Tuning Expert Systems for Cost-Sensitive Decisions

There is currently a growing body of research examining the effects of the fusion of domain knowledge and data mining. This paper examines the impact of such fusion in a novel way by applying validation techniques and training data to enhance the performance of knowledge-based expert systems. We present an algorithm for tuning an expert system to minimize the expected misclassification cost. The algorithm employs data reserved for training data mining models to determine the decision cutoff of the expert system, in terms of the certainty factor of a prediction, for optimal performance. We evaluate the proposed algorithm and find that tuning the expert systemresults in significantly lower costs. Our approach could be extended to enhance the performance of any intelligent or knowledge system that makes cost-sensitive business decisions.