Probabilistic Reasoning in the Domain of Genetic Counseling

Abstract

This paper describes a program, GENINFER, which uses belief networks to calculate risks of inheriting genetic disorders. GENINFER is based on Judea Pearl's [17] algorithm for fusion and propagation in probabilistic belief networks. These networks allow the effects of various pieces of information to be propagated and fused in such a way that, when equilibrium is reached, each proposition can be assigned a degree of believe consistent with the axioms of probability theory.