Retrodiction
Retrodiction (or
postdiction, though this should not be confused with the use of the term in criticisms of
parapsychological research) is the act of making a
prediction about the past. This is especially useful when one wishes to test a theory whose actual predictions are too long-term to be of immediate use. One speculates about uncertain events in the more distant past so that the theory would have predicted a known event in the less distant past. This is useful in, for example, the fields of
archaeology,
evolutionary biology,
financial analysis,
forensic science, and
cosmology.
