KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURES AND EVIDENTIAL REASONING IN DECISION ANALYSIS.

The roles played by decision factors in making complex subjective decisions are characterized by how these factors affect the overall decision. Evidence that partially matches a factor is evaluated, and then effective computational rules are applied to these roles to form an appropriate aggregation of the evidence. The use of this technique supports the expression of deeper levels of causality, and may also preserve the cognitive structure of the decision maker better than the usual weighting methods, certainty-factor or other probabilistic models can.