Thursday 29 April 2021, 12:45-13:15 via zoom
Eric Cator (RU)
Bombs away!
In the Netherlands (and in fact throughout Europe) there are many sites that have been bombed in the Second World War. Many of these bombs (around 10%) did not explode upon impact, and are therefore still present in the ground up to this day. They form a serious threat during building works. Historical analysis can give relevant information about specific bombings (number of planes, number of bombs dropped, aerial photographs), so that there is a clear idea about how many missing bombs there are, and where the other bombs exploded. The question is: where are these missing bombs? I will describe a model we have developed for this problem, using Bayesian statistics and the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, that is now in use for several bomb sites in the Netherlands.