Customer Reviews

Uncertainty: A Guide to Dealing with Uncertainty in Quantitative Risk and Policy Analysis

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I work in the mining industry and most activities which are carried out in the mining industry involve an element of risk. Decisions must be made in a climate of uncertainty and the outcome is dependent on circumstances & events that in many cases are simply beyond the control of the decision-maker. The subjects of uncertainty and risk are thus highly topical in the mining industry today. This book is an excellent starting point for geologists and engineers who wish to get to grips with the conceptual and philosophical basis of uncertainty assessment as well as a sound source of information about the specifics of modeling and other techniques.

The authors use of the word 'policy' should not be a deterrent: this is a fundamentally technical book. They use the word policy to mean '...to evaluate, order and structure incomplete knowledge so as to allow
decisions to be made with as complete an understanding as possible of the current state of knowledge, its limitations and its implications'.

The book is set out logically and comprises:

1. An overview including philosophical frameworks, an extended discussion of the nature, types and sources of uncertainty, and an introduction to the required probability and statistical theory (Ch. 1-4);
2. A good summary of the state of research about 'human judgments of uncertainty' and performance of probability assessments (Ch. 6-7). The psychology of uncertainty assessments, notions of subjectivity,
methods of evaluating subjective risk scores, and discussion of the role of 'experts' are covered well. Readers interested in these topics might also want to obtain James Reasons' book 'Human Error' (1990,Cambridge University Press; ISBN 0 521 31419 4).
3. Two chapters on technical tools and approaches. Ch. 8 covers the propagation and analysis of uncertainty, and the following chapter gives good guidance on the graphical presentation of uncertainty.
4. Ch. 10 & Ch. 11 present discussion of large, complex policy models and some specific guidance on software,& are probably least interesting to a mining audience.
5. The final chapter (Ch. 12) is entitled 'the value of knowing how little you know' and includes presentation of methods for establishing the expected value of including uncertainty (EVIU).

The book is clearly written, well-informed and extensively referenced. It's a bargain.

I've been trying to get more indepth involvement in the topic of risk and risk management at work. I found this from an Amazon partner at a really great price and decided to give it a whirl. It is a bit outdated but has a really good bunch of material that is surprisingly tractable given that in my experience books written in this timeframe tended to be pretty hard to use without a professor holding your hand. This one, in that regard, is somewhat typical but was surprisingly better than I would have expected. This is a definite keeper.

The authors have nailed this one. A very complete treatment of the field. I rarely see a good review of decision theory that includes comprehensive research in calibrated probability assessments. But they cover the spectrum from basic decision theory to Monte Carlo simulations and everything in between.

The decision psychology was particularly comprehensive for a book of this genre.

Stochastic analysis, distributions, Monte-Carlo. All buzz-words whose meanings become clear with the aid of this vital tool.