BLOG: Probabilistic Models with Unknown Objects

  • Brian Milch ,
  • Bhaskara Marthi ,
  • Stuart Russell ,
  • David Sontag ,
  • Daniel L. Ong ,

in Introduction to Statistical Relational Learning

Published by MIT Press | 2007

This chapter describes Bayesian logic (BLOG), a formal language for defining probability models over worlds with unknown objects and identity uncertainty. BLOG unifies and extends several existing approaches. Subject to certain acyclicity constraints, every BLOG model specifies a unique probability distribution over first-order model structures that can contain varying and unbounded numbers of objects. Furthermore, complete inference algorithms exist for a large fragment of the language. We also introduce a probabilistic form of Skolemization for handling evidence.