The problem of abduction can be characterized as finding the best explanation of a set of data. In this paper we focus on one type of abduction in which the best explanation is the most plausible combination of hypotheses that explains all the data. We then present several computational complexity results demonstrating that this type of abduction is intractable (NP-hard) in general. In particular, choosing between incompatible hypotheses, reasoning about cancellation effects among hypotheses, and satisfying the maximum plausibility requirement are major factors leading to intractability. We also identify a tractable, but restricted, class of abduction problems. Thanks to B. Chandrasekaran, Ashok Goel, Jack Smith, and Jon Sticklen for their comments on the numerous versions of this paper. The referees have also made a substantial contribution. Any remaining errors are our responsibility, of course. This research has been supported in part by the National Library of Medicine, grant LM-...

We present methods for coupling hidden Markov models (hmms) to model systems of multiple interacting processes. The resulting models have multiple state variables that are temporally coupled via matrices of conditional probabilities. We introduce a deterministic O(T (CN) 2 ) approximation for maximum a posterior (MAP) state estimation which enables fast classification and parameter estimation via expectation maximization. An "N-heads" dynamic programming algorithm samples from the highest probability paths through a compact state trellis, minimizing an upper bound on the cross entropy with the full (combinatoric) dynamic programming problem. The complexity is O(T (CN) 2 ) for C chains of N states apiece observing T data points, compared with O(TN 2C ) for naive (Cartesian product), exact (state clustering), and stochastic (Monte Carlo) methods applied to the same inference problem. In several experiments examining training time, model likelihoods, classification accuracy, and ro...