Objective Bayesian Nets
Jon Williamson · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2010
I present a formalism that combines two methodologies: *objective Bayesianism* and *Bayesian nets*. According to *objective Bayesianism*, an agent's degrees of belief (i) ought to satisfy the axioms of probability, (ii) ought to satisfy constraints imposed by background knowledge, and (iii) should otherwise be as non-committal as possible (i.e. have maximum entropy). *Bayesian nets* offer an efficient way of representing and updating probability functions. An *objective Bayesian net* is a Bayesian net representation of the maximum entropy probability function. I show how objective Bayesian nets can be constructed, updated and combined, and how they can deal with cases in which the agent's background knowledge includes knowledge of qualitative *influence relationships*, e.g. causal influences. I then sketch a number of applications of the resulting formalism, showing how it can shed light on probability logic, causal modelling, logical reasoning, semantic reasoning, argumentation and recursive modelling.