REX: an Expert System for Regression Analysis
Daryl Pregibon, William A. Gale · 1984
Existing statistical software is quite powerful, but requires considerable statistical knowledge to be used effectively. The knowledge required is not available as theorems or algorithms, but is nevertheless used regularly by statisticians. A new programming methodology, expert systems, has been developed by artificial intelligence research for this kind of problem. REX is an exploration of the feasibility of expert system techniques for making advanced statistical techniques available safely to novices. This paper explains why we undertook the development of REX and illustrates how an interactive session with REX looks to the user.We believe that REX demonstrates the feasibility of using expert system techniques in the data analysis area.