Abductive reasoning

About: Abductive reasoning is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1917 publications have been published within this topic receiving 44645 citations. The topic is also known as: abduction & abductive inference.

Elementary Probability and Statistics: A Primer

Abstract: Publisher Summary Probability and statistics provide necessary tools to capture the uncertain state of knowledge. This chapter focuses on the nature of probabilistic/statistical reasoning by contrasting probabilistic/statistical reasoning/inference with deductive reasoning/inference. The property of deductive validity of an argument is central to understanding the distinction between deductive inference and inductive inference, when deductive validity could be understood in terms of the monotonic property of reasoning. It further defines “deductive validity” followed by an understanding of the property of monotonicity. An argument is deductively valid if and only if it is logically impossible for its premises to be true, but its conclusion to be false. Probability theory provides a better tool for handling inductive arguments via which non-monotonic reasoning has primarily been expressed. Statistics is an ever growing discipline with multi-layered complexity.

Bi-Abductive Inference for Shape and Ordering Properties

Abstract: In separation logic, bi-abduction - a combination of abductive inference and frame inference - is the key enabler for compositional reasoning, helping to scale up verification significantly. Indeed, the success of bi-abduction led to the development of Infer, the tool used daily to verify Facebook's codebase of millions of lines of code. However, this success currently stays largely within the shape domain. To extend this impact towards the combination of shape and arithmetic domains, in this work, we present a novel one-stage bi-abductive procedure for a combination of data structures and ordering values. The procedure is designed in the spirit of the Unfold-and-Match paradigm where the inference is utilized to derive any mismatched portion. We demonstrate our proposal through several interesting examples to show that it is promising for an automated verification of heap-manipulating programs.

Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning, NMR'2000

Abstract: The papers gathered in this collection were presented at the 8th International Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning, NMR2000. The series was started by John McCarthy in 1978. The first international NMR workshop was held at Mohonk Mountain House, New Paltz, New York in June, 1984, and was organized by Ray Reiter and Bonnie Webber. In the last 10 years the area of nonmonotonic reasoning has seen a number of important developments. Significant theoretical advances were made in the understanding of general abstract principles underlying nonmonotonicity. Key results on the expressibility and computational complexity of nonmonotonic logics were established. The role of nonmonotonic reasoning in belief revision, abduction, reasoning about action, planing and uncertainty was further clarified. Several successful NMR systems were built and used in applications such as planning, scheduling, logic programming and constraint satisfaction. The papers in the proceedings reflect these recent advances in the field. They are grouped into sections corresponding to special sessions as they were held at the workshop: 1. General NMR track 2. Abductive reasonig 3. Belief revision: theory and practice 4. Representing action and planning 5. Systems descriptions and demonstrations 6. Uncertainty frameworks in NMR