"It’s always fascinating to look into a crystal ball”
Statistician Johanna Ziegel is a great believer in numbers and their power to predict the future. Away from work, though, she’s learned not to plan for every eventuality.
How do you deal with unpredictability at home?
I’m an organised, disciplined person, but I’ve also learned not to plan every last detail when it’s not really necessary. That’s a good strategy for both work and family life, because it’s easier for something to work out well when your definition of “well” is nice and broad! And it also teaches you about what really matters in life.
What’s so exciting about using statistics to forecast the future?
It’s always fascinating to look into a crystal ball. I study what it is that makes a forecast “good”. A good forecast is one that is statistically consistent with what actually happens and thus predicts the future as accurately as possible. To compare forecasts in a fair and meaningful way, we first need to define their starting conditions precisely in mathematical terms. This allows us to demonstrate which evaluation criteria reliably favour good forecasts – without being misled by clever tricks.
Robots in action
This text appeared in the 25/04 issue of the ETH magazine Globe.
Your research is applied across a range of fields. What are the biggest challenges here?
My work is more about theory and method?ology than their specific applications. But I always aim for the methods I develop to be useful across different fields. In the field of weather forecasting, for example, artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly important role. In fact, some AI-based models are already outperforming the classic physical models. What I want to do is to develop new statistical methods that can better assess whether AI models are consistent with the laws of physics and how well they can forecast extreme weather events.
You became a professor and a mother at a young age. What does it take to combine professional and family life?
It’s important to have a healthy picture of who you are and to learn ways of caring for yourself. That’s something I owe not only to myself but also to my children. Children need parents who are healthy and basically happy, otherwise it’s hard for them to learn how to become healthy, contented adults themselves.