title: Automated critiquing of medical decision trees.
abstract: The authors developed a decision tree-critiquing program (called BUNYAN) that identifies potential modeling errors in medical decision trees. The program's critiques are based on the structure of a decision problem, obtained from an abstract description specifying only the basic semantic categories of the model's components. A taxonomy of node and branch types supplies the primitive building blocks for representing decision trees. Bunyan detects potential problems in a model by matching general pattern expressions that refer to these primitives. A small set of general principles justifies critiquing rules that detect four categories of potential structural problems: impossible strategies, dominated strategies, unaccountable violations of symmetry, and omission of apparently reasonable strategies. Although critiquing based on structure alone has clear limitations, principled structural analysis constitutes the core of a methodology for reasoning about decision models.
authors: Clinical Decision Making Group MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
authors: M P
authors: MP
authors: Wellman
authors: M H
authors: MH
authors: Eckman
authors: C
authors: C
authors: Fleming
authors: S L
authors: SL
authors: Marshall
authors: F A
authors: FA
authors: Sonnenberg
authors: S G
authors: SG
authors: Pauker
mesh_terms: D003663:Decision Trees; D012984:Software