Making Decisions with Data

Making Decisions with Spatially and Temporally Uncertain Data

We consider a decision-making problem where the environment varies both in space and time. Such problems arise naturally when considering e.g., the navigation of an underwater robot amidst ocean currents or the navigation of an aerial vehicle in wind. To model such spatiotemporal variation, we extend the standard Markov Decision Process (MDP) to a new framework called the Time-Varying Markov De...

Feedlot and Carcass Data: Making “Cents” and Making Decisions

Making Decisions with Belief Functions

A primary motivation for reasoning under uncertainty is to derive decisions in the face of inconclusive evi­ dence. However, Shafer's theory of belief functions, which explicitly represents the underconstrained na­ ture of many reasoning problems, lacks a formal pro­ cedure for making decisions. Clearly, when sufficient information is not available, no theory can prescribe actions without makin...

Title: Making Decisions with a Continuous Mind

Making Decisions with Unknown Sensory Reliability

To make fast and accurate behavioral choices, we need to integrate noisy sensory input, take prior knowledge into account, and adjust our decision criteria. It was shown previously that in two-alternative-forced-choice tasks, optimal decision making can be formalized in the framework of a sequential probability ratio test and is then equivalent to a diffusion model. However, this analogy hides ...