After reading the introduction to modeling in Modeling and Simulation Fundamentals (J. Sokolowski, C. Banks 2010) I believe I have whittled the choices in modeling strategies down to data-based modeling or agent-based modeling. The former would be the math formula based solution, likely modeling survivorship as a single quantity (treating the tern chicks as one population rather than many individuals). The latter would be the individual decision based solution, modeling survivorship of each tern chick individually and allowing statistics to provide an overall measure of survivorship.
I am still not sure which method I am leaning towards. I would really like to attempt this problem from an agent-based angle but I am not sure how feasible that is. My concern with the agent-based strategy is that I may either not be able to figure out the right distribution of variables to obtain data similar to the observed survivorship in past years OR I might not have adequate support for my choices of what I model on an individual scale, resulting in a model that others deem useless in actually predicting future survivorship.
No comments:
Post a Comment