Sensitivity Analysis for Business, Technology, and Policymaking : Made Easy with Simulation Decomposition (SimDec)

Abstract

SimDec is a revolution in decision-making support. SimDec “teases out” inherent cause-and-effect relationships and reveals the intricacy of relationships between sets of input and output variables. At its core, SimDec is an amalgamation of uncertainty and global sensitivity analysis with an innovative visualization technique. While straightforward and elegant, this novel approach significantly enhances the analytical capabilities of users by readily exposing seemingly, a priori, counterintuitive behaviours so that they can be readily understood by both technical specialists and non-technical users alike. This book is the first to articulate the ubiquitous applicability of SimDec and has been written by the leading proponents of the technique. The book provides the necessary background to fully understand the underlying approach and then demonstrates its applicability to a wide spectrum of fields, such as finance, entrepreneurship, energy, 3D manufacturing, geology, the environment, engineering, public policy, and even superconducting magnets. To facilitate as widespread adoption and penetration of SimDec as possible, all supporting computer codes are available, open-source, in Python, Julia, R, and Matlab. The innovative material will be of primary benefit to practitioners and researchers analyzing data from the social sciences, business, science, engineering, mathematics, and computing. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.