Probabilistic theorem proving

Abstract

Many representation schemes combining first-order logic and probability have been proposed in recent years. Progress in unifying logical and probabilistic inference has been slower. Existing methods are mainly variants of lifted variable elimination and belief propagation, neither of which take logical structure into account. We propose the first method that has the full power of both graphical model inference and first-order theorem proving (in finite domains with Herbrand interpretations). We first define probabilistic theorem proving (PTP), their generalization, as the problem of computing the probability of a logical formula given the probabilities or weights of a set of formulas. We then show how PTP can be reduced to the problem of lifted weighted model counting, and develop an efficient algorithm for the latter. We prove the correctness of this algorithm, investigate its properties, and show how it generalizes previous approaches. Experiments show that it greatly outperforms lifted variable elimination when logical structure is present. Finally, we propose an algorithm for approximate PTP, and show that it is superior to lifted belief propagation.