Background to and Perspectives on Possibilistic Graphical Models

Graphical modelling is an important tool for the efficient representation and analysis of uncertain information in knowledge-based systems. While Bayesian networks and Markov networks from probabilistic graphical modelling have been well-known for about ten years, the field of possibilistic graphical modelling appears to be a new promising area of research. Possibilistic networks provide an alternative approach compared to probabilistic networks, whenever it is necessary to model uncertainty and imprecision as two different kinds of imperfect information. Imprecision in the sense of multivalued data has often to be considered in situations where information is obtained from human observations or non-precise measurement units. In this contribution we present a comparison of the background and perspectives of probabilistic and possibilistic graphical models, and give an overview on the current state of the art of possibilistic networks with respect to propagation and learning algorithms, applicable to data mining and data fusion problems.