Expert System
Prof. Ansar Sheikh
Expert System
• An expert system is a computer program that is designed to solve
complex problems and to provide decision-making ability like a
human expert.
• It performs this by extracting knowledge from its knowledge base
using the reasoning and inference rules according to the user queries.
• The expert system is a part of AI, and the first ES was developed in
the year 1970, which was the first successful approach of artificial
intelligence.
• It solves the most complex issue as an expert by extracting the
knowledge stored in its knowledge base.
Cont…
• The system helps in decision making for complex problems using both facts
and heuristics like a human expert.
• It is called so because it contains the expert knowledge of a specific domain
and can solve any complex problem of that particular domain.
• These systems are designed for a specific domain, such as medicine,
science, etc.
• The performance of an expert system is based on the expert's knowledge
stored in its knowledge base.
• The more knowledge stored in the KB, the more that system improves its
performance.
• One of the common examples of an ES is a suggestion of spelling errors
while typing in the Google search box.
Popular examples of the Expert System
1. DENDRAL: domain-specific expert system (Stanford, mid-1960s)
that helped organic chemists infer molecular structures from
mass-spectrometry data
2. MYCIN: A 1970s Stanford medical expert system for diagnosing
bacterial blood and CNS infections and recommending antibiotics
3. PXDES: It analyses chest X-ray features (shadows/patterns) to help
detect and stage pneumoconiosis (lung disease) using an
inference/knowledge-based approach
4. CaDeT: Early cancer-detection support
Characteristics of Expert System
• High Performance: The expert system provides high performance for
solving any type of complex problem of a specific domain with high
efficiency and accuracy.
• Understandable: It responds in a way that can be easily
understandable by the user. It can take input in human language and
provides the output in the same way.
• Reliable: It is much reliable for generating an efficient and accurate
output.
• Highly responsive: ES provides the result for any complex query
within a very short period of time
Components of Expert System
1. User Interface
2. Inference Engine
3. Knowledge Base
• 1. User Interface
• With the help of a user interface, the expert system interacts with the
user, takes queries as an input in a readable format, and passes it to the
inference engine. After getting the response from the inference engine,
it displays the output to the user. In other words, it is an interface that
helps a non-expert user to communicate with the expert system to
find a solution.
• 2. Inference Engine(Rules of Engine)
• The inference engine is known as the brain of the expert system as it is the main
processing unit of the system. It applies inference rules to the knowledge base to
derive a conclusion or deduce new information. It helps in deriving an error-free
solution of queries asked by the user.
• With the help of an inference engine, the system extracts the knowledge from the
knowledge base.
• There are two types of inference engine:
• Deterministic Inference engine: The conclusions drawn from this type of
inference engine are assumed to be true. It is based on facts and rules.
• Probabilistic Inference engine: This type of inference engine contains uncertainty
in conclusions, and based on the probability.
• Inference engine uses the below modes to derive the solutions:
• Forward Chaining: It starts from the known facts and rules, and applies the
inference rules to add their conclusion to the known facts.
• Backward Chaining: It is a backward reasoning method that starts from the goal
and works backward to prove the known facts.
• 3. Knowledge Base
• The knowledgebase is a type of storage that stores knowledge acquired
from the different experts of the particular domain. It is considered as
big storage of knowledge. The more the knowledge base, the more
precise will be the Expert System.
• It is similar to a database that contains information and rules of a
particular domain or subject.
• One can also view the knowledge base as collections of objects and
their attributes. Such as a Lion is an object and its attributes are it is a
mammal, it is not a domestic animal, etc.
• Components of Knowledge Base
1. Factual Knowledge: The knowledge which is based on facts and accepted
by knowledge engineers comes under factual knowledge.
2. Heuristic Knowledge: This knowledge is based on practice, the ability to
guess, evaluation, and experiences.
• Knowledge Representation:
• It is used to formalize the knowledge stored in the knowledge base using the
If-else rules.
• Knowledge Acquisitions:
• It is the process of extracting, organizing, and structuring the domain
knowledge, specifying the rules to acquire the knowledge from various
experts, and store that knowledge into the knowledge base.