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Associate

Professional

Track: Analytics in the Public Sector

The PRECISE Uncertainty Project

Tuesday, April 13, 1:45-2:25pm EDT

Projected Revenue Estimation from Crowdsourced Information on Statistical Errors is a new approach to quantitative risk analysis based on SIP libraries, which represent uncertainties as auditable data that obey both the laws of arithmetic and the laws of probability. In 2015, The Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) did a study of the accuracy of tax revenue projections by a small subset of its 20,000 members, mostly municipal Chief Financial Officers. In 2020, GFOA and 501(c)(3) nonprofit ProbabilityManagement.org, teamed up to extract stochastic libraries from this data to assist GFOA members in estimating the chances of achieving their revenue targets in uncertain times. The same basic approach may be applied within any enterprise that regularly collects data involving uncertain forecasts and actual outcomes.

Sam Savage image

Sam Savage

Sam Savage

Executive Director at ProbabilityManagement.org

Dr. Sam L. Savage is Executive Director of ProbabilityManagement.org, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit devoted to the communication and calculation of uncertainty. The organization has received funding from Chevron, Lockheed Martin, General Electric, PG&E, Wells Fargo and others, and Harry Markowitz, Nobel Laureate in Economics was a founding board member. Dr. Savage is author of The Flaw of Averages: Why We Underestimate Risk in the Face of Uncertainty (John Wiley & Sons, 2009, 2012), is an Adjunct Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University and a Fellow of Cambridge University’s Judge Business School. He is the inventor of the Stochastic Information Packet (SIP), a standardized, auditable data array for conveying uncertainty. Dr. Savage received his Ph.D. in computational complexity from Yale University.