Book Image

Simulation for Data Science with R

By : Matthias Templ
Book Image

Simulation for Data Science with R

By: Matthias Templ

Overview of this book

Data Science with R aims to teach you how to begin performing data science tasks by taking advantage of Rs powerful ecosystem of packages. R being the most widely used programming language when used with data science can be a powerful combination to solve complexities involved with varied data sets in the real world. The book will provide a computational and methodological framework for statistical simulation to the users. Through this book, you will get in grips with the software environment R. After getting to know the background of popular methods in the area of computational statistics, you will see some applications in R to better understand the methods as well as gaining experience of working with real-world data and real-world problems. This book helps uncover the large-scale patterns in complex systems where interdependencies and variation are critical. An effective simulation is driven by data generating processes that accurately reflect real physical populations. You will learn how to plan and structure a simulation project to aid in the decision-making process as well as the presentation of results. By the end of this book, you reader will get in touch with the software environment R. After getting background on popular methods in the area, you will see applications in R to better understand the methods as well as to gain experience when working on real-world data and real-world problems.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Simulation for Data Science with R
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 11. System Dynamics and Agent-Based Models

Judging by the title of this chapter, you may think that we are going to discuss a completely different topic compared to previous chapter topics. But this is not true. We already did some simple system dynamics in Chapter 6, Probability Theory Shown by Simulation when we flipped the coin (over time). The evolution over time was just the frequency counts of one side of the coin. In addition, we did Markov chain Monte Carlo experiments that also develop over time and possibly converge against a solution. However, this chapter differs in terms of only constants and probabilities playing a role. Statistical uncertainty is – unfortunately – not directly related to system dynamics.

In this chapter, we want to discuss some more advanced modeling over time. Generally, dynamic systems, in terms of the evolution of systems in time, have widespread applications, for example, the growth of organisms, stock markets in finance, traffic, chemical reactions...