Quantification of Incertitude in Black Box Simulation Codes

Abstract

We present early results from a study addressing the question of how one treats the propagation of incertitude, that is, epistemic uncertainty, in input parameters in astrophysical simulations. As an example, we look at the propagation of incertitude in control parameters for stellar winds in MESA stellar evolution simulations. We apply two methods of incertitude propagation, the Cauchy Deviates method and the Quadratic Response Surface method, to quantify the output uncertainty in the final white dwarf mass given a range of values for wind parameters. The methodology we apply is applicable to the problem of propagating input incertitudes through any simulation code treated as a “black box,” i.e. a code for which the algorithmic details are either inaccessible or prohibitively complicated. We have made the tools developed for this study freely available to the community.