Objective Bayesian Nets

I present a formalism that combines two methodologies: objective Bayesianism and Bayesian nets. According to objective Bayesianism, an agent’s degrees of belief (i) ought to satisfy the axioms of probability, (ii) ought to satisfy constraints imposed by background knowledge, and (iii) should otherwise be as non-committal as possible (i.e. have maximum entropy). Bayesian nets offer an efficient way of representing and updating probability functions. An objective Bayesian net is a Bayesian net representation of the maximum entropy probability function. I show how objective Bayesian nets can be constructed, updated and combined, and how they can deal with cases in which the agent’s background knowledge includes knowledge of qualitative influence relationships, e.g. causal influences. I then sketch a number of applications of the resulting formalism, showing how it can shed light on probability logic, causal modelling, logical reasoning, semantic reasoning, argumentation and recursive modelling.