Related papers: Subjective-objective policy making approach: Coupl…

A long line of work in social psychology has studied variations in people's susceptibility to persuasion -- the extent to which they are willing to modify their opinions on a topic. This body of literature suggests an interesting…

Predictive models are often introduced to decision-making tasks under the rationale that they improve performance over an existing decision-making policy. However, it is challenging to compare predictive performance against an existing…

Different machine learning techniques have been proposed and used for modeling individual and group user needs, interests and preferences. In the traditional predictive modeling instances are described by observable variables, called…

Subjective wellbeing is a fundamental aspect of human life, influencing life expectancy and economic productivity, among others. Mobility plays a critical role in maintaining wellbeing, yet the increasing frequency and intensity of both…

We present a new approach to the problems of evaluating and learning personalized decision policies from observational data of past contexts, decisions, and outcomes. Only the outcome of the enacted decision is available and the historical…

Multi-objective Markov decision processes are a special kind of multi-objective optimization problem that involves sequential decision making while satisfying the Markov property of stochastic processes. Multi-objective reinforcement…

In settings where Machine Learning (ML) algorithms automate or inform consequential decisions about people, individual decision subjects are often incentivized to strategically modify their observable attributes to receive more favorable…

Explanation is a fundamentally human process. Understanding the goal and audience of the explanation is vital, yet existing work on explainable reinforcement learning (XRL) routinely does not consult humans in their evaluations. Even when…

Even though it is unrealistic to expect citizens to pinpoint the policy implementation that they prefer from the set of alternatives, it is still possible to infer such information through an exercise of ranking the importance of policy…

In the causal adjustment setting, variable selection techniques based on one of either the outcome or treatment allocation model can result in the omission of confounders, which leads to bias, or the inclusion of spurious variables, which…

A broad current application of algorithms is in formal and quantitative measures of murky concepts -- like merit -- to make decisions. When people strategically respond to these sorts of evaluations in order to gain favorable decision…

Penalized regression methods, such as lasso and elastic net, are used in many biomedical applications when simultaneous regression coefficient estimation and variable selection is desired. However, missing data complicates the…

Determining the most appropriate features for machine learning predictive models is challenging regarding performance and feature acquisition costs. In particular, global feature choice is limited given that some features will only benefit…

Recommender systems that learn from implicit feedback often use large volumes of a single type of implicit user feedback, such as clicks, to enhance the prediction of sparse target behavior such as purchases. Using multiple types of…

Off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning offers the chance of using observational data to improve future outcomes in domains such as healthcare and education, but safe deployment in high stakes settings requires ways of assessing its…

This paper studies policy evaluation with multiple data sources, especially in scenarios that involve one experimental dataset with two arms, complemented by a historical dataset generated under a single control arm. We propose novel data…

When humans interact with intelligent systems, their causal responsibility for outcomes becomes equivocal. We analyze the descriptive abilities of a newly developed responsibility quantification model (ResQu) to predict actual human…

Reactive power compensation is an important challenge in current and future smart power systems. However, in the context of reactive power compensation, most existing studies assume that customers can assess their compensation value, i.e.,…

In declining and ageing societies, local communities face the `risk of eventual extinction.' In Japan, a population equivalent to that of an entire city is lost every year, representing one of the most severe cases of population decline.…

To address the major issues associated with using Time-Use Survey (TUS) for simulating residential load curves, we present the SMACH approach, which combines qualitative and quantitative data with agent-based simulation. Our model consists…