expert: Modeling Without Data Using Expert Opinion Expert opinion is a technique to do statistical modeling when data is scarse (e.g. accidents in nuclear plants) or even absent, at least for the analyst (e.g. confidential settlements in liability insurance). Opinions on the distribution of the decision random variable is sought from experts in the field. The experts give their opinion in the form of a few quantiles for the decision variable and for a set of "seed variables" for which the analyst knows the true quantiles. Results for seed variables are compared to the true values and used to determine the influence of each expert on the aggregated distribution. The package supports three different ways to aggregate the information provided by the experts in one final distribution: 1. the classical model of Cooke (1991); 2. the Bayesian model of Mendel and Sheridan (1989); 3. an ad-hoc procedure where the weight of each expert is pre- determined by the analyst. The main function of the package is expert(), a unified interface to all three methods above. The package also provides a few utility functions to display, plot or compute probabilities and quantiles from the aggregated distribution returned by expert(). Best regards, Mathieu Pigeon Institut de Statistique Universite Catholique de Louvain Voie du Roman Pays, 20 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve BELGIUM E-mail address : mathieu.pigeon at uclouvain.be _______________________________________________ R-packages mailing list R-packages at r-project.org https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-packages