Related papers: Teaching decision theory proof strategies using a …

We consider the $M$-ary classification problem via crowdsourcing, where crowd workers respond to simple binary questions and the answers are aggregated via decision fusion. The workers have a reject option to skip answering a question when…

Missing values arise in most real-world data sets due to the aggregation of multiple sources and intrinsically missing information (sensor failure, unanswered questions in surveys...). In fact, the very nature of missing values usually…

We study a model of consensus decision making, in which a finite group of Bayesian agents has to choose between one of two courses of action. Each member of the group has a private and independent signal at his or her disposal, giving some…

Data-driven decision making plays an important role even in high stakes settings like medicine and public policy. Learning optimal policies from observed data requires a careful formulation of the utility function whose expected value is…

As machine learning is increasingly used to help make decisions, there is a demand for these decisions to be explainable. Arguably, the most explainable machine learning models use decision rules. This paper focuses on decision sets, a type…

Here we focus on the description of the mechanisms behind the process of information aggregation and decision making, a basic step to understand emergent phenomena in society, such as trends, information spreading or the wisdom of crowds.…

We demonstrate that the principle of maximum relative entropy (ME), used judiciously, can ease the specification of priors in model selection problems. The resulting effect is that models that make sharp predictions are disfavoured,…

Microtask crowdsourcing has enabled dataset advances in social science and machine learning, but existing crowdsourcing schemes are too expensive to scale up with the expanding volume of data. To scale and widen the applicability of…

Machines, not humans, are the world's dominant knowledge accumulators but humans remain the dominant decision makers. Interpreting and disseminating the knowledge accumulated by machines requires expertise, time, and is prone to failure.…

We consider Bayesian optimization of an expensive-to-evaluate black-box objective function, where we also have access to cheaper approximations of the objective. In general, such approximations arise in applications such as reinforcement…

Aggregating agent preferences into a collective decision is an important step in many problems (e.g., hiring, elections, peer review) and across areas of computer science (e.g., reinforcement learning, recommender systems). As Social Choice…

Recent decades have seen an interest in prediction problems for which Bayesian methodology has been used ubiquitously. Sampling from or approximating the posterior predictive distribution in a Bayesian model allows one to make inferential…

We study a tandem of agents who make decisions about an underlying binary hypothesis, where the distribution of the agent observations under each hypothesis comes from an uncertainty class. We investigate both decentralized detection rules,…

It is common to use minimax rules to make decisions for planning when there is great uncertainty on what will happen in the future. Minimax regret is one popular version of this. We give an analysis of the behaviour of minimax rules in the…

It is well understood that Bayesian decision theory and average case analysis are essentially identical. However, if one is interested in performing uncertainty quantification for a numerical task, it can be argued that standard approaches…

For statistical decision problems with finite parameter space, it is well-known that the upper value (minimax value) agrees with the lower value (maximin value). Only under a generalized notion of prior does such an equivalence carry over…

In applications such as recommendation systems and revenue management, it is important to predict preferences on items that have not been seen by a user or predict outcomes of comparisons among those that have never been compared. A popular…

Bayesian probability theory is used to analyze the oft-made assumption that humans are typical observers in the universe. Some theoretical calculations make the {\it selection fallacy} that we are randomly chosen from a class of objects by…

We introduce a novel rule-based approach for handling regression problems. The new methodology carries elements from two frameworks: (i) it provides information about the uncertainty of the parameters of interest using Bayesian inference,…

In this paper the problem of learning appropriate bias for an environment of related tasks is examined from a Bayesian perspective. The environment of related tasks is shown to be naturally modelled by the concept of an {\em objective}…