Relation between Chance Discovery and Black Swan Awareness: From the Viewpoint of Abduction and Affordance

Introduction

We have been researching for chance discovery more than 10 years. Of course, the aim of chance discovery is discover something, but chance discovery is rather different from data mining. In general, data mining tries to discover trends or general matters which will be useful for us. For instance, a trend in stock price is usually data mined. Data mining usually adopts stochastic models. Since abnormal values are usually ignored, stochastic models such as the Black-Scholes model could not explain the end of the bubble phenomenon (Takeuchi, 2000). This situation is the same as in data mining. In fact, recently data mining has changed its scope to discover exception or outlier. These tendencies might be accelerated by recent unstable economic situation. The status of economics in the world has not been stable yet. This situation has been caused by the financial crises of 2007 in USA. For Japan, after the end of the middle or long term economic ``bubble'' situation in 1990, we could not recover from unstable and bad economical situation. Many persons could not predict the changes where financial crises occurred. Thus it is rather difficult to follow trends which are generalized pattern of past events. Actually, those who can predict this type of extraordinary situation can make money. Thus the change of data mining's research interest is very natural. On the other hand, according to the definition of chance discovery (Ohsawa & McBurney, 2003), chance discovery's main aim has been to discover rare, hidden, potential or novel event(s) / situation(s) that can be conceived either as a future opportunity or risk. In 2007 Taleb introduced a concept ``Black Swan'' (Taleb, 2007). Black swans had never seen in Europe, but are native to Australia. Therefore, Europeans believed all swans were white and the sighting of the first black swan might have been an interesting surprise for a few ornithologists. Taleb uses this rare black swan metaphor to explain how usual person tend to ignore rare or novel events and the importance of being aware of such rare or novel events.

For the financial crises of 2007 in USA, several analyses have been presented, for instance that by Rajan (2010) and Posner (2010). In fact, several years before the crises, Rajan warned the possibility of the financial crises. However many person ignored his warnings. Posner also shows his successes and failure in analyses before the crises. Thus a few researcher were aware of ``chance<sup>1</sup>'' of the financial crises, but since they were not acceptable or rare opinions, accordingly they were ignored. Posner regards such rare or novel situation as ``Black Swan.''

The main concept of Black Swan seems coincide with that of chance discovery. Thus in Abe (2011) I compared chance with Black Swan and discussed a relationship between chance and Black Swan awareness.

In this paper, I compare a chance with Black Swan and present the future feather of chance discovery. For chance discovery I mainly use a framework proposed in Abe (The Role of Abduction in Chance Discovery, 2001; The Role of Abduction in Chance Discovery, 2003; The Role of Abduction in Chance Discovery, 2003; Abduction and Analogy in Chance Discovery, 2003) etc. This framework is based on abduction. I will review the framework in the following section.

In the rest of this paper, I will briefly review chance discovery and Black Swan theory, and several viewpoints of unusual economical situation by Rajan and Posner. Then I will discuss how to discover the better chance from the viewpoint of abduction and affordance, and give a formalization.