Taxonomy of Models: What is a model? What are the different kinds of models? What are the differences between each?
-
I had often been asked "What kind of model is yours?" referring to my thesis work. I have always felt puzzled while attempting to answer that question - my model is/was neither a "linear mixed model", "graphical model", "drift diffusion model", or anything I could put a label on. I'd have called it a "mechanistic model", but the puzzling look on the faces remained.
In the back of my mind, I have heard the terms "causal models", "mechanistic models", "statistical models". But I have a hard time explaining the exact differences between each of them - all of them come with equations, so you cannot simply use the absence or presence of them to eliminate.
I recently found the below table in a paper on Towards Causal Representational Learning, which might explain some differences and be of interest to some people.
-
There are several rabbit holes one can go down here, but one I would like to emphasize is the shifting meaning of the term 'prediction' in science over time. See here for an interesting historical perspective