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Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain

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Re: Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain

#31

This is really cool. Can anyone recommend any particularly good/cogent Simple Caveman explanations of how Bayesoan theory/Monte Carlo simulation work?

I wrote a tutorial about statistical bootstrap resampling w/ animations, which is similar/related to the Monte Carlo method: http://minimaxir.com/2015/09/bootstrap-resample/

Re: Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain

#33

This is a really great interface, and cool idea. You might consider upping the run count, or maybe narrowing your bins for the visualization. Either way, it's great to see more tools embracing probability and uncertainty like this.

5,000 tests is more than enough for most general use cases. (i.e. data that would be able to fit into browser memory, anyways)

Re: Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain

#35

This is a really great interface, and cool idea. You might consider upping the run count, or maybe narrowing your bins for the visualization. Either way, it's great to see more tools embracing probability and uncertainty like this.

In practice, 5000 was basically the number that wouldn't slow it down; this represented around 20-30% of the rendering time (react components were the main bottleneck, surprisingly, though I could still optimize them more).

I think that this works fine for small models, which is much of what exists now. As there are larger models, I'd eventually like to offload calculations to AWS Lambda or something similar, so we can do far more.

Re: Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain

#36
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it would be handy, but it depends on the size. Right now I think it's reasonably fast and intuitive for models of around 3 to 40 metrics(variables). If you have more it could get slower, especially if many of them have to be recalculated at once. I suggest trying it out. If nothing else, you may be able to begin with very simple models of the most important variables.

It was around 6-8 metrics so i guess it would be fine?

Definitely. Here's one in that range as an example. http://getguesstimate.com/models/163

Feel free to play with it. You can edit it, just not save it. (I recently realized this was not obvious to most people)

Re: Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain

#38
post #2

I wasn't expecting this to go on hnews yet, but happy to take any questions!

Have you seen or were you at all inspired by Analytica from Lumina Decision Systems (http://www.lumina.com/why-analytica)? It's been around for about twenty years and is often used in the field of policy analysis when you need you to quantify messy things like human lives in dollars in the face of massive uncertainties.

Re: Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain

#39
post #2

I wasn't expecting this to go on hnews yet, but happy to take any questions!

<3 this! Are there any plans for some type of export utility, e.g. some type of JSON serialization of a finished model?

That's definitely on the agenda. Curious, what are you interested in a JSON serialization for?
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