21 research outputs found
Autoencoders for strategic decision support
In the majority of executive domains, a notion of normality is involved in
most strategic decisions. However, few data-driven tools that support strategic
decision-making are available. We introduce and extend the use of autoencoders
to provide strategically relevant granular feedback. A first experiment
indicates that experts are inconsistent in their decision making, highlighting
the need for strategic decision support. Furthermore, using two large
industry-provided human resources datasets, the proposed solution is evaluated
in terms of ranking accuracy, synergy with human experts, and dimension-level
feedback. This three-point scheme is validated using (a) synthetic data, (b)
the perspective of data quality, (c) blind expert validation, and (d)
transparent expert evaluation. Our study confirms several principal weaknesses
of human decision-making and stresses the importance of synergy between a model
and humans. Moreover, unsupervised learning and in particular the autoencoder
are shown to be valuable tools for strategic decision-making
Mining Statistical Relations for Better Decision Making in Healthcare Processes
An important part of healthcare decision making is to understand how certain actions relate to desired and undesired outcomes. One key challenge is to deal with confounding variables, i.e., variables that influence the relation between actions and outcomes. Existing techniques aim to uncover the underlying statistical relations between actions and outcomes, but either do not account for confounding variables or only consider the process or case level instead of the event level. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel relation mining approach for healthcare processes that 1) explicitly accounts for confounding variables at the event level, and 2) transparently communicates the effect of the confounding variables to the user. We demonstrate the applicability and importance of our approach using two evaluation experiments. We use a real-world healthcare dataset to show that the identified relations indeed provide important input for decision making in healthcare processes. We use a synthetic dataset to illustrate the importance of our approach in the general setting of causal model estimation