Better Models

At https://phys.org/print413431868.html … Sent in by William. Yakov Ben-Haim, a professor of mechanical engineering in Haifa, has investigated what he calls an 'innovative dilemma' – a model that is innovative by including new concepts may come up with results more likely to be prone to error than a standard state of the art model. There is a tendency to add more and more information as it is gleaned to models used right across the disciplines from engineering to economics and climate change. Not all progress is an actual improvement. As a lot of research nowadays revolves around modeling and computer simulation, some of it extremely dense in nature, does this mean there is a problem? The paper is published in The Proceedings of the Royal Society A (May 2017). The idea seems to show that some models work better for different arguments, and innovative offerings (the complicated ones) may be okay at a more severe trade-off than simple models. In other words, the more complex a model it the more difficult it is to predict a 'rare' event.