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In science and engineering, root cause analysis (RCA) is a method of problem solving used for identifying the root causes of faults or problems.[1] It is widely used in IT operations, manufacturing, telecommunications, industrial process control, accident analysis (e.g., in aviation,[2] rail transport, or nuclear plants), medical diagnosis, the healthcare industry (e.g., for epidemiology), etc. Root cause analysis is a form of inductive inference (first create a theory, or root, based on empirical evidence, or causes) and deductive inference (test the theory, i.e., the underlying causal mechanisms, with empirical data).
RCA can be decomposed into four steps:
RCA generally serves as input to a remediation process whereby corrective actions are taken to prevent the problem from recurring. The name of this process varies between application domains. According to ISO/IEC 31010, RCA may include these techniques: Five whys, Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), Fault tree analysis, Ishikawa diagrams, and Pareto analysis.