This article examines the direction in which knowledge bases are constructed for diagnosis and decision making. When building an expert system, it is traditional to elicit knowledge from an expert in the direction in which the knowledge is to be applied, namely, from observable evidence toward unobservable hypotheses. However, experts usually find it simpler to reason in the opposite direction-from hypotheses to unobservable evidence-because this direction reflects causal relationships. Therefore, we argue that a knowledge base be constructed following the expert's natural reasoning direction, and then reverse the direction for use. This choice of representation direction facilitates knowledge acquisition in deterministic domains and is essential when a problem involves uncertainty. We illustrate this concept with influence diagrams, a methodology for graphically representing a joint probability distribution. Influence diagrams provide a practical means by which an expert can characterize the qualitative and quantitative relationships among evidence and hypotheses in the apporiate direction. Once constructed, the relationships can easily be reserved into the less intuitive direction in order to perform inference inference and diagnosis. In this way, knowledge acquisition is made cognitively simple; the machine carries the burden of translating the representation.

Chapman and Hall. See also: Influence diagrams for Bayesian decision analysis, European Journal of Operational Research, Volume 40, Issue 3, 15 June 1989, Pages 363–376 (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0377221789904293). Bayesian Decision Analysis: Principles and Practice, Cambridge University Press, 2010 (https://books.google.com/books/about/Bayesian_Decision_Analysis.html?id=O1lXnQAACAAJ).

See also: Evaluating influence diagrams with decision circuits. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2007)Operations Research, 34, 871-882

In IJCAI-85, pp. 1002--1009.

Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, University of California, Irvine, CA. pp. 329–334

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is largely an experimental science—at least as much progress has been made by building and analyzing programs as by examining theoretical questions. MYCIN is one of several well-known programs that embody some intelligence and provide data on the extent to which intelligent behavior can be programmed. As with other AI programs, its development was slow and not always in a forward direction. But we feel we learned some useful lessons in the course of nearly a decade of work on MYCIN and related programs. In this book we share the results of many experiments performed in that time, and we try to paint a coherent picture of the work. The book is intended to be a critical analysis of several pieces of related research, performed by a large number of scientists. We believe that the whole field of AI will benefit from such attempts to take a detailed retrospective look at experiments, for in this way the scientific foundations of the field will gradually be defined. It is for all these reasons that we have prepared this analysis of the MYCIN experiments.

The complete book in a single file.

Editors' Note: Many expert systems require some means criticisms of this approach from those steeped in the practical of handling heuristic rules whose conclusions are less than certain issues of constructing large rule-based expert systems. Abstract the expert system draws inferences in solving different problems. Doyle's paper argues that it is difficult for a human expert "certainty factors," and in spite of the experimentally observed insensitivity of system performance to perturbations of the chosen values Recent successes of "expert systems" stem from much Research Projects Agency (DOD), ARPA Order No. 3597, monitored In the following, we explain the modified approach together with its practical and theoretical attractions. The client's income bracket is 50%, can be found (Minsky, 1975; Shortliffe & Buchanan, 1975; and 2. The client carefully studies market trends, Duda, Hart, & Nilsson, 1976; Szolovits, 1978; Szolovits & THEN: 3. There is evidence (0.8) that the investment Pauker, 1978). Reasoned Assumptions (from Davis, 1979) and would use the rule to draw conclusions whose "certainty factors" depend on the observed certainty Although our approach usually approximates that of Bayesian probabilities, accommodates representational systems based on "frames" namely as subjective degrees of belief.

This paper presents generalizations of Bayes likelihood-ratio updating rule which facilitate an asynchronous propagation of the impacts of new beliefs and/or new evidence in hierarchically organized inference structures with multi-hypotheses variables. The computational scheme proposed specifies a set of belief parameters, communication messages and updating rules which guarantee that the diffusion of updated beliefs is accomplished in a single pass and complies with the tenets of Bayes calculus.Proc AAAI

D.Michie (Ed.), Expert systems in the micro- electronic age.Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 153-167

AI Journal 11(1,2):115— 154. Reprinted in Clancey & Shortliffe, Ch.9.