A belief framework for order-of-magnitude reasoning and other qualitative relations

摘要

We present a new framework for the representation of qualitative knowledge and in particular order-of-magnitude relations. The framework is based on the assignment of beliefs to intervals. Generic techniques are proposed for the manipulation of basic-probability densities and belief functions to make inferences. The framework allows a rigorous interpretation of qualitative knowledge without abandoning the informal appeal of intuitive relations. Multiple order-of-magnitude relations can be accommodated and combined for the same pair of quantities. Relations can be propagated to other pairs of quantities; the increasing uncertainty is rigorously modeled, but overly- conservative interpretations that use a single interval for each relation are avoided.