Beyond intervals: Phase transitions lead to more general ranges

Abstract

One of the main tasks of science and engineering is to use the current values of the physical quantities for predicting the future values of the desired quantities. Due to the (inevitable) measurement inaccuracy, we usually know the current values of the physical quantities with interval uncertainty. Traditionally, it is assumed that all the processes are continuous; as a result, the range of possible values of the future quantities is also known with interval uncertainty. However, in many practical situations (such as phase transitions), the dependence of the future values on the current ones becomes discontinuous. We show that in such cases, initial interval uncertainties can lead to arbitrary bounded closed ranges of possible values of the future quantities. We also show that the possibility of such a discontinuity may drastically increase the computational complexity of the corresponding range prediction problem.