Retrodiction

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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.