Patent ID: 11928699
Assignee: INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 10:
11. A computer program product comprising a computer readable storage medium having program instructions embodied therewith, the program instructions executable by a computing device to cause the computing device to:
obtain a natural language spatiotemporal query related to a demand of at least one product in a supply chain;
apply one or more natural language processes to the natural language spatiotemporal query to identify a context of the natural language spatiotemporal query;
determine, based at least in part on the context, one or more parameters affecting the demand of the at least one product, wherein the one or more parameters comprise at least one of one or more climate parameters and one or more disruptive event parameters;
generate a set of counterfactual queries by perturbing the natural language spatiotemporal query with respect to at least one of the one or more parameters, wherein the generating comprises traversing a search space corresponding to the one or more parameters using an iterative search-based optimization algorithm;
compute one or more confidence values for one or more corresponding demand forecasts generated by a prediction model for the set of counterfactual queries;
construct a knowledge graph comprising a set of nodes for at least a portion of the set of counterfactual queries, wherein each node in the set comprises information indicating an impact on the demand of the at least one product for at least a portion of the one or more parameters, and wherein the constructing comprises pruning one or more nodes in the set in response to determining that a given computed confidence value satisfies a corresponding confidence threshold;
in response to determining that at least one of the computed confidence values does not satisfy the corresponding confidence value threshold, automatically initiate an interactive conversation with the user, wherein the interactive conversation comprises:
generate and output at least one question to the user, wherein the at least one question is generated based at least in part on the context; and
update the at least one computed confidence value based on feedback received from the user for the at least one question; and
output, to a user interface, an explanation of a predicted demand forecast for the at least one product based at least in part on the knowledge graph.