Watching Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen sashay across the Olympic stadium in Rio reminded me that, while these fashion plates are really dishy to view, they can be very dippy when it comes to forecasting. Every time one of our local weather gurus says that their models are disagreeing, I wonder why they would ask someone like Gisele. What does she and her like know about meteorology?
There really is a connection of fashion and statistical models—the random walk. However, this movement would be more like that of a drunken man than a fashionably-calculated stroll down the catwalk. For example, see this video by an MIT professor showing 7 willy-nilly paths from a single point.
Anyways, I am wandering all over the place with this blog. Mainly I wanted to draw your attention to the Monte Carlo method for forecasting. I used this for my MBA thesis in 1980, burning up many minutes of very expensive main-frame computer time in the late ‘70s. What got me going on this whole Monte Carlo meander is this article from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Check out how the European models did better than the Americans on predicting the path of Hurricane Sandy. Evidently the Euros are on to something as detailed in this Scientific American report at the end of last year’s hurricane season.
I have a random thought for improving the American models—ask Cindy Crawford. She graduated as valedictorian of her high school in Illinois and earned a scholarship for chemical engineering at Northwestern University. Cindy has all the talents to create a convergence of fashion and statistical models. That would be really sweet.