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

Gabriele Sottocornola (), Sanja Baric, Fabio Stella and Markus Zanker ()
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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

Agriculture, 2023, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-18

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.

Keywords: post-harvest diseases of apple; expert system in agriculture; Bayesian network; knowledge elicitation; likelihood evidence; explanation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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