Explanation and diagnosis in business assessment

An architecture for the diagnosis of a firm that combines quantitative methods with qualitative reasoning is presented. The system consists of a problem identification module and a diagnostic module. The problem identification module operates in quantitative mode to discover deviations from norm values for key variables. The diagnostic module uses both quantitative and qualitative relations to generate intuitively appealing explanations for the symptoms discovered. This architecture provides a convenient and flexible way of coding different kinds of knowledge and reasoning methods of human financial experts.<
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