Book Review: A. Darwiche, Modeling and Reasoning with Bayesian Networks

The field of probabilistic reasoning with Bayesian networks has experienced fruitful advancement in the last three decades, generating a large body of rich literature. Beginning with Pearl’s influential 1988 book, there have been now over a dozen books that cover the diverse topics in this field. These books, successively published over a two-decade period, cover the latest development of the field at the time of the writing. Furthermore, as the field sufficiently matures to have a broader impact on AI practice, it is necessary to make the key results more accessible to a broader audience beyond researchers specialized in the field. As a result, newly published books increasingly appeal better to a wider readership. The book Modeling and Reasoning with Bayesian Networks by Adnan Darwiche is an excellent example of this trend. The book provides a comprehensive, accessible and advanced treatment of the representational and computational issues surrounding probabilistic reasoning with Bayesian Networks. Adnan Darwiche is a leading researcher and is responsible for a number of techniques presented in the book.