Focused Belief Measures for Uncertainty Quantification in High Performance Semantic Analysis

In web-scale semantic data analytics there is a great need for methods which aggregate uncertainty claims, on the one hand respecting the information provided as accurately as possible, while on the other still being tractable. Traditional statistical methods are more robust, but only represent distributional, additive uncertainty. Generalized information theory methods, including fuzzy systems and Dempster-Shafer (DS) evidence theory, represent multiple forms of uncertainty, but are computationally and methodologically difficult. We require methods which provide an effective balance between the complete representation of the full complexity of uncertainty claims in their interaction, while satisfying the needs of both computational complexity and human cognition. Here we build on Jøsang’s subjective logic to posit methods in focused belief measures (FBMs), where a full DS structure is focused to a single event. The resulting ternary logical structure is posited to be able to capture the minimally sufficient amount of generalized complexity needed at a maximum of computational efficiency. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach in a web ingest experiment over the 2012 Billion Triple dataset from the Semantic Web Challenge.