Efficient inference for hybrid dynamic Bayesian networks

This paper is a revision of a paper presented at the SPIE conference on Signal Processing, Senior Fusion, and Target Recognition XII, Aug. 2004, Orlando, Florida. The paper presented there appears (unrefereed) in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5429. Bayesian networks for static as well as for dynamic cases have been the subject of a great deal of theoretical analysis and practical inference-algorithm development in the research community of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and pattern recognition. After summarizing the well-known theory of discrete and continuous Bayesian networks, we introduce an efficient reasoning scheme into hybrid Bayesian networks. In addition to illustrating the similarities between the dynamic Bayesian networks and the Kalman filter, we present a computationally efficient approach for the inference problem of hybrid dynamic Bayesian networks (HDBNs). The proposed method is based on the separation of the dynamic and static nodes, and subsequent hypercubic partitions via the decision tree algorithm. Experiments show that with high statistical confidence the novel algorithm used in the HDBN performs favorably in the trade-offs of computational complexity and accuracy performance, compared to other exact and approximate methods for applications with uncertainty in a dynamic system.