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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Approximating the Log-Partition Function

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Graphical Models are used to represent structural information on a high-dimensional joint probability distribution. Their expressiveness offers simple reductions from a large number of NP-hard problems to inference tasks such as computing the partition function (exact inference) or approximating the log-partition function (approximate inference). In this master thesis, we will motivate the need for a general constant-factor approximations of the log-partition function and prove that a variant of the well studied tree-reweighted algorithm [1] achieves constant factor guarantees. We will express the corresponding approximation ratio 𝜅(𝐺) solely as a function of the graph structure 𝐺.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2021

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Cosson, Romain
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Shah, Devavrat

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
  • Copyright MIT

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/139223
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/139223

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
related terms
citation

Cosson, Romain. Approximating the Log-Partition Function. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2021. https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/139223