Without Tears

Abstract

I give an introduction to Bayesian networks for of AI researchers with a limited grounding in prob- ability theory. Over the last few years, this method of reasoning using probabilities has, become popular within the AI probability and uncertainty community. Indeed, it is probably fair to say that Bayesian networks are to a large segment of the AI-uncertainty community what resolution theorem proving is to the AI-logic bilistic causal community. Nevertheless, despite what seems to networks, and so on, be their obvious importance, the ideas and is has become popular techniques have not spread much beyond the research community responsible for them. This is probably because the ideas and techniques are not that easy to understand. I hope to rectify this situation by making Bayesian networks more method accessible to the probabilistically unsophisticated.