Reasoning With Conditional Ceteris Paribus Preference Statem

In many domains it is desirable to assess the pref­ erences of users in a qualitative rather than quan­ titative way. Such representations of qualitative preference orderings form an important compo­ nent of automated decision tools. We propose a graphical representation of preferences that re­ flects conditional dependence and independence of preference statements under a ceteris paribus (all else being equal) interpretation. Such a rep­ resentation is often compact and arguably natural. We describe several search algorithms for domi­ nance testing based on this representation; these algorithms are quite effective, especially in spe­ cific network topologies, such as chainand tree­ structured networks, as well as polytrees.