Corporate Evidential Decision Making in Performance Prediction Domains
  Performance prediction or forecasting sporting outcomes involves a great deal
of insight into the particular area one is dealing with, and a considerable
amount of intuition about the factors that bear on such outcomes and
performances. The mathematical Theory of Evidence offers representation
formalisms which grant experts a high degree of freedom when expressing their
subjective beliefs in the context of decision-making situations like
performance prediction. Furthermore, this reasoning framework incorporates a
powerful mechanism to systematically pool the decisions made by individual
subject matter experts. The idea behind such a combination of knowledge is to
improve the competence (quality) of the overall decision-making process. This
paper reports on a performance prediction experiment carried out during the
European Football Championship in 1996. Relying on the knowledge of four
predictors, Evidence Theory was used to forecast the final scores of all 31
matches. The results of this empirical study are very encouraging.
