Calibration of Expert Judgments in Counterterrorism Risk Assessment

This project will develop an elicitation process to assess important counterterrorism values such as adversary intent and capabilities, target vulnerabilities, and countermeasure costs, by aggregating judgments of a diverse panel of intelligence experts. In this process, experts would be asked to give medians and prediction intervals that reflect their best knowledge and levels of confidence (or uncertainty) both for the uncertain quantities of interest, and for a set of “seed variables ” whose true values are verifiable using historical or anticipated near-future data. A consensus probability distribution for the quantity of interest can then be achieved by weighting the various experts based on performance on the seed variables (and possibly other factors). Project Technical Description 1. Keywords: Risk assessment, expert elicitation, uncertainty, calibration, aggregation of judgment