Brendan J. Frey and David J. C. MacKay 1998. A revolution: Belief propagation in graphs with cycles. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 10. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. Presented at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference, Denver, Colorado, Dec. 1997.


Until recently, artificial intelligence researchers have frowned upon the application of probability propagation in Bayesian belief networks that have cycles. The probability propagation algorithm is only exact in networks that are cycle-free. However, it has recently been discovered that the two best error-correcting decoding algorithms are actually performing probability propagation in belief networks with cycles.

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