An Empirical Comparison of Three Inference Methods
Abstract
In this paper, an empirical evaluation of three inference methods for uncertain reasoning is presented in the context of Pathfinder, a large expert system for the diagnosis of lymph-node pathology. The inference procedures evaluated are (1) Bayes' theorem, assuming evidence is conditionally independent given each hypothesis; (2) odds-likelihood updating, assuming evidence is conditionally independent given each hypothesis and given the negation of each hypothesis; and (3) a inference method related to the Dempster-Shafer theory of belief. Both expert-rating and decision-theoretic metrics are used to compare the diagnostic accuracy of the inference methods.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1304.2357,
title = {An Empirical Comparison of Three Inference Methods},
author = {David Heckerman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1304.2357},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
Appears in Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI1988). LaTex errors corrected in this version