Rare
event is an event that happens very less in our day to day life. For instance,
the event that we all saw in the film "2012" or in "Day After
Tomorrow" Motion picture can be termed as a rare event. Thus the melting
and displacement of earth's crust, natural disasters comes under the domain of
rare event. The 2007 motion picture flip "Die Hard 4" also had a
different form of rare event. It showed us about an organized terror attack
that was coupled with cyber and network security attacks creating a complete
shutdown of road, power, banking infrastructure. The commonality between all
these events is that they are rare but have dire consequences and cannot be
predicted easily as the chances of estimating the occurences of these events
are often beyond the imagination of mathematicians, modellers. However, they
are still possible and they do happen with high damages. Moreover when they
happen if the preparation to manage those damages are less the risk of damages
to society goes up. Therefore, from a perspective of risk management, it is
important to know the chance of occurrence of these rare events so that
measures can be taken to manage them. Risk mitigation in case of rare events
should also be tried in case of some types of rare events like the terror attack
mentioned in case of the film Die Hard 4. It can reduce the extent of damages
and uncertainty (simply put as the consequences which are beyond the control of
risk mitigation measures at a point of time) associated with the occurence of
the event. However, for rare events like as depicted in the film 2012: risk
mitigation measures can be difficult as controlling the occurences of the event
was totally outside the human control (though the team knew it in the film few
months in advance that something will happen) and was a natural phenomenon.
Therefore,
it is important to understand the pattern of occurence of these events even
though it is difficult to put them in a statistical distribution pattern.
However, through use of multiple simulations by using Monte Carlo techniques
(which creates an imaginary world of simulation and runs such a simulation
again and again) and uncertainty modelling if the chance of their occurrence
can be predicted even with a margin of error, it can prepare the human society to
prepare in a better way to create risk management measures through preventive
actions. Policies can be therefore designed on the basis of these predictions
(considering the margin of errors in the predictions) to create tangible
measures that can protect the human society from adverse consequences of these
events when they happen. However, rare event modelling as of now is often not
done in an integrated manner. Time has come to join the skills of engineers,
psychologists, scientists, modellers, social scientists, people from different
disciplines and policy makers to establish integrated rare event models which
will capture all the elements of consequences of a damage that can happen to
the human society in case of occurrence of a rare event.
For rare events,
which do not have well defined probability of occurence, in other words for
whom the uncertainty of probability estimates are very high, there is a larger
need for creating integrated rare event models. It is because for most of these
events, the damage extent and degree will be very high. Therefore the
importance of mitigating risks in such cases assumes a larger relevance.
Mitigation of such risks can only happen when within the construction process
of a rare event model, there is an engineer who can say that what can be the
chances of failure of certain engineering designs of an infrastructure in the
wake of a rare event (say a natural disaster). It will also require a scientist
in the model building who will incorporate the science of the natural process
owing to which the natural disaster happens. Behavioral, social scientists,
psychologists will need to pitch in the model-building by suggesting how people
can behave in the wake of such a rare event. In case of occurrence of a human
induced rare event of an extreme type like cyber and infrastructure network
terrorism (as shown in Bruce Willis starrer Die Hard 4), psychologists have to
be a part of the modelling process to understand the mind pattern of the
terrorists who aim to attack cyber and infrastructure networks. Such an
understanding will help in framing some surrogate probability distribution
pattern to predict these events for possible risk mitigation measures. Finally,
within the modelling team policy makers,
practitioners, have to be there who can constantly question the modelling team
to be sensitive to the practical domains of policy realities coming out of the
ideal world of modelling simulations while framing the equation structures and
finalizing the result interpretations. This will help in coming up with policy
prescriptions to create risk mitigation measures for addressing the
consequences of rare event occurences. Once, all this integration happens, rare
event modelling work will transform to an useful tool to capture the realistic
world of imaginations that can happen in future and need to be tackled to
protect the human society. However, to achieve that, rare event modelling has
to be more of an art based on the science of understanding an imaginary world
of occurence of certain events being placed in the present context. Therefore,
a good piece of rare event modelling is one where there are many scientists,
thinkers, implementors who have turned as artists and are constantly working
together to move inwards towards different imaginary layers of dreams as was
shown in the motion picture -
"Inception".
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