Extending Qualitative Probabilistic Network with Mutual Information Weights

Abstract

Bayesian network (BN) is a well-accepted framework for representing and inferring uncertain knowledge. As the qualitative abstraction of BN, qualitative probabilistic network (QPN) is introduced for probabilistic inferences in a qualitative way. With much higher efficiency of inferences, QPNs are more suitable for real-time applications than BNs. However, the high abstraction level brings some inference conflicts and tends to pose a major obstacle to their applications. In order to eliminate the inference conflicts of QPN, in this paper, we begin by extending the QPN by adding a mutual-information-based weight (MI weight) to each qualitative influence in the QPN. The extended QPN is called MI-QPN. After obtaining the MI weights from the corresponding BN, we discuss the symmetry, transitivity and composition properties of the qualitative influences. Then we extend the general inference algorithm to implement the conflict-free inferences of MI-QPN. The feasibility of our method is verified by the results of the experiment.