Probabilistic Sufficient Explanations

An Approach to Abductive Reasoning in Equational Logic

IJCAI'13, 2013. [All Versions]. Abduction has been extensively studied in propositional logic because of its many applications in artificial intelligence. However, its intrinsic complexity has been a limitation to the implementation of abductive reasoning tools in more expressive logics. The authors have devised such a tool in ground flat equational logic, in which literals are equations or disequations between constants. The tool is based on the computation of prime implicates. It uses a relaxed paramodulation calculus, designed to generate all prime implicates of a formula, together with a carefully defined data structure storing the implicates and able to efficiently detect, and remove, redundancies

Functional genomic hypothesis generation and experimentation by a robot scientist

Nature, 2004. [All Versions]. This paper describes a physically implemented robotic system that applies techniques from artificial intelligence to carry out cycles of scientific experimentation. The system automatically originates hypotheses to explain observations, devises experiments to test these hypotheses, physically runs the experiments using a laboratory robot, interprets the results to falsify hypotheses inconsistent with the data, and then repeats the cycle. The system is applied to the determination of gene function using deletion mutants of yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and auxotrophic growth experiments. The authors built and tested a detailed logical model (involving genes, proteins and metabolites) of the aromatic amino acid synthesis pathway

Abduction in Logic Programming

Computational Logic, 2002. [All Versions]. [Preprint]. Abduction in Logic Programming started in the late 80s, early 90s, in an attempt to extend logic programming into a framework suitable for a variety of problems in Artificial Intelligence and other areas of Computer Science. This paper aims to chart out the main developments of the field over the last ten years and to take a critical view of these developments from several perspectives: logical, epistemological, computational and suitability to application. The paper attempts to expose some of the challenges and prospects for the further development of the field

Bayesian Abductive Logic Programs: A Probabilistic Logic for Abductive Reasoning

IJCAI'11, 2011. [All Versions]. [Preprint]. This work introduces Bayesian Abductive Logic Programs (BALP), a probabilistic logic that adapts Bayesian Logic Programs (BLPs) for abductive reasoning. Like BLPs, BALPs also combine first-order logic and Bayes nets. However, unlike BLPs, which use deduction to construct Bayes nets, BALPs employ logical abduction. As a result, BALPs are more suited for problems like plan/activity recognition that require abductive reasoning