Representing and Reasoning With Probabilistic Knowledge: A Bayesian Approach
This is an incremental contribution to probabilistic reasoning for autonomous agents, focusing on representation and inference mechanisms.
The paper tackles the problem of autonomous learning in probabilistic domains by introducing PAGODA, which uses uniquely predictive theories and PCI inference to make probabilistic predictions, but no concrete numbers are provided for results.
PAGODA (Probabilistic Autonomous Goal-Directed Agent) is a model for autonomous learning in probabilistic domains [desJardins, 1992] that incorporates innovative techniques for using the agent's existing knowledge to guide and constrain the learning process and for representing, reasoning with, and learning probabilistic knowledge. This paper describes the probabilistic representation and inference mechanism used in PAGODA. PAGODA forms theories about the effects of its actions and the world state on the environment over time. These theories are represented as conditional probability distributions. A restriction is imposed on the structure of the theories that allows the inference mechanism to find a unique predicted distribution for any action and world state description. These restricted theories are called uniquely predictive theories. The inference mechanism, Probability Combination using Independence (PCI), uses minimal independence assumptions to combine the probabilities in a theory to make probabilistic predictions.