Reasoning with Conditional Probabilities and Joint Distributions in Coq

抄録

Probabilities occur in many applications of computer science, such as communication theory and artificial intelligence. These are critical applications that require some form of verification to guarantee the quality of their implementations. Unfortunately, probabilities are also the typical example of a mathematical theory whose abuses of notations make pencil-and-paper proofs difficult to formalize. In this paper, we experiment a new formalization of conditional probabilities that we validate with two applications. First, we formalize the foundational definitions and theorems of information theory, extending previous work with new lemmas. Second, we formalize the notion of conditional independence and its properties, paving the road for a formalization of probabilistic graphical models.