A Probabilistic Theory of Abductive Reasoning

Abstract

We present an abductive search strategy that integrates creative abduction and probabilistic reasoning to produce plausible explanations for unexplained observations. Using a graphical model representation of abductive search, we introduce a heuristic approach to hypothesis generation, comparison, and selection. To identify creative and plausible explanations, we propose 1) applying novel structural similarity metrics to a search for simple explanations, and 2) optimizing for the probability of a hypothesis’ occurrence given known observa-