Temporal Bayesian Knowledge Bases – Reasoning about uncertainty with temporal constraints

Time is ubiquitous. Accounting for time and its interaction with change is crucial to modeling the dynamic world, especially in domains whose study of data is sensitive to time such as in medical diagnosis, financial investment, and natural language processing, to name a few. We present a framework that incorporates both uncertainty and time in its reasoning scheme. It is based on an existing knowledge representation called Bayesian Knowledge Bases. It provides a graphical representation of knowledge, time and uncertainty, and enables probabilistic and temporal inferencing. The reasoning scheme is probabilistically sound and the fusion of temporal fragments is well defined. We will discuss some properties of this framework and introduce algorithms to ensure groundedness during the construction of the model. The framework has been applied to both artificial and real world scenarios.

► We developed a unified framework for reasoning under uncertainty with time.► We model time by imposing temporal constraints on atemporal inferences. ► We introduce probabilistically sound reasoning and well defined fusion algorithm. ► Reference to current time is used to model people’s perception at a given moment. ► Dynamism of real world events can be captured with simple temporal constraints.