Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Ebola scare shows problems in computer models

Sierra Leone health officials check passengers transiting at the border crossing with Liberia in Jendema in order to prevent the spread of Ebola on March 28, 2015 Flaws in computer modelling led to apocalyptic forecasts of how the deadly Ebola virus would spread in West Africa, specialists said. Many of the models were off-the-shelf software that failed to take into account complexities and uncertainties in the way the disease spread in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, they said on Tuesday. "In the early days of the Ebola outbreak, a lot of people got into the forecasting business," said Aaron King of the University of Michigan in the United States, who led a probe into why so many predictions turned out to be wildly wrong. "They did it using appealingly simple mathematical models, and the result was a series of warnings that alerted the world, quite rightly to the seriousness of the situation.








via Health News Headlines - Yahoo News http://ift.tt/1Ikepez

No comments:

Post a Comment