Incidence Calculus: A Mechanism for Probabilistic Reasoning

Abstract

Mechanisms for the automation of uncertainty are required for expert systems. Sometimes these mechanisms need to obey the properties of probabilistic reasoning. A purely numeric mechanism, like those proposed so far, cannot provide a probabilistic logic with truth functional connectives. We propose an alternative mechanism, Incidence Calculus, which is based on a representation of uncertainty using sets of points, which might represent situations, models or possible worlds. Incidence Calculus does provide a probabilistic logic with truth functional connectives.