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From: sfp@mars.ornl.gov (Phil Spelt)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets
Subject: Re: Extracting Rules from a Trained Network
Message-ID: <1991Apr19.124324.21793@cs.utk.edu>
Date: 19 Apr 91 12:43:24 GMT
References: <886@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au> <14940@helios.TAMU.EDU>
Sender: usenet@cs.utk.edu (USENET News Poster)
Reply-To: sfp@mars.epm.ornl.gov (Phil Spelt)
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Lines: 56

In article <14940@helios.TAMU.EDU> jdm5548@tamsun.tamu.edu (James Darrell McCauley) writes:
>In article <886@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au>, bakker@cs.uq.oz.au (Paultje Bakker) writes:
>|> I am interested in pointers to any articles, researchers, papers,
>|> or books that have investigated the extraction of rules from a
>|> successfully trained neural network.
>|> 
>
>On a similar note, Martin Wildberger of General Physics presented something
>at the Simulation Multiconference in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago on 
>using weights to determine significance of inputs and then "fuzzyfy" them 
>and change them to verbage so that a non-techie could understand why a NN 
>came to a particular solution.
>
>This is a second-hand account of his talk - I was unable to stay in town.
>Does anyone have any references to this type of thing?  This again is
>second-hand, but I heard that when folks asked for references (or even copies
>of his slides) that he referred them to a publication last year, either
>in the SMC Proceedings or some NN conference.
>
>-- 
>James Darrell McCauley, Grad Res Asst, Spatial Analysis Lab 
>Dept of Ag Engr, Texas A&M Univ, College Station, TX 77843-2117, USA
>(jdm5548@diamond.tamu.edu, jdm5548@tamagen.bitnet)

I have seen several postings on this topic in this newsgroup, so I fianlly 
decided that no-one reading this group is aware of work being done at FL
State Univ.  The work started as graduate work by Dave Kuncicky ("kun-
sisky"), and has bee picked up by others in the FSU CS Department:  Susan
Hruska and Chris Lacher, most noteably.  Their "mission" is to explore
the transfer of knowledge between [simple] exeprt systems and neural nets --
in both directions.  Snail-mail for these people is:

Department of Computer Science
Florida Statre University
Tallahassee, FL  32306

Their work has been presented at both the Auburn Workshops on ANNs ('90
and '91).  Although I was skeptical a year ago about the reults, I have
since become convinced that this is a potentially very useful line of
investigation -- permitting the "fine tuning" of expert systems by
training a specially-designed [backprop] net, then transferring the
knowledge back to the ES.  The net would be designed on the basis of
expert nowledge initialy encoded into the ES.  Contact these reserachers
if you are interested.  They LOVE to talk about their work!

=============================================================================
MIND.  A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain.  Its chief activity
consists in the endeavor to asscertain its own nature, the futility of the
attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself
with.   -- Ambrose Bierce
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Phil Spelt, Cognitive Systems & Human Factors Group  sfp@epm.ornl.gov
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Any opinions expressed or implied are my own, IF I choose to own up to them.
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