Fission is the dominant decay channel of super-heavy elements formed in heavy ions collisions. The probability of synthesizing heavy or super-heavy nuclei in fusion-evaporation reactions is then very sensitive to the height of their fission barriers. This contribution will firstly address the influence of theoretical uncertainty on excitation functions. Our second aim is to investigate the inverse problem, i.e., what information about the fission barriers can be extracted from excitation functions? For this purpose, Bayesian methods have been used with a simplified toy model.