Reasoning about Confidence in Goal Satisfaction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Goal models are commonly used requirements engineering artefacts that capture stakeholder requirements and their inter-relationships in a way that supports reasoning about their satisfaction, trade-off analysis, and decision making. However, when there is uncertainty in the data used as evidence to evaluate goal models, it is crucial to understand the confidence or trust level in such evaluations, as uncertainty may increase the risk of making premature or incorrect decisions. Different approaches have been proposed to tackle goal model uncertainty issues and risks. However, none of them considers simple quality measures of collected data as a starting point. In this paper, we propose a Data Quality Tagging and Propagation Mechanism to compute the confidence level of a goal’s satisfaction level based on the quality of input data sources. The paper uses the Goal-oriented Requirement Language (GRL), part of the User Requirements Notation (URN) standard, in examples, with an implementation of the proposed mechanism and a case study conducted in order to demonstrate and assess the approach. The availability of computed confidence levels as an additional piece of information enables decision makers to (i) modulate the satisfaction information returned by goal models and (ii) make better-informed decisions, including looking for higher-quality data when needed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.033 | 0.238 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".