When Good Enough Is Best

When Good Enough Is Best

In this issue of Neuron, Rinberg et al. show that mice use a speed-accuracy tradeoff in odor discrimination. Shorter sampling results in high performance for easy problems, and enforced longer sampling results in higher accuracy for difficult problems, but mice freely choose intermediate sampling durations and accuracy varies with difficulty. Reward value and task requirements may determine sam...

Only the best is good enough.

When Is a Confidence Measure Good Enough?

Confidence estimation has recently become a hot topic in image processing and computer vision. Yet, several definitions exist of the term ”confidence” which are sometimes used interchangeably. This is a position paper, in which we aim to give an overview on existing definitions, thereby clarifying the meaning of the used terms to facilitate further research in this field. Based on these clarifi...

Risk Criteria – When is low enough good enough ?

Criteria are used to help decide whether the risk associated with a project or activity is low enough to proceed. The key question then, is when is low enough good enough? This paper describes the flexible framework in use in the oil, gas and petrochemical industries for deciding on the tolerability of risk. The levels of individual risk that are generally accepted world-wide as intolerable are...

When second best is good enough: another probabilistic look at saturation mutagenesis.

We developed new criteria for determining the library size in a saturation mutagenesis experiment. When the number of all possible distinct variants is large, any of the top-performing variants (e.g., any of the top three) is likely to meet the design requirements, so the probability that the library contains at least one of them is a sensible criterion for determining the library size. By usin...