The Role of Tuning Uncertain Inference Systems

This study examined the effects of "tuning" the parameters of the incremental function of MYCIN, the independent function of PROSPECTOR, a probability model that assumes independence, and a simple additive linear equation. me parameters of each of these models were optimized to provide solutions which most nearly approximated those from a full probability model for a large set of simple networks. Surprisingly, MYCIN, PROSPECTOR, and the linear equation performed equivalently; the independence model was clearly more accurate on the networks studied.