Combining Relevant Expert Knowledge Using Mixtures of Feedback Fuzzy Cognitive Maps

Olaoluwa Adigun, Akash Kumar Panda, Bart Kosko

A neuro-symbolic system should combine only relevant answers from expert agents or other knowledge sources. Using only relevant experts for a given input query becomes ever more important for accuracy and scalability as the knowledge network grows and connects ever more knowledge sources. We extend the standard definition of relevance from the legal theory of evidence: An answer is relevant if and only if it is both probative and material for the matter at hand given the knowledge available. We apply this relevancy scheme to mixing the feedback fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) of real or artificial experts. The expert FCM directed causal graphs mix or combine into a common knowledge network. We compare the equilibrium limit-cycle predictions or answers of the experts to the answers of the mixture FCM and then estimate the probative status of answers by their difference or variation. A new Bayes-like theorem de-mixes the knowledge mixture into corresponding posterior-like FCMs that also allow relevancy-based comparisons. The result is a final set of relevancy mixing weights that produces a relevancy-mixed FCM knowledge network for the given query. So different queries produce different…