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How Statisticians Could Help Find That Missing Plane
- ropman76 13y agoIf this is the case, let's see it in action. There is a great deal of information about this event that has been released to the public so I am curious to see if the experts in this field can generate probable locations of the aircraft and when the aircraft is found take a look and see if following the recommendations would have found the aircraft more quickly.
- ape4 13y agoI would guess that the authorities already have some stats guys working on it.
- JetSpiegel 13y agoWhat are the odds?
- oscardelben 13y agoLast I heard they recruited a witch.
- paulgb 13y agoFrom the sounds of it he recruited himself. Malaysia has denied involvement. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/03/13/with-satellites-unsuccesful-in-plane-search-malaysian-shaman-tries-coconuts/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/03/13...
- oscardelben 13y agoThanks for pointing that out.
- Houshalter 13y agoFTA: >Despite the widespread use of Bayesian methods in searches, not every airline or government uses them — there’s no evidence the Malaysian government nor Malaysia Airlines has in the current search, though they are getting help from a team of French government investigators who worked on the Air France hunt. (The Malaysian embassy in Washington, D.C., didn’t immediately respond to an emailed request for comment, and calls to the embassy on Monday yielded an automated reply that the office was closed because of snow.) >“I suspect that they just guess, like professional baseball managers used to do before ‘Moneyball,’” said Peter Thall, a biostatistician at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
- markbnj 13y agoI was thinking yesterday that there are not _that_ many jets the size of the 777 in the world, and the location of most of them can probably be detected by U.S. military satellites. If that satellite data were correlated with data from the airlines on the location of their planes, some much smaller set should emerge that consists of planes whose location does not have an official explanation.
- davidw 13y agoCommercial satellites are ok for seeing planes for that matter. It's knowing where and when to look that's important. I don't think that even the US military constantly monitors vast tracts of empty ocean on the off chance that a plane might crash there. https://maps.google.com/maps?q=35%C2%B003%E2%80%B234%E2%80%B3N+118%C2%B009%E2%80%B206%E2%80%B3W&hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=35.062179,-118.158946&spn=0.03172,0.066047&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=61.711173,135.263672&t=h&z=15 https://maps.google.com/maps?q=35%C2%B003%E2%80%B234%E2%80%B... For instance, these two maps are pretty similar in scale (I couldn't make Maps do the exact same scale though) https://maps.google.com/?ll=44.527843,13.227539&spn=14.141703,33.815918&t=h&z=6 https://maps.google.com/?ll=44.527843,13.227539&spn=14.14170... https://maps.google.com/?ll=-32.509762,80.991211&spn=16.698429,33.815918&t=h&z=6 https://maps.google.com/?ll=-32.509762,80.991211&spn=16.6984... That's a "whole lot of nothin'".
- Create 13y agoI don't think that even the US military constantly monitors vast tracts of empty ocean on the off chance that a plane might crash there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS
- davidw 13y agoLines (chains, as per your article) have a "lot less area" than rectangles do, though. In other words, it's way, way easier to answer "what has crossed this line, at what time?" than "is there a needle in this haystack as large as Europe?", especially when the rectangle in question is basically of zero interest 99.9999% of the time, and you're tying up resources that could be pointed at China, North Korea, Russia, Iran, San Marino or other more 'interesting' places. Furthermore, as your article mentions, they decommissioned some of that because it was too expensive and didn't serve much purpose with the end of the cold war. Even those guys' budgets are not unlimited.
- dsugarman 13y agoit sounds like the strength of the bayesian model is completely dependant on the ability of experts to provide accurate statistical guesses
- thearn4 13y agoBayesian inference is definitely only as good as the quality of the chosen prior, if the number of samples is low.
- ajtulloch 13y agoI don't think this is technically correct - as Bernstein-Von Mises guarantee under certain conditions that the posterior is independent of the prior after sufficient data is observed. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein%E2%80%93von_Mises_theorem http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein%E2%80%93von_Mises_t...
- XFrequentist 13y agoIt was actually "technically correct" - he said "if the number of samples is low". You're correct about the general case, of course.
- Houshalter 13y agoBut what's the alternative? The same experts making the same guesswork with the same information.
- joshdance 13y agoSeemed like a pretty clear (if low level) explanation of Bayes theorem.
- stirbot 13y agoBy Submarine in the 1960's, he's referring to Dr. John Craven's methodology for finding the USS Scorpion using Bayesian search theory. It was interesting to read the back story in Blind Man's Bluff, although I did get the feeling it was punched up a bit for drama.
- pash 13y agoJames Surowiecki also tells the story of the search for the Scorpion in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, where I first read about it. The Wikipedia article [0] gives a basic account, and the article on Bayesian search theory [1], in addition to describing the procedure quite well, mentions several other searches in which the method proved successful. 0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589)#Search:_1968 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589)#Search:_... 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_search_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_search_theory
- pitnips 13y agoso, October Sky 2014?