Author: Roger M. Cooke Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195362373 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 334
Book Description
This book is an extensive survey and critical examination of the literature on the use of expert opinion in scientific inquiry and policy making. The elicitation, representation, and use of expert opinion is increasingly important for two reasons: advancing technology leads to more and more complex decision problems, and technologists are turning in greater numbers to "expert systems" and other similar artifacts of artificial intelligence. Cooke here considers how expert opinion is being used today, how an expert's uncertainty is or should be represented, how people do or should reason with uncertainty, how the quality and usefulness of expert opinion can be assessed, and how the views of several experts might be combined. He argues for the importance of developing practical models with a transparent mathematic foundation for the use of expert opinion in science, and presents three tested models, termed "classical," "Bayesian," and "psychological scaling." Detailed case studies illustrate how they can be applied to a diversity of real problems in engineering and planning.
Author: Roger Cooke Publisher: ISBN: 9780197730379 Category : Decision making Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This volume contains an extensive survey and critical examination of current views on the use of expert opinion in scientific inquiry and policy-making.
Author: Bilal M. Ayyub Publisher: CRC Press ISBN: 9780849310874 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
Experts, despite their importance and value, can be double-edged swords. They can make valuable contributions from their deep base of knowledge, but those contributions may also contain their own biases and pet theories. Therefore, selecting experts, eliciting their opinions, and aggregating their opinions must be performed and handled carefully, with full recognition of the uncertainties inherent in those opinions. Elicitation of Expert Opinions for Uncertainty and Risks illuminates those uncertainties and builds a foundation of philosophy, background, methods, and guidelines that helps its readers effectively execute the elicitation process. Based on the first-hand experiences of the author, the book is filled with illustrations, examples, case studies, and applications that demonstrate not only the methods and successes of expert opinion elicitation, but also its pitfalls and failures. Studies show that in the future, analysts, engineers, and scientists will need to solve ever more complex problems and reach decisions with limited resources. This will lead to an increased reliance on the proper treatment of uncertainty and on the use of expert opinions. Elicitation of Expert Opinions for Uncertainty and Risks will help prepare you to better understand knowledge and ignorance, to successfully elicit expert opinions, to select appropriate expressions of those opinions, and to use various methods to model and aggregate opinions.
Author: Anthony O'Hagan Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 0470033304 Category : Mathematics Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
Elicitation is the process of extracting expert knowledge about some unknown quantity or quantities, and formulating that information as a probability distribution. Elicitation is important in situations, such as modelling the safety of nuclear installations or assessing the risk of terrorist attacks, where expert knowledge is essentially the only source of good information. It also plays a major role in other contexts by augmenting scarce observational data, through the use of Bayesian statistical methods. However, elicitation is not a simple task, and practitioners need to be aware of a wide range of research findings in order to elicit expert judgements accurately and reliably. Uncertain Judgements introduces the area, before guiding the reader through the study of appropriate elicitation methods, illustrated by a variety of multi-disciplinary examples. This is achieved by: Presenting a methodological framework for the elicitation of expert knowledge incorporating findings from both statistical and psychological research. Detailing techniques for the elicitation of a wide range of standard distributions, appropriate to the most common types of quantities. Providing a comprehensive review of the available literature and pointing to the best practice methods and future research needs. Using examples from many disciplines, including statistics, psychology, engineering and health sciences. Including an extensive glossary of statistical and psychological terms. An ideal source and guide for statisticians and psychologists with interests in expert judgement or practical applications of Bayesian analysis, Uncertain Judgements will also benefit decision-makers, risk analysts, engineers and researchers in the medical and social sciences.
Author: Jerzy W. Grzymala-Busse Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 146153982X Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 242
Book Description
3. Textbook for a course in expert systems,if an emphasis is placed on Chapters 1 to 3 and on a selection of material from Chapters 4 to 7. There is also the option of using an additional commercially available sheU for a programming project. In assigning a programming project, the instructor may use any part of a great variety of books covering many subjects, such as car repair. Instructions for mostofthe "weekend mechanic" books are close stylisticaUy to expert system rules. Contents Chapter 1 gives an introduction to the subject matter; it briefly presents basic concepts, history, and some perspectives ofexpert systems. Then itpresents the architecture of an expert system and explains the stages of building an expert system. The concept of uncertainty in expert systems and the necessity of deal ing with the phenomenon are then presented. The chapter ends with the descrip tion of taxonomy ofexpert systems. Chapter 2 focuses on knowledge representation. Four basic ways to repre sent knowledge in expert systems are presented: first-order logic, production sys tems, semantic nets, and frames. Chapter 3 contains material about knowledge acquisition. Among machine learning techniques, a methodofrule learning from examples is explained in de tail. Then problems ofrule-base verification are discussed. In particular, both consistency and completeness oftherule base are presented.
Author: Kostas Kampourakis Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190871687 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
Scientific knowledge is the most solid and robust kind of knowledge that humans have because of the self-correcting character inherent in its own processes. Nevertheless, anti-evolutionists, climate denialists, and anti-vaxxers, among others, question some of the best-established scientific findings, making claims that are unsupported by empirical evidence. A common aspect of these claims is the reference to the uncertainties in these areas of research, which leads to the conclusion that science is uncertain about evolution, climate change, and vaccination, among others. The truth of the matter is that while the broad picture is clear, there exist--and will always exist--uncertainties about the details of the respective phenomena. In this book Kampourakis and McCain show that uncertainty is an inherent feature of science that does not devalue it. In contrast, uncertainty actually makes science advance because it motivates further research. The first book of its kind, Uncertainty draws on philosophy of science to explain what uncertainty in science is and how it makes science advance. It contrasts evolution, climate change, and vaccination, where the uncertainties are exaggerated, to genetic testing and forensic science where the uncertainties are usually overlooked. Kampourakis and McCain discuss the scientific, psychological, and philosophical aspects of uncertainty in order to explain what it is really about, what kind of problems it actually poses, and why it ultimately makes science advance. Contrary to the public representations of scientific findings and conclusions that produce an intuitive but distorted view of science as certain, we need to understand and learn to live with uncertainty in science.
Author: Millett Granger Morgan Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 113993581X Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 422
Book Description
The authors explain the ways in which uncertainty is an important factor in the problems of risk and policy analysis. This book outlines the source and nature of uncertainty, discusses techniques for obtaining and using expert judgment, and reviews a variety of simple and advanced methods for analyzing uncertainty.
Author: S.O. Funtowicz Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 9400906218 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 231
Book Description
This book explains the notational system NUSAP (Numeral, Unit, Spread, Assessment, Pedigree) and applies it to several examples from the environmental sciences. The authors are now making further extensions of NUSAP, including an algorithm for the propagation of quality-grades through models used in risk and safety studies. They are also developing the concept of `Post-normal Science', in which quality assurance of information requires the participation of `extended peer-communities' lying outside the traditional expertise.
Author: Michael Heazle Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136530320 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 205
Book Description
Uncertainty in Policy Making explores how uncertainty is interpreted and used by policy makers, experts and politicians. It argues that conventional notions of rational, evidence-based policy making - hailed by governments and organisations across the world as the only way to make good policy - is an impossible aim in highly complex and uncertain environments; the blind pursuit of such a 'rational' goal is in fact irrational in a world of competing values and interests. The book centres around two high-profile and important case studies: the Iraq war and climate change policy in the US, UK and Australia. Based on three years' research, including interviews with experts such as Hans Blix, Paul Pillar, and Brian Jones, these two case studies show that the treatment of uncertainty issues in specialist advice is largely determined by how well the advice fits with or contradicts the policy goals and orientation of the policy elite. Instead of allowing the debates to be side-tracked by arguments over whose science or expert advice is 'more right', we must accept that uncertainty in complex issues is unavoidable and recognise the values and interests that lie at the heart of the issues. The book offers a 'hedging' approach which will enable policy makers to manage rather than eliminate uncertainty.
Author: Bilal Ayyub Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 9780792380306 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 414
Book Description
Uncertainty has been of concern to engineers, managers and . scientists for many centuries. In management sciences there have existed definitions of uncertainty in a rather narrow sense since the beginning of this century. In engineering and uncertainty has for a long time been considered as in sciences, however, synonymous with random, stochastic, statistic, or probabilistic. Only since the early sixties views on uncertainty have ~ecome more heterogeneous and more tools to model uncertainty than statistics have been proposed by several scientists. The problem of modeling uncertainty adequately has become more important the more complex systems have become, the faster the scientific and engineering world develops, and the more important, but also more difficult, forecasting of future states of systems have become. The first question one should probably ask is whether uncertainty is a phenomenon, a feature of real world systems, a state of mind or a label for a situation in which a human being wants to make statements about phenomena, i. e. , reality, models, and theories, respectively. One cart also ask whether uncertainty is an objective fact or just a subjective impression which is closely related to individual persons. Whether uncertainty is an objective feature of physical real systems seems to be a philosophical question. This shall not be answered in this volume.
Author: Roger M. Cooke
Author: Roger Cooke
Author: Bilal M. Ayyub
Author: Anthony O'Hagan
Author: Jerzy W. Grzymala-Busse
Author: Kostas Kampourakis
Author: Millett Granger Morgan
Author: S.O. Funtowicz
Author: Michael Heazle
Author: Bilal Ayyub