Sunday, March 11, 2012

Predictive power

When the financial crisis broke in August 2007, David Viniar, chief financial officer of Goldman Sachs, famously commented that 25-standard deviation events had occurred on several successive days.
Taken literally, this is of course false; no one has ever seen even a single 25-standard deviation event, and no one ever will. What has occurred was probably the most spectacular failure of a mathematical model in the history of mathematical models.

(The source of the quote is here.)

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