Certainty Factor

The Certainty Factor (CF) is a way to measure how confident we are about a particular piece of information or diagnosis in decision-making systems. It assigns a value between -1 and 1, where positive numbers indicate varying degrees of belief, negative numbers show disbelief, and zero reflects uncertainty. For example, a CF of 0.7 suggests a strong belief in a hypothesis, while -0.4 indicates a moderate doubt. This system helps combine multiple pieces of uncertain information to reach a more informed conclusion, making it useful in fields like expert systems and medical diagnosis.