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Confidence in risk assessments
Author(s) -
Rougier Jonathan
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of the royal statistical society: series a (statistics in society)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.103
H-Index - 84
eISSN - 1467-985X
pISSN - 0964-1998
DOI - 10.1111/rssa.12445
Subject(s) - confidence interval , risk assessment , event (particle physics) , risk analysis (engineering) , computer science , statistics , mathematics , medicine , physics , computer security , quantum mechanics
Summary Risk is assessed with varying degrees of confidence, and the degree of confidence is relevant to the risk manager. The paper proposes an operational framework for representing confidence, based on an expert's current beliefs about how her beliefs might be different in the future. Two modelling simplifications, ‘no unknown unknowns’ and a homogeneous Poisson process, make this framework trivial to apply. This is illustrated for assessing an exceedance probability for a large event, with volcanic risk as a specific example. The paper ends with a discussion about risk and confidence assessments for national scale risk assessment, including several further illustrations.