Lazy Evaluation of Symmetric Bayesian Decision Problems

Abstract: Solving symmetric Bayesian decision problems is a computationally intensive task to perform regardless of the algorithm used. In this paper we propose a method for improving the efficiency of algorithms for solving Bayesian decision problems. The method is based on the principle of lazy evaluation - a principle recently shown to improve the efficiency of inference in Bayesian networks. The basic idea is to maintain decompositions of potentials and to postpone computations for as long as possible. The efficiency improvements obtained with the lazy evaluation based method is emphasized through examples. Finally, the lazy evaluation based method is compared with the hugin and valuation-based systems architectures for solving symmetric Bayesian decision problems.