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Development of a Knowledge-Based Expert System for Diagnosing Post-Harvest Diseases of Apple

Author

Listed:
  • Gabriele Sottocornola

    (Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, 39100 Bolzano, Italy)

  • Sanja Baric

    (Faculty of Science and Technology, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, 39100 Bolzano, Italy)

  • Fabio Stella

    (Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e Comunicazione, University of Milano-Bicocca, 20126 Milano, Italy)

  • Markus Zanker

    (Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, 39100 Bolzano, Italy
    Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity, University of Klagenfurt, 9020 Klagenfurt, Austria)

Abstract

Post-harvest diseases are one of the main causes of economical losses in the apple fruit production sector. Therefore, this paper presents an application of a knowledge-based expert system to diagnose post-harvest diseases of apple. Specifically, we detail the process of domain knowledge elicitation for constructing a Bayesian network reasoning system. We describe the developed expert system, dubbed BN-DSSApple , and the diagnostic mechanism given the evidence provided by the user, as well as a likelihood evidence method, learned from the estimated consensus of users’ and expert’s interactions, to effectively transfer the performance of the model to different cohorts of users. Finally, we detail a novel technique for explaining the provided diagnosis, thus increasing the trust in the system. We evaluate BN-DSSApple with three different types of user studies, involving real diseased apples, where the ground truth of the target instances was established by microbiological and DNA analysis. The experiments demonstrate the performance differences in the knowledge-based reasoning mechanism due to heterogeneous users interacting with the system under various conditions and the capability of the likelihood-based method to improve the diagnostic performance in different environments.

Suggested Citation

  • Gabriele Sottocornola & Sanja Baric & Fabio Stella & Markus Zanker, 2023. "Development of a Knowledge-Based Expert System for Diagnosing Post-Harvest Diseases of Apple," Agriculture, MDPI, vol. 13(1), pages 1-18, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jagris:v:13:y:2023:i:1:p:177-:d:1031058
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mahaman, B. D. & Passam, H. C. & Sideridis, A. B. & Yialouris, C. P., 2003. "DIARES-IPM: a diagnostic advisory rule-based expert system for integrated pest management in Solanaceous crop systems," Agricultural Systems, Elsevier, vol. 76(3), pages 1119-1135, June.
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