Scaling up uncertain predictions
The process of scaling up predictions to higher levels of organization has a surprising consequence: it tends to systematically underestimate the magnitude of system-level change, an effect whose significance grows with the system’s dimensionality. This stems from a geometrical observation: in high dimensions there are more ways to be more different, than ways to be more similar. This effect, and methods that can be used to account for it, is described in our paper Scaling up uncertain predictions to higher levels of organisation tends to underestimate change (https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13621).
We have also provided a (web application) that can be used to visualize and explore this effect. The app also contains code (in R, MATLAB, and Python) that can be used to plot the theoretical expectations
