Thinking Backward for Knowledge Acquisition
Ross D. Shachter, David E. Heckerman · 1987
This article examines the direction in which knowledge bases are constructed for diagnosis and decision making When building an expert system, it is traditional to elicit knowledge from an expert in the direction in which the knowledge is to be applied, namely, from observable evidence toward unobservable hypotheses However, experts usually find it simpler to reason in the opposite direction-from hypotheses to unobservable evidence-because this direction reflects causal relationships Therefore, we argue that a knowledge base be constructed following the expert’s natural reasoning