In Proceedings of the AAAI - 97 Workshop on Abstractions , Decisions , and Uncertainty , Providence , RI , USA , July 1997 Incremental Tradeo Resolution in Qualitative Probabilistic

Qualitative probabilistic reasoning in a Bayesian network often reveals tradeoos: relationships that are ambiguous due to competing qualitative innuences. We present two techniques that combine qualitative and numeric probabilistic reasoning to resolve such tradeoos, inferring the qualitative relationship between nodes in a Bayesian network. The rst approach incrementally marginalizes nodes in network, and the second incrementally reenes the state spaces of random variables. Both provide systematic methods for tradeoo resolution at potentially lower computational cost than application of purely numeric methods.