Towards the entropy-limit conjecture

The maximum entropy principle is widely used to determine non-committal probabilities on a finite domain, subject to a set of constraints, but its application to continuous domains is notoriously problematic. This paper concerns an intermediate case, where the domain is a first-order predicate language. Two strategies have been put forward for applying the maximum entropy principle on such a domain: (i) applying it to finite sublanguages and taking the pointwise limit of the resulting probabilities as the size n of the sublanguage increases; (ii) selecting a probability function on the language as a whole whose entropy on finite sublanguages of size n is not dominated by that of any other probability function for sufficiently large n. The entropy-limit conjecture says that, where these two approaches yield determinate probabilities, the two methods yield the same probabilities. If this conjecture is found to be true, it would provide a boost to the project of seeking a single canonical inductive logic—a project which faltered when Carnap's attempts in this direction succeeded only in determining a continuum of inductive methods. The truth of the conjecture would also boost the project of providing a canonical characterisation of normal or default models of first-order theories. Hitherto, the entropy-limit conjecture has been verified for languages which contain only unary predicate symbols and also for the case in which the constraints can be captured by a categorical statement of quantifier complexity. This paper shows that the entropy-limit conjecture also holds for categorical statements of complexity, for various non-categorical constraints, and in certain other general situations

Semantics for possibilistic disjunctive programs

We define a possibilistic disjunctive logic programming approach for modeling uncertain, incomplete and inconsistent information. This approach introduces the use of possibilistic disjunctive clauses which are able to capture incomplete information and incomplete states of a knowledge base at the same time. This approach is computable and moreover allows encoding uncertain information by using either numerical values or relative likelihoods. In order to define the semantics of the possibilistic disjunctive programs, three approaches are defined: 1.- The first is strictly close to the proof theory of possibilistic logic and answer set models; 2.- The second is based on partial evaluation, a fix-point operator and answer set models; and 3.- The last is also based on the proof theory of possibilistic logic and pstable semantics. In order to manage inconsistent possibilistic logic programs, a preference criterion between inconsistent possibilistic models is defined; in addition, the approach of cuts for restoring consistency of an inconsistent possibilistic knowledge base is adopted. The approach is illustrated by a medical scenario.Postprint (published version

Combining Probabilistic Logic Programming with the Power of Maximum Entropy

This paper is on the combination of two powerful approaches to uncertain reasoning: logic programming in a probabilistic setting, on the one hand, and the information-theoretical principle of maximum entropy, on the other hand. More precisely, we present two approaches to probabilistic logic programming under maximum entropy. The first one is based on the usual notion of entailment under maximum entropy, and is defined for the very general case of probabilistic logic programs over Boolean events. The second one is based on a new notion of entailment under maximum entropy, where the principle of maximum entropy is coupled with the closed world assumption (CWA) from classical logic programming. It is only defined for the more restricted case of probabilistic logic programs over conjunctive events. We then analyze the nonmonotonic behavior of both approaches along benchmark examples and along general properties for default reasoning from conditional knowledge bases. It turns out that both approaches have very nice nonmonotonic features. In particular, they realize some inheritance of probabilistic knowledge along subclass relationships, without suffering from the problem of inheritance blocking and from the drowning problem. They both also satisfy the property of rational monotonicity and several irrelevance properties. We finally present algorithms for both approaches, which are based on generalizations of recent techniques for probabilistic logic programming under logical entailment. The algorithm for the first approach still produces quite large weighted entropy maximization problems, while the one for the second approach generates optimization problems of the same size as the ones produced in probabilistic logic programming under logical entailment.</p

Combining probabilistic logic programming with the power of maximum entropy

This paper is on the combination of two powerful approaches to uncertain reasoning: logic programming in a probabilistic setting, on the one hand, and the information-theoretical principle of maximum entropy, on the other hand. More precisely, we present two approaches to probabilistic logic programming under maximum entropy. The first one is based on the usual notion of entailment under maximum entropy, and is defined for the very general case of probabilistic logic programs over Boolean events. The second one is based on a new notion of entailment under maximum entropy, where the principle of maximum entropy is coupled with the closed world assumption (CWA) from classical logic programming. It is only defined for the more restricted case of probabilistic logic programs over conjunctive events. We then analyze the nonmonotonic behavior of both approaches along benchmark examples and along general properties for default reasoning from conditional knowledge bases. It turns out that both approaches have very nice nonmonotonic features. In particular, they realize some inheritance of probabilistic knowledge along subclass relationships, without suffering from the problem of inheritance blocking and from the drowning problem. They both also satisfy the property of rational monotonicity and several irrelevance properties. We finally present algorithms for both approaches, which are based on generalizations of techniques from probabilisti