Latent effects decision analysis

DETAILED DESCRIPTION It is an object of this invention is to provide a new risk management decision-aid methodology.
It is also an object of this invention to aggregate data that are inputs (both objective and subjective) to each subsystem by a "soft aggregation" process.
It is a further object to track uncertainty whereby inputs may be entered with uncertainty measures and output uncertainty may be correspondingly determined.
It is another object to provide a technique to account for dependence between or among inputs (which is by far the most common case as opposed to independent inputs).
It is also an object of the invention to account for "importance" (contribution of each input to the output value(s)) and "sensitivity" (potential for improvement in the output due to each input(s)).
And it is an object of the invention to be able to determine "trends" for each input and output over time.
It is also an object of this invention to display inputs as they are entered, outputs as they are aggregated for overall contribution or "early alerts," in a manner that is unusually natural for humans to understand and work with (instrumentation-like displays portrayed on a computer screen) To achieve the foregoing and other objects, and in accordance with the purpose of the present invention, as embodied and broadly described herein, the present invention may comprise a method of nonlinear decision analysis, comprising providing a plurality of inputs having either positive or negative values, and determining an output representative of a decision as a function of the inputs, where the output approaches a first value asymptotically as the value of positive inputs increases, and approaches a second value asymptotically as the value of negative inputs increases.
The invention further includes instrumentation-like gage displays (giving a human-friendly interface and display of uncertainty range) for displaying inputs and outputs, an architecture of subsystem modules that are interconnected to reflect latent effects, and a "soft aggregation" combination of input data to reflect nonlinear accumulation of effects