Patent ID: 6910000

Claim:
A computer implemented method for determining probabilities of states of a system represented by a model including a plurality of nodes connected by links, each node representing possible states of a corresponding part of the system, and each link representing statistical dependencies between possible states of related nodes, comprising: grouping the plurality of nodes into arbitrary-sized clusters such that every node is included in at least one cluster and each link is completely contained in at least one cluster; identifying nodes in intersections of clusters, and intersections of intersections of clusters as regions of nodes; defining messages based on the regions of nodes, each message having associated sets of source nodes and destination nodes and a value and a rule depending on other messages and selected links connecting the source nodes and destination nodes; assigning initial values to the messages; updating the value of each message using the associated rule; and determining approximate probabilities of the states of the system from the messages when a termination condition is reached.