Bayesian Case-Exclusion and Explainable AI (XAI) for Sustainable Farming

The 29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence - 17th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-PRICAI-20), Yokohama, Japan, January 2021 (Conference postponed due to COVID-19 pandemic) Smart agriculture (SmartAg) has emerged as a rich domain for AI-driven decision support systems (DSS); however, it is often challenged by user-adoption issues. This paper reports a case-based reasoning system, PBI-CBR, that predicts grass growth for dairy farmers, that combines predictive accuracy and explanations to improve user adoption. PBI-CBR’s key novelty is its use of Bayesian methods for case-base maintenance in a regression domain. Experiments report the tradeoff between predictive accuracy and explanatory capability for different variants of PBI-CBR, and how updating Bayesian priors each year improves performance. Science Foundation Ireland Insight Research Centre