scholarly journals Decision Making with Differential Privacy under a Fairness Lens

Author(s):  
Cuong Tran ◽  
Ferdinando Fioretto ◽  
Pascal Van Hentenryck ◽  
Zhiyan Yao

Many agencies release datasets and statistics about groups of individuals that are used as input to a number of critical decision processes. To conform with privacy and confidentiality requirements, these agencies are often required to release privacy-preserving versions of the data. This paper studies the release of differentially private datasets and analyzes their impact on some critical resource allocation tasks under a fairness perspective. The paper shows that, when the decisions take as input differentially private data, the noise added to achieve privacy disproportionately impacts some groups over others. The paper analyzes the reasons for these disproportionate impacts and proposes guidelines to mitigate these effects. The proposed approaches are evaluated on critical decision problems that use differentially private census data.

Author(s):  
Jia Zhang ◽  
◽  
Xiang Wang ◽  
Fang Deng ◽  
Bin Xin ◽  
...  

Battlefield decision-making is an important part of modern information warfare. It can analyze and integrate battlefield information, reduce operators’ work and assist them to make decisions quickly in complex battlefield environment. The paper presents a dynamic battlefield decision-making method based on Markov Decision Processes (MDP). By this method, operators can get decision support quickly in the case of incomplete information. In order to improve the credibility of decisions, dynamic adaptability and intelligence, softmax regression and random forest are introduced to improve the MDP model. Simulations show that the method is intuitive and practical, and has remarkable advantages in solving the dynamic decision problems under incomplete information.


2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tadeusz Krupa ◽  
Teresa Ostrowska

Abstract The article is dedicated to the modelling of the essence of decision-taking processes in flat and hierarchical decision problems. In flat decision problems particular attention is drawn to the effectiveness of strategies in seeking decision variants on solution decomposition trees, taking into account the strength of their predefined contradictions. For hierarchical decision processes, the issue of iterative balancing of global (hierarchical) decisions is expressed, based on the valuation of the significance of flat decisions.


2012 ◽  
Vol 52 (No. 4) ◽  
pp. 187-196
Author(s):  
S. Aly ◽  
I. Vrana

The multiple, different and specific expertises are often needed in making YES-or-NO (YES/NO) decisions for treating a variety of business, economic, and agricultural decision problems. This is due to the nature of such problems in which decisions are influenced by multiple factors, and accordingly multiple corresponding expertises are required. Fuzzy expert systems (FESs) are widely used to model expertise due to its capability to model real world values which are not always exact, but frequently vague, or uncertain. In addition, they are able to incorporate qualitative factors. The problem of integrating multiple fuzzy expert systems involves several independent and autonomous fuzzy expert systems arranged synergistically to suit a varying problem context. Every expert system participates in judging the problem based on a predefined match between problem context and the required specific expertises. In this research, multiple FESs are integrated through combining their crisp numerical outputs, which reflect the degree of bias to the Yes/No subjective answers. The reasons for independency can be related to maintainability, decision responsibility, analyzability, knowledge cohesion and modularity, context flexibility, sensitivity of aggregate knowledge, decision consistency, etc. This article presents simple algorithms to integrate multiple parallel FES under specific requirements: preserving the extreme crisp output values, providing for null or non-participating expertises, and considering decision-related expert systems, which are true requirements of a currently held project. The presented results provides a theoretical framework, which can bring advantage to decision making is many disciplines, as e.g. new product launching decision, food quality tracking, monitoring of suspicious deviation of the business processes from the standard performance, tax and customs declaration issues, control and logistic of food chains/networks, etc. 


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (7) ◽  
pp. 1092-1102
Author(s):  
Tal Gilead ◽  
Iris BenDavid-Hadar

Purpose The method by which the state allocates resources to its schooling system can serve as an important instrument for achieving desired improvements in levels of educational attainment, social equity and other social policy goals. In many school systems, the allocation of school resources is done according to a needs-based funding formula. The purpose of this paper is to provide a deeper understanding of some significant tradeoffs involved in employing needs-based funding formulae. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on theoretical investigations of normative aspects involved in using needs-based funding formulae. Findings There are a number of underexplored complications and difficulties that arise from the use of needs-based funding formulae. Dealing with these involves significant tradeoffs that require taking normative decisions. Understanding these tradeoffs is important for improving the use of needs-based funding formulae. Originality/value The paper highlights three under-examined issues that emerge from the current use of needs-based funding formulae. These issues are: to what extent funding formulae should be responsive to social and economic needs? To what extent should funding formulae allow for the use of discretion in resource allocation? To what degree needs-based formulae funding should be linked to outcomes? By discussing these issues and the tradeoffs involved in them, the paper provides a deeper understanding of significant aspects stemming from the use of needs-based funding formulae. This, in turn, can serve as a basis for an improved and better informed process for decision making regarding the use of funding formulae.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (02) ◽  
pp. 513-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blanca Ceballos ◽  
David A. Pelta ◽  
María T. Lamata

Rank reversal is a common phenomenon in multi-criteria decision-making methods. It appears when the addition/deletion of new options to the alternatives’ set produces a change in the original ranking. In this contribution, we want to assess this phenomenon in the context of the VIKOR method. Using randomly generated multi-criteria decision problems, we confirmed that rank reversal existed and strongly depended on VIKOR’s parameter. Also, we observed that the influence of the number of alternatives was stronger than that of the number of criteria. Finally, although rank reversal may exist, we saw that it may not affect the top alternative of the ranking, thus potentially having a low impact.


2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (31) ◽  
pp. E4531-E4540 ◽  
Author(s):  
Braden A. Purcell ◽  
Roozbeh Kiani

Decision-making in a natural environment depends on a hierarchy of interacting decision processes. A high-level strategy guides ongoing choices, and the outcomes of those choices determine whether or not the strategy should change. When the right decision strategy is uncertain, as in most natural settings, feedback becomes ambiguous because negative outcomes may be due to limited information or bad strategy. Disambiguating the cause of feedback requires active inference and is key to updating the strategy. We hypothesize that the expected accuracy of a choice plays a crucial rule in this inference, and setting the strategy depends on integration of outcome and expectations across choices. We test this hypothesis with a task in which subjects report the net direction of random dot kinematograms with varying difficulty while the correct stimulus−response association undergoes invisible and unpredictable switches every few trials. We show that subjects treat negative feedback as evidence for a switch but weigh it with their expected accuracy. Subjects accumulate switch evidence (in units of log-likelihood ratio) across trials and update their response strategy when accumulated evidence reaches a bound. A computational framework based on these principles quantitatively explains all aspects of the behavior, providing a plausible neural mechanism for the implementation of hierarchical multiscale decision processes. We suggest that a similar neural computation—bounded accumulation of evidence—underlies both the choice and switches in the strategy that govern the choice, and that expected accuracy of a choice represents a key link between the levels of the decision-making hierarchy.


2015 ◽  
Vol 713-715 ◽  
pp. 1769-1772
Author(s):  
Jie Wu ◽  
Lei Na Zheng ◽  
Tie Jun Pan

In order to reflect the decision-making more scientific and democratic, modern decision problems often require the participation of multiple decision makers. In group decision making process,require the use of intuitionistic fuzzy hybrid averaging operator (IFHA) to get the final decision result.


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