Shortly after the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic subsided, nine experts were invited by this journal to predict whether the epidemic would recur. A review of their opinions two years after the epidemic may prove insightful. SARS has not recurred in epidemic proportions since it ended in July 2003. Since September 2003, several laboratory associated cases occurred: in Singapor...

This paper uses the recently proposed cautious combination rule of the Transferable Belief Model to aggregate experts’ opinion on the climate sensitivity parameter. The non-independence of experts issue is dealt with by organizing experts into schools of thought, requiring non-interactivity only across but not within groups. The issue of dissonance, that is wide qualitative differences in belie...

An essential aim in Group Decision Making (GDM) problems is to achieve a high level of consensus among experts. Consensus is defined as general or widespread agreement, and it is usually modelled mathematically via a similarity function measuring how close experts’ opinions or preferences are. Similarity functions are defined based on the use of a metric describing the distance between experts’...

To face the reality of practical multiple criteria problems usually possessing characters of fuzziness, and to consider group decision making with various subjective–objective backgrounds usually participating in decision-making process. In this paper, the experts’ opinions are described by linguistic terms which can be expressed in trapezoidal (or triangular) fuzzy numbers. To make the consens...

OBJECTIVE This study is the second of four to prepare International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF; and Children and Youth version, ICF(-CY)) Core Sets for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).The objective of this study was to survey the opinions and experiences of international experts on functioning and disability in ASD. METHODS Using a protocol stipulated by the Worl...

Fast, automatic processing of texts posted on the Internet to find positive and negative attitudes towards products and companies gave sentiment analysis, an area of text mining, a significant application in predicting trends on stock markets. Opinion mining further extended the scope of the search to help companies, such as those specialising in media analysis, to automate extraction of people...

Multiple experts decision-making (MEDM) can be regarded as a situation where group of are invited to provide their opinions by evaluating the given alternatives, and then select optim...

Asset management is an increasing concern for wastewater utilities and companies. Indicators are developed for supporting the definition of investigation and rehabilitation programs. These indicators are mostly based on visual inspections, which provide major information. However, difficulty remains in the translation of a visual inspection survey into dysfunction indicators. Condition grade of...

BACKGROUND Oesophageal carcinoma is a rare disease with often dismal prognosis. Despite multiple trials addressing specific issues, currently, many questions in management remain unanswered. This work aimed to specifically address areas in the management of oesophageal cancer where high level evidence is not available, performing trials is very demanding and for many questions high-level eviden...

Many of the techniques for making decisions, including land use, depend on weight assigned each criterion. These criteria can be based a panel experts’ opinions, who assess certain decisions’ influence final objectives. opinions should contrasted to decide if they are used or select ones achieve an internal coherence. In this study, we evaluate responses provided by expert in context future env...