An Introduction to the SAFE Matlab Toolbox With Practical Examples and Guidelines

The chapter introduces a Matlab/Octave toolbox called SAFE (Sensitivity Analysis For Everybody). The software implements the most widely used as well as new global sensitivity analysis (GSA) methods as functions and provides support for their application. SAFE includes a wide range of tools that can help users to address critical choices when applying GSA (e.g., choice of sample size or of parameter ranges). Commented workflow scripts suggest how to use and combine the different functions present in SAFE. The software is open source and freely available for academic and noncommercial purposes, and it has already been used in a wide range of application areas. Here we aim in particular at giving practical advice for performing a robust GSA with SAFE. We also demonstrate some of the numerical and visual analyses that can be realized with the software through examples of applications from the literature.