Fat Tailed Distributions in Catastrophe Prediction

نویسنده

  • Louis Mello
چکیده

The notion that natural disasters can be controlled is, of course, farcical; history is permeated with examples of countless failed attempts at this pointless task; it is synonymous with trying to build a perpetual motion machine. Nonetheless, there are ways to reduce their impact on human communities, particularly by looking away from the normal hypothesis. In a press conference on the remnants of Katrina, the commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, Gen. Carl Strock, asserted: " … when the project was designed-… we figured we had a 200 or 300 year level of protection. That means that the event we were protecting from might be exceeded every 200 or 300 years. That is a 0.05% likelihood. So we had an assurance that 99.5% of this would be okay. We, unfortunately, have had that 0.5% activity here. " This argument operates under two assumptions: 1. Given that this issue is entirely based on probabilities, there is no assurance of anything at all. 2. The estimate presented is based on a Gaussian bell shaped curve, the proverbial Normal Curve. Since the late 1800s, researchers have been aware that the probability of what are called " extreme events " , i.e., events that fall on the tail ends of a statistical distribution and, as such, are the most likely not to occur, cannot always be accurately described by the bell-shaped curve. Such manner of activity is usually much more appropriately described using " fat-tailed " or the stable-Paretian class of distributions.

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عنوان ژورنال:
  • CoRR

دوره abs/cs/0512022  شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2005