Dynamic systems modelling and simulation – assisted thought experiments by Dr Charles Driver

About the speaker

Dr Charles Driver is a researcher at the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. He focuses on improving methods for mapping theories of change to data and applying these to different problems across the broad domain of human development. One of his projects included writing the statistical software package “ctsem” in R, which can be used to model dynamic systems. (@CharlesDriverAU)

About the talk

Most phenomena of scientific interest can be loosely thought of as ‘dynamic systems’, in the sense that they usually change in different ways depending on different inputs. In the social sciences, phenomena are usually highly complex and dependent on many features of the world, such that any formal model is inherently a vast simplification. In order for our modelling simplifications to provide useful insight, they need to adequately represent the core aspects we are interested in, and cope with the many aspects we are not. In this talk I will discuss some of the basic ideas of modelling dynamic systems, demonstrate how simulating such systems can yield important insight and questions, and outline the ctsem software for estimating dynamic systems models in social science contexts.