Conclusion:

-Influence diagrams represent the relationships between variables. These relationships are important

because they reflect the analyst's, or the decision maker’s, knowledge about a problem.

-The construction of such a model often involves collaboration between an analyst and the decision

maker.

-This collaboration represents an exercise in knowledge acquisition — the analyst

attempts to construct a model that reflects the decision maker’s understanding of

the problem domain.

THE USAGE OF INFLUENCE DIAGRAM

• building a common understanding of “how things work”;• facilitating communication among technical experts, decision makers and

stakeholders;• integrating knowledge from different sources in decision making (e.g.,

science, TEK, etc.);• encouraging disciplined thinking about cause and effect relationships;• being explicit about uncertainty, in particular, emphasizing the existence of

competing hypotheses and facilitating informed debate about them;• defining evaluation criteria;• determining modeling and information needs directly related to the

evaluation criteria;• structuring subsequent quantitative modeling (especially when constructed

under more formalized rules to describe inter-related conditional probabilities);

• documenting the basis for and improving the transparency of expert judgments

Influence diagrams are particularly helpful

• when problems have a high degree of conditional independence,

• when compact representation of extremely large models is needed,

• when communication of the probabilistic relationships is important, or

• when the analysis requires extensive Bayesian updating