Learning Qualitative Models

In general, modeling is a complex and creative task, and building qualitative models is no exception. One way of automating this task is by means of machine learning. Observed behaviors of a modeled system are used as examples for a learning algorithm that constructs a model that is consistent with the data. In this article, we review approaches to learning qualitative models, either from numeric data or qualitative observations. However, an important practical question is how do we construct qualitative models in the first place.