Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-fv566 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-16T23:32:28.476Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Making Confident Decisions with Model Ensembles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Joe Roussos ,
Richard Bradley  and
Roman Frigg
Roman Frigg
Affiliation:
To contact the authors, please write to: Joe Roussos, Institute for Futures Studies, Holländargatan 13, 101 31 Stockholm, Sweden; e-mail: joe.roussos@iffs.se.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Many policy decisions take input from collections of scientific models. Such decisions face significant and often poorly understood uncertainty. We rework the so-called confidence approach to tackle decision-making under severe uncertainty with multiple models, and we illustrate the approach with a case study: insurance pricing using hurricane models. The confidence approach has important consequences for this case and offers a powerful framework for a wide class of problems. We end by discussing different ways in which model ensembles can feed information into the approach, appropriate to different collections of models.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 88 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 439 - 460
Copyright
Copyright 2021 by the Philosophy of Science Association. All rights reserved.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

We thank Tom Philp for numerous discussions about hurricane modeling and for his helpful advice on navigating the hurricane science literature. Thanks also to Jan-Willem Romeijn, Sean Gryb, Simon Dietz, and Jonathan Livengood for their comments on earlier drafts.

References

Armstrong, J. Scott. 2001. “Combining Forecasts.” In Principles of Forecasting, 417–39. Boston: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Australian Bureau of Meteorology. 2017. “Forecast Verification.” /.Google Scholar
Betz, Gregor. 2009. “Underdetermination, Model-Ensembles and Surprises: On the Epistemology of Scenario-Analysis in Climatology.” Journal for General Philosophy of Science 40:3–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Betz, Gregor. 2013. “In Defence of the Value Free Ideal.” European Journal for Philosophy of Science 3:207–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Booth, Ben B. B., Dunstone, Nick J., Halloran, Paul R., Andrews, Timothy, and Bellouin, Nicolas. 2012. “Aerosols Implicated as a Prime Driver of Twentieth-Century North Atlantic Climate Variability.” Nature 484 (7393): 228–32..CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bradley, Richard. 2017. Decision Theory with a Human Face. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bradley, Seamus. 2019. “Imprecise Probabilities.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Zalta, Edward N.. Stanford, CA: Stanford University. .Google Scholar
Clemen, Robert T. 1989. “Combining Forecasts: A Review and Annotated Bibliography.” International Journal of Forecasting 5 (4): 559–83..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dietrich, Franz, and List, Christian. 2016. “Probabilistic Opinion Pooling.” In Oxford Handbook of Probability and Philosophy, ed. Hajek, Alan and Hitchcock, Christopher. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Enfield, David B., and Cid-Serrano, Luis. 2006. “Projecting the Risk of Future Climate Shifts.” International Journal of Climatology 26 (7): 885–95..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
FCHLPM (Florida Commission on Hurricane Loss Projection Methodology). 2007. “Report to the Florida House of Representatives Comparison of Hurricane Loss Projection Models.” .Google Scholar
FCHLPM (Florida Commission on Hurricane Loss Projection Methodology). 2015. “Current Year 2015 Modeler Submissions.” .Google Scholar
Frigg, Roman, Thompson, Erica, and Werndl, Charlotte. 2015. “Philosophy of Climate Science.” Pt. 2, “Modelling Climate Change.” Philosophy Compass 10 (12): 965–77..Google Scholar
Gilboa, Itzhak, and Marinacci, Massimo. 2013. “Ambiguity and the Bayesian Paradigm.” In Advances in Economics and Econometrics: Theory and Applications, ed. Acemoglu, D., Arellano, M., and Dekel, E.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gilboa, Itzhak, and Schmeidler, David. 1989. “Maxmin Expected Utility with Non-unique Prior.” Journal of Mathematical Economics 18 (2): 141–53..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guin, Jayanta. 2010. “Understanding Uncertainty.” AIR Worldwide, March 16. .Google Scholar
Hansen, Lars Peter, and Sargent, Thomas J.. 1982. Robustness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Heal, G., and Milner, A.. 2014. “Uncertainty and Decision Making in Climate Change Economics.” Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 8:120–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Helgeson, Casey, Bradley, Richard, and Hill, Brian. 2018. “Combining Probability with Qualitative Degree-of-Certainty Assessment.” Climatic Change 149 (3–4): 517–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hill, Brian. 2013. “Confidence and Decision.” Games and Economic Behavior 82:675–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hill, Brian. 2016. “Incomplete Preferences and Confidence.” Journal of Mathematical Economics 65 (August): 83–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hill, Brian. 2019. “Confidence in Beliefs and Rational Decision Making.” Economics and Philosophy 35 (2): 223–58..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Insurance ERM. 2018. “RMS Responds to AIR’s Attack on Hurricane Risk Modelling.” Insurance ERM, May 29. .Google Scholar
Jewson, Stephen, Bellone, Enrica, Laepple, Thomas, Nzerem, Kechi, Shree, Khare, Lonfat, Manuel, Shay, Adam O., Penzer, Jeremy, and Coughlin, Katie. 2009. “Five Year Prediction of the Number of Hurricanes That Make United States Landfall.” In Hurricanes and Climate Change, ed. Elsner, James B. and Jagger, Thomas H.. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Keynes, John Maynard. 1921. A Treatise on Probability. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Klibanoff, Peter, Marinacci, Massimo, and Mukerji, Sujoy. 2005. “A Smooth Model of Decision Making under Ambiguity.” Econometrica 73 (6): 1849–92..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knutti, Reto. 2010. “The End of Model Democracy?” Climate Change 102:395–404.10.1007/s10584-010-9800-2CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kriegler, Elmar. 2007. “Updating and Testing Beliefs: An Open Version of Bayes’ Rule.” In Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications, ed. Gert de Cooman, Jiřina Vejnarová, and Zaffalon, Marco, 271–80. Prague: Action M.Google Scholar
Leitgeb, Hannes, and Pettigrew, Richard. 2010. “An Objective Justification of Bayesianism I: Measuring Inaccuracy.” Philosophy of Science 77:201–35.Google Scholar
Mach, Katharine J., and Field, Christopher B.. 2017. “Toward the Next Generation of Assessment.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 42:569–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marinacci, Massimo. 2015. “Model Uncertainty.” Journal of the European Economic Association 13:1022–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, M. Granger. 2014. “Use (and Abuse) of Expert Elicitation in Support of Decision Making for Public Policy.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 111 (20): 7176–84..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peirce, Charles S. 1878. “The Probability of Induction.” Popular Science Monthly 12.Google Scholar
Philp, Tom, Tom Sabbatelli, C. Roberston, and Wilson, Paul. 2019. “Issues of Importance to the (Re)Insurance Industry: A Timescale Perspective.” In Hurricane Risk, Vol. 1, ed. Collins, Jennifer and Walsh, Kevin. Cham: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sabbatelli, Tom. 2017. “Catastrophe Modeling.” Pt. 2. RMS Blog, September 2. .Google Scholar
Sabbatelli, Tom, and Waters, Jeff. 2015. “We’re Still All Wondering: Where Have All the Hurricanes Gone?” RMS Blog, October 27. .Google Scholar
Shome, Nilesh, Rahnama, Mohsen, Jewson, Steve, and Wilson, Paul. 2018. “Quantifying Model Uncertainty and Risk.” In Risk Modeling for Hazards and Disasters, ed. Michel, Gero, 3–46. Amsterdam: Elsevier.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stainforth, David A., Allen, M. R., Tredger, E. R., and Smith, Leonard. 2007. “Confidence, Uncertainty and Decision-Support Relevance in Climate Predictions.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 365 (June): 2145–61.Google ScholarPubMed
Stainforth, David A., Downing, T. E., Washington, R., Lopez, A., and New, M.. 2007. “Issues in the Interpretation of Climate Model Ensembles to Inform Decisions.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 365 (1857): 2163–77..Google ScholarPubMed
Stocker, Thomas F., et al. 2014. Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Stone, James. 1973. “A Theory of Capacity and the Insurance of Catastrophe Risks.” Pt. 1. Journal of Risk and Insurance 40 (2): 231–43..Google Scholar