Testing, validation and evaluation

The testing phase is important in expert system development. The practical applicability of the expert system will largely depend on this phase. Testing expert systems is different from normal software engineering in a number of ways. First, it is difficult to test exhaustively the full code and all possible paths the reasoning process may follow. Secondly, the nature of expert systems poses some typical problems. Due to their heuristic nature the correctness of the results cannot be easily verified. A certain degree of errors may be acceptable and, moreover, an 

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Bryant, A. Adam, D.R. Taylor and R.C. Rowe, A review of expert systems for chromatography. Anal. Chim. Acta, 297 (1994) 317-347. 

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