Richard Levins has advocated the scientific merits of qualitative modeling throughout his career. He believed an excessive and uncritical focus on emulating the models used by physicists and maximizing quantitative precision was hindering biological theorizing in particular. Greater emphasis on qualitative properties of modeled systems would help counteract this tendency, and Levins subsequentl...

A Qualitative System Identification Method A method which can qualitatively identify a dynamical system according to qualitative descriptions about the behavior of the observed system is proposed . The system identification problem is well known especially in control theory . It involves the identification of the causal structure of systems according to observed behabvior . We introduce a Quali...

We present a new method for specifying temporal constraints on trajectories of dynamical systems and enforcing them during qualitative simulation. Such constraints are otherwise inexpressible using standard qualitative reasoning techniques. Trajectory constraints can be used to restrict the simulation to a region of the state space and to inject discontinuities. This capability can be used to f...

Qualitative models are predictive models that describe how changes in values of input variables affect the output variable in qualitative terms, e.g. increasing or decreasing. We describe Padé, a new method for qualitative learning which estimates partial derivatives of the target function from training data and uses them to induce qualitative models of the target function. We formulated three ...

Qualitative models are predictive models which describe how changes in values of input variables a ect the output variable in qualitative terms, e.g. increasing or decreasing. We describe Padé, a new method for qualitative learning which estimates partial derivatives of the target function from training data and uses them to induce qualitative models of the target function. We formulated three ...

The parallels between design science research and various types of qualitative research as well as the synergies between the two research paradigms have been pointed out in many recent design science research in IS (DSRIS) papers. Commonly, for example, a qualitative research method, action research, has been used or proposed for validation of a DSRIS artifact. Building on insights into the sim...

The purpose of this work is to propose a plan for future research and development of the qualitative decision support method DEX. DEX is a qualitative multi-attribute modelling method used to evaluate and analyse multiple decision alternatives in order to select the best alternative. We propose six extensions to DEX: supporting full hierarchies, using numeric attributes, probabilistic and fuzzy...