[BTeam] sloppiness

[Jay Benesch]

I was unaware that sloppiness was a defined mathematical concept.  I 
haven't gotten far enough into the paper to learn if there's application 
to desks.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.05679

The geometry of sloppiness
Emilie Dufresne, Heather A. Harrington, Dhruva V. Raman
(Submitted on 19 Aug 2016)

     Mathematical models in the sciences often require the estimation of 
unknown parameter values from data. Sloppiness provides information 
about the uncertainty of this task. We develop the precise mathematical 
foundation for sloppiness and define rigorously its key concepts, such 
as `model manifold' in relation to concept of structural 
identifiability. The traditional definition of sloppiness uses the 
Fisher Information Matrix, and as such it deals with infinitesimal 
measurement error. We generalize sloppiness and define it in terms of 
the premetric on parameter space induced by measurement noise. 
Applications include parametric statistical models, explicit time 
dependent models, and ordinary differential equation models with time 
series data.

Comments: 	25 pages, 5 figures
Subjects: 	Metric Geometry (math.MG); Dynamical Systems (math.DS); 
Statistics Theory (math.ST); Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability 
(physics.data-an); Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM)