This paper reports on a model building process developed to enable multiple audiences, particularly non-experts, to appreciate the validity of the models being built and their outcomes. The process is a four stage reversible cascade. This cascade provides a structured, auditable/transparent,...

Although mixing of OR methods is an area of increasing interest to the OR community, there has been little discussion regarding generic lessons that can be learnt from mixing methods in practice. The aim of this paper is to carry out such an analysis through considering generic lessons that may...

Classical approaches to estimating the rate of occurrence of events perform poorly when data are few. Maximum likelihood estimators result in overly optimistic point estimates of zero for situations where there have been no events. Alternative empirical-based approaches have been proposed based...

Empirical Bayes provides one approach to estimating the frequency of rare events as a weighted average of the frequencies of an event and a pool of events. The pool will draw upon, for example, events with similar precursors. The higher the degree of homogeneity of the pool, then the Empirical...