On the Use of Abduction as an Alternative to Decision Trees in Environmental Decision Support Systems

Although decision trees are frequently used in environmental decision support systems, they have shortcomings. In the case of an available model, decision trees have to be constructed manually from the model. Moreover, not all knowledge is represented in the decision tree. To overcome this issue, the author proposes the use of abductive reasoning directly applied to the available cause-effect model. In particular the abduction problem the author introduces (i.e., the problem of finding a cause for observed effects), shows how this problem can be extended to allow distinguishing between competing explanations, and discusses the integration of testing and repair actions within the framework. The latter is especially important in case of environmental decision support systems.