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Updated: Jun 23, 2026

Evidence-based Knowledge Synthesis and Hypothesis Validation: Navigating Biomedical Knowledge Bases via Explainable AI and Agentic Systems
Published on: June 13, 2025
Computing with evidence Part I: A drug-mechanism evidence taxonomy oriented toward confidence assignment
Richard Boyce1, Carol Collins, John Horn
1Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, VALE M, PA 15260, USA. rdb20@pitt.edu
Abstract:
We present a new evidence taxonomy that, when combined with a set of inclusion criteria, enable drug experts to specify what their confidence in a drug mechanism assertion would be if it were supported by a specific set of evidence. We discuss our experience applying the taxonomy to representing drug-mechanism evidence for 16 active pharmaceutical ingredients including six members of the HMG-CoA-reductase inhibitor family (statins). All evidence was collected and entered into the Drug-Interaction Knowledge Base (DIKB); a system that can provide customized views of a body of drug-mechanism knowledge to users who do not agree about the inferential value of particular evidence types. We provide specific examples of how the DIKB's evidence model can flag when a particular use of evidence should be re-evaluated because its related conjectures are no longer valid. We also present the algorithm that the DIKB uses to identify patterns of evidence support that are indicative of fallacious reasoning by the evidence-base curators.
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