An Introduction to Decision Theory and Decision Analysis

Summer semester 2024-2025, Wednesdays, 17:40-19:10 (Room A216)
Rectorate Building, Wiejska 45-A, Bialystok
We will be meeting every week during the first half of the semester
Teacher: Marek J. Druzdzel

"The average man's judgment is so poor, he runs a risk every time he uses it." --- Edgar W. Howe

The course "An Introduction to Decision Theory and Decision Analysis" introduces doctoral students to the field of decision theory and its applied branch decision analysis. Decision theory is a mathematical theory of how decisions should be made. You will notice that every interesting decision is made under uncertainty, involves multiple attributes, and is often made by multiple decision makers. We will talk about learning decision models from data, which may prove useful in your dissertation work -- almost every research these days involves collection and analysis of data.

Class outline:

March 12:
Getting to know each other; organization and overview of the course. Decision making; uncertainty, preferences, and actions; motivation for decision support; decision support systems. Rationality, rational behavior; good decisions vs. good outcomes; foundations of decision-analytic approach to decision support.

March 19:
A brief overview of useful statistical techniques.

March 26:
Bayesian networks. Introduction to GeNIe and SMILE?.

April 2:
Structuring decisions, causality and probability.

April 9:
Subjective probability, elicitation of probabilities. Canonical probability distributions: Noisy-OR, -MAX, -AND, -MIN, DeMorgan gates. (non)Importance of precision in numerical parameters. Clarity test, sensitivity analysis, value of information.

April 16:
Learning Bayesian networks/causal discovery.

April 23:
Model validation techniques.

May 7:
Risk attitudes. Quantification of preferences. Expected utility theory. Utility elicitation, sensitivity analysis, value of information.

May 14:
Conflicting objectives: basic techniques, multi-attribute utility functions.

May 21:
Influence diagrams.

Grading:

At the conclusion of the semester you will be expected to write a brief (5 pages) report on the application of decision-theoretic methods to a practical problem. It is the wisest to choose a practical problem that is relatively close to your dissertation work -- this way you will be able to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of this approach.

Class materials
Marek Druzdzel's teaching page
Marek Druzdzel's home page

HOME marek@sis.pitt.edu / Last update: 27 February 2025