In the eyes of a rationalist like Descartes or Spinoza, human reasoning is flawless, marching toward uncovering ultimate truth. A few centuries later, however, culminating in the work of Kahneman and Tversky, human reasoning was portrayed as anything but flawless, filled with numerous misjudgments, biases, and cognitiv…
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21 results for “fallacies”
Value-at-Risk is a flawed substitute for non-ruin capital, leading to misleading financial standards.
problem Misuse of Value-at-Risk as a risk measure, replacing non-ruin capital, leads to flawed financial standards.
method Mathematical analysis of risk measures and their implications on financial standards.
result Non-ruin capital is a more accurate risk measure than Value-at-Risk, necessitating its adoption over the former.
The paper identifies and critiques problems with risk matrices using ordinal scales.
problem Problems with risk matrices using ordinal scales.
method Overview of risk assessment process, explanation of fallacies, and suggestions for improvement.
result The paper proposes avoiding risk matrices and using fully quantitative methods instead.
Examines parallels between human subjects and texts for causal inference.
problem Ambiguity and fallacies in causal inference using textual data.
method Two strategies: shifting from traits to perceptions and from concepts to parts.
result Highlights the importance of clarifying fundamental concepts.
Just as war is sometimes fallaciously represented as a zero sum game -- when in fact war is a negative sum game - stock market trading, a positive sum game over time, is often erroneously represented as a zero sum game. This is called the "zero sum fallacy" -- the erroneous belief that one trader in a stock market exch…
The F-measure or F-score is one of the most commonly used single number measures in Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, but it is based on a mistake, and the flawed assumptions render it unsuitable for use in most contexts! Fortunately, there are better alternatives.
Cost-benefit analysis often assumes accurate estimates, but this study finds significant inaccuracies.
problem Inaccurate cost and benefit estimates in public investments.
method Largest dataset of public investments, statistical analysis of cost overruns and benefit shortfalls.
result Significant inaccuracies in cost and benefit estimates of public investments.
Dan Lovallo and Daniel Kahneman must be commended for their clear identification of causes and cures to the planning fallacy in "Delusions of Success: How Optimism Undermines Executives' Decisions" (HBR July 2003). Their look at overoptimism, anchoring, competitor neglect, and the outside view in forecasting is highly …
This report reviews the Edinburgh tram project's risk management. Projects frequently overrun their cost and timelines and fall short on intended benefits. Cost, schedule, and benefit risk of projects need to be carefully considered to avoid this. The report describes and evaluates risk assessment and management for th…
This paper explores how theories of the planning fallacy and the outside view may be used to conduct quality control and due diligence in project management. First, a much-neglected issue in project management is identified, namely that the front-end estimates of costs and benefits--used in the business cases, cost-ben…
The machine learning community adopted the use of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) in order to ensure the statistical validity of results. Many scientific fields however realized the shortcomings of frequentist reasoning and in the most radical cases even banned its use in publications. We should do the same…
This is an invited article for the Discussion and Debate special issue of The European Physical Journal Special Topics on the subject "Can Economics Be a Physical Science?" The first part of the paper traces the personal path of the author from theoretical physics to economics. It briefly summarizes applications of sta…
Recently, researchers have discovered that the state-of-the-art object classifiers can be fooled easily by small perturbations in the input unnoticeable to human eyes. It is also known that an attacker can generate strong adversarial examples if she knows the classifier parameters. Conversely, a defender can robustify …
Critiques causal reductionism in financial studies, suggesting alternative approaches.
problem Limitations of unidirectional causation in self-referencing systems like finance.
method Critical assessment of causal inference in empirical finance, using ecological models.
result Current financial tools may be limited to ex post inference, especially in reflexive contexts.
Method orders Pareto solutions using transformed objective scores.
problem Lack of orderability in multi-objective optimization solutions.
method Probability integral transform to map objectives to scores.
result Pareto efficient solutions can be ordered in score space.
This paper addresses the challenges in classifying textual data obtained from open online platforms, which are vulnerable to distortion. Most existing classification methods minimize the overall classification error and may yield an undesirably large type I error (relevant textual messages are classified as irrelevant)…
The paper introduces a framework to assess nonlinear causality in financial markets.
problem Identifying and quantifying co-dependence between financial instruments.
method Transfer entropy and convergent cross-mapping methods to assess linear and nonlinear causality.
result Stock indices exhibit significant nonlinear causality, and correlation underestimates causality.
New findings show increased exploration needed in non-stationary RL tasks.
problem Task non-stationarity leads to conflicting goals in RL.
method Analyzes the trade-off between cumulative and simple regret in non-stationary environments.
result Increased exploration is necessary to balance CR and SR in non-stationary tasks.
Topic models have been extensively used to organize and interpret the contents of large, unstructured corpora of text documents. Although topic models often perform well on traditional training vs. test set evaluations, it is often the case that the results of a topic model do not align with human interpretation. This …
Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) are mainstay tools for assessing the long-term interactions between climate and the economy and for deriving optimal policy responses in the form of carbon prices. IAMs have been criticized for controversial discount rate assumptions, arbitrary climate damage functions, and the inade…
There is great potential for damage from adversarial learning (AL) attacks on machine-learning based systems. In this paper, we provide a contemporary survey of AL, focused particularly on defenses against attacks on statistical classifiers. After introducing relevant terminology and the goals and range of possible kno…