Missing Flight Found Using Bayes’ Theorem?
Last March, the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 was all over the news and a huge topic of concern to many people all over the world. The Boeing 777 carrying 239 passengers went missing while on route to Beijing. Searchers struggle to find any sign of the plane and the direction it was heading when it disappeared. The age-old question is where was the plane and how did it disappear.
Recently, scientists have looked into the method that helped discover the missing Air France Flight 447 in 2009. Six years ago, Air France Flight 447 that was heading to Paris from Rio De Janeiro disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean. After extensive search efforts, authorities contacted scientific consultants who applied Bayes’ Theorem to solve the mystery. This theorem is based on probability by starting with a hypothesis, and projecting the probability of other events based on that initial hypothesis. “Applying all available information – including wind and water currents, previous flight patterns and underwater drift – Bayes’ Theorem helped French authorities determine where Flight 447 would most likely be. The flight’s black box was then found under more than 12,000 feet of water.” And what is even more astonishing is that Bayes’ Theorem was used many times throughout history to solve pressing world problems. For example, “The theorem was used in World War II to locate German U-boats and the lost nuclear submarine U.S.S. Scorpion. It was also used during the Cold War to spot Soviet submarines.”
Malaysian authorities came to a false conclusion when they used Bayes’ Theorem to conclude that the flight had crashed over the Malacca Straits where they suspect an oil slick to have originated from the plane. They forgot a key conditional aspect of Bayes’ Theorem. “Though Bayes’ rule allows for constant modification to a hypothesis, it only works if the situation is similar enough to evidence applied from past incidents. Searchers’ focus on the oil slick in the Malaysia Airlines case would have guided Bayes’ Theorem in the wrong direction because the slick was not related to the missing plane. A “weakness of Bayes’ theorem is that you have to have reasonably accurate past experiences in order for the theorem to calculate accurately,” Efron said.” Unfortunately, the whereabouts of the Malaysian flight still remains an unsolved mystery.
In class, we used Bayes’ Theorem to determine if an event B will occur given the probabilities that a related event A occurs. It is amazing to see how a concept we learned in class is used to solve real-world problems.
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/12/mathematical-equationcouldhelpfindmissingmalaysianplane.html