Bounding Search Space Size via (Hyper)tree Decompositions

This paper develops a measure for bounding the performance of AND/OR search algorithms for solving a variety of queries over graphical models. We show how drawing a connection to the recent notion of hypertree decompositions allows to exploit determinism in the problem specification and produce tighter bounds. We demonstrate on a variety of practical problem instances that we are often able to improve upon existing bounds by several orders of magnitude.