Credible Agent-Based Simulation – An Illusion or Only A Step Awayƒ

During the World Café activity at the 2018 Winter Simulation Conference, we discussed Agent-based Simulation (ABS) credibility. The topic is important since credible ABS leads to an impact on society whereby ABS is implemented by users and they can benefit from it. This paper presents the perspective of three academic panelists and a practitioner on the credibility of ABS. The discussion reveals that the increasing use of ABS models to explain social phenomena or systems that exhibit emergent behavior pose a challenge for model credibility. Several points and suggestions are raised by the panelists, including evaluating ABS model credibility via its explanatory power, the multi-dimensionality of credibility and the role of software engineering approaches.

[1]  Amina Adadi,et al.  Peeking Inside the Black-Box: A Survey on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) , 2018, IEEE Access.

[2]  Kai-Uwe Kühnberger,et al.  Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning: A Survey and Interpretation , 2017, Neuro-Symbolic Artificial Intelligence.

[3]  Bruce Edmonds,et al.  From KISS to KIDS - An 'Anti-simplistic' Modelling Approach , 2004, MABS.

[4]  Roberto Leombruni,et al.  A Common Protocol for Agent-Based Social Simulation , 2006, J. Artif. Soc. Soc. Simul..

[5]  Carlos Guestrin,et al.  "Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier , 2016, ArXiv.

[6]  Joshua M. Epstein,et al.  Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling (Princeton Studies in Complexity) , 2007 .

[7]  J. Woodward,et al.  Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World , 1988 .

[8]  Angela O'Mahony,et al.  Priority Challenges for Social and Behavioral Research and Its Modeling , 2018 .

[9]  Przemyslaw Biecek,et al.  DALEX: explainers for complex predictive models , 2018, J. Mach. Learn. Res..

[10]  Martin Kunc,et al.  Strengthening the reporting of empirical simulation studies: Introducing the STRESS guidelines , 2019, J. Simulation.

[11]  Armando Geller.  Behavioral Modeling and Simulation: From Individuals to Societies by Greg L. Zacharias, Jean Macmillan and Susan B. Van Hemel , 2009, J. Artif. Soc. Soc. Simul..

[12]  C. Hempel,et al.  Studies in the Logic of Explanation , 1948, Philosophy of Science.

[13]  Fei Wu,et al.  HST-LSTM: A Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal Long-Short Term Memory Network for Location Prediction , 2018, IJCAI.

[14]  M. Batty.  Generative social science: Studies in agent-based computational modeling , 2008 .

[15]  Franziska Klügl,et al.  A validation methodology for agent-based simulations , 2008, SAC '08.

[16]  Franziska Klügl-Frohnmeyer,et al.  A validation methodology for agent-based simulations , 2008, SAC.