[Tutor] Medical Decision-Making Question

[Fred G]

Thanks guys for all the feedback.

re Jim's comments: I completely agree that the difference b/t "slight" fever
and "returning" fever, etc will pose some problems.  My hunch is that
initially I'll just do something like make "fever" be the only one for now
w/ the obvious caveat that a few more diseases would not be eliminated than
actually should be.  Building on this, another challenging problem will be
how to code the fact that when a symptom occurs early it usually means
something else than if it returns later in the course of an illness.  I'm
not 100% sure how I'll handle this, but I think the first priority is
getting access to a dataset and getting the bot up and running before I
focus on this.

re Steve's comments: hmm, sounds like I really should take an AI class.
 This problem is just really exciting and driving me, and I'm glad you
pointed out that this will probably take a lot more time than I had
predicted.  I'm pretty motivated personally to solve it.  I had a few more
questions about your code:
a) Why did you choose not to use a dictionary to store the diseases (keys)
and their possible values (symptoms)?  That seemed the most intuitive to me,
like, what I want to do is have it such that we enter in a few symptoms and
then all the keys without those symptoms are automatically eliminated.  I've
been off and on teaching myself python for the last 6 months and have
experience in Java.  I mean, I think I want a structure like this:
1) Main class
-this class calls the diagnose_disease class based on the set of entered
symptoms and demographic information (ie age, location, season (winter,
spring, fall, etc), patient history)
2) Diagnose_disease class
-this is the heart of the project.  Based on the entered symptoms, it keeps
narrowing down the list of possible diseases.  Ideally it would ask
follow-up questions of the user to even further narrow down the list of
possible diseases, but that's going to have to wait until I get the rest
working.
3) Dictionary Class
-this class contains a *dictionary??* of all possible diseases and their
associated symptoms.  Assuming in a standardized form for now (such that
"slight_fever" and "returning_fever" are simply coded as "fever" for now,
etc).

does this seem like the best way to go about it?

re: James.  I completely agree that my first step should be getting access
to a dataset.  I need to know the format, etc of it before I really can
progress on this.
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