A structured expert judgment study for a model of campylobacter transmission during broiler-chicken processing

IHJ van der Fels-Klerx, RM Cooke, MN Nauta, LHJ Goossens, AH Havelaar

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

47 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

A structured expert judgment study was organized to obtain input data for a microbial risk-assessment model describing the transmission of campylobacter during broiler-chicken processing in the Netherlands. More specially, the expert study was aimed at quantifying the uncertainty on input parameters of this model and focused on the contamination of broiler-chicken carcasses with campylobacter during processing. Following the protocol for structured expert judgment studies, expert assessments were elicited individually through subjective probability distribution functions. The classical model was used to aggregate the individual experts' distributions in order to obtain a single combined distribution per variable. Three different weighting schemes were applied, including equal weighting and performance-based weighting with and without optimalization of the combined distributions. The individual experts' weights were based on their performance on the seed variables. Results of the various weighting schemes are presented in terms of performance, robustness, and combined distributions of the seed variables and some of the query variables. All three weighting schemes had adequate performance, with the optimized combined distributions significantly outperforming both the equal weight and the nonoptimized combined distributions. Hence, this weighting scheme, having adequate robustness, was chosen for further processing of the results.
Original languageUndefined/Unknown
Pages (from-to)109-124
Number of pages16
JournalRisk Analysis: an international journal
Volume25
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2005

Keywords

  • academic journal papers
  • ZX CWTS JFIS < 1.00

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