Nomological Deductive Reasoning for Trustworthy, Human-Readable, and Actionable AI Outputs
Gedeon Hakizimana, Agapito Ledezma · Algorithms · 2025
The lack of transparency in many AI systems continues to hinder their adoption in critical domains such as healthcare, finance, and autonomous systems. While recent explainable AI (XAI) methods—particularly those leveraging large language models—have enhanced output readability, they often lack traceable and verifiable reasoning that is aligned with domain-specific logic. This paper presents Nomological Deductive Reasoning (NDR), supported by Nomological Deductive Knowledge Representation (NDKR), as a framework aimed at improving the transparency and auditability of AI decisions through the integration of formal logic and structured domain knowledge. NDR enables the generation of causal, rule-based explanations by validating statistical predictions against symbolic domain constraints. The framework is evaluated on a credit-risk classification task using the Statlog (German Credit Data) dataset, demonstrating that NDR can produce coherent and interpretable explanations consistent with expert-defined logic. While primarily focused on technical integration and deductive validation, the approach lays a foundation for more transparent and norm-compliant AI systems. This work contributes to the growing formalization of XAI by aligning statistical inference with symbolic reasoning, offering a pathway toward more interpretable and verifiable AI decision-making processes.