Black swans in astronomical data

Yield of Black Swans

h EXCEPT FOR GETTING your chip to market on time, optimizing yield is perhaps the most important thing we can do to improve IC profitability. We address this problem in several ways: design for manufacturability (DFM) through layout rules, process control, and increasingly clean cleanrooms. In an ideal world, this would solve our yield problems. We know it doesn’t, so we build a diagnostic capa...

Black Swans and white tablets

The Black Swan, a metaphor for highly improbable, high impact events, warns us to understand the limits of our predictions and expect the “unknown unknowns” everywhere, from war to science and industry. From the earliest stages of discovery to post-marketing events, we argue that fundamentally the structure of pharmaceutical industry is driven by and impacted by both positive and negative Black...

Waiting for medicine's black swans.

The foundations of statistics with black swans

We extend the foundation of statistics to integrate rare events that are potentially catastrophic, called black swans.These include natural hazards, regime change in complex systems, market crashes, catastrophic climate change and major episodes of species extinction. Classic statistics and physics treat such events as ‘outliers’ and often disregard them. We propose a new axiomatization of subj...

The Foundations of Probability with Black Swans

We extend the foundation of probability in samples with rare events that are potentially catastrophic, called black swans, such as natural hazards, market crashes, catastrophic climate change, and species extinction. Such events are generally treated as “outliers” and disregarded. We propose a new axiomatization of probability requiring equal treatment in the measurement of rare and frequent ev...