Belief Maintenance
Ron Musick
Center for Applied Scientific Computing
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
P.O. Box 808, L-561, Livermore, CA 94551
rmusick@llnl.gov
Abstract
Belief maintenance is the problem of determining how a system of
beliefs should be constructed from existing data, and how it should be
modified after seeing additional data. The techniques for carrying out
this work are based in logic, statistics and probability theory. For
the most part, the theories focus on enabling computer-based methods
for reasoning about potentially large amounts of complicated,
interrelated data. The primary goals have been to build tools that can
assist human decision making, to build intelligent agents that can
reason and perform tasks without human supervision, or to simply
develop a better understanding of the decision making process. The
need for automated methods to support decision making exists, and will
grow as the quantity and variety of data that must be assimilated in
the scientific and business communities increase daily.
Appeared In
The 24-volume Wiley Encyclopedia of Electrical
and Electronics Engineering, published in 1999 by John
Wiley & Sons.