A theoretical framework for possibilistic independence in a weakly ordered setting

The notion of independence is central in many information processing areas, such as multiple criteria decision making, databases, or uncertain reasoning. This is especially true in the later case, where the success of Bayesian networks is basically due to the graphical representation of independence they provide. This paper first studies qualitative independence relations when uncertainty is encoded by a complete pre-order between states of the world. While a lot of work has focused on the formulation of suitable definitions of independence in uncertainty theories our interest in this paper is rather to formulate a general definition of independence based on purely ordinal considerations, and that applies to all weakly ordered settings. The second part of the paper investigates the impact of the embedding of qualitative independence relations into the scale-based possibility theory. The absolute scale used in this setting enforces the commensurateness between local pre-orders (since they share the same scale). This leads to an easy decomposability property of the joint distributions into more elementary relations on the basis of the independence relations. Lastly we provide a comparative study between already known definitions of possibilistic independence and the ones proposed here.