In a previous thread For trinity believers: Does your world come unravelled if Jesus is not God,but ONLY Gods Son? the question came up concerning the problems of science dating fossils by @Dimi95, which was off topic. It is a complex topic that deserves its own thread.
The first question questioned the reliability test results because different results were attained at different times. Yes, importan t fossil are often tested more than once especially if improved technology. Second there is commonly a range of results. What is important consideration here is multiple methods of dating are compared to improved the accuracy of the results, The following reference is a research project the tested the probability of the statistics for radiometric dating methods. The source goes into detail the problem of the variability of radiometric testing results, If you understand statistics it is a good read. If not the conclusions are that radiometric dating is: Taken together, our findings indicate that the PEWMA method is a useful quantitative tool for testing hypotheses about past human-environment dynamics. It can be used to determine whether an underlying correlation exists between a calendrically-dated archaeological time-series and a radiocarbon-dated palaeoenvironmental time-series.
The second question asked how to determine that Natural Laws and processes are consistent over time in the past. This is partially addressed here by comparing calendrically-dating to radiometric dating. The next reference concerning a Japanese Lake confirms radiometric dating with calendrically-dating for more than 100,000 years.
[URLunfurl="true"]Radiocarbon dating uncertainty and the reliability of the PEWMA method of time-series analysis for research on long-term human-environment interaction
Time-series analysis has considerable potential to improve our understanding of past human-environment interaction. However, there is reason to think that its application could be undermined by the widespread reliance on calibrated radiocarbon dates for age-depth models. Calibrated radiocarbon dates have highly irregular uncertainties, as we mentioned earlier. These highly irregular uncertainties potentially pose a significant problem because they undermine the assumptions of standard statistical methods. With this in mind, we conducted a large simulation study in which we explored the effect of calibrated radiocarbon date uncertainty on a potentially useful Poisson regression-based method for time-series regression, called PEWMA. To test the effect of calibrated radiocarbon date error on the PEWMA method, we simulated thousands of archaeological and palaeoenvironmental time-series with known correlations and then analysed them with the PEWMA algorithm.
Our simulation experiments yielded three important findings. One is that the PEWMA method was able to identify true underlying correlations between the synthetic time-series much of the time. The true-positive rate for the method ranged from 20–90%, with higher true-positive rates when the synthetic environmental series contained less noise and the correlation between the time-series was stronger. Under the most realistic conditions, with moderate noise levels and correlation strengths, the true positive rate was around 30–50%. Decreasing the noise levels and increasing the correlation coefficients to 0.5 or 0.75 led to true positive rates upwards of 90%. While it is not surprising that stronger correlations in less-noisy data were easier to identify, it is important to be aware that the method might miss low correlation relationships.
The second important finding is that the false positive error rate of the method is roughly 10%, on average. This is surprising because we were expecting the highly irregular chronological errors of radiocarbon dates to warp the time-series in ways that could cause many spurious correlations and therefore a high false positive rate. Instead, the 10% false-positive rate suggests that finding spurious correlations is actually unlikely—in the context of archaeological research at any rate.
The third, and perhaps most surprising finding, was that varying the number of radiocarbon dates used to date the time-series had no noticeable effect. The true-positive rates were largely consistent whether five, 10, or 15 radiocarbon dates were used. This was surprising because it seems like adding more dates should reduce chronological uncertainty by increasing the number of chronological anchors for the age-depth models. Thus, we expected that more dates would improve our ability to find underlying correlations. That increasing the number of dates above five had no substantial impact on the true- or false-positive rates indicates that the PEWMA method is fairly robust to chronological uncertainty.
Taken together, our findings indicate that the PEWMA method is a useful quantitative tool for testing hypotheses about past human-environment dynamics. It can be used to determine whether an underlying correlation exists between a calendrically-dated archaeological time-series and a radiocarbon-dated palaeoenvironmental time-series. Crucially, it has a low false-positive rate, a moderate-to-high true-positive rate, and it appears to be fairly robust to chronological uncertainty. Methods with these traits are essential for analyzing archaeological and palaeoenvironmental time-series, which is a vital part of understanding past human-environment interaction.
Note: I previously noted that multiple dating method are used to correlate and confirm radiometric dating methods. In this research project the used calendrically-dated methods.
The next reference I will post refers to the Japanese Lake varved deposits provide over 150,000 years of individual annual varves to use in correlation with calendrically-dates of annual varves to confirm radiometric dating.
The first question questioned the reliability test results because different results were attained at different times. Yes, importan t fossil are often tested more than once especially if improved technology. Second there is commonly a range of results. What is important consideration here is multiple methods of dating are compared to improved the accuracy of the results, The following reference is a research project the tested the probability of the statistics for radiometric dating methods. The source goes into detail the problem of the variability of radiometric testing results, If you understand statistics it is a good read. If not the conclusions are that radiometric dating is: Taken together, our findings indicate that the PEWMA method is a useful quantitative tool for testing hypotheses about past human-environment dynamics. It can be used to determine whether an underlying correlation exists between a calendrically-dated archaeological time-series and a radiocarbon-dated palaeoenvironmental time-series.
The second question asked how to determine that Natural Laws and processes are consistent over time in the past. This is partially addressed here by comparing calendrically-dating to radiometric dating. The next reference concerning a Japanese Lake confirms radiometric dating with calendrically-dating for more than 100,000 years.
[URLunfurl="true"]Radiocarbon dating uncertainty and the reliability of the PEWMA method of time-series analysis for research on long-term human-environment interaction
Time-series analysis has considerable potential to improve our understanding of past human-environment interaction. However, there is reason to think that its application could be undermined by the widespread reliance on calibrated radiocarbon dates for age-depth models. Calibrated radiocarbon dates have highly irregular uncertainties, as we mentioned earlier. These highly irregular uncertainties potentially pose a significant problem because they undermine the assumptions of standard statistical methods. With this in mind, we conducted a large simulation study in which we explored the effect of calibrated radiocarbon date uncertainty on a potentially useful Poisson regression-based method for time-series regression, called PEWMA. To test the effect of calibrated radiocarbon date error on the PEWMA method, we simulated thousands of archaeological and palaeoenvironmental time-series with known correlations and then analysed them with the PEWMA algorithm.
Our simulation experiments yielded three important findings. One is that the PEWMA method was able to identify true underlying correlations between the synthetic time-series much of the time. The true-positive rate for the method ranged from 20–90%, with higher true-positive rates when the synthetic environmental series contained less noise and the correlation between the time-series was stronger. Under the most realistic conditions, with moderate noise levels and correlation strengths, the true positive rate was around 30–50%. Decreasing the noise levels and increasing the correlation coefficients to 0.5 or 0.75 led to true positive rates upwards of 90%. While it is not surprising that stronger correlations in less-noisy data were easier to identify, it is important to be aware that the method might miss low correlation relationships.
The second important finding is that the false positive error rate of the method is roughly 10%, on average. This is surprising because we were expecting the highly irregular chronological errors of radiocarbon dates to warp the time-series in ways that could cause many spurious correlations and therefore a high false positive rate. Instead, the 10% false-positive rate suggests that finding spurious correlations is actually unlikely—in the context of archaeological research at any rate.
The third, and perhaps most surprising finding, was that varying the number of radiocarbon dates used to date the time-series had no noticeable effect. The true-positive rates were largely consistent whether five, 10, or 15 radiocarbon dates were used. This was surprising because it seems like adding more dates should reduce chronological uncertainty by increasing the number of chronological anchors for the age-depth models. Thus, we expected that more dates would improve our ability to find underlying correlations. That increasing the number of dates above five had no substantial impact on the true- or false-positive rates indicates that the PEWMA method is fairly robust to chronological uncertainty.
Taken together, our findings indicate that the PEWMA method is a useful quantitative tool for testing hypotheses about past human-environment dynamics. It can be used to determine whether an underlying correlation exists between a calendrically-dated archaeological time-series and a radiocarbon-dated palaeoenvironmental time-series. Crucially, it has a low false-positive rate, a moderate-to-high true-positive rate, and it appears to be fairly robust to chronological uncertainty. Methods with these traits are essential for analyzing archaeological and palaeoenvironmental time-series, which is a vital part of understanding past human-environment interaction.
Note: I previously noted that multiple dating method are used to correlate and confirm radiometric dating methods. In this research project the used calendrically-dated methods.
The next reference I will post refers to the Japanese Lake varved deposits provide over 150,000 years of individual annual varves to use in correlation with calendrically-dates of annual varves to confirm radiometric dating.
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