DOI: 10.3390/sym18081382 ISSN: 2073-8994

Design of a Risk Assessment Model for Grassroots Agricultural Product Quality and Safety Based on Bayesian Networks and Evidential Reasoning

Yijia Qiu, Yuheng Li

The quality and safety supervision of agricultural products at the grassroots level has long faced the triple superposition dilemma of small-sample sampling, multi-source evidence conflict, and risk chain evolution. Although existing data-driven models have considerable accuracy, they are difficult to leverage for intervention decisions, and the simple serial connection of traditional Bayesian networks and evidence theory cannot respond to dynamic scenarios. Aiming at this research gap, this paper constructs a dynamic risk assessment model, CIBE-DR, that deeply couples Bayesian networks with evidential reasoning. It contains three core innovations. First, the structure learning method of the causally identifiable Bayesian network embeds a graded do-calculus identifiability score covering both back-door and front-door criteria into the BDeu scoring function and combines this reward with an expert-prior divergence penalty that breaks Markov equivalence so as to realize the transition from relevance modeling to intervention decision modeling. Second, the conflict-aware adaptive evidence synthesis rule orthogonally decomposes multi-source conflict into an epistemic component and an ontological component, which are modeled respectively by Tsallis belief entropy and abductive inference over a discrete twenty-seven-point heterogeneity hypothesis space and are then fused under a reparameterized Dempster–Yager interpolation in which the two endpoints recover the two named rules under a single consistent interpretation. Third, the bidirectional closed-loop coupling mechanism between BN and ER realizes the mutual calibration between the conditional probability table and the evidence credibility prior under a Lyapunov monotone descent argument with the explicit Lipschitz bound Lθ ≤ 0.028 < 1, endowing the model with time-varying self-correction ability. Based on experiments on 156,847 sampling samples from counties and townships in East China, Central China, and Southwest China from 2021 to 2024, the proposed method achieved the best value in six of the seven evaluation indicators, with a minority recall of 0.864 ± 0.014, an intervention effect estimation error of 0.063 ± 0.005, and a dynamic response delay of 2.8 ± 0.3 days, significantly ahead of eleven mainstream baselines under the McNemar test on classification (p < 0.001) and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test on intervention-effect estimation (p < 0.001). The only indicator on which CIBE-DR does not lead is overall accuracy, which is 0.002 lower than that of Transformer; this difference does not reach statistical significance under the McNemar test (p = 0.32) and does not weaken the value of grassroots supervision in the strong-imbalance scenario where the positive rate is only 1.04%. The robustness advantage of the model is particularly prominent in the scenarios of sparse data, adversarial perturbation, and prior-graph incompleteness, and the intervention-effect estimates were additionally validated against two post-2022 policy interventions with absolute deviations of 1.4 and 1.2 percentage points respectively. These results verify the product gain and grassroots deployability of the three mechanisms.

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