Posts Tagged ‘evidence’

Evidence Informatics

January 20th, 2015

I sent off my revised abstract to ECA Lisbon 2015, the European Conference on Argumentation. Evidence informatics, in 75 words:

Reasoning and decision-making are common throughout human activity. Increasingly, human reasoning is mediated by information technology, either to support collective action at a distance, or to support individual decision-making and sense-making.

We will describe the nascent field of “evidence informatics”, which considers how to structure reasoning and evidence. Comparing and contrasting evidence support tools in different disciplines will help determine reusable underlying principles, shared between fields such as legal informatics, evidence-based policy, and cognitive ergonomics.

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Four types of evidence

May 17th, 2013

A great image “Four types of evidence” appears in a recent paper on probabalistic argumentation schemes ((‘Dempster-Shafer Argument Schemes‘ by Yuqing Tang, Nir Oren, Simon Parsons, and Katia Sycara (2013) in Proceedings of ArgMAS 2013.)). The delineation of 4 types of evidence ((These, the authors mention, were drawn from an earlier technical report: K. Stentz and S. Ferson. Combination of evidence in Dempster-Shafer theory. Technical Report SAND 2002-0835, Sandia National Laboratories, 2002. See especially pages 10-13. The context in that technical report, is sensor fusion using Dempster-Shafer Theory, which as I have since learned, is a common approach to combination of evidence.)) serves the larger goal of the paper — which is to describe how to combine evidence of different types.

Four Types of Evidence, from Tang et al. ArgMAS2013
Four Types of Evidence, from Tang et al. ArgMAS2013

The four types of evidence depicted are:

  1. Consonant Evidence – each set is wholly contained in another (all sets can be arranged in a nested series of subsets)
  2. Consistent Evidence – have a common element (nonempty intersection of all sets)
  3. Disjoint Evidence – in which there is no overlap (pairwise disjoint intersection of sets)
  4. Arbitrary Evidence – where none of the three preceding situations holds (i.e. there is no consensus but some agreement)

Evidence classification could possibly be thought of in conjunction with argument classification; for the latter, see my earlier musings Towards a Catalog of Argumentation Patterns.

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