Preface
This book is about modelling in general, as a support for decision-making in man-made systems and/or in relation to life and the natural environment. It is also about uncertainty: in the view of the author, modelling is so connected to uncertainty that the expressions of ‘uncertainty modeling’ or ‘model uncertainty’ are fraught with pleonasm. It is just as much about risk modelling, meaning the crafting of models to help risk assessment and support decision-making to prevent risk. Incidentally, controlling the risk generated by the use of models – a critical issue for many analysts of the world financial crises since 2008 – is a key by-product of the analysis.
Coming from a traditional – that is deterministic – scientific and engineering background, the author experienced regular discomfort in acting as a young consulting engineer in the mid-1990s: (a) struggling to calibrate models on past figures before discovering horrendous errors in the most serious datasets and previous model-based expertise, or large deviations between client-provided data and his own field surveys; (b) being challenged on the confidence that could be placed in his models by acute clients or regulators; (c) being pressured by the same clients to reduce the study budget and hence to downsize data collection and model sophistication. A memorable case was that of a small village of the French Alps where the author had to draw an official line between the floodable and non-floodable areas under intense ...
