Theseus: An Expert Statistical Consultant

SYNOPTIC ABSTRACT

Two of the major problems in developing any expert system are the time and effort involved in knowledge elicitation and the less well documented area of software development. These two problems are particularly apparent in the area of statistical expert systems. Another problem is that practising statisticians tend to use only those techniques with which they are familiar. Since the area of applied statistics is so vast, it was decided to concentrate effort on a limited area of statistical expertise; the area of one-way analysis of variance and related techniques which our researches have shown to be heavily in demand. It is expected that the principles established in this area will be applicable to larger scale systems. The system has been written in Turbo Pascal and is designed to run on an IBM AT.

Keywords and Phrases:

• expert systems
• statistical analysis
• ANOVA
• multiple comparisons