Posted on December - 22 - 2011
Searching For A Layman’s Explanation of Parametric Modeling
Professor Charlie Eppes, solving crime no doubt
For a few years, CBS has been running a television show called Numb3rs. The premise is the standard take off on the brothers-solving-mysteries cliché that has been around since at least the Hardy Boys. Granted, Numbers has a couple of differences – the boys are older and employed. Don Eppes, the older of the pair, runs a team of FBI agents based in Los Angeles – a fair step above the amateur sleuthing of the Hardy boys. Charlie Eppes, the younger brother, is a math genius and a professor at the fictional “Cal Sci”.
Each week, Don and his street-savvy FBI team encounter a problem, usually a time sensitive one, which is just too tough to figure out through traditional police work. Like clockwork, Professor Charlie Eppes and his team of socially-awkward yet brilliant mathematicians are able to use some form of advanced mathematics to accomplish a whole list of things from predicting where a kidnapping will happen next to the contents of boxes.
And while a great deal of that is Hollywood magic, taking lab theory and shoehorning it into unrealistic time periods with even less realistic amounts of data, there is one part of the show that I always admire. At some point, the young Professor Eppes must explain a complex, doctoral-level mathematical system in terms that team of FBI agents can understand. This happens every single episode with such predictability that the character in the show have started to expect it, even making jokes and attempting to give their own explanations.
Charlie’s explanations are clearly a plot device to convince the audience that his brilliant mathematical insights aren’t simply a weekly deus ex machine. However, just as Charlie has to explain how his math models the real world, the use of software estimation can often seem just as improbable. True, you can sit back and say “Well, the program relies on parametric modeling of our current situation,” but that look is far more likely to generate blank stares than anything else.
To that end, I’m currently working on a good lay definition of parametric modeling and a few handy examples. Stay tuned for those.
Similar to star trek too, science distilled to a simple analogy. ‘we will polarize the beam to make it less agreeable to energy creature a’ AKA ‘were going to sour the milk’.