Variational hybridization and transformation for large inaccurate noisy-or networks

Abstract: Variational inference provides approximations to the computationally intractable posterior distribution in Bayesian networks. A prominent medical application of noisy-or Bayesian network is to infer potential diseases given observed symptoms. Previous studies focus on approximating a handful of complicated pathological cases using variational transformation. Our goal is to use variational transformation as part of a novel hybridized inference for serving reliable and real time diagnosis at web scale. We propose a hybridized inference that allows variational parameters to be estimated without disease posteriors or priors, making the inference faster and much of its computation recyclable. In addition, we propose a transformation ranking algorithm that is very stable to large variances in network prior probabilities, a common issue that arises in medical applications of Bayesian networks. In experiments, we perform comparative study on a large real life medical network and scalability study on a much larger (36,000x) synthesized network.