Efficient temporal probabilistic reasoning via context-sensitive model construction

We present a language for representing context-sensitive temporal probabilistic knowledge. Context constraints allow inference to be focused on only the relevant portions of the probabilistic knowledge. We provide a declarative semantics for our language. We present a sound and complete algorithm for computing posterior probabilities of temporal queries, as well as an efficient implementation of the algorithm. Throughout we illustrate the approach with the problem of reasoning about the effects of medications and interventions on the state of a patient in cardiac arrest. We empirically evaluate the efficiency of our system by comparing its inference times on problems in this domain with those of standard Bayesian network representations of the problems.