Week 8 — Model Fitting Night: Parameter Recovery & Show and Tell

Week 8 of 8. The session that separates modeling from storytelling.
A model with enough free parameters will fit anything, including noise. Worse, a model can fit your data beautifully and still be unidentifiable — meaning the parameter values you recovered are meaningless. Almost nobody checks. We're going to check, and then we'll look at what members have built over the last seven weeks.
Agenda:

1. Intros and recap of the series (10 min)
2. Parameter recovery: simulate from known parameters, refit, see whether you get them back. The single most useful hour in modeling (25 min)
3. Model comparison: AIC, BIC, and why cross-validation is usually the honest answer (20 min)
4. Overfitting demonstrated live, with a model we all agree is wrong (15 min)
5. Show and tell — bring anything you built or read during the series, however rough (30 min)
6. What we do next season (10 min)
   Bring: a laptop if you want to run the recovery exercise. Otherwise just bring what you made.
   This is an online event. The video link appears on this page once you RSVP.