Related papers: Teaching decision theory proof strategies using a …

While the Bayesian decision-theoretic framework offers an elegant solution to the problem of decision making under uncertainty, one question is how to appropriately select the prior distribution. One idea is to employ a worst-case prior.…

We derive asymptotically optimal statistical decision rules for discrete choice problems when payoffs depend on a partially-identified parameter $\theta$ and the decision maker can use a point-identified parameter $\mu$ to deduce…

We consider a decision maker who must choose an action in order to maximize a reward function that depends also on an unknown parameter {\Theta}. The decision maker can delay taking the action in order to experiment and gather additional…

Our goal is to deploy a high-accuracy system starting with zero training examples. We consider an "on-the-job" setting, where as inputs arrive, we use real-time crowdsourcing to resolve uncertainty where needed and output our prediction…

After experimenting with a number of non-probabilistic methods for dealing with uncertainty many researchers reaffirm a preference for probability methods [1] [2], although this remains controversial. The importance of being able to form…

We describe a hierarchical Bayesian approach for inference about a parameter $\theta$ lower-bounded by $\alpha$ with uncertain $\alpha$, derive some basic identities for posterior analysis about $(\theta,\alpha)$, and provide illustrations…

Crowd-sourcing is a cheap and popular means of creating training and evaluation datasets for machine learning, however it poses the problem of `truth inference', as individual workers cannot be wholly trusted to provide reliable…

The problem of simple $M-$ary hypothesis testing under a generic performance criterion that depends on arbitrary functions of error probabilities is considered. Using results from convex analysis, it is proved that an optimal decision rule…

A common approach to aggregate classification estimates in an ensemble of decision trees is to either use voting or to average the probabilities for each class. The latter takes uncertainty into account, but not the reliability of the…

Decision theories offer principled methods for making choices under various types of uncertainty. Algorithms that implement these theories have been successfully applied to a wide range of real-world problems, including materials and drug…

This paper develops a theory of learning under ambiguity induced by the decision maker's beliefs about the collection of data correlated with the true state of the world. Within our framework, two classical results on Bayesian learning…

Ensemble-based approaches are very effective in various fields in raising the accuracy of its individual members, when some voting rule is applied for aggregating the individual decisions. In this paper, we investigate how to find and…

Detection rules have traditionally been designed for rational agents that minimize the Bayes risk (average decision cost). With the advent of crowd-sensing systems, there is a need to redesign binary hypothesis testing rules for behavioral…

Wisdom of the crowd revealed a striking fact that the majority answer from a crowd is often more accurate than any individual expert. We observed the same story in machine learning--ensemble methods leverage this idea to combine multiple…

We present here an introduction to Brainstorming approach, that was recently proposed as a consensus meta-learning technique, and used in several practical applications in bioinformatics and chemoinformatics. The consensus learning denotes…

Forecasting techniques for assessing the power of future experiments to discriminate between theories or discover new laws of nature are of great interest in many areas of science. In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian forecasting method…

Crowdsourcing has emerged as an effective means for performing a number of machine learning tasks such as annotation and labelling of images and other data sets. In most early settings of crowdsourcing, the task involved classification,…

In earlier work, we introduced flexible inference and decision-theoretic metareasoning to address the intractability of normative inference. Here, rather than pursuing the task of computing beliefs and actions with decision models composed…

Models often need to be constrained to a certain size for them to be considered interpretable. For example, a decision tree of depth 5 is much easier to understand than one of depth 50. Limiting model size, however, often reduces accuracy.…

Current analysis of astronomical data are confronted with the daunting task of modeling the awkward features of astronomical data, among which heteroscedastic (point-dependent) errors, intrinsic scatter, non-ignorable data collection…