Abstraction

Engineers use mathematical models to describe the production of plastics and other chemicals. The models contain unknown parameters that are estimated from plant data. In the past year, the research team analyzed several criteria that modelers use to decide how complex or how simplified their models should be. They showed that one popular model-selection criterion, the corrected Akaike Information Criterion, tends to select very simple models, and that another, the adjusted coefficient of determination, tends to select models with many parameters.