Using Domain Knowledge to Select Solutions in Abductive Diagnosis
Frank van Harmelen, Frank Van Harmelen, Annette ten Teije · 1994
. This paper presents a novel extension to abductive reasoning in causal nets, namely the use of domain knowledge to select among alternative diagnoses. We describe how preferences among multiple causes of a given state can be expressed in terms of causal nets, and how these preferences can be used to select among alternative diagnoses. We investigate this new extension by proving a number of properties, and show how our preference scheme interacts with conventional ways of choosing among competing diagnoses. Our extension increases the expressive power of causal nets, enjoys a number of desirable properties, and compares favourably with existing proposals for expressing preferential knowledge in causal nets. 1 INTRODUCTION The standard definition of abduction in causal nets (e.g. [2]) often yields multiple possible explanations of a given set of observations, without any further means of distinguishing between these explanations. In this paper, we show how knowledge required for maki...