Artificial intelligence and expert systems have seen a great deal of research in recent years, much of which has been devoted to methods for incorporating uncertainty into models. This book is devoted to providing a thorough and up-to-date survey of this field for researchers and students.

Probabilistic expert systems are graphical networks which support the modeling of uncertainty and decisions in large complex domains, while retaining ease of calculation. Building on original research by the authors, this book gives a thorough and rigorous mathematical treatment of the underlying ideas, structures, and algorithms. The book will be of interest to researchers in both artificial intelligence and statistics, who desire an introduction to this fascinating and rapidly developing field. The book, winner of the DeGroot Prize 2002, the only book prize in the field of statistics, is new in paperback.

Probabilistic expert systems are graphical networks which support the modeling of uncertainty and decisions in large complex domains, while retaining ease of calculation. Building on original research by the authors, this book gives a thorough and rigorous mathematical treatment of the underlying ideas, structures, and algorithms. The book will be of interest to researchers in both artificial intelligence and statistics, who desire an introduction to this fascinating and rapidly developing field. The book, winner of the DeGroot Prize 2002, the only book prize in the field of statistics, is new in paperback.

The increasing complexity of our world demands new perspectives on the role of technology in decision making. Human decision making has its li- tations in terms of information-processing capacity. We need new technology to cope with the increasingly complex and information-rich nature of our modern society. This is particularly true for critical environments such as crisis management and tra?c management, where humans need to engage in close collaborations with arti?cial systems to observe and understand the situation and respond in a sensible way. We believe that close collaborations between humans and arti?cial systems will become essential and that the importance of research into Interactive Collaborative Information Systems (ICIS) is self-evident. Developments in information and communication technology have ra- cally changed our working environments. The vast amount of information available nowadays and the wirelessly networked nature of our modern so- ety open up new opportunities to handle di?cult decision-making situations such as computer-supported situation assessment and distributed decision making. To make good use of these new possibilities, we need to update our traditional views on the role and capabilities of information systems. The aim of the Interactive Collaborative Information Systems project is to develop techniques that support humans in complex information en- ronments and that facilitate distributed decision-making capabilities. ICIS emphasizes the importance of building actor-agent communities: close c- laborations between human and arti?cial actors that highlight their comp- mentary capabilities, and in which task distribution is ?exible and adaptive.

Probabilistic networks, also known as Bayesian networks and influence diagrams, have become one of the most promising technologies in the area of applied artificial intelligence. This book provides a comprehensive guide for practitioners who wish to understand, construct, and analyze intelligent systems for decision support based on probabilistic networks. Intended primarily for practitioners, this book does not require sophisticated mathematical skills. The theory and methods presented are illustrated through more than 140 examples, and exercises are included for the reader to check his/her level of understanding.

Bayesian Networks and Influence Diagrams: A Guide to Construction and Analysis, Second Edition, provides a comprehensive guide for practitioners who wish to understand, construct, and analyze intelligent systems for decision support based on probabilistic networks. This new edition contains six new sections, in addition to fully-updated examples, tables, figures, and a revised appendix. Intended primarily for practitioners, this book does not require sophisticated mathematical skills or deep understanding of the underlying theory and methods nor does it discuss alternative technologies for reasoning under uncertainty. The theory and methods presented are illustrated through more than 140 examples, and exercises are included for the reader to check his or her level of understanding. The techniques and methods presented for knowledge elicitation, model construction and verification, modeling techniques and tricks, learning models from data, and analyses of models have all been developed and refined on the basis of numerous courses that the authors have held for practitioners worldwide.

This is a brand new edition of an essential work on Bayesian networks and decision graphs. It is an introduction to probabilistic graphical models including Bayesian networks and influence diagrams. The reader is guided through the two types of frameworks with examples and exercises, which also give instruction on how to build these models. Structured in two parts, the first section focuses on probabilistic graphical models, while the second part deals with decision graphs, and in addition to the frameworks described in the previous edition, it also introduces Markov decision process and partially ordered decision problems.