Abductive Reasoning in Logical Credal Networks

Radu Marinescu, Junkyu Lee, Debarun Bhattacharjya, Fabio Cozman, Alexander G. Gray

Keywords: probabilistic logic, imprecise probabilities, MAP inference, search, message passing

TL;DR: The paper presents new algorithms for MAP and Marginal MAP inference in Logical Credal Networks.

Abstract: Logical Credal Networks or LCNs were recently introduced as a powerful probabilistic logic framework for representing and reasoning with imprecise knowledge. Unlike many existing formalisms, LCNs have the ability to represent cycles and allow specifying marginal and conditional probability bounds on logic formulae which may be important in many realistic scenarios. Previous work on LCNs has focused exclusively on marginal inference, namely computing posterior lower and upper probability bounds on a query formula. In this paper, we explore abductive reasoning tasks such as solving MAP and Marginal MAP queries in LCNs given some evidence. We first formally define the MAP and Marginal MAP tasks for LCNs and subsequently show how to solve these tasks exactly using search-based approaches. We then propose several approximate schemes that allow us to scale MAP and Marginal MAP inference to larger problem instances. An extensive empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our algorithms on both random LCN instances as well as LCNs derived from more realistic use-cases.

Primary Area: Probabilistic methods (for example: variational inference, Gaussian processes)

Submission Number: 15667