Conditional Independence for Iterated Belief Revision

Abstract

Conditional independence is a crucial concept for efficient probabilistic reasoning. For symbolic and qualitative reasoning, however, it has played only a minor role. Recently, Lynn, Delgrande, and Peppas have considered conditional independence in terms of syntactic multivalued dependencies. In this paper, we define conditional independence as a semantic property of epistemic states and present axioms for iterated belief revision operators to obey conditional independence in general. We show that c-revisions for ranking functions satisfy these axioms, and exploit the relevance of these results for iterated belief revision in general.