Hassall, Kirsty L.Dailey, GordonZawadzka, JoannaMilne, Alice E.Harris, Jim A.Corstanje, RonaldWhitmore, Andrew P.2019-10-092019-10-092019-10-01Hassall KL, Dailey G, Zawadzka J, Milne AE, Harris JA, Corstanje R and Whitmore AP. Facilitating the elicitation of beliefs for use in Bayesian Belief modelling. Environmental Modelling and Software, Volume 122, December 2019, Article number 1045391364-8152https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2019.104539http://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/handle/1826/14598Expert opinion is increasingly being used to inform Bayesian Belief Networks, in particular to define the conditional dependencies modelled by the graphical structure. The elicitation of such expert opinion remains a major challenge due to both the quantity of information required and the ability of experts to quantify subjective beliefs effectively. In this work, we introduce a method designed to initialise conditional probability tables based on a small number of simple questions that capture the overall shape of a conditional probability distribution before enabling the expert to refine their results in an efficient way. These methods have been incorporated into a software Application for Conditional probability Elicitation (ACE), freely available at https://github.com/KirstyLHassall/ACE Hassall (2019)enAttribution 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Bayes netsBelief networksExpert elicitationConditional probability tablesArticle