Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge Representation and Inference

In any inference, a certain amount of uncertainty is involved. In this Chapter, I do not intend to discuss the fine details of the philosophical arguments about uncertainty (for some detailed breakdowns of uncertainty, see for example Graham and Jones, 1988; Klir and Folger, 1988; Smithson, 1989). I, however, concentrate on the management of two major types of uncertainty in knowledge representation and inference. They are uncertainty due to randomness and uncertainty due to imprecision (see Leung, 1988a, Chapter 2, for a discussion).