Spurious Behaviors in Qualitative Prediction

Abstract

I examine the scope and causes of the spurious behavior problem in two widely different approaches to qualitative prediction, Sacks' PLR and Kuipers' QSIM. QSIM's proliferation of spurious behaviors and PLR's limited applicability and problematic extensibility lead me to propose a third, intermediate approach to qualitative prediction called the Phase Space Geometry approach. This has the potential advantages of predicting far fewer spurious behaviors than QSIM-like approaches and being directly applicable to nonlinear systems of all orders.