Does Query-Based Diagnostics Work?

Query-based diagnostics (Agosta, Gardos, & Druzdzel, 2008) offers passive, incremental construction of diagnostic models that rest on the interaction between a diagnostician and a computer-based diagnostic system. Effectively, this approach minimizes knowledge engineering, the main bottleneck in practical application of Bayesian networks. While this idea is appealing, it has undergone only limited testing in practice. We describe a series of experiments that subject a prototype implementing passive, incremental model construction to a rigorous practical test. We show that the prototype’s diagnostic accuracy reaches reasonable levels after merely tens of cases and continues to increase with the number of cases, comparing favorably to state of the art approaches based on learning.