Heuristics for Determining the Elimination Ordering in the Influence Diagram Evaluation with Binary Trees

Abstract

Finding an optimal elimination ordering is a NP-hard problem of crucial importance for the efficiency of the Influence Diagrams evaluation. Some of the traditional methods for determining the elimination ordering use heuristics that consider that potentials are represented as tables. However, if potentials are represented using binary trees traditional methods may not offer the best results. In the present paper, two new heuristics that consider that potentials are represented as binary trees are proposed. As a result, the storage requirements for evaluating an ID with binary trees is reduced.