This paper presents an architecture for solving conditional linear-quadratic Gaussian (CLQG) influence diagrams (IDs) by Lazy Propagation (LP). A strong junction tree (SJT) is used to guide the elimination order whereas the marginalization operation is based on arc-reversal (AR). The use of AR for marginalization simplifies the implementation and gives the architecture a number of advantages. T...

Even though existing algorithms for belief update in Bayesian networks (BNs) have exponential time and space complexity, belief update in many real-world BNs is feasible. However, in some cases the efficiency of belief update may be insufficient. In such cases minor improvements in efficiency may be important or even necessary to make a task tractable. This paper introduces two improvements to ...

Updating probabilities by conditioning can lead to bad predictions, unless one explicitly takes into account the mechanisms that determine (1) what is observed and (2) what has to be predicted. Analogous to the observation-CAR (coarsening at random) condition, used in existing analyses of (1), we propose a new prediction task-CAR condition to analyze (2). We redefine conditioning so that it rem...

A wide range of computations performed by the nervous system involves a type of probabilistic inference known as marginalization. This computation comes up in seemingly unrelated tasks, including causal reasoning, odor recognition, motor control, visual tracking, coordinate transformations, visual search, decision making, and object recognition, to name just a few. The question we address here ...

Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling methods often suffer from long correlation times. Consequently, these methods must be run for many steps to generate an independent sample. In this paper, a method is proposed to overcome this difficulty. The method utilizes information from rapidly equilibrating coarse Markov chains that sample marginal distributions of the full system. This is accomplished th...

Missing data recognition has been proposed to increase noise robustness of automatic speech recognition. This strategy relies on the use of a spectrographic mask that gives information about the true clean speech energy of a corrupted signal. This information is then used to refine the data process during the decoding step. We propose in this work a new mask that provides more information about...

The central argument of the paper is that economic globalization in the 19 th century created the present-day third world, and contemporary globalization perpetuates this marginalization of the developing world. The difference lies in the fact that global disparities and inequities are far more transparent in our virtually uncensored information age. Throughout the paper, I mainly refer to the ...

advantage of trading opportunities has always been under contention. Data indicate that the continent’s share of world exports has declined sharply, from about 5.5 percent in 1975 to about 2.5 percent in 2002 (Figure 1). At face value, this declining share points to the increased marginalization of Africa in world trade, but the observed pattern of trade need not be inconsistent with predicted ...