Qualitative reasoning Jllilkes use of qualitative assessments provided by subject matter experts to model facwrs such as security risk. Confidence in a result is important and useful when comparing competing results. Quantifying the confidence in an evidential reasoning result must be consistent and based on the available information. A novel method is proposed to relate confidence to the available information uncertainty in the result using fuzzy sets. Information uncertainty can be quantified through measures of non-specificity and conflict. Fuzzy values for confidence are established from information uncertainty values that lie between the measured minimum and maximum information uncertainty values.
The security risk associated with malevolent acts such as those of terrorism are often void of the historical data required for a traditional PRA. Most information available to conduct security risk assessments for these malevolent acts is obtained from subject matter experts as subjective judgements. Qualitative reasoning approaches such as approximate reasoning and evidential reasoning are useful for modeling the predicted risk from information provided by subject matter experts. Absent from these approaches is a consistent means to compare the security risk assessment results. This paper explores using entropy measures to quantify the information uncertainty associated with conflict and non-specificity in the predicted reasoning results. Extensions of previous entropy measures are presented here to quantify the nonspecificity and conflict associated with security risk assessment results obtained from qualitative reasoning models.
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