Related papers: Representation Dependence in Probabilistic Inferen…
The definition is a common form of human expert knowledge, a building block of formal science and mathematics, a foundation for database theory and is supported in various forms in many knowledge representation and formal specification…
The probabilistic characterization of the relationship between two or more random variables calls for a notion of dependence. Dependence modeling leads to mathematical and statistical challenges, and recent developments in extremal…
Heckerman (1993) defined causal independence in terms of a set of temporal conditional independence statements. These statements formalized certain types of causal interaction where (1) the effect is independent of the order that causes are…
In this paper we examine the problem of inference in Bayesian Networks with discrete random variables that have very large or even unbounded domains. For example, in a domain where we are trying to identify a person, we may have variables…
One of the fundamental results in computability is the existence of well-defined functions that cannot be computed. In this paper we study the effects of data representation on computability; we show that, while for each possible way of…
Conditional-independence-based discovery uses statistical tests to identify a graphical model that represents the independence structure of variables in a dataset. These tests, however, can be unreliable, and algorithms are sensitive to…
Maximum entropy principle identifies forces conjugated to observables and the thermodynamic relations between them, independent upon their underlying mechanistic details. For data about state distributions or transition statistics, the…
Causal inference often hinges on strong assumptions - such as no unmeasured confounding or perfect compliance - that are rarely satisfied in practice. Partial identification offers a principled alternative: instead of relying on…
We study two-layer belief networks of binary random variables in which the conditional probabilities Pr[childlparents] depend monotonically on weighted sums of the parents. In large networks where exact probabilistic inference is…
Representation learning is an approach that allows to discover and extract the factors of variation from the data. Intuitively, a representation is said to be disentangled if it separates the different factors of variation in a way that is…
Abductive reasoning is a popular non-monotonic paradigm that aims to explain observed symptoms and manifestations. It has many applications, such as diagnosis and planning in artificial intelligence and database updates. In propositional…
Computing the probability of a formula given the probabilities or weights associated with other formulas is a natural extension of logical inference to the probabilistic setting. Surprisingly, this problem has received little attention in…
We consider the problem of exact probabilistic inference for Union of Conjunctive Queries (UCQs) on tuple-independent databases. For this problem, two approaches currently coexist. In the extensional method, query evaluation is performed by…
Advances in the general capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have led to their use for information retrieval, and as components in automated decision systems. A faithful representation of probabilistic reasoning in these models may…
We propose a new paradigm for Belief Change in which the new information is represented as sets of models, while the agent's body of knowledge is represented as a finite set of formulae, that is, a finite base. The focus on finiteness is…
The principle of maximum entropy provides a useful method for inferring statistical mechanics models from observations in correlated systems, and is widely used in a variety of fields where accurate data are available. While the assumptions…
Generative models can be trained to emulate complex empirical data, but are they useful to make predictions in the context of previously unobserved environments? An intuitive idea to promote such extrapolation capabilities is to have the…
We provide and axiomatize a representation for preferences over lotteries that generalizes the expected utility model. Since the representation uses different utility functions to evaluate different lotteries, the preferences can be…
Following the recent success of word embeddings, it has been argued that there is no such thing as an ideal representation for words, as different models tend to capture divergent and often mutually incompatible aspects like…
Recently, it has been emphasized that the possibility theory framework allows us to distinguish between i) what is possible because it is not ruled out by the available knowledge, and ii) what is possible for sure. This distinction may be…