SAMY@gmr.com.UUCP (03/11/87)
Seminar at the General Motors Research Laboratories in Warren, Michigan. Friday, March 20, 1987 at 10 a.m. INDUCTION, KNOWLEDGE, and EXPERT SYSTEMS J. ROSS QUINLAN Head, School of Computing Sciences New South Wales Institute of Technology, Sydney, Australia ABSTRACT This general talk examines inductive inference as a knowledge acquisition methodology, both from the perspective of the performance characteristics of the knowledge so acquired and its intelligibility. A relatively simple class of induction methods that generate decision trees for classification tasks is outlined and illustrated. A case study in which this approach was used to generate diagnostic knowledge in the domain of thyroid assays is presented, and the performance of the decision trees is compared with that of a conventional expert system constructed by interviewing endocrinologists. Finally, recent work in which decision trees are re-expressed as collections of production rules has been found to improve both the accuracy and comprehensibility of the inductively acquired knowledge. Non-GMR personnel interested in attending please contact R. Uthurusamy [ samy@gmr.com ] 313-986-1989