Tech Reports

ULCS-01-007

Context-specific Sign-Propagation in Qualitative Probabilistic Networks

Silja Renooij, Simon Parsons and Linda van der Gaag

Abstract

Qualitative probabilistic networks represent probabilistic influences between variables. Due to the level of representation detail provided, knowledge about influences that hold only in specific contexts cannot be expressed. The results computed from a qualitative network, as a consequence, can be quite weak and uninformative. We extend the basic formalism of qualitative probabilistic networks by providing for the inclusion of context-specific information about influences and show that exploiting this information upon inference has the ability to forestall unnecessarily weak results.

Keywords: Qualitative probabilistic networks, Context-specific information.

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