Computer based support of reasoning in the presence of fuzziness and uncertainty

摘要

Decision making tasks require that we access (possibly large volumes of) data, transform it in various ways by performing computations on it, as well as reason with such raw or transformed data. Also, imprecision is almost omnipresent in practical decision making environments. In order to provide computer based support for reasoning activities in such environments, it is therefore necessary to develop schemes to represent imprecise knowledge and mechanically manipulate it. A previous paper developed such a scheme for fuzzy knowledge. This paper extends that representation to capture uncertainty as well. Mechanisms for propagating uncertainty during the reasoning process are also developed. The propagation mechanism allows interaction between fuzziness and uncertainty during the course of reasoning. The scheme developed here has been tested on a prototype implementation. The robustness of the representation and its use are demonstrated with an example.