Calibration tool: submit

This page allows you to submit a project for calibration. It also allows you to specify particular settings for the MCMC simulation used for undertaking the calibration.

Accessing this page

This page can be accessed from the project manager by selecting "Submit" for the project you wish to calibrate.

Description

This page shows a form containing the current settings for the MCMC simulation. The default values should be sufficient for most projects. However, the fields are as follows:

Precision for internal calculations - This should normally be set to 10.
Seed for the pseudo random number generator - You can specify the seed to use for pseudo random number generation. This should normally be set to -1 which sets the seed automatically from the clock.
Bin width for histograms - This sets the bin width (in years) for the MCMC sampling. It will affect the bin width of the plots produced by the results presentation tool. If you want your results computed to the nearest year, this should be set to 1. If you are happy with calculations to the nearest 10 years, for example, you can speed up the calibration by setting the bin width to 10.
MCMC burn in time - This sets the number of simulations (per parameter) that should be discarded at the beginning of the MCMC simulation. This is known as the burn in time and is typically set to 1000.
MCMC sample interval - The sampling interval between accepted simulations (i.e. those used to form the final sample upon which results are based). This is typically set to 10, so that parameter estimates at every 10th simulation contribute to the final results.
Minimum sample size - This specifies the minimum number of iterations that should be simulated. Once the minimum number of iterations have been simulated BCal will perform automatic convergence checking (see below).
Convergence checking sensitivity level - This specifies the sensitivity of the convergence checking (see below). Level 5 is the most strict, whereas level 1 is most lenient. 0 will disable convergence checking and the project will be simulated for the maximum allowable number of iterations.

BCal automatically performs a limited level of convergence checking whilst your calibration takes place. We recommend that you read the page Internal convergence checking for more information, especially if you are having problems.