The performance of a product that is being designed is affected by variations in material, manufacturing process, use, and environmental variables. As a consequence of uncertainties in these factors, some items may fail. Failure is taken very generally, but we assume that it is a random event that occurs at most once in the lifetime of an item. The designer wants the probability of failure to b...

In the context of quality assurance strategies, statistical process control techniques and conformance testing are necessary to perform a correct quality auditing of process outcomes. However, data collection is based on measurements and every measurement is intrinsically affected by uncertainty. Even if adopted instruments are in a condition of metrological confirmation, random and systematic ...

A complete description of intelligent or cognitive systems always requires a model of reasoning. In real world situations reasoning is never sharp. Therefore an interval statistical formalism is presented for reasoning under conditions of uncertainty on diierent levels. After a short outline of the theoretical foundations, the possibilities for a representation of psychological insights are dis...

Decisions in the environmental and in particular the climate domain are burdened with uncertainty. Here, we focus on uncertainties faced by individuals when making decisions about environmental behavior, and we use the statistical sampling framework to develop a classification of different sources of uncertainty they encounter. We then map these sources to different public policy strategies aim...

Graphic methods for displaying uncertainty are often the most concise and informative way to communicate abstract concepts. Presentation methods currently in use for the display and interpretation of scientific uncertainty are reviewed. Numerous subjective and objective uncertainty display methods are presented, including qualitative assessments, node and arrow diagrams, standard statistical me...

This paper describes a methodology to asses the uncertainty in seismic hazard estimates at particular sites. A variant of the bootstrap statistical method is used to combine the uncertainty due to earthquake catalog incompleteness, earthquake magnitude, and recurrence and attenuation models used. The uncertainty measure is provided in the form of a confidence interval. Comparisons of this metho...

People often have erroneous intuitions about the results of uncertain processes, such as scientific experiments. Many uncertainty visualizations assume considerable statistical knowledge, but have been shown to prompt erroneous conclusions even when users possess this knowledge. Active learning approaches been shown to improve statistical reasoning, but are rarely applied in visualizing uncerta...

The effect of measurement uncertainty on estimates and decisions performed under a regime of quality control and improvement, is considered in this paper. Standard statistical quality tools are analyzed such as control charts and instrument calibration procedures. Their performance is characterized under the assumption of both normally and uniformly distributed measurement uncertainty. Exact an...

Statistical modeling techniques have been applied successfully to natural language processing tasks such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and statistical machine translation (SMT). Since most statistical approaches rely heavily on availability of data and the underlying model assumptions, reduction in uncertainty is critical to their optimal performance. In speech translation, the uncertai...