What is an Expert System?

[Lecture Notes for Students]

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. 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.

Below is the block diagram that represents the working of an expert system:
Note: It is important to remember that an expert system is not used to replace the human
experts; instead, it is used 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 Systems

 High performance
 Understandable
 Reliable
 Highly responsive

Capabilities of Expert Systems

The expert systems are capable of −

 Advising
 Instructing and assisting human in decision making
 Demonstrating
 Deriving a solution
 Diagnosing
 Explaining
 Interpreting input
 Predicting results
 Justifying the conclusion
 Suggesting alternative options to a problem
They are incapable of −

 Substituting human decision makers

 Possessing human capabilities
 Producing accurate output for inadequate knowledge base
 Refining their own knowledge

Below are some popular examples of the Expert System:

 o DENDRAL: It was an artificial intelligence project in 1960 that was made as a
chemical analysis expert system. It was used in organic chemistry to detect unknown
organic molecules with the help of their mass spectra and knowledge base of
chemistry.
o MYCIN: It was one of the earliest backward chaining expert systems that was
designed to find the bacteria causing infections like bacteraemia and meningitis. It
was also used for the recommendation of antibiotics and the diagnosis of blood
clotting diseases.
o PXDES: It is an expert system that is used to determine the type and level of lung
cancer. To determine the disease, it takes a picture from the upper body, which
looks like the shadow. This shadow identifies the type and degree of harm.
o CaDeT: The CaDet expert system is a diagnostic support system that can detect
cancer at early stages.

Characteristics of Expert System

o High Performance: The expert system provides high performance for solving any
type of complex problem of a specific domain with high efficiency and accuracy.
o 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.
o Reliable: It is much reliable for generating an efficient and accurate output.
o Highly responsive: ES provides the result for any complex query within a very
short period of time.

Components of Expert System

An expert system mainly consists of three components:

o User Interface
o Inference Engine
o 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)

Use of efficient procedures and rules by the Inference Engine is essential in deducting a correct, flawless
solution.
In case of knowledge-based ES, the Inference Engine acquires and manipulates the knowledge from the
knowledge base to arrive at a particular solution.

In case of rule based ES, it −

 Applies rules repeatedly to the facts, which are obtained from earlier rule application.
 Adds new knowledge into the knowledge base if required.
 Resolves rules conflict when multiple rules are applicable to a particular case.
To recommend a solution, the Inference Engine uses the following strategies −

 Forward Chaining
  Backward Chaining
o 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.
o With the help of an inference engine, the system extracts the knowledge from the
knowledge base.
o There are two types of inference engine:
o Deterministic Inference engine: The conclusions drawn from this type of
inference engine are assumed to be true. It is based on facts and rules.
o 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.
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.

o Backward Chaining: It is a backward reasoning method that starts from the goal
and works backward to prove the known facts.
o With this strategy, an expert system finds out the answer to the question, “Why
this happened?”
o 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.

3. Knowledge Base
o 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.
o It is similar to a database that contains information and rules of a particular domain
or subject.
o 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

o Factual Knowledge: The knowledge which is based on facts and accepted by

knowledge engineers comes under factual knowledge.
o 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.

Development of Expert System

Here, we will explain the working of an expert system by taking an example of MYCIN ES.
Below are some steps to build an MYCIN:
 o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o In the end, it 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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?

Before using any technology, we must have an idea about why to use that technology and
hence the same for the ES. Although we have human experts in every field, then what is
the need to develop a computer-based system. So below are the points that are describing
the need of the ES:

1. No memory Limitations: It 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.
2. 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.
3. Expertise in a domain: There are lots of human experts in each domain, and they
all have different skills, different experiences, and different skills, so it is not easy to
get a final output for the query. But if we put the knowledge gained from human
experts into the expert system, then it provides an efficient output by mixing all the
facts and knowledge
4. Not affected by emotions: These systems are not affected by human emotions
such as fatigue, anger, depression, anxiety, etc.. Hence the performance remains
constant.
5. High security: These systems provide high security to resolve any query.
 6. 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.
7. Regular updates improve the performance: If 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.

Capabilities of the Expert System

Below are some capabilities of an Expert System:

o Advising: It is capable of advising the human being for the query of any domain
from the particular ES.
o Provide decision-making capabilities: It provides the capability of decision
making in any domain, such as for making any financial decision, decisions in
medical science, etc.
o Demonstrate a device: It is capable of demonstrating any new products such as its
features, specifications, how to use that product, etc.
o Problem-solving: It has problem-solving capabilities.
o Explaining a problem: It is also capable of providing a detailed description of an
input problem.
o Interpreting the input: It is capable of interpreting the input given by the user.
o Predicting results: It can be used for the prediction of a result.
o Diagnosis: An ES designed for the medical field is capable of diagnosing a disease
without using multiple components as it already contains various inbuilt medical
tools.

Advantages of Expert System

o These systems are highly reproducible.
o They can be used for risky places where the human presence is not safe.
o Error possibilities are less if the KB contains correct knowledge.
o The performance of these systems remains steady as it is not affected by emotions,
tension, or fatigue.
o They provide a very high speed to respond to a particular query.

Limitations of Expert System

o The response of the expert system may get wrong if the knowledge base contains
the wrong information.
 o Like a human being, it cannot produce a creative output for different scenarios.
o Its maintenance and development costs are very high.
o Knowledge acquisition for designing is much difficult.
o For each domain, we require a specific ES, which is one of the big limitations.
o It cannot learn from itself and hence requires manual updates.

Applications of Expert System

o In designing and manufacturing domain
It can be broadly used for designing and manufacturing physical devices such as
camera lenses and automobiles.
o In the knowledge domain
These systems are primarily used for publishing the relevant knowledge to the users.
The two popular ES used for this domain is an advisor and a tax advisor.
o In the finance domain
In the finance industries, it is used to detect any type of possible fraud, suspicious
activity, and advise bankers that if they should provide loans for business or not.
o In the diagnosis and troubleshooting of devices
In medical diagnosis, the ES system is used, and it was the first area where these
systems were used.
o Planning and Scheduling
The expert systems can also be used for planning and scheduling some particular
tasks for achieving the goal of that task.

The following table shows where ES can be applied.

Application Description

Design Domain Camera lens design, automobile design.

Diagnosis Systems to deduce cause of disease from observed data,

Medical Domain
conduction medical operations on humans.

Comparing data continuously with observed system or with prescribed

Monitoring Systems
behavior such as leakage monitoring in long petroleum pipeline.

Process Control Systems Controlling a physical process based on monitoring.

Knowledge Domain Finding out faults in vehicles, computers.

Detection of possible fraud, suspicious transactions, stock market trading,

Finance/Commerce
Airline scheduling, cargo scheduling.