2.4. Scientific Modeling

2.4 Scientific Modeling

Scientific modeling is a scientific activity aimed to make a particular part or feature of the world easier to understand, define, quantify, visualize, and simulate. Models are real and concrete entities, representations separate from the reality that generates them. Kretzschmar (2013) considers them "useful as replacements for things or phenomena that cannot be directly observed because they are too large (weather systems) or too small (atoms) or for things that we wish to manipulate and understand without interfering with the source."

Descriptive vs Predictive Model

According to Kretzschmar (2013), the "descriptive model of language data simply associates the data with locations without trying to make generalizations or draw conclusions." For example, figure 1 shows a descriptive model from the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS). It is descriptive because each symbol indicates the presence or absence of the response chest of drawers in the LAMSAS database.

Figure 1: A descriptive plot of respondents’ use of chest of drawers to describe‘bedroom case furniture’, from LAMSAS.

A predictive model processes data before presenting it for the purpose of making generalizations and drawing conclusions. For example, figure 2 uses the same data as figure 1 but includes density-estimation statistics to render a prediction about the likelihood that the response chest of drawers might have been elicited at any location within a certain region. Thus, it visualizes a prediction for each area based on the original data.

Figure 2: A density estimation prediction of respondents’ use of chest of drawers to describe ‘bedroom case furniture’ from LAMSAS.

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