Data Obsolescence Detection in the Light of Newly Acquired Valid
  Observations
  The information describing the conditions of a system or a person is
constantly evolving and may become obsolete and contradict other information. A
database, therefore, must be consistently updated upon the acquisition of new
valid observations that contradict obsolete ones contained in the database. In
this paper, we propose a novel approach for dealing with the information
obsolescence problem. Our approach aims to detect, in real-time, contradictions
between observations and then identify the obsolete ones, given a
representation model. Since we work within an uncertain environment
characterized by the lack of information, we choose to use a Bayesian network
as our representation model and propose a new approximate concept,
$\epsilon$-Contradiction. The new concept is parameterised by a confidence
level of having a contradiction in a set of observations. We propose a
polynomial-time algorithm for detecting obsolete information. We show that the
resulting obsolete information is better represented by an AND-OR tree than a
simple set of observations. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our
approach on a real elderly fall-prevention database and showcase how this tree
can be used to give reliable recommendations to doctors. Our experiments give
systematically and substantially very good results.
