| Article ID: | iaor20114418 |
| Volume: | 39 |
| Issue: | 6 |
| Start Page Number: | 702 |
| End Page Number: | 709 |
| Publication Date: | Dec 2011 |
| Journal: | Omega |
| Authors: | de Mast Jeroen |
| Keywords: | problem solving |
This paper clarifies a class of strategies for diagnostic problem solving. General causal directions are branched into more specific explanations. Evidence eliminates all but a few branches (pruning). Well‐known methods are shown to exploit such a branch‐and‐prune strategy. Eight generic structures are proposed for branching the search tree.