Belief aggregation
Open-knowledge reference entry
Belief aggregation, also called risk aggregation, opinion aggregation or probabilistic opinion pooling, is a process in which different probability distributions, produced by different experts, are combined to yield a single probability distribution.
Background
Expert opinions are often uncertain. Rather than saying e.g. "it will rain tomorrow", a weather expert may say "it will rain with probability 70% and be sunny with probability 30%". Such a statement is called a belief. Different experts may have different beliefs; for example, a different weather expert may say "it will rain with probability 60% and be sunny with probability 40%". In other words, each expert has a subjeciive probability distribution over a given set of outcomes.
A belief aggregation rule is a function that takes as input two or more probability distributions over the same set of outcomes, and returns a single probability distribution over the same space.
Applications
Documented applications of belief aggregation include:
Prediction of volcanic activity.
Predicting the likelihood of abrupt climate change.
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This entry incorporates text from “Belief aggregation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.