Category Archives: Forecasting and prediction

Regression done right: Part 1: Can I predict the future?

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I recently saw an article in the Harvard Business Review called “Refresher on Regression Analysis”. I thought it was horrible so I wanted to set the record straight.

Linear regression from the viewpoint of machine learning

Linear regression is important, not only because it is a useful tool in itself, but because it is (almost) the simplest statistical model. The issues that arise in a relatively straightforward form are issues that beset the whole of statistical modelling and predictive analytics. Anyone who understands linear regression properly is able to ask probing questions about more complicated models. The complex internal algorithms of Kalman filters, ARIMA processes and artificial neural networks are accessible only to the specialist mathematician. However, each has several general features in common with simple linear regression. A thorough understanding of linear regression enables a due diligence of the claims made by the machine learning advocate. Linear regression is the paradigmatic exemplar of machine learning.

There are two principal questions that I want to talk about that are the big takeaways of linear regression. They are always the first two questions to ask in looking at any statistical modelling or machine learning scenario.

  1. What predictions can I make (if any)?
  2. Is it worth the trouble?

I am going to start looking at (1) in this blog and complete it in a future Part 2. I will then look at (2) in a further Part 3.

Variation, variation, variation

Variation is a major problem for business, the tendency of key measures to fluctuate irregularly. Variation leads to uncertainty. Will the next report be high or low? Or in the middle? Because of the uncertainty we have to allow safety margins or swallow some non-conformancies. We have good days and bad days, good products and not so good. We have to carry costly working capital because of variation in cash flow. And so on.

We learned in our high school statistics class to characterise variation in a key process measure, call it the Big Y, by an histogram of observations. Perhaps we are bothered by the fluctuating level of monthly sales.

RegressionHistogram

The variation arises from a whole ecology of competing and interacting effects and factors that we call the cause-system of the outcome. In general, it is very difficult to single out individual factors as having been the cause of a particular observation, so entangled are they. It is still useful to capture them for reference on a cause and effect diagram.

RegressionIshikawa

One of the strengths of the cause and effect diagram is that it may prompt the thought that one of the factors is particularly important, call it Big X, perhaps it is “hours of TV advertising” (my age is showing). Motivated by that we can generate a sample of corresponding measurements data of both the Y and X and plot them on a scatter plot.

RegressionScatter1

Well what else is there to say? The scatter plot shows us all the information in the sample. Scatter plots are an important part of what statistician John Tukey called Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA). We have some hunches and ideas, or perhaps hardly any idea at all, and we attack the problem by plotting the data in any way we can think of. So much easier now than when W Edwards Deming wrote:1

[Statistical practice] means tedious work, such as studying the data in various forms, making tables and charts and re-making them, trying to use and preserve the evidence in the results and to be clear enough to the reader: to endure disappointment and discouragement.

Or as Chicago economist Ronald Coase put it.

If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess.

The scatter plot is a fearsome instrument of data torture. It tells me everything. It might even tempt me to think that I have a basis on which to make predictions.

Prediction

In machine learning terms, we can think of the sample used for the scatter plot as a training set of data. It can be used to set up, “train”, a numerical model that we will then fix and use to predict future outcomes. The scatter plot strongly suggests that if we know a future X alone we can have a go at predicting the corresponding future Y. To see that more clearly we can draw a straight line by hand on the scatter plot, just as we did in high school before anybody suggested anything more sophisticated.

RegressionScatter2

Given any particular X we can read off the corresponding Y.

RegressionScatter3

The immediate insight that comes from drawing in the line is that not all the observations lie on the line. There is variation about the line so that there is actually a range of values of Y that seem plausible and consistent for any specified X. More on that in Parts 2 and 3.

In understanding machine learning it makes sense to start by thinking about human learning. Psychologists Gary Klein and Daniel Kahneman investigated how firefighters were able to perform so successfully in assessing a fire scene and making rapid, safety critical decisions. Lives of the public and of other firefighters were at stake. This is the sort of human learning situation that machines, or rather their expert engineers, aspire to emulate. Together, Klein and Kahneman set out to describe how the brain could build up reliable memories that would be activated in the future, even in the agony of the moment. They came to the conclusion that there are two fundamental conditions for a human to acquire a skill.2

  • An environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable.
  • An opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice

The first bullet point is pretty much the most important idea in the whole of statistics. Before we can make any prediction from the regression, we have to be confident that the data has been sampled from “an environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable”. The regression “learns” from those regularities, where they exist. The “learning” turns out to be the rather prosaic mechanics of matrix algebra as set out in all the standard texts.3 But that, after all, is what all machine “learning” is really about.

Statisticians capture the psychologists’ “sufficiently regular” through the mathematical concept of exchangeability. If a process is exchangeable then we can assume that the distribution of events in the future will be like the past. We can project our historic histogram forward. With regression we can do better than that.

Residuals analysis

Formally, the linear regression calculations calculate the characteristics of the model:

Y = mX + c + “stuff”

The “mX+c” bit is the familiar high school mathematics equation for a straight line. The “stuff” is variation about the straight line. What the linear regression mathematics does is (objectively) to calculate the m and c and then also tell us something about the “stuff”. It splits the variation in Y into two components:

  • What can be explained by the variation in X; and
  • The, as yet unexplained, variation in the “stuff”.

The first thing to learn about regression is that it is the “stuff” that is the interesting bit. In 1849 British astronomer Sir John Herschel observed that:

Almost all the greatest discoveries in astronomy have resulted from the consideration of what we have elsewhere termed RESIDUAL PHENOMENA, of a quantitative or numerical kind, that is to say, of such portions of the numerical or quantitative results of observation as remain outstanding and unaccounted for after subducting and allowing for all that would result from the strict application of known principles.

The straight line represents what we guessed about the causes of variation in Y and which the scatter plot confirmed. The “stuff” represents the causes of variation that we failed to identify and that continue to limit our ability to predict and manage. We call the predicted Ys that correspond to the measured Xs, and lie on the fitted straight line, the fits.

fiti = mXi + c

The residual values, or residuals, are obtained by subtracting the fits from the respective observed Y values. The residuals represent the “stuff”. Statistical software does this for us routinely. If yours doesn’t then bin it.

residuali = Yi – fiti

RegressionScatter4

There are a number of properties that the residuals need to satisfy for the regression to work. Investigating those properties is called residuals analysis.4 As far as use for prediction in concerned, it is sufficient that the “stuff”, the variation about the straight line, be exchangeable.5 That means that the “stuff” so far must appear from the data to be exchangeable and further that we have a rational belief that such a cause system will continue unchanged into the future. Shewhart charts are the best heuristics for checking the requirement for exchangeability, certainly as far as the historical data is concerned. Our first and, be under no illusion, mandatory check on the ability of the linear regression, or any statistical model, to make predictions is to plot the residuals against time on a Shewhart chart.

RegressionPBC

If there are any signals of special causes then the model cannot be used for prediction. It just can’t. For prediction we need residuals that are all noise and no signal. However, like all signals of special causes, such will provide an opportunity to explore and understand more about the cause system. The signal that prevents us from using this regression for prediction may be the very thing that enables an investigation leading to a superior model, able to predict more exactly than we ever hoped the failed model could. And even if there is sufficient evidence of exchangeability from the training data, we still need to continue vigilance and scrutiny of all future residuals to look out for any novel signals of special causes. Special causes that arise post-training provide fresh information about the cause system while at the same time compromising the reliability of the predictions.

Thorough regression diagnostics will also be able to identify issues such as serial correlation, lack of fit, leverage and heteroscedasticity. It is essential to regression and its ommision is intolerable. Residuals analysis is one of Stephen Stigler’s Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom.6 As Tukey said:

The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.

To come:

Part 2: Is my regression significant? … is a dumb question.
Part 3: Quantifying predictions with statistical intervals.

References

  1. Deming, W E (‎1975) “On probability as a basis for action”, The American Statistician 29(4) pp146-152
  2. Kahneman, D (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow, Allen Lane, p240
  3. Draper, N R & Smith, H (1998) Applied Regression Analysis, 3rd ed., Wiley, p44
  4. Draper & Smith (1998) Chs 2, 8
  5. I have to admit that weaker conditions may be adequate in some cases but these are far beyond any other than a specialist mathematician.
  6. Stigler, S M (2016) The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom, Harvard University Press, Chapter 7

Why did the polls get it wrong?

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This week has seen much soul-searching by the UK polling industry over their performance leading up to the 2015 UK general election on 7 May. The polls had seemed to predict that Conservative and Labour Parties were neck and neck on the popular vote. In the actual election, the Conservatives polled 37.8% to Labour’s 31.2% leading to a working majority in the House of Commons, once the votes were divided among the seats contested. I can assure my readers that it was a shock result. Over breakfast on 7 May I told my wife that the probability of a Conservative majority in the House was nil. I hold my hands up.

An enquiry was set up by the industry led by the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM). They presented their preliminary findings on 19 January 2016. The principal conclusion was that the failure to predict the voting share was because of biases in the way that the data were sampled and inadequate methods for correcting for those biases. I’m not so sure.

Population -> Frame -> Sample

The first thing students learn when studying statistics is the critical importance, and practical means, of specifying a sampling frame. If the sampling frame is not representative of the population of concern then simply collecting more and more data will not yield a prediction of greater accuracy. The errors associated with the specification of the frame are inherent to the sampling method. Creating a representative frame is very hard in opinion polling because of the difficulty in contacting particular individuals efficiently. It turns out that Conservative voters are harder than Labour voters to get hold of, so that they can be questioned. The NCRM study concluded that, within the commercial constraints of an opinion poll, there was a lower probability that a Conservative voter would be contacted. They therefore tended to be under-represented in the data causing a substantial bias towards Labour.

This is a well known problem in polling practice and there are demographic factors that can be used to make a statistical adjustment. Samples can be stratified. NCRM concluded that, in the run up to the 2015 election, there were important biases tending to under state the Conservative vote and the existing correction factors were inadequate. Fresh sampling strategies were needed to eradicate the bias and improve prediction. There are understandable fears that this will make polling more costly. More calls will be needed to catch Conservatives at home.

Of course, that all sounds an eminently believable narrative. These sorts of sampling frame biases are familiar but enormously troublesome for pollsters. However, I wanted to look at the data myself.

Plot data in time order

That is the starting point of all statistical analysis. Polls continued after the election, though with lesser frequency. I wanted to look at that data after the election in addition to the pre-election data. Here is a plot of poll results against time for Conservative and Labour. I have used data from 25 January to the end of 2015.1, 2 I have not managed to jitter the points so there is some overprinting of Conservative by Labour pre-election.

Polling201501

Now that is an arresting plot. Yet again plotting against time elucidates the cause system. Something happened on the date of the election. Before the election the polls had the two parties neck and neck. The instant (sic) the election was done there was clear red/ blue water between the parties. Applying my (very moderate) level of domain knowledge to the data before, the poll results look stable and predictable. There is a shift after the election to a new datum that remains stable and predictable. The respective arithmetic means are given below.

Party Mean Poll Before Election Mean Poll After
Conservative 33.3% 37.8% 38.8%
Labour 33.5% 31.2% 30.9%

The mean of the post-election polls is doing fairly well but is markedly different from the pre-election results. Now, it is trite statistics that the variation we observe on a chart is the aggregate of variation from two sources.

  • Variation from the thing of interest; and
  • Variation from the measurement process.

As far as I can gather, the sampling methods used by the polling companies have not so far been modified. They were awaiting the NCRM report. They certainly weren’t modified in the few days following the election. The abrupt change on 7 May cannot be because of corrected sampling methods. The misleading pre-election data and the “impressive” post-election polls were derived from common sampling practices. It seems to me difficult to reconcile NCRM’s narrative to the historical data. The shift in the data certainly needs explanation within that account.

What did change on the election date was that a distant intention turned into the recall of a past action. What everyone wants to know in advance is the result of the election. Unsurprisingly, and as we generally find, it is not possible to sample the future. Pollsters, and their clients, have to be content with individuals’ perceptions of how they will vote. The vast majority of people pay very little attention to politics at all and the general level of interest outside election time is de minimis. Standing in a polling booth with a ballot paper is a very different matter from being asked about intentions some days, weeks or months hence. Most people take voting very seriously. It is not obvious that the same diligence is directed towards answering pollster’s questions.

Perhaps the problems aren’t statistical at all and are more concerned with what psychologists call affective forecasting, predicting how we will feel and behave under future circumstances. Individuals are notoriously susceptible to all sorts of biases and inconsistencies in such forecasts. It must at least be a plausible source of error that intentions are only imperfectly formed in advance and mapping into votes is not straightforward. Is it possible that after the election respondents, once again disengaged from politics, simply recalled how they had voted in May? That would explain the good alignment with actual election results.

Imperfect foresight of voting intention before the election and 20/25 hindsight after is, I think, a narrative that sits well with the data. There is no reason whatever why internal reflections in the Cartesian theatre of future voting should be an unbiased predictor of actual votes. In fact, I think it would be a surprise, and one demanding explanation, if they were so.

The NCRM report does make some limited reference to post-election re-interviews of contacts. However, this is presented in the context of a possible “late swing” rather than affective forecasting. There are no conclusions I can use.

Meta-analysis

The UK polls took a horrible beating when they signally failed to predict the result of the 1992 election in under-estimating the Conservative lead by around 8%.3 Things then felt better. The 1997 election was happier, where Labour led by 13% at the election with final polls in the range of 10 to 18%.4 In 2001 each poll managed to get the Conservative vote within 3% but all over-estimated the Labour vote, some pollsters by as much as 5%.5 In 2005, the final poll had Labour on 38% and Conservative,  33%. The popular vote was Labour 36.2% and Conservative 33.2%.6 In 2010 the final poll had Labour on 29% and Conservative, 36%, with a popular vote of 29.7%/36.9%.7 The debacle of 1992 was all but forgotten when 2015 returned to pundits’ dismay.

Given the history and given the inherent difficulties of sampling and affective forecasting, I’m not sure why we are so surprised when the polls get it wrong. Unfortunately for the election strategist they are all we have. That is a common theme with real world data. Because of its imperfections it has to be interpreted within the context of other sources of evidence rather than followed slavishly. The objective is not to be driven by data but to be led by the insights it yields.

References

  1. Opinion polling for the 2015 United Kingdom general election. (2016, January 19). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:57, January 20, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Opinion_polling_for_the_2015_United_Kingdom_general_election&oldid=700601063
  2. Opinion polling for the next United Kingdom general election. (2016, January 18). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:55, January 20, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election&oldid=700453899
  3. Butler, D & Kavanagh, D (1992) The British General Election of 1992, Macmillan, Chapter 7
  4. — (1997) The British General Election of 1997, Macmillan, Chapter 7
  5. — (2002) The British General Election of 2001, Palgrave-Macmillan, Chapter 7
  6. Kavanagh, D & Butler, D (2005) The British General Election of 2005, Palgrave-Macmillan, Chapter 7
  7. Cowley, P & Kavanagh, D (2010) The British General Election of 2010, Palgrave-Macmillan, Chapter 7

UK railway suicides – 2015 update

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The latest UK rail safety statistics were published in September 2015 absent the usual press fanfare. Regular readers of this blog will know that I have followed the suicide data series, and the press response, closely in 2014, 2013 and 2012.

This year I am conscious that one of those units is not a mere statistic but a dear colleague, Nigel Clements. It was poet W B Yeats who observed, in his valedictory verse Under Ben Bulben that “Measurement began our might.” He ends the poem by inviting us to “Cast a cold eye/ On life, on death.” Sometimes, with statistics, we cast the cold eye but the personal reminds us that it must never be an academic exercise.

Nigel’s death gives me an additional reason for following this series. I originally latched onto it because I felt that exaggerated claims  as to trends were being made. It struck me as a closely bounded problem that should be susceptible to taught measurement. And it was something important.  Again I have re-plotted the data myself on a Shewhart chart.

RailwaySuicides4

Readers should note the following about the chart.

  • Some of the numbers for earlier years have been updated by the statistical authority.
  • I have recalculated natural process limits as there are still no more than 20 annual observations.
  • The signal noted last year has persisted (in red) with two consecutive observations above the upper natural process limit. There are also now eight points below the centre line at the beginning of the series.

As my colleague Terry Weight always taught me, a signal gives us license to interpret the ups and downs on the chart. This increasingly looks like a gradual upward trend.

Though there was this year little coverage in the press, I did find this article in The Guardian newspaper. I had previously wondered whether the railway data simply reflected an increasing trend in UK suicide in general. The Guardian report is eager to emphasise:

The total number [of suicides] in the UK has risen in recent years, with the latest Office for National Statistics figures showing 6,233 suicides registered in the UK in 2013, a 4% increase on the previous year.

Well, #executivetimeseries! I have low expectations of press data journalism so I do not know why I am disappointed. In any event I decided to plot the data. There were a few problems. The railway data is not collected by calendar year so the latest observation is 2014/15. I have not managed to identify which months are included though, while I was hunting I found out that the railway data does not include London Underground. I can find no railway data before 2001/02. The national suicide data is collected by calendar year and the last year published is 2013. I have done my best by (not quite) arbitrarily identifying 2013/14 in the railway data with 2013 nationally. I also tried the obvious shift by one year and it did not change the picture.

RailwaySuicides5

I have added a LOWESS line (with smoothing parameter 0.4) to the national data the better to pick out the minimum around 2007, just before the start of the financial crisis. That is where the steady decline over the previous quarter century reverses. It is in itself an arresting statistic. But I don’t see the national trend mirrored in the railway data, thereby explaining that trend.

Previously I noted proposals to repeat a strategy from Japan of bathing railway platforms with blue light. Professor Michiko Ueda of Syracuse University was kind enough to send me details of the research. The conclusions were encouraging but tentative and, unfortunately, the Japanese rail companies have not made any fresh data available for analysis since 2010. In the UK, I understand that such lights were installed at Gatwick in summer 2014 but I have not seen any data.

A huge amount of sincere endeavour has gone into this issue but further efforts have to be against the background that there is an escalating and unexplained problem.

Things and actions are what they are and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?

Joseph Butler

How to predict floods

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File:Llanrwst Floods 2015 1.ogvI started my grown-up working life on a project seeking to predict extreme ocean currents off the north west coast of the UK. As a result I follow environmental disasters very closely. I fear that it’s natural that incidents in my own country have particular salience. I don’t want to minimise disasters elsewhere in the world when I talk about recent flooding in the north of England. It’s just that they are close enough to home for me to get a better understanding of the essential features.

The causes of the flooding are multi-factorial and many of the factors are well beyond my expertise. However, The Times (London) reported on 28 December 2015 that “Some scientists say that [the UK Environment Agency] has been repeatedly caught out by the recent heavy rainfall because it sets too much store by predictions based on historical records” (p7). Setting store by predictions based on historical records is very much where my hands-on experience of statistics began.

The starting point of prediction is extreme value theory, developed by Sir Ronald Fisher and L H C Tippett in the 1920s. Extreme value analysis (EVA) aims to put probabilistic bounds on events outside the existing experience base by predicating that such events follow a special form of probability distribution. Historical data can be used to fit such a distribution using the usual statistical estimation methods. Prediction is then based on a double extrapolation: firstly in the exact form of the tail of the extreme value distribution and secondly from the past data to future safety. As the old saying goes, “Interpolation is (almost) always safe. Extrapolation is always dangerous.”

EVA rests on some non-trivial assumptions about the process under scrutiny. No statistical method yields more than was input in the first place. If we are being allowed to extrapolate beyond the experience base then there are inevitably some assumptions. Where the real world process doesn’t follow those assumptions the extrapolation is compromised. To some extent there is no cure for this other than to come to a rational decision about the sensitivity of the analysis to the assumptions and to apply a substantial safety factor to the physical engineering solutions.

One of those assumptions also plays to the dimension of extrapolation from past to future. Statisticians often demand that the data be independent and identically distributed. However, that is a weird thing to demand of data. Real world data is hardly ever independent as every successive observation provides more information about the distribution and alters the probability of future observations. We need a better idea to capture process stability.

Historical data can only be projected into the future if it comes from a process that is “sufficiently regular to be predictable”. That regularity is effectively characterised by the property of exchangeability. Deciding whether data is exchangeable demands, not only statistical evidence of its past regularity, but also domain knowledge of the physical process that it measures. The exchangeability must continue into the predicable future if historical data is to provide any guide. In the matter of flooding, knowledge of hydrology, climatology, planning and engineering, law, in addition to local knowledge about economics and infrastructure changes already in development, is essential. Exchangeability is always a judgment. And a critical one.

Predicting extreme floods is a complex business and I send my good wishes to all involved. It is an example of something that is essentially a team enterprise as it demands the co-operative inputs of diverse sets of experience and skills.

In many ways this is an exemplary model of how to act on data. There is no mechanistic process of inference that stands outside a substantial knowledge of what is being measured. The secret of data analysis, which often hinges on judgments about exchangeability, is to visualize the data in a compelling and transparent way so that it can be subjected to collaborative criticism by a diverse team.

Imagine …

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Ben Bernanke official portrait.jpgNo, not John Lennon’s dreary nursery rhyme for hippies.

In his memoir of the 2007-2008 banking crisis, The Courage to Act, Ben Benanke wrote about his surprise when the crisis materialised.

We saw, albeit often imperfectly, most of the pieces of the puzzle. But we failed to understand – “failed to imagine” might be a better phrase – how those pieces would fit together to produce a financial crisis that compared to, and arguably surpassed, the financial crisis that ushered in the Great Depression.

That captures the three essentials of any attempt to foresee a complex future.

  • The pieces
  • The fit
  • Imagination

In any well managed organisation, “the pieces” consist of the established Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and leading measures. Diligent and rigorous criticism of historical data using process behaviour charts allows departures from stability to be identified timeously. A robust and disciplined system of management and escalation enables an agile response when special causes arise.

Of course, “the fit” demands a broader view of the data, recognising interactions between factors and the possibility of non-simple global responses remote from a locally well behaved response surface. As the old adage goes, “Fit locally. Think globally.” This is where the Cardinal Newman principle kicks in.

“The pieces” and “the fit”, taken at their highest, yield a map of historical events with some limited prediction as to how key measures will behave in the future. Yet it is common experience that novel factors persistently invade. The “bow wave” of such events will not fit a recognised pattern where there will be a ready consensus as to meaning, mechanism and action. These are the situations where managers are surprised by rapidly emerging events, only to protest, “We never imagined …”.

Nassim Taleb’s analysis of the financial crisis hinged on such surprises and took him back to the work of British economist G L S Shackle. Shackle had emphasised the importance of imagination in economics. Put at its most basic, any attempt to assign probabilities to future events depends upon the starting point of listing the alternatives that might occur. Statisticians call it the sample space. If we don’t imagine some specific future we won’t bother thinking about the probability that it might come to be. Imagination is crucial to economics but it turns out to be much more pervasive as an engine of improvement that at first is obvious.

Imagination and creativity

Frank Whittle had to imagine the jet engine before he could bring it into being. Alan Turing had to imagine the computer. They were both fortunate in that they were able to test their imagination by construction. It was all realised in a comparatively short period of time. Whittle’s and Turing’s respective imaginations were empirically verified.

What is now proved was once but imagined.

William Blake

Not everyone has had the privilege of seeing their imagination condense into reality within their lifetime. In 1946, Sir George Paget Thomson and Moses Blackman imagined a plentiful source of inexpensive civilian power from nuclear fusion. As of writing, prospects of a successful demonstration seem remote. Frustratingly, as far as I can see, the evidence still refuses to tip the balance as to whether future success is likely or that failure is inevitable.

Something as illusive as imagination can have a testable factual content. As we know, not all tests are conclusive.

Imagination and analysis

Imagination turns out to be essential to something as prosaic as Root Cause Analysis. And essential in a surprising way. Establishing an operative cause of a past event is an essential task in law and engineering. It entails the search for a counterfactual, not what happened but what might have happened to avoid the  regrettable outcome. That is inevitably an exercise in imagination.

In almost any interesting situation there will be multiple imagined pasts. If there is only one then it is time to worry. Sometimes it is straightforward to put our ideas to the test. This is where the Shewhart cycle comes into its own. In other cases we are in the realms of uncomfortable science. Sometimes empirical testing is frustrated because the trail has gone cold.

The issues of counterfactuals, Root Cause Analysis and causation have been explored by psychologists Daniel Kahneman1 and Ruth Byrne2 among others. Reading their research is a corrective to the optimistic view that Root Cause analysis is some sort of inevitably objective process. It is distorted by all sorts of heuristics and biases. Empirical testing is vital, if only through finding some data with borrowing strength.

Imagine a millennium bug

In 1984, Jerome and Marilyn Murray published Computers in Crisis in which they warned of a significant future risk to global infrastructure in telecommunications, energy, transport, finance, health and other domains. It was exactly those areas where engineers had been enthusiastic to exploit software from the earliest days, often against severe constraints of memory and storage. That had led to the frequent use of just two digits to represent a year, “71” for 1971, say. From the 1970s, software became more commonly embedded in devices of all types. As the year 2000 approached, the Murrays envisioned a scenario where the dawn of 1 January 2000 was heralded by multiple system failures where software registers reset to the year 1900, frustrating functions dependent on timing and forcing devices into a fault mode or a graceless degradation. Still worse, systems may simply malfunction abruptly and without warning, the only sensible signal being when human wellbeing was compromised. And the ruinous character of such a threat would be that failure would be inherently simultaneous and global, with safeguarding systems possibly beset with the same defects as the primary devices. It was easy to imagine a calamity.

Risk matrixYou might like to assess that risk yourself (ex ante) by locating it on the Risk Assessment Matrix to the left. It would be a brave analyst who would categorise it as “Low”, I think. Governments and corporations were impressed and embarked on a massive review of legacy software and embedded systems, estimated to have cost around $300 billion at year 2000 prices. A comprehensive upgrade programme was undertaken by nearly all substantial organisations, public and private.

Then, on 1 January 2000, there was no catastrophe. And that caused consternation. The promoters of the risk were accused of having caused massive expenditure and diversion of resources against a contingency of negligible impact. Computer professionals were accused, in terms, of self-serving scare mongering. There were a number of incidents which will not have been considered minor by the people involved. For example, in a British hospital, tests for Down’s syndrome were corrupted by the bug resulting in contra-indicated abortions and births. However, there was no global catastrophe.

This is the locus classicus of a counterfactual. Forecasters imagined a catastrophe. They persuaded others of their vision and the necessity of vast expenditure in order to avoid it. The preventive measures were implemented at great costs. The Catastrophe did not occur. Ex post, the forecasters were disbelieved. The danger had never been real. Even Cassandra would have sympathised.

Critics argued that there had been a small number of relatively minor incidents that would have been addressed most economically on a “fix on failure” basis. Much of this turns out to be a debate about the much neglected column of the risk assessment headed “Detectability”. Where a failure will inflict immediate pain, it is so much more critical as to management and mitigation than a failure that will present the opportunity for detection and protection in advance of a broader loss. Here, forecasting Detectability was just as important as Probability and Consequences in arriving at an economic strategy for management.

It is the fundamental paradox of risk assessment that, where control measures eliminate a risk, it is not obvious whether the benign outcome was caused by the control or whether the risk assessment was just plain wrong and the risk never existed. Another counterfactual. Again, finding some alternative data with borrowing strength can help though it will ever be difficult to build a narrative appealing to a wide population. There are links to some sources of data on the Wikipedia article about the bug. I will leave it to the reader.

Imagine …

Of course it is possible to find this all too difficult and to adopt the Biblical outlook.

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Ecclesiastes 9:11
King James Bible

That is to adopt the outlook of the lady on the level crossing. Risk professionals look for evidence that their approach works.

The other day, I was reading the annual report of the UK Health and Safety Executive (pdf). It shows a steady improvement in the safety of people at work though oddly the report is too coy to say this in terms. The improvement occurs over the period where risk assessment has become ubiquitous in industry. In an individual work activity it will always be difficult to understand whether interventions are being effective. But using the borrowing strength of the overall statistics there is potent evidence that risk assessment works.

References

  1. Kahneman, D & Tversky, A (1979) “The simulation heuristic”, reprinted in Kahneman et al. (1982) Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Cambridge, p201
  2. Byrne, R M J (2007) The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality, MIT Press