We introduce cause identification, a new problem involving classification of incident reports in the aviation domain. Specifically, given a set of pre-defined causes, a cause identification system seeks to identify all and only those causes that can explain why the aviation incident described in a given report occurred. The difficulty of cause identification stems in part from the fact that it is a multi-class, multilabel categorization task, and in part from the skewness of the class distributions and the scarcity of annotated reports. .
