The Bayesian Basis of Common Sense Medical Diagnosis

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 3

Knowledge Representation and Problem Solving

In the paper, we show that the objections most frequently related against the use of Bayesian statistics within the AI-in-Medicine community do not seem to hold. In particular, we will show that the independence assumptions required to make Bayesian statistics computationally feasiable are not nearly as damaging as has been claimed. We will also argue that Bayesian statistics is perfectly compatible with heuristic solu-tions to the multiple disease problem.