Automated selection of mathematical software

Abstract

Current approaches to recommending mathematical software are qualitative and categorical. These approaches are unsatisfactory when the problem to be solved has features that can “trade-off” in the recommendation process. A quantitative system is proposed that permits tradeoffs and can be built and modified incrementally. This quantitative approach extends other knowledge-engineering techniques in its knowledge representation and aggregation facilities. The system is demonstrated on the domain of ordinary differential equation initial value problems. The results are significantly superior to an existing qualitative (decision tree) system.