FREE online courses on Expert Systems - Uncertainty
Often times in structured selection problems the final answer
is not known with complete certainty. The expert's rules might be vague, and the
user might be unsure of answers to questions. This can be easily seen in medical
diagnostic systems where the expert is not able to be definite about the
relationship between symptoms and diseases. In fact, the doctor might offer
multiple possible diagnoses.
For expert systems to work in the real world they must also
be able to deal with uncertainty. One of the simplest schemes is to associate a
numeric value with each piece of information in the system. The numeric value
represents the certainty with which the information is known. There are numerous
ways in which these numbers can be defined, and how they are combined during the
inference process.