Lecture 27

Reasoning under Uncertainty
Instructors: Dr. Durgesh Singh

CSE Discipline, PDPM IIITDM, Jabalpur -482005
Reasoning under uncertainty
▪ Agents in the real world need to handle uncertainty, whether

due to partial observability, nondeterminism, or adversaries.
▪ An agent may never know for sure what state it is in now or
where it will end up after a sequence of actions.
Nature of Uncertain Knowledge
▪ Let us try to write rules for dental diagnosis using propositional

logic, so that we can see how the logical approach breaks down.
Consider the following simple rule:
Toothache ⇒ Cavity.
▪ The problem is that this rule is wrong.
▪ Not all patients with toothaches have cavities; some of them
have gum disease, swelling, or one of several other problems:
Toothache ⇒ Cavity ∨ GumProblem ∨ Swelling ∨ ……..
▪ In order to make the rule true, we have to add an almost

unlimited list of possible problems. We could try turning the rule
into a causal rule:
Cavity ⇒ Toothache
But this rule is also not right; not all cavities cause pain.
Toothache and a Cavity are always not connected, so the
judgement may go wrong.
▪ This is typical of the medical domain, as well as most other

judgmental domains: law, business, design, automobile repair,
gardening, dating, and so on.
▪ The agent’s knowledge can at best provide only a degree of
belief in the relevant sentences.
▪ Our main tool for dealing with degrees of belief is probability
theory.
▪ A logical agent believes each sentence to be true or false or has
no opinion, whereas a probabilistic agent may have a numerical
degree of belief between 0 (for sentences that are certainly
false) and 1 (certainly true).
Basic Probability Notation
▪ Random variables are typically divided into three kinds,

depending on the type of the domain:
▪ Boolean random variables, such as Cavity, have the domain
(true, false) or (1,0)
▪ Discrete random variables, take on values from a countable
domain. For example, the domain of Weather might be (sunny,
rainy, cloudy, snow).
▪ Continuous random variables (bounded or unbounded) take on
values from the real numbers. Ex: temp=21.4; temp<21.4 or
temp< 1.
Atomic events or sample points
▪ Atomic event: A complete specification of the state of the world
about which the agent is uncertain
▪ E.g., if the world consists of only two Boolean variables Cavity
and Toothache, then there are 4 distinct atomic events:
Cavity = false  Toothache = false
Cavity = false  Toothache = true
Cavity = true  Toothache = false
Cavity = true  Toothache = true
▪ Atomic events are mutually exclusive and exhaustive
▪ When two events are mutually exclusive, it means they cannot both occur at
the same time.
▪ When two events are exhaustive, it means that one of them must occur.
Axioms of Probability Theory
▪ All probabilities between 0 and 1

– 0 ≤ P(A) ≤ 1
– P(true) = 1
– P(false) = 0.
▪ The probability of disjunction is:
P(A B) = P(A)+ P(B)− P(A B)
Prior probability
▪ The unconditional or prior probability associated with a

proposition A is the degree of belief according to the absence of
any other information;
▪ It is written as P ( A ).
▪ For example, if the prior probability that I have a cavity is 0.1,
then we would write
P ( Cavity= true ) = 0.1 or P ( cavity ) = 0.1
▪ P ( A ) can be used only when there is no other information.
▪ As soon as some new information is known, we must reason with
the conditional probability of a given that new information.
Prior probability…
▪ Sometimes, we will want to talk about the probabilities of all the
possible values of a random variable.
▪ In that case, we will use an expression such as P(Weather), which
denotes a vector of values for the probabilities of each individual state
of the weather.
▪ Instead of writing these four equations
P ( Weather = sunny) = 0.7
P ( Weather= rain) = 0.2
P ( Weather= cloudy) = 0.08
P(Weather = snow) = 0.02
we may simply write: P( Weather) = (0.7,0.2,0.08,0.02) (Note that the
probabilities sum to 1 )
▪ This statement defines a prior probability distribution for the random
variable Weather.
Prior probability…
▪ Joint probability distribution for a set of random variables gives
the probability of every atomic event on those random variables
▪ P(Weather, Cavity) = a 4 × 2 matrix of values:
Weather = sunny rainy cloudy snow

Cavity = true 0.144 0.02 0.016 0.02
Cavity = false 0.576 0.08 0.064 0.08
▪ A full joint distribution specifies the probability of every atomic

event and is therefore a complete specification of one's
uncertainty about the world in question.
Conditional or posterior probability
▪ The notation used is P(a l b),where a and b are any proposition.

This is read as "the probability of a, given that all we know is b."
For example,
P(cavity l toothache) = 0.8
“indicates that if a patient is observed to have a toothache and no
other information is yet available, then the probability of the
patient's having a cavity will be 0.8.”
Conditional or posterior probability
▪ Conditional probabilities can be defined in terms of

unconditional probabilities.
P(a|b) = P (a ^ b)
P (b)
holds whenever P(b)>0

This equation can be written as
P(a^b) = P(a|b) * P(b) (which is called product rule)
Alternative way:
P(a^b) = P(b|a) * P(a)
Chain Rule/Product Rule

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Reasoning under Uncertainty

Instructors: Dr. Durgesh Singh

▪ Agents in the real world need to handle uncertainty, whether

▪ Let us try to write rules for dental diagnosis using propositional

▪ In order to make the rule true, we have to add an almost

▪ This is typical of the medical domain, as well as most other

▪ Random variables are typically divided into three kinds,

▪ All probabilities between 0 and 1

▪ The unconditional or prior probability associated with a

Weather = sunny rainy cloudy snow

▪ A full joint distribution specifies the probability of every atomic

▪ The notation used is P(a l b),where a and b are any proposition.

▪ Conditional probabilities can be defined in terms of

holds whenever P(b)>0

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