Dealing with complex queries in decision-support systems

Article history: Received 19 March 2009 Received in revised form 8 October 2010 Accepted 8 October 2010 Available online 30 October 2010 In decision-making problems under uncertainty, a decision table consists of a set of attributes indicating what is the optimal decision (response) within the different scenarios defined by the attributes. We recently introduced a method to give explanations of these responses. In this paper, the method is extended. To do this, it is combined with a query system to answer expert questions about the preferred action for a given instantiation of decision table attributes. The main difficulty is to accurately answer queries associated with incomplete instantiations. Incomplete instantiations are the result of the evaluation of a partial model outputting decision tables that only include a subset of the whole problem, leading to uncertain responses. Our proposal establishes an automatic and interactive dialogue between the decision-support system and the expert to elicit information from the expert to reduce uncertainty. Typically, the process involves learning a Bayesian network structure from a relevant part of the decision table and computing some interesting conditional probabilities that are revised accordingly. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.