Expert System

In
Artificial Intelligence
By
Dr. Fazeel Abid
Assistant Professor

University of Lahore
What is an Expert System
• A computer program that is designed to solve complex problems and to provide decision-making ability
like a human expert.
• Performs 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.
• The system helps in decision making for complex problems using both facts and heuristics like a
human expert as it contains the expert knowledge of a specific domain and 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.
What is an Expert System

• It is important to remember that an expert system is not used to replace the human experts;
instead, to assist the human in making a complex decision.
• These systems do not have human capabilities of thinking and work on the basis of the
knowledge base of the particular domain.
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.
Capabilities of Expert Systems
• Advising: Capable of advising the human being for the query of any domain from the particular ES.
• Provide decision-making capabilities in any domain, such as for making any financial decision, decisions
in medical science, etc.
• Demonstrate a device Capable of demonstrating any new products such as its features, specifications, how
to use that product, etc.
• Problem-solving:  It has problem-solving capabilities.
• Explaining a problem Capable of providing a detailed description of an input problem.
• Interpreting the input Capable of interpreting the input given by the user.
• Predicting results: Can be used for the prediction of a result.
• Diagnosis: Designed for the medical field is capable of diagnosing a disease without using multiple
components as it already contains various inbuilt medical tools.
They are incapable of:
 Substituting human decision makers
 Possessing human capabilities
 Producing accurate output for inadequate knowledge base
 Refining their own knowledge
Components of Expert System

• An expert system mainly consists of three components:

Knowledge Base
• It contains domain-specific and high-quality knowledge.
• Knowledge is required to exhibit intelligence. The success of any ES majorly depends upon the collection of highly accurate
and precise knowledge.
What is Knowledge?
• The data is collection of facts. The information is organized as data and facts about the task domain. Data,
information, and past experience combined together are termed as knowledge.
Components of Knowledge Base
 Factual Knowledge: It is the information widely accepted by the Knowledge Engineers and scholars in the task domain.
 Heuristic Knowledge: It is about practice, accurate judgement, one’s ability of evaluation, and guessing.
Knowledge representation
• It is the method used to organize and formalize the knowledge in the knowledge base. It is in the form of IF-THEN-ELSE
rules.
Knowledge Acquisition
• The success of any expert system majorly depends on the quality, completeness, and accuracy of the information stored in the
knowledge base.
• The knowledge base is formed by readings from various experts, scholars, and the Knowledge Engineers.
 The knowledge engineer is a person with the qualities of empathy, quick learning, and case analyzing skills.
 Acquires information from subject expert by recording, interviewing, and observing him at work, etc.
 Categorizes and organizes the information in a meaningful way, in the form of IF-THEN-ELSE rules, to be used by
interference machine. The knowledge engineer also monitors the development of the ES.
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 two 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.
Forward Chaining

• It is a strategy of an expert system to answer the question, “What can happen

next?”
• Here, the Inference Engine follows the chain of conditions and derivations and
finally deduces the outcome. It considers all the facts and rules, and sorts them
before concluding to a solution.
• This strategy is followed for working on conclusion, result, or effect. For example,
prediction of share market status as an effect of changes in interest rates.
Backward Chaining
• With this strategy, an expert system finds out the answer to the question, “Why
this happened?”
• On the basis of what has already happened, the Inference Engine tries to find out
which conditions could have happened in the past for this result.
• This strategy is followed for finding out cause or reason. For example, diagnosis
of blood cancer in humans.
User Interface

• User interface provides interaction between user of the ES and the ES itself.
• It is generally Natural Language Processing so as to be used by the user who is well-versed in
the task domain.
• The user of the ES need not be necessarily an expert in Artificial Intelligence.
• It explains how the ES has arrived at a particular recommendation. The explanation may appear
in the following forms
 Natural language displayed on screen.
 Verbal narrations in natural language.
 Listing of rule numbers displayed on the screen.
 The user interface makes it easy to trace the credibility of the deductions.
Requirements of Efficient ES User Interface
 It should help users to accomplish their goals in shortest possible way.
 It should be designed to work for user’s existing or desired work practices.
 Its technology should be adaptable to user’s requirements; not the other way round.
 It should make efficient use of user input.
Development of Expert System (Example)

• The working of an expert system by taking an example of MYCIN ES has some steps to
build an MYCIN:
• Firstly, ES should be fed with expert knowledge.
• In the case of MYCIN, human experts specialized in the medical field of bacterial infection,
provide information about the causes, symptoms, and other knowledge in that domain.
• The KB of the MYCIN is updated successfully. In order to test it, the doctor provides a new
problem to it. The problem is to identify the presence of the bacteria by inputting the details
of a patient, including the symptoms, current condition, and medical history.
• The ES will need a questionnaire to be filled by the patient to know the general information
about the patient, such as gender, age, etc.
• Now the system has collected all the information, so it will find the solution for the problem
by applying if-then rules using the inference engine and using the facts stored within the KB.
• In the end, will provide a response to the patient by using the user interface.
Participants in the development of Expert System
There are three primary participants in the building of Expert System:
• Expert: 
The success of an ES much depends on the knowledge provided by human experts.
These experts are those persons who are specialized in that specific domain.
• Knowledge Engineer: 
Knowledge engineer is the person who gathers the knowledge from the domain
experts and then codifies that knowledge to the system according to the formalism.
• End-User: 
This is a particular person or a group of people who may not be experts, and
working on the expert system needs the solution or advice for his queries, which are
complex.
Why Expert System?
No memory Limitations Can store as much data as required and can memorize it at the time of
its application. But for human experts, there are some limitations to memorize all things at
every time.
High Efficiency If the knowledge base is updated with the correct knowledge, then it provides
a highly efficient output, which may not be possible for a human.
Expertise in a domain Put the knowledge gained from human experts into the expert system,
provides an efficient output by mixing all the facts and knowledge
Not affected by emotions Not affected by human emotions such as fatigue, anger, depression,
anxiety, etc.. Hence the performance remains constant.
High security These systems provide high security to resolve any query.
Considers all the facts To respond to any query, it checks and considers all the available facts
and provides the result accordingly. But it is possible that a human expert may not consider
some facts due to any reason.
Regular updates improve the performance There is an issue in the result provided by the
expert systems, we can improve the performance of the system by updating the knowledge base.
Applications of Expert System
The process of Building An Expert Systems
• Determining the characteristics of the problem
• Knowledge engineer and domain expert work in coherence to define the problem
• The knowledge engineer translates the knowledge into a computer-understandable
language.
• He designs an inference engine, a reasoning structure, which can use knowledge
when needed.
• Knowledge Expert also determines how to integrate the use of uncertain
knowledge in the reasoning process and what type of explanation would be useful.
Conventional System vs. Expert System
Human expert vs. Expert System
Benefits of Expert Systems

• Availability 
They are easily available due to mass production of software.
• Less Production Cost 
Production cost is reasonable. This makes them affordable.
• Speed 
They offer great speed. They reduce the amount of work an individual puts in.
• Less Error Rate 
Error rate is low as compared to human errors.
• Reducing Risk 
They can work in the environment dangerous to humans.
• Steady response 
• They work steadily without getting motional, tensed or fatigued.
Limitations of the Expert System

Unable to make a creative response in an extraordinary situation

Errors in the knowledge base can lead to wrong decision
The maintenance cost of an expert system is too expensive
Each problem is different therefore the solution from a human expert can also be
different and more creative
Applications of Expert Systems

Some popular Application of Expert System:

Information management
Hospitals and medical facilities
Help desks management
Employee performance evaluation
Loan analysis
Virus detection
Useful for repair and maintenance projects
Warehouse optimization
Planning and scheduling
The configuration of manufactured objects
Financial decision making Knowledge publishing
Process monitoring and control
Supervise the operation of the plant and controller
Stock market trading
Airline scheduling & cargo schedules