Lecture Notes: Factor graphs and belief propagation

A graphical model is nothing but an illustration of anequation. This equation determins how a functional overmultiple variables factorizes. We are mostly interested infunctionals that represent a multivariate probability dis-tribution – but graphical models and the related methodscould be applied on any functional. Here are some basicexamples for equations concerning the factorization of afunctional Pover variables X