POSSIBILISTIC EVALUATION OF SETS

Abstract

In the past decades, the theory of possibility has been developed as a theory of uncertainty that is compatible with the theory of probability. Whereas probability theory tries to quantify uncertainty that is caused by variability (or equivalently randomness), possibility theory tries to quantify uncertainty that is caused by incomplete information. A specific case of incomplete information is that of ill-known sets, which is of particular interest in the study of temporal databases. However, the construction of possibility distributions in the case of ill-known sets is known to be overly complex. This paper contributes to the study of ill-known sets by investigating the inference of uncertainty when constraints are specified over ill-known values. More specific, in this paper it is investigated how the knowledge about constraint satisfaction can be inferred if the constraints themselves are defined by means of ill-known values. It is shown how such reasoning can contribute to the study of (fuzzy) temporal databases.