4,410 research outputs found
Using graphical models and multi-attribute utility theory for probabilistic uncertainty handling in large systems, with application to nuclear emergency management
Although many decision-making problems involve uncertainty, uncertainty handling within large decision support systems (DSSs) is challenging. One domain where uncertainty handling is critical is emergency response management, in particular nuclear emergency response, where decision making takes place in an uncertain, dynamically changing environment. Assimilation and analysis of data can help to reduce these uncertainties, but it is critical to do this in an efficient and defensible way. After briefly introducing the structure of a typical DSS for nuclear emergencies, the paper sets up a theoretical structure that enables a formal Bayesian decision analysis to be performed for environments like this within a DSS architecture. In such probabilistic DSSs many input conditional probability distributions are provided by different sets of experts overseeing different aspects of the emergency. These probabilities are then used by the decision maker (DM) to find her optimal decision. We demonstrate in this paper that unless due care is taken in such a composite framework, coherence and rationality may be compromised in a sense made explicit below. The technology we describe here builds a framework around which Bayesian data updating can be performed in a modular way, ensuring both coherence and efficiency, and provides sufficient unambiguous information to enable the DM to discover her expected utility maximizing policy
Estimation from Pairwise Comparisons: Sharp Minimax Bounds with Topology Dependence
Data in the form of pairwise comparisons arises in many domains, including
preference elicitation, sporting competitions, and peer grading among others.
We consider parametric ordinal models for such pairwise comparison data
involving a latent vector that represents the
"qualities" of the items being compared; this class of models includes the
two most widely used parametric models--the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) and the
Thurstone models. Working within a standard minimax framework, we provide tight
upper and lower bounds on the optimal error in estimating the quality score
vector under this class of models. The bounds depend on the topology of
the comparison graph induced by the subset of pairs being compared via its
Laplacian spectrum. Thus, in settings where the subset of pairs may be chosen,
our results provide principled guidelines for making this choice. Finally, we
compare these error rates to those under cardinal measurement models and show
that the error rates in the ordinal and cardinal settings have identical
scalings apart from constant pre-factors.Comment: 39 pages, 5 figures. Significant extension of arXiv:1406.661
Pure Nash Equilibria: Hard and Easy Games
We investigate complexity issues related to pure Nash equilibria of strategic
games. We show that, even in very restrictive settings, determining whether a
game has a pure Nash Equilibrium is NP-hard, while deciding whether a game has
a strong Nash equilibrium is SigmaP2-complete. We then study practically
relevant restrictions that lower the complexity. In particular, we are
interested in quantitative and qualitative restrictions of the way each players
payoff depends on moves of other players. We say that a game has small
neighborhood if the utility function for each player depends only on (the
actions of) a logarithmically small number of other players. The dependency
structure of a game G can be expressed by a graph DG(G) or by a hypergraph
H(G). By relating Nash equilibrium problems to constraint satisfaction problems
(CSPs), we show that if G has small neighborhood and if H(G) has bounded
hypertree width (or if DG(G) has bounded treewidth), then finding pure Nash and
Pareto equilibria is feasible in polynomial time. If the game is graphical,
then these problems are LOGCFL-complete and thus in the class NC2 of highly
parallelizable problems
Item Recommendation with Evolving User Preferences and Experience
Current recommender systems exploit user and item similarities by
collaborative filtering. Some advanced methods also consider the temporal
evolution of item ratings as a global background process. However, all prior
methods disregard the individual evolution of a user's experience level and how
this is expressed in the user's writing in a review community. In this paper,
we model the joint evolution of user experience, interest in specific item
facets, writing style, and rating behavior. This way we can generate individual
recommendations that take into account the user's maturity level (e.g.,
recommending art movies rather than blockbusters for a cinematography expert).
As only item ratings and review texts are observables, we capture the user's
experience and interests in a latent model learned from her reviews, vocabulary
and writing style. We develop a generative HMM-LDA model to trace user
evolution, where the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) traces her latent experience
progressing over time -- with solely user reviews and ratings as observables
over time. The facets of a user's interest are drawn from a Latent Dirichlet
Allocation (LDA) model derived from her reviews, as a function of her (again
latent) experience level. In experiments with five real-world datasets, we show
that our model improves the rating prediction over state-of-the-art baselines,
by a substantial margin. We also show, in a use-case study, that our model
performs well in the assessment of user experience levels
Independent Utility Regulators: Lessons from Monetary Policy
This paper explores the similarity of the underlying economic problems that lead to the establishment of (a) independent central banks to operate national monetary policies and (b) independent regulatory agencies for telecommunications and other utility service industries. We show that, in both cases, the adoption of agencies inde- pendent of government results from the need to achieve credibility and a reputation for economically sound long-run behaviour while preserving signi¯cant discretion to handle unanticipated events. We show that this solution is superior to policy rules that are ¯xed in advance. Both for central banks and regulatory agencies, what is re- quired are institutions that provide limited and accountable discretion within a clear policy framework, for example via high levels of accountability and transparency in their decision making processes. On the basis of a review of the empirical literature, we argue that central banks with superior governance arrangements, particularly on accountability and transparency, out-perform those with inferior arrangements and we discuss how this work might be extended to utility regulatory agencies.Monetary policy, credibility, regulation, under-investment, delegation.
Sequential Deliberation for Social Choice
In large scale collective decision making, social choice is a normative study
of how one ought to design a protocol for reaching consensus. However, in
instances where the underlying decision space is too large or complex for
ordinal voting, standard voting methods of social choice may be impractical.
How then can we design a mechanism - preferably decentralized, simple,
scalable, and not requiring any special knowledge of the decision space - to
reach consensus? We propose sequential deliberation as a natural solution to
this problem. In this iterative method, successive pairs of agents bargain over
the decision space using the previous decision as a disagreement alternative.
We describe the general method and analyze the quality of its outcome when the
space of preferences define a median graph. We show that sequential
deliberation finds a 1.208- approximation to the optimal social cost on such
graphs, coming very close to this value with only a small constant number of
agents sampled from the population. We also show lower bounds on simpler
classes of mechanisms to justify our design choices. We further show that
sequential deliberation is ex-post Pareto efficient and has truthful reporting
as an equilibrium of the induced extensive form game. We finally show that for
general metric spaces, the second moment of of the distribution of social cost
of the outcomes produced by sequential deliberation is also bounded
Using Incomplete Information for Complete Weight Annotation of Road Networks -- Extended Version
We are witnessing increasing interests in the effective use of road networks.
For example, to enable effective vehicle routing, weighted-graph models of
transportation networks are used, where the weight of an edge captures some
cost associated with traversing the edge, e.g., greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions
or travel time. It is a precondition to using a graph model for routing that
all edges have weights. Weights that capture travel times and GHG emissions can
be extracted from GPS trajectory data collected from the network. However, GPS
trajectory data typically lack the coverage needed to assign weights to all
edges. This paper formulates and addresses the problem of annotating all edges
in a road network with travel cost based weights from a set of trips in the
network that cover only a small fraction of the edges, each with an associated
ground-truth travel cost. A general framework is proposed to solve the problem.
Specifically, the problem is modeled as a regression problem and solved by
minimizing a judiciously designed objective function that takes into account
the topology of the road network. In particular, the use of weighted PageRank
values of edges is explored for assigning appropriate weights to all edges, and
the property of directional adjacency of edges is also taken into account to
assign weights. Empirical studies with weights capturing travel time and GHG
emissions on two road networks (Skagen, Denmark, and North Jutland, Denmark)
offer insight into the design properties of the proposed techniques and offer
evidence that the techniques are effective.Comment: This is an extended version of "Using Incomplete Information for
Complete Weight Annotation of Road Networks," which is accepted for
publication in IEEE TKD
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