A Causal Knowledge-Driven Inference Engine for Expert System

Although many methods of knowledge acquisition has been developed in the exper systems field, such a need form causal knowledge acquisition hs not been stressed relatively. In this respect, this paper is aimed at suggesting a causal knowledge acquisition process, and then investigate the causal knowledge-based inference process. A vehicle for causal knowledge acquisition is FCM (Fuzzy Cognitive Map), a fuzzy signed digraph with causal relationships between concept variables found in a specific application domain. Although FCM has a plenty of generic properties for causal knowledge acquisition, it needs some theoretical improvement for acquiring a more refined causal knowledge. In this sense, we refine fuzzy implications of FCM by proposing fuzzy causal relationship and fuzzy partially causal relationship. To test the validity of our proposed approach, we prototyped a causal knowledge-driven inference engine named CAKES and then experimented with some illustrative examples.