Possibilistic conditional independence: A similarity-based measure and its application to causal network learning

Abstract

A definition for similarity between possibility distributions is introduced and discussed as a basis for detecting dependence between variables by measuring the similarity degree of their respective distributions. This definition is used to detect conditional independence relations in possibility distributions derived from data. This is the basis for a new hybrid algorithm for recovering possibilistic causal networks. The algorithm POSSCAUSE is presented and its applications discussed and compared with analogous developments in possibilistic and probabilistic causal networks learning.