How to draw plausible conclusions from uncertain and conflicting sources of evidence is one of the major intellectual challenges of Artificial Intelligence. It is a prerequisite of the smart technology needed to help humans cope with the information explosion of the modern world. In addition, computational modelling of uncertain reasoning is a key to understanding human rationality. Previous computational accounts of uncertain reasoning have fallen into two camps: purely symbolic and numeric. This book represents a major advance by presenting a unifying framework which unites these opposing...

The subject of this book is the reasoning under uncertainty based on sta tistical evidence, where the word reasoning is taken to mean searching for arguments in favor or against particular hypotheses of interest. The kind of reasoning we are using is composed of two aspects. The first one is inspired from classical reasoning in formal logic, where deductions are made from a knowledge base of observed facts and formulas representing the domain spe cific knowledge. In this book, the facts are the statistical observations and the general knowledge is represented by an instance of a special kind...

This volume is a collection of papers presented at a conference held in Shoresh Holiday Resort near Jerusalem, Israel, in December 2000 organized by the Israeli Ministry of Science, Culture and Sport. The theme of the conference was "Foundation of Statistical Inference: Applications in the Medical and Social Sciences and in Industry and the Interface of Computer Sciences." The following is a quotation from the Program and Abstract booklet of the conference. "Over the past several decades, the field of statistics has seen tremendous growth and development in theory and methodology. At the same...