parents. Get all messages from children (this might require the children to get messages from the co-parents). Compute the expected value of the nodes sufficient statistics. Constraints Because every child must be conjugate to its parent, this has limited the types of distributions that can be used in the model. For example, the parents of a Gaussian distribution must be a Gaussian distribution (corresponding to the Mean) and a gamma distribution (corresponding to the precision, or one over in more common parameterizations). Discrete variables can have Dirichlet parents, and Poisson and exponential nodes must have gamma parents. More recently, VMP has been extended to handle models that violate this conditional conjugacy constraint. References External links Infer.NET: an inference framework which includes an implementation of VMP with examples. dimple: an open-source inference system supporting VMP. An older implementation of VMP with usage examples. Bayesian networks