Statisticians try to calculate probability of another 9/11 sized attack
Monday, September 10, 2012 - 05:10
in Mathematics & Economics
(Phys.org)—In the world of probability and statistics almost anything can be labeled as a percentage of likelihood of occurring; statistics based on actual numbers give rise to probabilistic estimates that in some cases may be very accurate, not so accurate, or impossible to prove one way or another. With such a view, two statisticians, Aaron Clauset and Ryan Woodard have trained their sights on terrorist incidents and the likelihood of them occurring, specifically, the big kinds, like 9/11. They have found, as they describe in their paper they've uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, that using tried and true statistical models, that the likelihood of another attack as big, or even bigger, than 9/11, is as likely as not.