Should I trust that model?

By Val Snow

val snow
Val Snow (biography)

How do those building and using models decide whether a model should be trusted? While my thinking has evolved through modelling to predict the impacts of land use on losses of nutrients to the environment – such models are central to land use policy development – this under-discussed question applies to any model.

In principle, model development is a straightforward series of steps:

   • Specification: what will be included in the model is determined conceptually and/or quantitatively by peers, experts and/or stakeholders and the underlying equations are decided

   • Coding: the concepts and equations are translated into computer code and the code is tested using appropriate software development processes

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