Indicated Assessment

An indicated assessment is a type of direct (ie, unconditional) assessment in which knowing that a particular set of preconditions holds is sufficient to assign an unconditional probability distribution or a single deterministic value to an uncertain variable represented by a frontier node in a relevance diagram. For example, knowing that someone we trust has asserted that a given coin is fair and knowing that the coin will be tossed by someone with no exceptional coin-tossing abilities may be sufficient to assign a probability of one half (½) that the coin flip will come out heads. To be both valid and useful, an indicated assessment need not address all the possible cases of its associated preconditions (eg, the above example need not address the case where the coin is known not to be fair). Indicated assessments do not create new relevance diagram structure (nodes and/or arrows).

See also: creating a node and linking.