CLP(BN): constraint logic programming for probabilistic knowledge

  • Authors:
  • Vítor Santos Costa;David Page;Maleeha Qazi;James Cussens

  • Affiliations:
  • COPPE/Sistemas, UFRJ, Brasil;Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, University of Wisconsin-Madison;Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, University of Wisconsin-Madison;Department of Computer Science, University of York, UK

  • Venue:
  • UAI'03 Proceedings of the Nineteenth conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

In Datalog, missing values are represented by Skolem constants. More generally, in logic programming missing values, or existentially-quantified variables, are represented by terms built from Skolem functors. In an analogy to probabilistic relational models (PRMs), we wish to represent the joint probability distribution over missing values in a database or logic program using a Bayesian network. This paper presents an extension of logic programs that makes it possible to specify a joint probability distribution over terms built from Skolem functors in the program. Our extension is based on constraint logic programming (CLP), so we call the extended language CLP(BN). We show that CLP(BN) subsumes PRMs; this greater expressivity carries both advantages and disadvantages for CLP(BN). We also show that algorithms from inductive logic programming (ILP) can be used with only minor modification to learn CLP(BN) programs. An implementation of CLP(BN) is publicly available as part of YAP Prolog at http://www.cos.ufrj.br/~vitor/Yap/clpbn