An Empirical Comparison of Three Inference Methods

David Heckerman

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arXiv · 1304.2357

An Empirical Comparison of Three Inference Methods

David Heckerman

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Abstract

In this paper, an empirical evaluation of three inference methods for uncertain reasoning is presented in the context of Pathfinder, a large expert system for the diagnosis of lymph-node pathology. The inference procedures evaluated are (1) Bayes' theorem, assuming evidence is conditionally independent given each hypothesis; (2) odds-likelihood updating, assuming evidence is conditionally independent given each hypothesis and given the negation of each hypothesis; and (3) a inference method related to the Dempster-Shafer theory of belief. Both expert-rating and decision-theoretic metrics are used to compare the diagnostic accuracy of the inference methods.

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David Heckerman. 2013-03-27. An Empirical Comparison of Three Inference Methods. https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.2357

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