The Use of Bounding Analysis in Risk Analysis

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

The project will begin the development and demonstration of a new method to produce quantitative bounds on the risk that can be attributed to a set of environmental agents in circumstances in which conventional agent-by-agent "front-to-back" risk analysis produces results with extremely wide uncertainty bounds. The method will begin by summarizing available toxicological and epidemiological evidence on the end-point(s) in a form that facilitates easy comparisons. A constrained sum expert elicitation procedure will be developed which uses these data, together with expert judgment, to probabilistically attribute known and suspected causes of the health end-point to the observed cases. The result of this work should be a new set of methods which can be used by the risk analysis community in conjunction with more traditional risk analytic methods to bound the magnitude of possible health impacts from some types of environmental risks.