Increases in extreme precipitation events of floods and droughts are expected to occur worldwide. The increase in extreme events will result in changes in streamflow that are expected to affect water availability for human consumption and aquatic ecosystem function. We present an analysis that may greatly improve current streamflow models by quantifying the impact of the interaction between for...

When facing small numbers of observations or rare events, political scientists often encounter separation, in which explanatory variables perfectly predict binary events or non-events. In this situation, maximum likelihood provides implausible estimates and the researcher might want incorporate some form of prior information into the model. The most sophisticated research uses Jeffreys’ invaria...

This paper provides a theoretical explanation for the common observation that people often fail to purchase insurance against low-probability high-loss events even when it is offered at favorable premiums. We hypothesize that individuals maximize expected utility but face an explicit or implicit cost to discovering the true probability of rare events. This cost constitutes a threshold that may ...

The telecommunications industry was one of the first to adopt data mining technology. This is most likely because telecommunication companies routinely generate and store enormous amounts of high-quality data, have a very large customer base, and operate in a rapidly changing and highly competitive environment. Telecommunication companies utilize data mining to improve their marketing efforts, ...

Risk analysis may be defined as the problem of estimating the probabilities of rare events and the magnitudes of associated damages. The topic unifies the environmental sciences. This paper considers risk analyses for earthquakes, wildfires and floods. The computation of insurance premiums is used to motivate and unite the work.

This chapter addresses the relation and difference between prediction, forecasting, and chance discovery. Prediction and forecasting have a long history. So far, many studies have been devoted to prediction and forecasting. However, in complex real-world systems, contrary to scientific laws, it is sometimes very difficult to predict the future. In such situations, model creation, model selectio...

Formulate predictive and diagnostic models on how sedimentary processes create strata, and contribute to the stratigraphic record. Of special concern are capturing the important rare events affecting strata formation (e.g., slides, floods) that are often difficult to observe but can control the stratigraphic development of a margin. The cumulative impact of these rare events can be predicted th...

In the month following the terrorist attacks of September 11, domestic air travel in the United States dropped more than 30% relative to the same period the previous year. More than six months later, revenue passenger miles remain more than 10% below what they were last Spring (Air Transport Association, March 6, 2002). Such reluctance to fly has obviously contributed to the recent recession in...

New methods for estimating erosion at Meteor Crater, Arizona, indicate that continuous ejecta deposits beyond 1/4-1/2 crater radii from the rim (0.25R-0.5R) have been lowered less than 1 m on the average. This conclusion is based on the results of two approaches: coarsening ofunweathered ejectainto surface lag deposits and calculation of the sediment budget within a drainage basin on the ejecta...

How do we learn non-physical properties of physical objects? We explored how the statistical structure of events can be a source of object property learning. Twenty-five participants saw sequences of visual events surrounding two distinct objects. Object identity determined 1) the direction of a high transition probability between two events, and 2) the frequency of two other events. Learning w...