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clickety_clack 7 days ago

I seem to be in the minority, but I don’t think you should use a fixed seed in the MC runs you use for decision making. It gives a false sense of the accuracy of process as the answers stay the same. I think a decision maker should be exposed to the effects of the standard error.

That said, I know sometimes the point of analysis is more about narrative building than decision making, and changing numbers make it harder to maintain trust in a narrative.

Ntrails 6 days ago | parent [-]

Agree - in one context if your decision is different due to a change in seed -> change in output, then frankly it isn't an input you should be using to decide?

On the other hand once you're happy with the error bars wrt seeding it is imo useful to have consistency in reporting.