Symbolic Reasoning Under

Uncertainty
Reasoning -Introduction
• Reasoning is the act of deriving logical conclusion and making predictions from
available knowledge, facts, and beliefs.
• Process of thinking - logically arguing - drawing the inference.
• When a system is required to do something, that it has not been explicitly told how
to do, it must reason. It must figure out what it needs to know from what it
already knows.
• Reasoning is a way to infer facts from existing data
• It is a general process of thinking rationally, to find valid conclusions.
Types of Reasoning
• 1.Deductive reasoning
• 2.Inductive reasoning
• 3.Abductive reasoning
• 4.Common Sense Reasoning
• 5.Monotonic Reasoning
• 6.Non-monotonic Reasoning
1. Deductive reasoning
• Deductive reasoning is deducing new information from logically related known information.
• It is the form of valid reasoning, which means the argument's conclusion must be true when the
premises are true.
• Type of propositional logic in AI, and it requires various rules and facts.
• Here, the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion.
Ex-
• Premise-1: All the human eats veggies
• Premise-2: Suresh is human.
• Conclusion: Suresh eats veggies.
• The general process of deductive reasoning is given below:
2. Inductive Reasoning
• Inductive reasoning is a form of reasoning to arrive at a conclusion using limited sets of facts by
the process of generalization.
• It starts with the series of specific facts or data and reaches to a general statement or conclusion.
• type of propositional logic, which is also known as cause-effect reasoning or bottom-up
reasoning.
• Premises provide probable supports to the conclusion, so the truth of premises does not
guarantee the truth of the conclusion.
• Ex:
Premise: All of the pigeons we have seen in the zoo are white.
Conclusion: Therefore, we can expect all the pigeons to be white.
3 Abductive reasoning
• Abductive reasoning is a form of logical reasoning which starts with single or multiple
observations then seeks to find the most likely explanation or conclusion for the
observation.
• Extension of deductive reasoning - but the premises do not guarantee the conclusion.
• Ex-
• Implication: Cricket ground is wet if it is raining
• Axiom: Cricket ground is wet.
• Conclusion: It is raining.
4. Common Sense Reasoning
• An informal form of reasoning, which can be gained through experiences.
• simulates the human ability to make presumptions about events which occurs on
every day.
• human mind can easily understand the reasoning and assume it
• Ex-
• One person can be at one place at a time.
• If I put my hand in a fire, then it will burn.
5. Monotonic Reasoning
• In monotonic reasoning, once the conclusion is taken, then it will remain the same even if we add
some other information to existing information in our knowledge base.
• In monotonic reasoning, adding knowledge does not decrease the set of prepositions that can be
derived.
• To solve monotonic problems, we can derive the valid conclusion from the available facts only,
and it will not be affected by new facts.
• Not useful for the real-time systems, as in real time, facts get changed, so we cannot use
monotonic reasoning.
• Any theorem proving is an example of monotonic reasoning.
• Ex-
• Earth revolves around the Sun.
• It is a true fact, and it cannot be changed even if we add another sentence in knowledge base
like, "The moon revolves around the earth" Or "Earth is not round," etc.
Advantages
• In monotonic reasoning, each old proof will always remain valid.
• If we deduce some facts from available facts, then it will remain valid for always.

Disadvantages
• We cannot represent the real world scenarios using Monotonic reasoning.
• Hypothesis knowledge cannot be expressed with monotonic reasoning, which
means facts should be true.
• Since we can only derive conclusions from the old proofs, so new knowledge
from the real world cannot be added.
 6. Non-monotonic Reasoning
• In Non-monotonic reasoning, some conclusions may be invalidated if we add some more
information to our knowledge base.
• Logic will be said as non-monotonic if some conclusions can be invalidated by adding more
knowledge into our knowledge base.
• Non-monotonic reasoning deals with incomplete and uncertain models.
• Ex-
• Birds can fly
• Penguins cannot fly
• Pitty is a bird
• So from the above sentences, we can conclude that Pitty can fly. However, if we add one another
sentence into knowledge base "Pitty is a penguin", which concludes "Pitty cannot fly“- so it
invalidates the above conclusion.
• Advantages : used in Robot navigation - we can choose probabilistic facts or can make
assumptions.
• Disadvantages : the old facts may be invalidated by adding new sentences - It cannot be used for
theorem proving.
 Uncertain Reasoning
• Any AI system that seeks to model and reasoning must be able to deal with Uncertainty (Ex: traffic)
• In particular it must be able to deal with:

• Clearly in order to deal with this some decision that are more likely to be true (or
false) than others, and we must introduce methods that can cope with this uncertainty.
Sources of uncertainty
• Uncertain inputs
• Missing data
• Noisy data
• Uncertain knowledge
• Multiple causes lead to multiple effects
• Incomplete enumeration of conditions or effects
• Incomplete knowledge of causality in the domain – Probabilistic/stochastic effects
• Uncertain outputs
• Abduction and induction are inherently uncertain
• Default reasoning, even in deductive fashion, is uncertain
• Incomplete deductive inference may be uncertain
Approaches to Reasoning - under uncertainties
There are three different approaches to reasoning under uncertainties.
1. Symbolic reasoning
2. Statistical reasoning
3. Fuzzy logic reasoning
Symbolic Reasoning :
• The basis for intelligent mathematical software is the integration of the “power of
symbolic mathematical tools” with the suitable “proof technology”.
• Mathematical reasoning enjoys a property called monotonicity, that says, “If a
conclusion follows from given premises A, B, C… then it also follows from any larger set of
premises, as long as the original premises A, B, C.. included.”
• Human reasoning is not monotonic. People arrive at conclusions only tentatively; based
on partial or incomplete information, reserve the right to retract those conclusions while
they learn new facts.
 Monotonic Reasoning
• A reasoning process that moves in one direction only.
• Moreover, The number of facts in the knowledge base is always increasing.
• The conclusions derived are valid deductions and they remain so.

A monotonic logic cannot handle

• 1. Reasoning by default: because consequences may derive only because of lack
of evidence to the contrary.
• 2. Abductive reasoning: because consequences only deduced as most likely
explanations.
• 3. Belief revision: because new knowledge may contradict old beliefs.
Non monotonic reasoning

Non monotonic reasoning is one in which the axioms and/or the rules of inference
are extended to make it possible to reason with incomplete information
• Inconsistency is resolved by removing the relevant conclusion(s) derived
previously by default rules.
• the truth value of propositions in a nonmonotonic logic can be classified into the
following types:
• facts that are definitely true, such as "Tweety is a bird"
• default rules that are normally true, such as "Birds fly"
• tentative conclusions that are presumably true, such as "Tweety flies"
• When an inconsistency is recognized, only the truth value of the last type is
changed
Types of Non monotonic reasoning
1. Default reasoning
• Nonmonotonic logic
• Abduction
• Inheritance
• Default logic

2. Minimalist reasoning
• Closed world assumption
• Circumscription

3. Truth maintenance systems

Default Reasoning
• Non monotonic reasoning is based on default reasoning or “most probabilistic
choice”.

• Default reasoning ( or most probabilistic choice) is defined as follows:

• ◦ Definition 1 : If X is not known, then conclude Y.
• ◦ Definition 2 : If X can not be proved, then conclude Y.
• ◦ Definition 3: If X can not be proved in some allocated amount of time then
conclude Y.
 Default logic
• Default logic- to formalize reasoning with default assumptions.
• Default logic can express facts like “by default, something is true”; by contrast,
standard logic can only express that something is true or that something is false.
• This is a problem because reasoning often involves facts that are true in the majority of
cases but not always.
• A classical example is: “birds typically fly”. --This rule can be expressed in standard logic
either by “all birds fly”, which is inconsistent with the fact that penguins do not fly, or by
“all birds that are not penguins and not ostriches and ... fly”, which requires all
exceptions to the rule to be specified.
If A is Provable and it is consistent to
assume B, then conclude C.”
• A default theory is a pair {W,D}. W is a set of logical formula, called the background
theory, that formalize the facts that are known for sure. D is a set of default rules,
each one being of the form:

• According to this default, if we believe that Prerequisite is true, and each

of Justificationn is consistent with our current beliefs, we are led to believe
that Conclusion is true.
• The logical formulae in W and all formulae in a default were originally assumed to
be first-order logic formulae, but they can potentially be formulae in an arbitrary
formal logic. The case in which they are formulae in propositional logic is one of
the most studied.
Inheritance
Minimalist Reasoning
• We describe methods for saying a very specific and highly useful class of things that are
generally true. These methods are based on some variant of the idea of a minimal
model.
• We will define a model to be minimal if there are no other models in which fewer
things are true.
• The idea behind using minimal models as a basis for non-monotonic reasoning:
• There are many fewer true statements than false ones.
• If something is true and relevant, it makes sense to assume that it has been entered
into our knowledge base.
• Therefore, assume that the only true statements are those that necessarily must be
true in order to maintain the consistency.
 The Closed World Assumption
• CWA - Simple kind of minimalist reasoning - is powerful as a basis for reasoning with Databases,
which are assumed to be complete with respect to the properties they describe.
• A common default assumption is that what is not known to be true is believed to be false. This is
known as the Closed World Assumption, and is formalized in default logic using a default like the
following one for every fact F.

• Eg. A company’s employee database, Airline example

Circumscription
• Circumscription is a rule of conjecture (conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information)
that allows you
• ◦ to jump to the conclusion that the objects you can show that posses a certain property, p, are in fact all the objects that
posses that property.

• Circumscription can also cope with default reasoning.

• Circumscription together with first order logic allows a form of Non-monotonic Reasoning.