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The Business Analyzer: A Second Generation Approach to Financial Decision Support

  • Conference paper
Second Generation Expert Systems

Abstract

The Business Understander is the architecture of a next generation knowledge-based facility for supporting the understanding of client businesses by Price Waterhouse practitioners. A key component is the Business Analyzer, which finds anomalies in financial results and computes explanations for them. Causal knowledge is represented in the form of constraints among financial variables, while empirical knowledge is represented as probability distributions over alternative assumptions, including modeling assumptions and assumptions about external perturbations. The task of auditing financial statements is used to illustrate the role of these types of reasoning in the Business Analyzer.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Price Waterhouse Technology Centre, 68 Willow Road, Menlo Park, CA, 94025, USA

    Walter Hamscher

Authors
  1. Walter Hamscher
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Service Systèmes Experts, Renault, 860 Quai Stalingrad, 92109, Boulogne-Billancourt, France

    Jean-Marc David

  2. Direction des Etudes et Recherches, Electricité de France, 1, Av. du Général de Gaulle, 92141, Clamart Cedex, France

    Jean-Paul Krivine

  3. School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213-3890, USA

    Reid Simmons

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© 1993 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Hamscher, W. (1993). The Business Analyzer: A Second Generation Approach to Financial Decision Support. In: David, JM., Krivine, JP., Simmons, R. (eds) Second Generation Expert Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-77927-5_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-77927-5_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-77929-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-77927-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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