Generic Local Computation

Many problems of artificial intelligence, or more generally, many problems of information processing, have a generic solution based on local computation on join trees or acyclic hypertrees. There are several variants of this method all based on the algebraic structure of a valuation algebra. A strong requirement underlying this approach is that the elements of a problem decomposition form a join tree. Although it is always possible to construct covering join trees, if the requirement is originally not satisfied, it is not always possible or not efficient to extend the elements of the decomposition to the covering join tree. Therefore in this paper different variants of an axiomatic framework of valuation algebras are introduced which prove sufficient for local computation without the need of an extension of the factors of a decomposition. This framework covers the axiomatic system proposed by (Shenoy & Shafer, 1990). A particular emphasis is laid on the important special cases of idempotent algebras and algebras with some notion of division. It is shown that all well-known architectures for local computation like the Shenoy-Shafer architecture, Lauritzen-Spiegelhalter and HUGIN architectures may be adapted to this new framework. Further a new architecture for idempotent algebras is presented. As examples, in addition to the classical instances of valuation algebras, semiring induced valuation algebras, Gaussian potentials and the relational algebra are presented.