Variational methods and the QMR - DTdatabaseTommi

We describe variational approximation methods for eecient probabilistic reasoning, applying these methods to the problem of diagnostic inference in the QMR-DT database. The QMR-DT database is a large-scale belief network based on statistical and expert knowledge in internal medicine. The size and complexity of this network render exact probabilistic diagnosis infeasible for all but a small set of cases. This has hindered the development of the QMR-DT network as a practical diagnostic tool and has hindered researchers from exploring and critiquing the diagnostic behavior of QMR. In this paper we describe how variational approximation methods can be applied to the QMR network, resulting in fast diagnostic inference. We evaluate the accuracy of our methods on a set of standard diagnostic cases and compare to stochastic sampling methods.