Probabilistic Logic for Belief Nets

We describe how to combine probabilistic logic and Bayesian networks to obtain a new frame-work ("Bayesian logic") for dealing with uncertainty and causal relationships in an expert system. Probabilistic logic, invented by Boole, is a technique for drawing inferences from uncertain propositions for which there are no independence assumptions. A Bayesian network is a "belief net" that can represent complex conditional independence assumptions. We show how to solve inference problems in Bayesian logic by applying Benders decomposition to a nonlinear programming formulation. We also show that the number of constraints grows only linearly with the problem size for a large class of networks.