Anatomy of a node

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Anatomy of a node

The different aspects of a node available through Network class methods are:

node definition

node value

node evidence

attributes which do not affect inference, but determine node's location, color, name, etc.

The definition of the node specifies how it interacts with other nodes in the network. The node definition is written as part of the network when the network is saved to a file or serialized as a string variable. For general chance node the definition consists of conditional probability table (CPT) and list of state names.

The value of the node contains the values (typically, the marginal probability distribution or the expected utilities) calculated for the node by the inference algorithm. Unlike the definition, the value is not written as part of the network.