---
title: "On a Tool for Reasoning with Mass Distributions"
authors:
  - "Rudolf Kruse"
  - "Erhard Schwecke"
  - "Frank Klawonn"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1991/175"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1991/0175.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1991
pages: "1190-1194"
track: "Qualitative Reasoning"
keywords:
---

# On a Tool for Reasoning with Mass Distributions

Rudolf Kruse, Erhard Schwecke, Frank Klawonn

*Proceedings of the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1190-1194.

## Abstract

We present a framework for reasoning under uncertainty using mass distributions. Our basic concept is the flow of evidence masses from supersets to subsets which is specified by experts. The expert domain is assumed to have various characteristics so that it can be considered to be a product space with one coordinate for each characteristic. Encoding the qualitative knowledge structure in a dependency network (hypertree) it is possible to describe an efficient propagation algorithm providing mass distributions on each characteristic. This algorithm bases on the computation in (small) subspaces of the product space which reduces its complexity in time as well as in space. It is also easy to make use of parallel computer architectures to improve the efficiency of the algorithm.