Evaluation of reliability of a decision-making process based on pattern recognition

In recent years, all kinds of assistance to decision-making processes have become of great importance. In many areas of life, technology, and science, computation machines, i.e. computers, assist people in making decisions; in some particular cases, computers are even able to make these decisions themselves. There are, admittedly, many situations, i.e. in flight control, airport traffic, or biomedical data analysis, where even decisions made by the most efficient algorithm (or the most efficient machine) must be confirmed by a man. Nevertheless, in many disciplines, such as finance, psychology, medicine, or biology, mechanisms assisting the decision-making process facilitate work significantly. One of the key issues is the reliability of made decisions. However, this issue is often passed over due to great increase in the amount of data processed by those systems, what forces the designers to focus on the systems' efficiency. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.