STRUCTURED EXPERT JUDGEMENT IN VOLCANOLOGY: PAST EXPERIENCES AND NEW TOOLS

Abstract

In this seminar, we will describe some examples of performance-based expert elicitations organized for different volcanoes (e.g. in Italy, Ecuador), with different aims, challenges and results but similar approaches, all of which are based on the use of the ‘Classical Model’. In addition, we will also present a new tool (‘Elicipy’) which allows to run remotely expert elicitation sessions even with large groups of experts, overcoming technical challenges related to naïve data collection by hand-made questionnaires. This is achieved with the use of online webforms, which collect all the experts’ answers (automatically checked to avoid inconsistencies) and allow analyzing them using different weighting schemes (Classical Model as default, Equal Weight and others optionally). The workflow produces automatically the Decision Maker’s distributions for each item and finally assembles them into a power point presentation, allowing presenting the results just after the collection of the answers.