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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.
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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.

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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.

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