Automatic Root Cause Diagnosis in Networks

An embodiment may involve: (i) obtaining a set of data records that include respective pluralities of tuples characterizing operation of communication sessions in a network and that identify hardware or software components related to the network that were involved in the communication sessions, (ii) determining degrees to which signatures in the pluralities of tuples are associated with communication problems in the network; (iii) identifying, from the degrees, a subset of the signatures most associated with the communication problems; (iv) grouping specific pairs from the subset of the signatures into equivalence classes based on co-occurrence of signatures of the specific pairs within the data records; (v) generating and pruning a dependency graph between the equivalence classes; (vi) from the equivalence classes remaining in the dependency graph, selecting a subset of the hardware or software components related to the network that are candidates for involvement with the communication problems.