as taken by Professor Ralph Peck's Legacy Website http://peck.geoengineer.org/words.html#
“A mechanistic model has the following advantages:
1. It contributes to our scientific understanding of the phenomenon under study.
2. It usually provides a better basis for extrapolation (at least to conditions worthy of further experimental investigation if not through the entire range of all input variables).
3. It tends to be parsimonious (i. e, frugal) in the use of parameters and to provide better estimates of the response”
Source: Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (1987), p. 13-14 as cited in: Andrew Odlyzko (2010) Social Networks and Mathematical Models http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/ecra.westland.pdf Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 9(1): 26-28 (2010)
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George E. P. Box 14
British statistician 1919–2013Related quotes

Source: Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, 2000, p. 14
Weckowicz (1967) "Chapter VI - Animal Studies of Hallucinogenic Drugs" in: Abram Hoffer, Humphry Osmond (1967) The hallucinogens. p. 555
Source: 1960s, Prisoner's dilemma: A study in conflict and cooperation (1965), p. 185
Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), p. 108; As cited in: Alberto Ortiz (1992, p. 13)
Source: System Engineering (1957), p. 302; As cited in: Thomas C. Ford (2008) Interoperability Measurement. p. 146
Geometry as a Branch of Physics (1949)

Letter to Wilhelm Fliess (25 March 1898)
1890s
Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. 70; Rest of first paragraph of Ch.3
Geometry as a Branch of Physics (1949)