Neural networks for safe knowledge based systems

James Austin

1. Introduction This paper discusses how work at York is beginning to investigate the use of neural networks for applications where conventional expert systems are inappropriate or fail. A particular emphasis of our approach concerns the problem of dealing with uncertain data.

Many applications of expert systems contain uncertainty; often an operator is unable to a respond exactly to request for information, or sensors may be faulty thus attaching some uncertainty to the information they provide. Furthermore, the system running the expert system and the knowledge base may contain hard or soft errors. The inability of expert systems to deal with uncertainty makes them unsafe. The conventional approach is to hand over the task of uncertainty management to a human operator. Unfortunately, this may not be possible in certain cercumstances as no human expert may be available or can react in time. This is especially true in safety critical applications. Currently, expert systems do not deal with uncertainty to any level approaching human abilities. Typically, these uncertainties arise within the inputs of a system or within the knowledge base of the system. Conventional expert systems require that special account is made of any uncertainty (in the form of certainty factors, use of Bayes theory, fuzzy l o p etc.). While these approaches may, in the long tern, turn out successful, neural networks offer an ability to deal with uncertainty as an implicit part of their operation. This is enhanced by their ability to learn from example, exhibit fault tolerant behaviour and their inherent parallelism. Work at York is looking at the implementation, the application and the theory of uncertain reasoning in neural networks. Our eventual aim is to provide tools and methods for applying this new technology in a wide variety of domains.

2. The Neural Network There are many neural network architectures* and many of these are suitable for reasoning with uncertain data. However, the following concentrates on the Advanced Distributed Associative Memory (ADAM) neural network developed at York.:! Typically, neural networks are pattern classifiers. They are able to recognise an unknown input pattern as similar to one of many stored prototypes. This ability is the basis of uncertain reasoning. By the action of recognizing an unknown pattern, a neural network is reasoning on uncertain data. This arises in the pattern as noise or distortion. If we are able to map howledge into pattern representations, and uncertainty in that knowledge as distortions or noise in the patterns, then we can use neural networks to deal with the uncertainty in the knowledge. The
Advanced Computer Architecture Group, Department of Computer Science, University of York, York,YO1 5DD.

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major problem is how the knowledge is transformed into a pattern and what form this takes. Conventional computers convert a users input into binary patterns, in this case knowledge must be encoded similarly, but into forms that a neural network can deal with and not a conventional processor. Once the knowledge is in the form of patterns, the knowledge can be stored in the network. For example, rules can be stored in a neural network if the network is set up as an associative memory. Rules made up of pattem/action pairs are stored in an associative memory as access keys (patterns) and contents (actions). Thus, when pre-condition patterns are presented to the associative memory, the item accessed will be the rule. If the associative memory is a neural network, the network can act on uncertain pre-conditions. TO enable the use of neural networks for this task we must find networks with the following abilities; 1 Learnrapidly. Many networks take a long time to learn new patterns, if we are to use neural networks in expert systems, where the knowledge is changing often, we must use networks with fast learning. 2 Ability to store large numbers of patterns. Typically a knowledge base will need to hold large amounts of knowledge. Most neural networks do not cope with large amounts of data. 3 Ability to control generalisation. Generalisation is the ability to recognise an unknown pattern as one belonging to a set of known patterns. How well, and by what degree, this operates must be controllable, as it is the essential feature that allows neural networks to reason on uncertain data. 4 Predictable behaviour. If a neural network is to be used in safety critical applications, its behaviour must be predictable. The majority of networks are not amenable to analysis. The advantage of the ADAM neural network is that it fits all the requirements above. Furthermore. it offers simple implementation in dedicated hardware. The architecture of ADAM was developed primarily for image processing. A specific feature of its architecture is the use of N tuple pre-processing. In the present context this allows the network to deal with conjunctions and disjunctions within the pre-conditions. This is achieved by defining knowledge fields on the input to the network into which data is presented: the amount of coupling between these fields defines the way in which the information presented in each of the fields interacts. To enable rules to be chained and actions to be formed the output of the network may be fed back into the input. This is analogous to the construction of a state machine. However, in this case the network is acting as a fuzzy state machine, where each state transition may be a single or combination of states. The advantage of this is that the network is able to follow multiple lines of reasoning (due to uncertainty) in parallel. When the network is certain, only one of the stored states will be output. If it is unsure multiple states will be output. The states being represented as patterns, the multiple states as mixtures of patterns. The details of this may be found in A ~ s t i n . ~

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This paper has introduced the use of neural networks for uncertain reasoning, and has highlighted how the ADAM network may achieve this. This may result in the safe use of expert systems, as the network can deal with uncertainty as a natural result of its operation, and does not rely on any explicitly programmed procedure.

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R Beale and T Jackson, Neural Computing an introduction, Adam Hilger ( 1990). J Austin, ADAM: A Distributed Associative Memory For Scene Analysis, pp. IV-285 in Proceedings of First lnternational Conference on Neural Networks, ed. M.Caudil1, C.Butler, IEEE, San Diego (June, 1987). J Austin, Uncertain Reasoning with RAM based Neural Networks, Journal of Inrelligent Systems, Freund Publishing House (UK) Ltd. (Submitted for publication).
Copies avaiable from the auther.