Title
Cp-logic: A language of causal probabilistic events and its relation to logic programming
Abstract
This paper develops a logical language for representing probabilistic causal laws. Our interest in such a language is two-fold. First, it can be motivated as a fundamental study of the representation of causal knowledge. Causality has an inherent dynamic aspect, which has been studied at the semantical level by Shafer in his framework of probability trees. In such a dynamic context, where the evolution of a domain over time is considered, the idea of a causal law as something which guides this evolution is quite natural. In our formalization, a set of probabilistic causal laws can be used to represent a class of probability trees in a concise, flexible and modular way. In this way, our work extends Shafer's by offering a convenient logical representation for his semantical objects. Second, this language also has relevance for the area of probabilistic logic programming. In particular, we prove that the formal semantics of a theory in our language can be equivalently defined as a probability distribution over the well-founded models of certain logic programs, rendering it formally quite similar to existing languages such as ICL or PRISM. Because we can motivate and explain our language in a completely self-contained way as a representation of probabilistic causal laws, this provides a new way of explaining the intuitions behind such probabilistic logic programs: we can say precisely which knowledge such a program expresses, in terms that are equally understandable by a non-logician. Moreover, we also obtain an additional piece of knowledge representation methodology for probabilistic logic programs, by showing how they can express probabilistic causal laws.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1017/S1471068409003767
TPLP
Keywords
DocType
Volume
logical language,probability tree,causal probabilistic event,causality,convenient logical representation,certain logic program,probabilistic logic program,probabilistic logic programming,knowledge representation methodology,probabilistic causal law,uncertainty,causal law,causal knowledge,formal semantics,probabilistic logic,knowledge representation,probability distribution
Journal
9
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
1471-0684
55
PageRank 
References 
Authors
2.12
45
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Joost Vennekens143437.36
Marc Denecker21626106.40
Maurice Bruynooghe32767226.05