A semantics for possibility theory based on likelihoods

DOI10.1006/JMAA.1997.5193MaRDI QIDQ1353693zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Serafin Moral, Henri Prade, Didier Dubois

Publication date 17 March 1998

Published in Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://semanticscholar.org/paper/377ac09af3279faade82d0fc13ea4582db27ac19

combination of possibility measures complement fuzzy sets hypothesis space likelihood membership function possibility distributions possibility theory space of observations upper probability envelopes

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Probability and inductive logic (03B48) Fuzzy logic; logic of vagueness (03B52) Axioms; other general questions in probability (60A05) Fuzzy sets and logic (in connection with information, communication, or circuits theory) (94D05)

Review text

The first section of this paper relates everything to everything: possibility measures are represented by possibility distributions, which in turn are represented as upper probability envelopes; given a mass function, as in Shafer's theory, this can be construed so as to give rise to a membership function in Zadeh's sense, and thus a possibility function; likelihoods can be used to obtain membership functions; and, as Cheeseman has observed, we can give a Bayesian twist to the membership function. The authors use convex sets of probabilities and conditional probabilities in a quite classical framework to provide a semantics for the possibility theory calculus. The basic semantical entity is a triple (\(\mathcal{O},\mathcal{P}\),\(O)\) where \(\mathcal O\) represents a space of observations, and \(\mathcal P\) = \(\mathcal{J} \times\)\( P_{1|2}\) is a convex set of joint probabilities. \(\mathcal J\) is the set of all possible probability measures on the hypothesis space \(U\) (it is assumed that such a set exists) and \(\mathcal P_{2|1}\) is a convex set of probabilities on \(\mathcal O\), given an element of \(U\). A possibility measure \(\Pi(A)\) is identified with \(\sup\{P(O|A):P \in \mathcal P\}\). The authors give some results on the combination of possibility measures when these measures are exclusive, or independent, and on the complement of a possibility measure. The main import of the paper is that the authors provide a semantical justification of the possibility measure calculus in terms of upper and lower probabilities.

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