Epistemic irrelevance in credal networks: the case of imprecise Markov trees

We replace strong independence in credal networks with the weaker notion of epistemic irrelevance. Focusing on directed trees, we show how to combine local credal sets into a global model, and we use this to construct and justify an exact message-passing algorithm that computes updated beliefs for a variable in the tree. The algorithm, which is essentially linear in the number of nodes, is formulated entirely in terms of coherent lower previsions. We supply examples of the algorithm’s operation, and report an application to on-line character recognition that illustrates the advantages of our model for prediction.