On the separation of aleatory and epistemic uncertainties in probabilistic assessments

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how the process of uncertainty designation (aleatory vs. epistemic) and subsequent separation in a two-staged nested Monte Carlo simulation approach may lead to misinterpretation of the study results, particularly with respect to the confidence (i.e., lower and upper bounds) in the estimated probabilities. Using simple examples, a critical distinction is made between first- and second-order random...