Modeling Aleatory and Epistemic Uncertainty in Human Health Risk Assessment

Abstract

Risk plays an important role in the decision making process. To assess the severity and likelihood of impairment to human health from exposure to a substance or activity that under plausible circumstances can cause harm to human health is the main purpose of risk assessment. It is important to know the nature and characteristic of all available information, data or model parameters which are more generally tainted with aleatory and epistemic uncertainty or both type of uncertainty. In some situation, model parameters are affected by aleatory uncertainty and simultaneously other some parameters are affected by epistemic uncertainty, how far computation of the risk is concern, two ways to deal with the situation either transform all the uncertainties to one type of format or need for joint propagation of uncertainties. In this paper, an effort has been made to combine probability distributions, generalized fuzzy numbers, normal fuzzy numbers and generalized interval valued fuzzy numbers within the same framework.