In general, sensitivity analysis attempts to determine the sensitivity of the output of a computation to small changes in the input.
An expert system should be relatively insensitive to small changes in the input or CF's; high sensitivity indicates bad design.
The sensitivity of MYCIN to small changes in CF values has been empirically tested; MYCIN was found to be relatively insensitive to CF values.
In part, this is due to the fact that MYCIN ``plays it safe:'' it treats for all organisms found with CF > .2.