English

A Logic for Reasoning about Evidence

Artificial Intelligence 2007-05-23 v3 Logic in Computer Science

Abstract

We introduce a logic for reasoning about evidence that essentially views evidence as a function from prior beliefs (before making an observation) to posterior beliefs (after making the observation). We provide a sound and complete axiomatization for the logic, and consider the complexity of the decision problem. Although the reasoning in the logic is mainly propositional, we allow variables representing numbers and quantification over them. This expressive power seems necessary to capture important properties of evidence.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cs/0405098,
  title  = {A Logic for Reasoning about Evidence},
  author = {Joseph Y. Halpern and Riccardo Pucella},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/0405098},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

34 pages. A preliminary version appeared in Proc. 19th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI'03)