A General Framework for Anytime Approximation in Probabilistic Databases

Maarten Van den Heuvel, Floris Geerts, Wolfgang Gatterbauer, Martin Theobald

Abstract: Anytime approximation algorithms that compute the probabilities of queries over probabilistic databases can be of great use to statistical learning tasks. Those approaches have been based so far on either (i) sampling or (ii) branch-and-bound with model-based bounds. We present here a more general branch-and-bound framework that extends the possible bounds by using 'dissociation', which yields tighter bounds.