George E. P. Box Quote

A mechanistic model has the following advantages:
1. It contributes to our scientific understanding of the phenomenon under study.
2. It usually provides a better basis for extrapolation (at least to conditions worthy of further experimental investigation if not through the entire range of all input variables).
3. It tends to be parsimonious (i. e, frugal) in the use of parameters and to provide better estimates of the response

p. 13-14 as cited in: Andrew Odlyzko (2010) Social Networks and Mathematical Models Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 9(1): 26-28 (2010) - Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (1987)

http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/ecra.westland....[dtc.umn.edu]