Artificial
Intelligence

Fall 2011
course
navigation

Oct 25

projects

Midterm project show & tell.
Logic project ??
Or maybe choice of logic or learning (next several weeks) for end of semester project ...

news

uncertainty

overview of upcoming topics : chap 13, 18, 20

probability

Example: What is Matt Ollis doing right now ... expressed as a probability. If I now tell you that he's downtown, what are the "probabilities" now?
Terminology:
P(A) is "probability of A" . P(A|B) is "probability of A given that we know B" P(a,b,c) is "joint distribution"
Example from text, pg 475 :
toothache !toothache catch !catch catch !catch cavity 0.108 0.012 0.072 0.008 !cavity 0.016 0.064 0.144 0.576
What is
P(cavity) ? P(cavity or toothache) ? P(cavity | catch) ?
Rules :
P(x|y) * P(y) = P(x and y) or P(x|y) = P(x and y) / P(y)
if we sum over all possibilities for y,
P(x) = sum_y P(x|y) * P(y)
if A and B are independent, then
P(A|B) = P(A) P(B|A) = P(B) P(A and B) = P(A) * P(B)
Bayes rule :
P(M and N) = P(M|N) * P(N) = P(N|M) * P(M) therefore P(M|N) = P(N|M) * P(M) / P(N)
"This simple equation underlies all modern AI systems for probabilistic inference."

cancer example

( from http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes ) | (or here)
1% of women at age forty who participate in routine screening have breast cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammographies. 9.6% of women without breast cancer will also get positive mammographies. A woman in this age group had a positive mammography in a routine screening. What is the probability that she actually has breast cancer?
"What do you think the answer is? If you haven't encountered this kind of problem before, please take a moment to come up with your own answer before continuing."
Here's the actual Bayes formula. (Note that the denominator is P(X).)
p(A|X) = p(X|A)*p(A) / { p(X|A)*p(A) + p(X|~A)*p(~A) }
Given some phenomenon A that we want to investigate, and an observation X that is evidence about A - for example, in the previous example, A is breast cancer and X is a positive mammography - Bayes' Theorem tells us how we should update our probability of A, given the new evidence X.
Once we get to learning, we'll apply this rule to training spam filters...
http://cs.marlboro.edu/ courses/ fall2011/ai/ notes/ Oct_25
last modified Monday October 24 2011 10:16 pm EDT