The Use of Evidence Conflict to extend Diagnostic Models

Information Refinement and Revision for Decision Making: Modeling for Diagnostics, Prognostics, and Prediction

Volume

Papers from the 2002 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Medical practitioners are pragmatic about defining new diseases to explain rarely occurring combinations of symptoms. This paper reviews a case from the literature that introduced a new disease by comparing two Bayes network diagnostic models, one that contains the disease, the other a sub-model without it. The analysis shows how the measure of evidence conflict proposed by Jensen 1990 applies in the case of a diagnosis where conflict appears as the disease progresses. We demonstrate how such a model with a known set of diseases can be extended to include a new disease.