Finding Most Likely Solutions

Abstract

As one simple type of statistical inference problems we consider Most Likely Solution problem, a task of finding a most likely solution (MLS in short) for a given problem instance under some given probability model. Although many MLS problems are NP-hard, we propose, for these problems, to study their average-case complexity under their assumed probabality models. We show three examples of MLS problems, and explain that “message passing algorithms” (e.g., belief propagation) work reasonably well for these problems. Some of the technical results of this paper are from the author’s recent joint work with his colleagues [WST, WY06, OW06] .