An Empirical Comparison of Three Inference Methods
Abstract
In this paper, an empirical evaluation of three inference methods for uncertain reasoning is presented in the context of Pathfinder, a large expert system for the diagnosis of lymph-node pathology. The inference procedures evaluated are (1) Bayes' theorem, assuming evidence is conditionally independent given each hypothesis; (2) odds-likelihood updating, assuming evidence is conditionally independent given each hypothesis and given the negation of each hypothesis; and (3) a inference method related to the Dempster-Shafer theory of belief. Both expert-rating and decision-theoretic metrics are used to compare the diagnostic accuracy of the inference methods.
Cite
Text
Heckerman. "An Empirical Comparison of Three Inference Methods." Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, 1988.Markdown
[Heckerman. "An Empirical Comparison of Three Inference Methods." Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, 1988.](https://mlanthology.org/uai/1988/heckerman1988uai-empirical/)BibTeX
@inproceedings{heckerman1988uai-empirical,
title = {{An Empirical Comparison of Three Inference Methods}},
author = {Heckerman, David},
booktitle = {Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence},
year = {1988},
url = {https://mlanthology.org/uai/1988/heckerman1988uai-empirical/}
}