Detecting the knowledge boundary with prudence analysis

Prudence analysis (PA) is a relatively new, practical and highly innovative approach to solving the problem of brittleness in knowledge based systems (KBS). PA is essentially an online validation approach, where as each situation or case is presented to the KBS for inferencing the result is simultaneously validated. This paper introduces a new approach to PA that analyses the structure of knowledge rather than the comparing cases with archived situations. This new approach is positively compared against earlier systems for PA, strongly indicating the viability of the approach. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.