Distortion models for estimating human error probabilities

Abstract

Human Reliability Analysis aims at identifying, quantifying and proposing solutions to human factors causing hazardous consequences. Quantifying the influence of the human factors gives rise to human error probabilities, whose estimation is a cumbersome problem. Since these human factors are usually related to other organisational or technological factors, it has been proposed to apply probabilistic graphical models, such as Bayesian or credal networks. However, these can be problematic when conditional probabilities on missing data are involved. While the solutions proposed so far combine frequentist and subjective approaches and are in general not robust to small modifications in the dataset, in this paper we propose an alternative based on distortion models, which are a type of imprecise probabilities. We perform a comparative analysis, showing that our proposal is consistent with the previous studies while giving rise to robust estimations.