Bayes’ Theorem May Find the Missing Plane?
A few years ago, in 2009, Air France Flight “disappeared” over the Atlantic Ocean, and it took two years for them to even come close to finding the plane. However, Bayes’ Theorem was used, and within five days, the plane was able to be located. Bayes’ Theorem has also been used in Google’s driverless cars, predictions in stock markets, World War II to locate German U-boats, and the Cold War to spot Soviet submarines.
Many people know about the Malaysian airplane that went missing when going to Beijing, and everyone is alarmed at the fact that the searchers are still so clueless about where the plane could possibly be. Officials are predicting that Bayes’ Theorem could be used in a similar way in this case, to help locate the plane. While the theorem starts with a hypothesis, seemingly inaccurate, you are basically forced to modify the hypothesis every time you get a new piece of information, leading the probability to become more accurate. Essentially, the searchers make a prediction about where they think the plane could be, and use Bayes’ Theorem to come up with a probability that the plane is actually in that location, or a nearby one.
However, Bayes’ Theorem definitely has many flaws, in that it really only works well if the situation is similar enough to past incidents. For example, had the searchers tried looking into the oil slick in the Malaysia Airlines, they could have been completely misled, since the two are not related. If they focused more on oceans and used the last signals they received from the airplanes though, Bayes’ Theorem would work more accurately. While this is not proving to be as beneficial as it has been in the past, it definitely can lead searchers to finding the plane much quicker than without it. Reading this article really interested me, as I found it very interesting to see that a theorem we learned in class and applied to small problems could actually make such a big impact, on something that we hear about in the news everyday.
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/12/mathematical-equationcouldhelpfindmissingmalaysianplane.html