results including the recursive algorithms that allow to compute these messages. Two didactic examples (the precipitation hidden Markov model and the pedigree Bayesian network) are considered along the paper to illustrate the new formalism and standalone R source code is provided in the appendix.