Abstract
An event DB is a database about states (of the world) and events (taken by an agent) whose effects are not well understood. Event DBs are omnipresent in the social sciences and may include diverse scenarios from political events and the state of a country to education-related actions and their effects on a school system. We consider the following problem: given an event DB representing historical events (what was the state and what actions were done at various past time points), and given a goal we wish to accomplish, what "change attempts" can the agent make so as to "optimize" the potential achievement of the goal? We define a formal version of this problem and derive results on its complexity. We then present a basic algorithm that provably provides a correct solution to finding an optimal state change attempt, as well as an enhanced algorithm that is built on top of the well known trie data structure and is also provably correct. We show correctness and algorithmic complexity results for both algorithms and report on experiments comparing their performance on synthetic data.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty - 11th European Conference, ECSQARU 2011, Proceedings |
Pages | 737-748 |
Number of pages | 12 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2011 |
Event | 11th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty, ECSQARU 2011 - Belfast, United Kingdom Duration: Jun 29 2011 → Jul 1 2011 |
Publication series
Name | Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) |
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Volume | 6717 LNAI |
ISSN (Print) | 0302-9743 |
ISSN (Electronic) | 1611-3349 |
Conference
Conference | 11th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty, ECSQARU 2011 |
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Country/Territory | United Kingdom |
City | Belfast |
Period | 6/29/11 → 7/1/11 |
Funding
Acknowledgements. The authors were funded in part by AFOSR grant FA95500610405 and ARO grant W911NF0910206. This work was also partially supported by the European Research Council under the EU’s 7th Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant 246858 – DIADEM.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Theoretical Computer Science
- General Computer Science