Uncertainty exists almost everywhere, except in the most idealized situations; it is not only an inevitable and ubiquitous phenomenon, but also a fundamental sci- ti?c principle. Furthermore, uncertainty is an attribute of information and, usually, decision-relevant information is uncertain and/or imprecise, therefore the abilities to handle uncertain information and to reason from incomplete knowledge are c- cial features of intelligent behaviour in complex and dynamic environments. By carefully exploiting our tolerance for imprecision and approximation we can often achieve tractability, robustness, and better descriptions of reality than traditional - ductive methods would allow us to obtain. In conclusion, as we move further into the ageofmachineintelligence,theproblemofreasoningunderuncertainty,in other words, drawing conclusions from partial knowledge, has become a major research theme. Not surprisingly,the rigoroustreatment of uncertaintyrequiressophisticated - chinery, and the present volume is conceived as a contribution to a better und- standing of the foundations of information processing and decision-making in an environment of uncertainty, imprecision and partiality of truth. This volume draws on papers presented at the 2008 Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty (IPMU), held in Malaga, ́ Spain, or- nized by the University of Mal ́ aga. The conference brought together some of the world’s leading experts in the study of uncertainty.

This is the first comprehensive treatment of subjective logic and all its operations. The author developed the approach, and in this book he first explains subjective opinions, opinion representation, and decision-making under vagueness and uncertainty, and he then offers a full definition of subjective logic, harmonising the key notations and formalisms, concluding with chapters on trust networks and subjective Bayesian networks, which when combined form general subjective networks. The author shows how real-world situations can be realistically modelled with regard to how situations are perceived, with conclusions that more correctly reflect the ignorance and uncertainties that result from partially uncertain input arguments. The book will help researchers and practitioners to advance, improve and apply subjective logic to build powerful artificial reasoning models and tools for solving real-world problems. A good grounding in discrete mathematics is a prerequisite.

Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems is a complete and accessible account of the theoretical foundations and computational methods that underlie plausible reasoning under uncertainty. The author provides a coherent explication of probability as a language for reasoning with partial belief and offers a unifying perspective on other AI approaches to uncertainty, such as the Dempster-Shafer formalism, truth maintenance systems, and nonmonotonic logic. The author distinguishes syntactic and semantic approaches to uncertainty--and offers techniques, based on belief networks, that provide a mechanism for making semantics-based systems operational. Specifically, network-propagation techniques serve as a mechanism for combining the theoretical coherence of probability theory with modern demands of reasoning-systems technology: modular declarative inputs, conceptually meaningful inferences, and parallel distributed computation. Application areas include diagnosis, forecasting, image interpretation, multi-sensor fusion, decision support systems, plan recognition, planning, speech recognition--in short, almost every task requiring that conclusions be drawn from uncertain clues and incomplete information. Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems will be of special interest to scholars and researchers in AI, decision theory, statistics, logic, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and the management sciences. Professionals in the areas of knowledge-based systems, operations research, engineering, and statistics will find theoretical and computational tools of immediate practical use. The book can also be used as an excellent text for graduate-level courses in AI, operations research, or applied probability.

Intended both as a text for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, and as a key reference work for AI researchers and developers, Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence is a lucid, rigorous, and comprehensive account of the fundamentals of artificial intelligence from the standpoint of logic. The first section of the book introduces the logicist approach to AI--discussing the representation of declarative knowledge and featuring an introduction to the process of conceptualization, the syntax and semantics of predicate calculus, and the basics of other declarative representations such as frames and semantic nets. This section also provides a simple but powerful inference procedure, resolution, and shows how it can be used in a reasoning system. The next several chapters discuss nonmonotonic reasoning, induction, and reasoning under uncertainty, broadening the logical approach to deal with the inadequacies of strict logical deduction. The third section introduces modal operators that facilitate representing and reasoning about knowledge. This section also develops the process of writing predicate calculus sentences to the metalevel--to permit sentences about sentences and about reasoning processes. The final three chapters discuss the representation of knowledge about states and actions, planning, and intelligent system architecture. End-of-chapter bibliographic and historical comments provide background and point to other works of interest and research. Each chapter also contains numerous student exercises (with solutions provided in an appendix) to reinforce concepts and challenge the learner. A bibliography and index complete this comprehensive work.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty, ECSQARU 2011, held in Belfast, UK, in June/July 2011. The 60 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 108 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on argumentation; Bayesian networks and causal networks; belief functions; belief revision and inconsistency handling; classification and clustering; default reasoning and logics for reasoning under uncertainty; foundations of reasoning and decision making under uncertainty; fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic; implementation and applications of uncertain systems; possibility theory and possibilistic logic; and uncertainty in databases.

This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to statistical principles, concepts and methods that are essential in modern statistics and data science. The topics covered include likelihood-based inference, Bayesian statistics, regression, statistical tests and the quantification of uncertainty. Moreover, the book addresses statistical ideas that are useful in modern data analytics, including bootstrapping, modeling of multivariate distributions, missing data analysis, causality as well as principles of experimental design. The textbook includes sufficient material for a two-semester course and is intended for master’s students in data science, statistics and computer science with a rudimentary grasp of probability theory. It will also be useful for data science practitioners who want to strengthen their statistics skills.

In this work Schum develops a general theory of evidence as it is understood and applied across a broad range of disciplines and practical undertakings. He include insights from law, philosophy, logic, probability, semiotics, artificial intelligence, psychology and history.

A New Approach to Sound Statistical ReasoningInferential Models: Reasoning with Uncertainty introduces the authors' recently developed approach to inference: the inferential model (IM) framework. This logical framework for exact probabilistic inference does not require the user to input prior information. The authors show how an IM produces meaning

Formal ways of representing uncertainty and various logics for reasoning about it; updated with new material on weighted probability measures, complexity-theoretic considerations, and other topics. In order to deal with uncertainty intelligently, we need to be able to represent it and reason about it. In this book, Joseph Halpern examines formal ways of representing uncertainty and considers various logics for reasoning about it. While the ideas presented are formalized in terms of definitions and theorems, the emphasis is on the philosophy of representing and reasoning about uncertainty. Halpern surveys possible formal systems for representing uncertainty, including probability measures, possibility measures, and plausibility measures; considers the updating of beliefs based on changing information and the relation to Bayes' theorem; and discusses qualitative, quantitative, and plausibilistic Bayesian networks. This second edition has been updated to reflect Halpern's recent research. New material includes a consideration of weighted probability measures and how they can be used in decision making; analyses of the Doomsday argument and the Sleeping Beauty problem; modeling games with imperfect recall using the runs-and-systems approach; a discussion of complexity-theoretic considerations; the application of first-order conditional logic to security. Reasoning about Uncertainty is accessible and relevant to researchers and students in many fields, including computer science, artificial intelligence, economics (particularly game theory), mathematics, philosophy, and statistics.

This book offers a philosophically-based, yet clinically-oriented perspective on current medical reasoning aiming at 1) identifying important forms of uncertainty permeating current clinical reasoning and practice 2) promoting the application of an abductive methodology in the health context in order to deal with those clinical uncertainties 3) bridging the gap between biomedical knowledge, clinical practice, and research and values in both clinical and philosophical literature. With a clear philosophical emphasis, the book investigates themes lying at the border between several disciplines, such as medicine, nursing, logic, epistemology, and philosophy of science; but also ethics, epidemiology, and statistics. At the same time, it critically discusses and compares several professional approaches to clinical practice such as the one of medical doctors, nurses and other clinical practitioners, showing the need for developing a unified framework of reasoning, which merges methods and resources from many different clinical but also non-clinical disciplines. In particular, this book shows how to leverage nursing knowledge and practice, which has been considerably neglected so far, to further shape the interdisciplinary nature of clinical reasoning. Furthermore, a thorough philosophical investigation on the values involved in health care is provided, based on both the clinical and philosophical literature. The book concludes by proposing an integrative approach to health and disease going beyond the so-called "classical biomedical model of care".