15th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence
  July 21-26 2002     Lyon     France  
   

ECAI-2002 Conference Paper

[PDF] [full paper] [prev] [tofc] [next]

Bayesian Network Modelling by Qualitative Patterns

Peter Lucas

In designing a Bayesian network for an actual problem, developers need to bridge the gap between the mathematical abstractions offered by the Bayesian-network formalism and the features of the problem to be modelled. A notion that has been suggested in the literature to facilitate Bayesian-network development is causal independence. It allows exploiting compact representations of probabilistic interactions among variables in a network. However, only very few types of causal independence are in use today, as only the most obvious ones are really understood. We believe that qualitative probabilistic networks (QPNs) may be useful in helping understand causal independence. Originally, QPNs have been put forward as qualitative analogues to Bayesian networks. In this paper, we deploy QPNs in developing and analysing a collection of qualitative, causal interaction patterns, called QC patterns. These are endowed with a fixed qualitative semantics, and are intended to offer developers a high-level starting point when developing Bayesian networks.

Keywords: probabilistic reasoning, qualitative reasoning, causal reasoning, reasoning under uncertainty

Citation: Peter Lucas: Bayesian Network Modelling by Qualitative Patterns. In F. van Harmelen (ed.): ECAI2002, Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2002, pp.690-694.


[prev] [tofc] [next]


ECAI-2002 is organised by the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) and hosted by the Université Claude Bernard and INSA, Lyon, on behalf of Association Française pour l'Intelligence Artificielle.