Approximations in diagnosis: motivations and techniques

Abstract

We argue that diagnosis should not be seen as solving a problem with a unique definition, but rather that there exists a whole space of reasonable notions of diagnosis. These notions can be seen as mutual approximations. We present a number of reasons for choosing among different notions of diagnosis. We also present an exhaustive categorisation of techniques that can be employed to obtain approximations, as well as a number of specific example techniques for each category. We also show that it is possible to characterise the relations between the approximations obtained by these techniques