Five Useful Properties of Probabilistic Knowledge Representations From the Point of View of Intelligent Systems

Although probabilistic knowledge representations and probabilistic reasoning have by now secured their position in artificial intelligence, it is not uncommon to encounter misunderstanding of their foundations and lack of appreciation for their strengths. This paper describes five properties of probabilistic knowledge representations that are particularly useful in intelligent systems research. (1) Directed probabilistic graphs capture essential qualitative properties of a domain, along with its causal structure. (2) Concepts such as relevance and conflicting evidence have a natural, formally sound meaning in probabilistic models. (3) Probabilistic schemes support sound reasoning at a variety of levels ranging from purely quantitative to purely qualitative levels. (4) The role of probability theory in reasoning under uncertainty can be compared to the role of first order logic in reasoning under certainty. Probabilistic knowledge representations provide insight into the foundations of logic-based schemes, showing their difficulties in highly uncertain domains. Finally, (5) probabilistic knowledge representations support automatic generation of understandable explanations of inference for the sake of user interfaces to intelligent systems.