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Probabilistic theorem proving

Published: 24 June 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Many representation schemes combining first-order logic and probability have been proposed in recent years. Progress in unifying logical and probabilistic inference has been slower. Existing methods are mainly variants of lifted variable elimination and belief propagation, neither of which take logical structure into account. We propose the first method that has the full power of both graphical model inference and first-order theorem proving (in finite domains with Herbrand interpretations). We first define probabilistic theorem proving (PTP), their generalization, as the problem of computing the probability of a logical formula given the probabilities or weights of a set of formulas. We then show how PTP can be reduced to the problem of lifted weighted model counting, and develop an efficient algorithm for the latter. We prove the correctness of this algorithm, investigate its properties, and show how it generalizes previous approaches. Experiments show that it greatly outperforms lifted variable elimination when logical structure is present. Finally, we propose an algorithm for approximate PTP, and show that it is superior to lifted belief propagation.

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cover image Communications of the ACM
Communications of the ACM  Volume 59, Issue 7
July 2016
118 pages
ISSN:0001-0782
EISSN:1557-7317
DOI:10.1145/2963119
  • Editor:
  • Moshe Y. Vardi
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 24 June 2016
Published in CACM Volume 59, Issue 7

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