A Perspective on Confidence and Its Use in Focusing Attention During Knowledge Acquisition

David Beckerman and Holly Jimison Medical Computer Science Group Knowledge Systems Laboratory Stanford University Medical School Office Building, Room 215 Stanford, California 94305 We examine a Bayesian approach for accommodating beliefs and preferences that are held with partial confidence. An important notion highlighted by the method is that additional modeling can be valuable when complete confidence is lacking. We develop a meta-decision-analytic approach to balance the benefits of additional modeling with associated costs. We show how the approach can be used during knowledge acquisition to focus the attention of a knowledge engineer or expert on parts of a decision model that deserve additional refinement.