The expert package provides tools to create and manipulate empirical statistical models using expert opinion (or judgment). Here, the latter expression refers to a specific body of techniques to elicit the distribution of a random variable when data is scarce or unavailable. Opinions on the quantiles of the distribution are sought from experts in the field and aggregated into a final estimate. ...

The expert package provides tools to create and manipulate empirical statistical models using expert opinion (or judgment). Here, the latter expression refers to a specific body of techniques to elicit the distribution of a random variable when data is scarce or unavailable. Opinions on the quantiles of the distribution are sought from experts in the field and aggregated into a final estimate. ...

AIM Presentation of the difficulties in diagnosing Münchausen syndrome by proxy. METHOD Comparison of four different conclusions in forensic psychiatric opinions issued in one case, due to the need of answering to the questions of the court, in what periods and why was the deterioration of the child's health, in connection with an allegation that the mother has acted to his detriment. In the ...

Although expert opinion, especially on medical and scientific matters, has been admitted as evidence in court increasingly often since the nineteenth century, psychological or psychiatric evidence has always been treated as a special case and has not been welcomed so readily by the courts. For more than 20 years, the extremely influential Court of Appeal decision in R. v. Turner' had the effect...

Background With an increasingly aged, frail population that holds a disproportionate amount of wealth, clinicians (especially those with expertise in older adults) may be asked with more frequency to offer a clinical opinion on testamentary capacity (TC), the mental capacity to make a will. Method This paper reviews the legal criteria as well as the empirical research on assessment tools for ...

Antisius, after examining the corpse of Julius Caesar, “opined that only one of the 23 sword wounds was deadly, namely the one perforating his thorax.” This report, dating back to the Roman Empire, seems to be the first documented use of a scientific expert witness. Experts are presumed to be persons with special reliable knowledge who share their insights through testimony so that legal issues...

The Patient Safety Committee of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery (ASMBS) encourages its members to testify in court to promote safe and responsible bariatric surgical care. The widespread availability of expert opinion to both defendants and plaintiffs is critical in meeting the Society’s social responsibility. The expert witness in a medical malpractice suit is of criti...

Organizing legislative texts into a hierarchy of legal topics enhances the access to legislation. Manually placing every part of new legislative texts in the correct place of the hierarchy, however, is expensive and slow, and therefore naturally calls for automation. In this paper, we assess the ability of machine learning methods to develop a model that automatically classifies legislative tex...

A high degree of user control has long been recognized as an important factor in the acceptance of data and information-based computer systems. Users of knowledge-based systems (KBS) also desire control but the complex approaches developed to address some of the limitations of KBS has resulted in systems controlled by knowledge engineers rather than the end-user. We offer a knowledge acquisitio...