I’m beginning to think I should have approached this maths modelling stuff from an engineering point of view: with a requirements document, version control and unit testing. Constructing a reasonably complicated mathematical model seems to have enough in common with software development that such things could be quite useful.
I’m calling this “meta-engineering”, because I’d be engineering the development of a model which itself describes (part of) the software engineering process.
The only problem is that formal maths notation can’t just be compiled and executed like source code, and source code is far too verbose (and lacking in variety of symbols) to give you a decent view of the maths.
Fortunately, Bayesian networks provide a kind of high-level design notation; perhaps the UML of probability analysis. Mine look like some sort of demented public transport system. However, drawing them in LaTeX using TikZ/PGF gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.