The Treatment of Uncertainty in the Economic Analysis Of projects, Sensitivity and Risk Analysis
Identification and qualitative comparison of sensitivity analysis methods that havebeen used across various disciplines, and that merit consideration for application tofood safety risk assessment models, are presented in this paper. Sensitivity analysiscan help in identifying critical control points, prioritizing additional data collection orresearch, and verifying and validating a model. Ten sensitivity analysis methods,including four mathematical methods, five statistical methods and one graphicalmethod, are identified. The selected methods are compared on the basis of theirapplicability to different types of models, computational issues such as initial datarequirement and complexity of their application, representation of the sensitivity, andthe specific uses of these methods. Applications of these methods are illustrated withexamples from various fields. No one method is clearly best for food safety risk models. In general, use of two or more methods, preferably with dissimilar theoretical foundations, may be needed to increase confidence in the ranking of key inputs