Expert Knowledge Elicitation with SHELF

In all areas of industry, commerce and government, big decisions are invariably difficult because of uncertainty in various factors, which results in uncertainty about the outcome of the decision. Expert judgement is required to assess the more or less likely values of these uncertain factors. But big decisions demand the... read moregreatest possible care and the greatest possible precision in those assessments, avoiding the many pitfalls of subjective expert judgement. This is the rationale for formal expert knowledge elicitation, using a protocol based on theory and experience about how to assist experts to make judgements that most accurately reflect their knowledge, and to deliver a probability distribution to quantify just how likely each possible value of an uncertain quantity is. SHELF – the Sheffield Elicitation Framework – is just such a protocol, and one of the leading protocols in the field. SHELF is widely used in many fields, but particularly in the pharmaceutical and health care domains.