Diagnosis is a well known task in the medical and the physical domain. However, in the financial domain it is not so clear what is encompassed by financial diagnosis. In practice, financial analysts and managers often encounter diagnostic tasks that incorporate much financial data. The objective of this article is to characterise financial diagnosis in order to indicate guidelines for automation of financial diag nosis. We will start with a general, domain independent, description of the problem of diagnosis. Further, we will compare the problem of financial diagnosis with diagnostic problems from the medical and physical domains. We will not give a complete survey of diagnostic research performed in these domains, but look instead at domain specific features that constitute points of comparison with financial diagnosis.
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