Automated Critiquing of Medical Decision Trees

Michael Wellman, Mark H. Eckman, Craig Fleming, Sharon L. Marshall, Frank A. Sonnenberg and Stephen G. Pauker

Medical Decision Making, 1989, vol. 9, issue 4, 272-284

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. Key words: decision trees; computer-assisted critiquing. (Med Decis Making 1989;9:272-284)

Date: 1989
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:medema:v:9:y:1989:i:4:p:272-284

DOI: 10.1177/0272989X8900900407

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