Winner of the 2002 DeGroot Prize. Awarded by the International Society for Bayesian Analysis to a book judged to represent an important, timely, thorough, and notably original contribution to the statistics literature. Probabilistic expert systems are graphical networks that support the modelling of uncertainty and decisions in large complex domains, while retaining ease of calculation. Building on original research by the authors over a number of years, this book gives a thorough and rigorous mathematical treatment of the underlying ideas, structures, and algorithms, emphasizing those cases in which exact answers are obtainable. It covers both the updating of probabilistic uncertainty in the light of new evidence, and statistical inference, about unknown probabilities or unknown model structure, in the light of new data. The book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in artificial intelligence who desire an understanding of the mathematical and statistical...