ABSTRACT

While interest in using human, social, cultural, and behavioral (HSCB) models in operational, field, and business environments grows, the challenge of developing metrics that can verifY, validate, scale and replicate the complexity of human driven events on computational platforms continues to confound. For HSCB models to make the jump from academic exercises into operational decision-making processes, metrics that can help decision-makers determine which model to trust and which results matter are essentiaL In this paper, the authors pull from traditional social science and mathematical approaches to provide an overview of the authors' approach for verifYing and validating HSCB models for decisionmaking. Using a non-computational HSCB model of conflict theory, the authors walk through each stage of the evaluation process to identify verification and

validation methodologies from the hard and soft science that can be applied to measure HSCB models on a consistent basis.