Typical models: minimizing false beliefs

Abstract: A knowledge system S describing a part of real world does in general not contain complete information. Reasoning with incomplete information is prone to errors since any belief derived from S may be false in the present state of the world. A false belief may suggest wrong decisions and lead to harmful actions. So an important goal is to make false beliefs as unlikely as possible. This work introduces the notions of "typical atoms" and "typical models", and shows that reasoning with typical models minimizes the expected number of false beliefs over all ways of using incomplete information. Various properties of typical models are studied, in particular, correctness and stability of beliefs suggested by typical models, and their connection to oblivious reasoning.