Decision Analysis and Expert Systems

Decision analysis and knowledge-based expert systems share some common goals. Both technologies are designed to improve human decision making; they attempt to do this by formalizing human expert knowledge so that it is amenable to mechanized reasoning. However, the technologies are based on rather different principles. Decision analysis is the application of the principles of decision theory supplemented with insights from the psychology of judgment. Expert systems, at least as we use this term here, involve the application of various logical and computational techniques of AI to the representation of human knowledge for automated inference.