Decision Analysis and Expert Systems

Decision analysis and expert systems are technologies intended to support human reasoning and decision making by formalizing expert knowledge so that it is amenable to mechanized reasoning methods. Despite some common goals, these two paradigms have evolved divergently, with fundamental differences in principle and practice. We present the key ideas of decision analysis and review recent research and applications that aim toward a marriage of these two paradigms. This work combines decision-analytic methods for structuring and encoding uncertain knowledge and preferences with computational techniques from AI for knowledge representation, inference, and explanation.