Tech Report CS-89-04

A Model for Reasoning About Persistence and Causation

Thomas Dean and Keiji Kanazawa

February 1989

Abstract:

In this paper, we describe a model of causal reasoning that accounts for knowledge concerning cause-and-effect relationships and knowledge concerning the tendency for propositions to persist or not as a function of time passing. Our model has a natural encoding in the form of a network representation for probabilistic models. We explore the computational properties of our model by considering recent advances in computing the consequences of models encoded in this network representation.

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