Scenario Update Applied to Causal Reasoning

Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference (KR2008)

Volume

Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference (KR2008)

Contents

In this paper, we propose to define the update of a scenario (sequence of observations at different time points) by a piece of information (value of a fluent or event occurrence) at a given time point. This operation computes the possible world evolutions (called trajectories) satisfying this piece of information that are the most in accordance with the initial scenario. It enables us to identify the consequences that a modification may involve on the evolution of the world. Updating scenarios allows us to define formally the counter-factual aspect of causation: to check if an event is a cause in a given scenario amounts to update this scenario by the non-occurrence of this event.