Ears always tingle in the decision analytics community when a mainstream publication talks about the things we do, and last Friday, the stimulus was provided by this article in the Wall Street Journal on Monte Carlo.
How do you tackle a model with 318 paths? Well, whatever you do, you better not do it 318 times! Even if you were able to calculate a billion paths a second, it would still take 30,000 years or so.
The model we recently shared as part of the March Madness promotion was solved using Hybrid Discrete Tree Simulation, one of DPL's decision tree evaluation methods.
(Or, Is this Decision Tree too Chunky?)
When it comes to modelling uncertainty, it seems there are two kinds of people: discrete decision tree people and continuous Monte Carlo simulation people. That's OK, to a point. Some analyses can be approached with either method, and it is just a matter of taste.
