Reasoning about Uncertainty, second edition

Reasoning about Uncertainty, second edition

Author: Joseph Y. Halpern

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2017-04-07

Total Pages: 505

ISBN-13: 0262533804

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Formal ways of representing uncertainty and various logics for reasoning about it; updated with new material on weighted probability measures, complexity-theoretic considerations, and other topics. In order to deal with uncertainty intelligently, we need to be able to represent it and reason about it. In this book, Joseph Halpern examines formal ways of representing uncertainty and considers various logics for reasoning about it. While the ideas presented are formalized in terms of definitions and theorems, the emphasis is on the philosophy of representing and reasoning about uncertainty. Halpern surveys possible formal systems for representing uncertainty, including probability measures, possibility measures, and plausibility measures; considers the updating of beliefs based on changing information and the relation to Bayes' theorem; and discusses qualitative, quantitative, and plausibilistic Bayesian networks. This second edition has been updated to reflect Halpern's recent research. New material includes a consideration of weighted probability measures and how they can be used in decision making; analyses of the Doomsday argument and the Sleeping Beauty problem; modeling games with imperfect recall using the runs-and-systems approach; a discussion of complexity-theoretic considerations; the application of first-order conditional logic to security. Reasoning about Uncertainty is accessible and relevant to researchers and students in many fields, including computer science, artificial intelligence, economics (particularly game theory), mathematics, philosophy, and statistics.


Subjective Logic

Subjective Logic

Author: Audun Jøsang

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-10-27

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 3319423371

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This is the first comprehensive treatment of subjective logic and all its operations. The author developed the approach, and in this book he first explains subjective opinions, opinion representation, and decision-making under vagueness and uncertainty, and he then offers a full definition of subjective logic, harmonising the key notations and formalisms, concluding with chapters on trust networks and subjective Bayesian networks, which when combined form general subjective networks. The author shows how real-world situations can be realistically modelled with regard to how situations are perceived, with conclusions that more correctly reflect the ignorance and uncertainties that result from partially uncertain input arguments. The book will help researchers and practitioners to advance, improve and apply subjective logic to build powerful artificial reasoning models and tools for solving real-world problems. A good grounding in discrete mathematics is a prerequisite.


Inferential Models

Inferential Models

Author: Ryan Martin

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2015-09-25

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1439886512

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A New Approach to Sound Statistical ReasoningInferential Models: Reasoning with Uncertainty introduces the authors' recently developed approach to inference: the inferential model (IM) framework. This logical framework for exact probabilistic inference does not require the user to input prior information. The authors show how an IM produces meaning


Beyond Uncertainty

Beyond Uncertainty

Author: Katie Steele

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-09-09

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 1108608043

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The main aim of this Element is to introduce the topic of limited awareness, and changes in awareness, to those interested in the philosophy of decision-making and uncertain reasoning. While it has long been of interest to economists and computer scientists, this topic has only recently been subject to philosophical investigation. Indeed, at first sight limited awareness seems to evade any systematic treatment: it is beyond the uncertainty that can be managed. On the one hand, an agent has no control over what contingencies she is and is not aware of at a given time, and any awareness growth takes her by surprise. On the other hand, agents apparently learn to identify the situations in which they are more and less likely to experience limited awareness and subsequent awareness growth. How can these two sides be reconciled? That is the puzzle we confront in this Element.


Clinical Reasoning: Knowledge, Uncertainty, and Values in Health Care

Clinical Reasoning: Knowledge, Uncertainty, and Values in Health Care

Author: Daniele Chiffi

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-01

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 3030590941

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This book offers a philosophically-based, yet clinically-oriented perspective on current medical reasoning aiming at 1) identifying important forms of uncertainty permeating current clinical reasoning and practice 2) promoting the application of an abductive methodology in the health context in order to deal with those clinical uncertainties 3) bridging the gap between biomedical knowledge, clinical practice, and research and values in both clinical and philosophical literature. With a clear philosophical emphasis, the book investigates themes lying at the border between several disciplines, such as medicine, nursing, logic, epistemology, and philosophy of science; but also ethics, epidemiology, and statistics. At the same time, it critically discusses and compares several professional approaches to clinical practice such as the one of medical doctors, nurses and other clinical practitioners, showing the need for developing a unified framework of reasoning, which merges methods and resources from many different clinical but also non-clinical disciplines. In particular, this book shows how to leverage nursing knowledge and practice, which has been considerably neglected so far, to further shape the interdisciplinary nature of clinical reasoning. Furthermore, a thorough philosophical investigation on the values involved in health care is provided, based on both the clinical and philosophical literature. The book concludes by proposing an integrative approach to health and disease going beyond the so-called “classical biomedical model of care”.


Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems

Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems

Author: Judea Pearl

Publisher: Elsevier

Published: 2014-06-28

Total Pages: 573

ISBN-13: 0080514898

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Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems is a complete and accessible account of the theoretical foundations and computational methods that underlie plausible reasoning under uncertainty. The author provides a coherent explication of probability as a language for reasoning with partial belief and offers a unifying perspective on other AI approaches to uncertainty, such as the Dempster-Shafer formalism, truth maintenance systems, and nonmonotonic logic. The author distinguishes syntactic and semantic approaches to uncertainty--and offers techniques, based on belief networks, that provide a mechanism for making semantics-based systems operational. Specifically, network-propagation techniques serve as a mechanism for combining the theoretical coherence of probability theory with modern demands of reasoning-systems technology: modular declarative inputs, conceptually meaningful inferences, and parallel distributed computation. Application areas include diagnosis, forecasting, image interpretation, multi-sensor fusion, decision support systems, plan recognition, planning, speech recognition--in short, almost every task requiring that conclusions be drawn from uncertain clues and incomplete information. Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems will be of special interest to scholars and researchers in AI, decision theory, statistics, logic, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and the management sciences. Professionals in the areas of knowledge-based systems, operations research, engineering, and statistics will find theoretical and computational tools of immediate practical use. The book can also be used as an excellent text for graduate-level courses in AI, operations research, or applied probability.


Reasoning About Knowledge

Reasoning About Knowledge

Author: Ronald Fagin

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2004-01-09

Total Pages: 576

ISBN-13: 9780262562003

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Reasoning about knowledge—particularly the knowledge of agents who reason about the world and each other's knowledge—was once the exclusive province of philosophers and puzzle solvers. More recently, this type of reasoning has been shown to play a key role in a surprising number of contexts, from understanding conversations to the analysis of distributed computer algorithms. Reasoning About Knowledge is the first book to provide a general discussion of approaches to reasoning about knowledge and its applications to distributed systems, artificial intelligence, and game theory. It brings eight years of work by the authors into a cohesive framework for understanding and analyzing reasoning about knowledge that is intuitive, mathematically well founded, useful in practice, and widely applicable. The book is almost completely self-contained and should be accessible to readers in a variety of disciplines, including computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, and game theory. Each chapter includes exercises and bibliographic notes.


Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence

Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence

Author: David Heckerman

Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann

Published: 2014-05-12

Total Pages: 554

ISBN-13: 1483214516

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Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence contains the proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence held at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, on July 9-11, 1993. The papers focus on methods of reasoning and decision making under uncertainty as applied to problems in artificial intelligence (AI) and cover topics ranging from knowledge acquisition and automated model construction to learning, planning, temporal reasoning, and machine vision. Comprised of 66 chapters, this book begins with a discussion on causality in Bayesian belief networks before turning to a decision theoretic account of conditional ought statements that rectifies glaring deficiencies in classical deontic logic and forms a sound basis for qualitative decision theory. Subsequent chapters explore trade-offs in constructing and evaluating temporal influence diagrams; normative engineering risk management systems; additive belief-network models; and sensitivity analysis for probability assessments in Bayesian networks. Automated model construction and learning as well as algorithms for inference and decision making are also considered. This monograph will be of interest to both students and practitioners in the fields of AI and computer science.


Surfing Uncertainty

Surfing Uncertainty

Author: Andy Clark

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0190217014

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Exciting new theories in neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence are revealing minds like ours as predictive minds, forever trying to guess the incoming streams of sensory stimulation before they arrive. In this up-to-the-minute treatment, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores new ways of thinking about perception, action, and the embodied mind.