Modeling for Understanding v. Modeling for Numbers
Summary (1 min read)
Summary
- I draw a distinction between Modeling for Numbers, which aims to address how much, when, and where questions, and Modeling for Understanding, which aims to address how and why questions.
- For-numbers models are often empirical, which can be more accurate than their mechanistic analogues as long as they are well calibrated and predictions are made within the domain of the calibration data.
- To address how and why questions, for-understanding models have to be mechanistic.
- The use of these models is clearly important; they address pressing environmental issues and attract a large amount of research money and effort.
- The emphasis of modeling for understanding is to understand underlying mechanisms, often by stripping away extraneous detail and thereby sacrificing quantitative accuracy.
- Answers to how much, where, and when can frequently be found based on past experience using purely empirical or statistical models.
- Such models have been used for thousands of years, for example, to know when to sow crops (e.g., after the Nile flood; Janick 2002).
- Modern science relies on non-mechanistic models in many ways.
- To assess the medical risk of smoking, LaCroix and others (1991) followed 11,000 individuals, 65 years of age or older, for five years to quantify the relationship between mortality rates and smoking.
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"Modeling for Understanding v. Model..." refers background in this paper
...…system properties can be fully explained in terms of the properties of its component parts and their interactions, but that explanation might be ‘‘incompressible’’ in the sense that the system properties can only be replicated by simulation of the full complexity of the system (Bedau 2013)....
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...The resulting tabular model is purely correlative and therefore cannot address the how and why connecting smoking to mortality, but it has diagnostic and predictive value....
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...Bedau (2013) argues that some systems have interactions that are ‘‘too complex to predict exactly in practice, except by crawling the causal web.’’...
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...Modern science relies on non-mechanistic models in many ways....
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7 citations
"Modeling for Understanding v. Model..." refers methods in this paper
...The model is still used today, but mostly as a component within larger models (for example, Pao 2015)....
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6 citations
Additional excerpts
...Received 20 April 2016; accepted 17 July 2016; *Corresponding author; e-mail: erastett@mbl.edu...
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