Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Qualitative vs Quantitative Modeling

Prof. P.N.Murthy retired last year as Advisor to Tata Consultancy Services when he reached the age of 80. The retirement is only from his official position. He is still invited repeatedly to the Business Systems & Cybernetics Centre of TCS to participate in its activities and deliver special lectures.

Among his many achievements is his development and use of Cybernetic Influence Diagrams to understand complex social situations. This is a method of qualitative modeling. People who believe in quantitative modeling find it difficult to accept that qualitative modeling can be yield any results at all. So I have written up an article, in the form of a conversation, explaining the value of and need for qualitative modeling. The article is located on my web site here. Please read it and let me know if you find it convincing.

1 comment:

  1. I'd like to know more about CID. I know of Conceptual Graph, Augmented Transition Network and think can be used to model social interactions. I worked with a project in ECIL that read a English text and prodcuced ATN and then stored the information in a database for further query.

    Similarly, UML diagrams are qualitative in nature. And metrics are being defined on it for qualitative reasoning e.g. Chidamber-Kramer Metrics. OCL is being used for rigour in qualitative modeling

    I'd like to know more of CID.

    Hrushikesha Mohanty

    ReplyDelete