Customized Structural Elicitation

Abstract

Expert elicitation is a powerful tool when modelling complex problems, especially in the common scenario when current probabilities are unknown and data is unavailable for certain regions of the probability space. Such methods are now widely developed, well understood, and have been used to model systems in a variety of domains including climate change, food insecurity, and nuclear risk assessment Barons et al. (2018), Rougier and Crucifix (2018), Hanea et al. (2006). However, eliciting expert probabilities faithfully has proved to be a sensitive task, particularly in multivariate settings. We argue that first eliciting structure is critical to the accuracy of the model, particularly as conducting a probability elicitation is time and resource-intensive.