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Benferhat

AAAI Conferences

Graphical belief models are compact and powerful tools for representing and reasoning under uncertainty. Possibilistic networks are graphical belief models based on possibility theory. In this paper, we address reasoning under uncertain inputs in both quantitative and qualitative possibilistic networks. More precisely, we first provide possibilistic counterparts of Pearl's methods of virtual evidence then compare them with the possibilistic counterparts of Jeffrey's rule of conditioning. As in the probabilistic setting, the two methods are shown to be equivalent in the quantitative setting regarding the existence and uniqueness of the solution. However in the qualitative setting, Pearl's method of virtual evidence which applies directly on graphical models disagrees with Jeffrey's rule and the virtual evidence method. The paper provides the precise situations where the methods are not equivalent. Finally, the paper addresses related issues like transformations from one method to another and commutativity.


Benferhat

AAAI Conferences

Interval-based possibilistic logic is a flexible setting extending standard possibilistic logic such that each logical expression is associated with a sub-interval of [0,1]. This paper focuses on the fundamental issue of conditioning in the interval-based possibilistic setting. The first part of the paper first proposes a set of natural properties that an interval-based conditioning operator should satisfy. We then give a natural and safe definition for conditioning an interval-based possibility distribution. This definition is based on applying standard min-based or product-based conditioning on the set of all associated compatible possibility distributions. We analyze the obtained posterior distributions and provide a precise characterization of lower and upper endpoints of the intervals associated with interpretations. The second part of the paper provides an equivalent syntactic computation of interval-based conditioning when interval-based distributions are compactly encoded by means of interval-based possibilistic knowledge bases. We show that interval-based conditioning is achieved without extra computational cost comparing to conditioning standard possibilistic knowledge bases.


Penalty Logic-Based Representation of C-Revision

Laaziz, Safia (Université des Sciences et Technologie Houari Boumediene) | Zeboudj, Younes (Université des Sciences et Technologie Houari Boumediene) | Benferhat, Salem (Université des Sciences et Technologie Houari Boumediene) | Haned, Faiza (Université des Sciences et Technologie Houari Boumediene)

AAAI Conferences

In some approaches, the input information is simply the whole Belief revision (Alchourrón, Gärdenfors, and Makinson epistemic as in (Benferhat et al. 2000). In this paper, the 1985; Williams 1995; Williams and Rott 2001), is an important new information will be represented by a consistent set of field of research in artificial intelligence and knowledge weighted propositional logic formulas.


Conditional Objects Revisited: Variants and Model Translations

Beierle, Christoph (Fern University, Hagen) | Kern-Isberner, Gabriele (Technical University Dortmund)

AAAI Conferences

The quality criteria of system P have been guiding qualitative uncertain reasoning now for more than two decades. Different semantical approaches have been presented to provide semantics for system P. The aim of the present paper is to investigate the semantical structures underlying system P in more detail, namely, on the level of the models. In particular, we focus on the approach via conditional objects which relies on Boolean intervals, without making any use of qualitative or quantitative information. Indeed, our studies confirm the singular position of conditional objects, but we are also able to establish semantical relationships via novel variants of model theories.


Revising Partial Pre-Orders with Partial Pre-Orders: A Unit-Based Revision Framework

Ma, Jianbing (Queen's University of Belfast) | Benferhat, Salem (University of Artois) | Liu, Weiru (Queen's University Belfast)

AAAI Conferences

Belief revision studies strategies about how agents revise their belief states when receiving new evidence.  Both in classical belief revision and in epistemic revision, a new input is either in the form of a (weighted) propositional formula or a total pre-order (where the total pre-order is considered as a whole).  However, in some real-world applications, a new input can be a partial pre-order where each unit that constitutes the partial pre-order is important and should be considered individually. To address this issue,  in this paper, we study how a partial pre-order representing the prior epistemic state can be revised by another partial pre-order (the new input) from a different perspective, where the revision is conducted recursively on the individual units of partial pre-orders.  We propose different revision operators (rules), dubbed the extension, match, inner and outer revision operators, from different revision points of view. We also analyze several properties for these operators.


Preferential Semantics for Plausible Subsumption in Possibility Theory

Qi, Guilin (Southeast University) | Zhang, Zhizheng (Southeast University)

AAAI Conferences

Handling exceptions in a knowledge-based system has been considered as an important issue in many domains of applications, such as medical domain. In this paper, we propose several preferential semantics for plausible subsumption to deal with exceptions in description logic-based knowledge bases. Our preferential semantics are defined in the framework of possibility theory, which is an uncertainty theory devoted to the handling of incomplete information. We consider the properties of these semantics and their relationships. Entailment of these plausible subsumption relative to a knowledge base is also considered. We show the close relationship between two of our semantics and the mutually dual preferential semantics given by Britz, Heidema and Meyer. Finally, we show that our semantics for plausible subsumption can be reduced to standard semantics of an expressive description logic. Thus, the problem of plausible subsumption checking under our semantics can be reduced to the problem of subsumption checking under the classical semantics.


On the Use of Guaranteed Possibility Measures in Possibilistic Networks

Ajroud, Amen (Universite de Sousse) | Benferhat, Salem (CRIL) | Omri, Mohamed Nazih (Universite de Sousse) | Youssef, Habib (Universite de Sousse)

AAAI Conferences

Possibilistic networks are useful tools for reasoning under uncertainty. Uncertain pieces of information can be described by different measures: possibility measures, necessity measures and more recently, guaranteed possibility measures, denoted by Delta. This paper first proposes the use of guaranteed possibility measures to define a so-called Delta-based possibilistic network. This graphical representation tries to express and to deal with the minimal (lower-bound) possibility degree guaranteed for each variable. We then establish relationships between graphical and logical-based representations of uncertain information encoded by guaranteed possibility measures. We show that possibilistic networks based on guaranteed possibility measures can be easily transformed, in a polynomial time, in Delta-based knowledge bases. Then we analyze propagation algorithms in Delta-based possibilistic networks. In fact, standard possibilistic propagation algorithms can be re-used since we show that a simple rewriting of the chain rule allows the transformation of the initial Delta-based possibilistic networks into standard min-based possibilistic networks.