Abstract
During the ski season, professional avalanche forecasters working for the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) monitor one of the most dangerous highways in the world. These forecasters continually evaluate the risk of avalanche activity and make road closure decisions.
Previous research on this topic was funded, in part, by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES-9212017).
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Notes
- 1.
See Bowles and Sandahl (1988).
- 2.
See Abromeit (2004).
- 3.
See Perla (1991).
- 4.
The word redundant more generally than correlation is used in this paper. This indicates when several variables are designed to measure the same thing or may be functions of each other.
- 5.
In computing SZAVLAG the measure which we use is the American size measure, which is perhaps less appropriate than the Canadian size measure. However, a similar adjustment might be relevant.
- 6.
Chipman et al. (2009).
- 7.
- 8.
This partition scores poorly but is only used to illustrate the concepts.
- 9.
The default value for a, 0.95, is selected. This implies a high likelihood of a split at the root node with a decreasing probability as the depth of the tree, d, increases. The default value of b is 2. However, b = 0.5 is used to obtain bushier trees (trees with more terminal nodes). The story used in the text had forecasters using less than 10 variables, but at least 3.
- 10.
Details are in Blattenberger and Fowles (1994, 1995). UDOT data indicate that, on average, there are 2.6 persons per vehicle, 2.5 of which are skiers. Of these skiers, 40 % are residents who spend an average of $19 per day at the ski resorts (1991 dollars). Sixty percent tended to be nonresidents who spent an average of $152 per day (1991). A road closure results in a revenue loss in 2005 of over $2.25 million per day based on average traffic volume of 5,710 cars during the ski season.
- 11.
The road must be closed while artificial explosives are used.
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Blattenberger, G., Fowles, R. (2014). Avalanche Forecasting: Using Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART). In: Alleman, J., Ní-Shúilleabháin, Á., Rappoport, P. (eds) Demand for Communications Services – Insights and Perspectives. The Economics of Information, Communication, and Entertainment. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7993-2_11
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