BACKGROUND: The intrinsic mechanism of multimorbidity is difficult to recognize and prediction and diagnosis are difficult to carry out accordingly. Bayesian networks can help to diagnose multimorbidity in health care, but it is difficult to obtain the conditional probability table (CPT) because of the lack of clinically statistical data.
OBJECTIVE: Today, expert knowledge and experience are increasingly used in training Bayesian networks in order to help predict or diagnose diseases, but the CPT in Bayesian networks is usually irrational or ineffective for ignoring realistic constraints especially in multimorbidity.
METHODS: In order to solve these problems, an evidence reasoning(ER) approach is employed to extract and fuse inference data from experts using a belief distribution and recursive ER algorithm, based on which evidence reasoning method for constructing conditional probability tables in Bayesian network of multimorbidity is presented step by step.
RESULTS: A multimorbidity numerical example is used to demonstrate the method and prove its feasibility and application. Bayesian network can be determined as long as the inference assessment is inferred by each expert according to his/her knowledge or experience.
CONCLUSIONS: Our method is more effective than existing methods for extracting expert inference data accurately and is fused effectively for constructing CPTs in a Bayesian network of multimorbidity.
