Bayesian knowledge base tuning : Uncertain Reasoning at FLAIRS 2011

For a knowledge-based system that fails to provide the correct answer, it is important to be able to tune the system while minimizing overall change in the knowledge-base. There are a variety of reasons why the answer is incorrect ranging from incorrect knowledge to information vagueness to incompleteness. Still, in all these situations, it is typically the case that most of the knowledge in the system is likely to be correct as specified by the expert(s) and/or knowledge engineer(s). In this paper, we propose a method to identify the possible changes by understanding the contribution of parameters on the outputs of concern. Our approach is based on Bayesian Knowledge Bases for modeling uncertainties. We start with, single parameter changes and then extend to multiple parameters. In order to identify the optimal solution that can minimize the change to the model as specified by the domain experts, we define and evaluate the sensitivity values of the results with respect to the parameters. We discuss the computational complexities of determining the solution and show that the problem of multiple parameters changes can be transformed into Linear Programming problems, and thus, efficiently solvable. Our work can also be applied towards validating the knowledge base such that the updated model can satisfy all test-cases collected from the domain experts. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.