Probabilistic Methods for Uncertainty Quantification

Author(s):  
N. Chugunov ◽  
G. Shepelyov ◽  
M. Sternin

The complexity and interdisciplinary nature of modern problems are often coupled with uncertainty inherent to real-life situations. There is a wide class of real-world problems described by well-formulated quantitative models for which a decision maker (DM) has to deal with uncertainty in values of initial parameters for these models. A good example of such a problem is hydrocarbon reservoir assessment in the exploration stage, which requires the involvement and joint consideration of geological, petroleum engineering, and financial models of reservoir exploration. The consequences of some unreasonable decisions can lead to millions of dollars in loss to the companies as it happens in the oil business, where industry sources on investment decision analysis continue to report surprise values (outside the [P10;P90] range) far more than the 20% indicated by this interval (Welsh, Begg, Bratvold, & Lee, 2004).

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 233-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Peper ◽  
Simone N. Loeffler

Current ambulatory technologies are highly relevant for neuropsychological assessment and treatment as they provide a gateway to real life data. Ambulatory assessment of cognitive complaints, skills and emotional states in natural contexts provides information that has a greater ecological validity than traditional assessment approaches. This issue presents an overview of current technological and methodological innovations, opportunities, problems and limitations of these methods designed for the context-sensitive measurement of cognitive, emotional and behavioral function. The usefulness of selected ambulatory approaches is demonstrated and their relevance for an ecologically valid neuropsychology is highlighted.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amarildo Likmeta ◽  
Alberto Maria Metelli ◽  
Giorgia Ramponi ◽  
Andrea Tirinzoni ◽  
Matteo Giuliani ◽  
...  

AbstractIn real-world applications, inferring the intentions of expert agents (e.g., human operators) can be fundamental to understand how possibly conflicting objectives are managed, helping to interpret the demonstrated behavior. In this paper, we discuss how inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) can be employed to retrieve the reward function implicitly optimized by expert agents acting in real applications. Scaling IRL to real-world cases has proved challenging as typically only a fixed dataset of demonstrations is available and further interactions with the environment are not allowed. For this reason, we resort to a class of truly batch model-free IRL algorithms and we present three application scenarios: (1) the high-level decision-making problem in the highway driving scenario, and (2) inferring the user preferences in a social network (Twitter), and (3) the management of the water release in the Como Lake. For each of these scenarios, we provide formalization, experiments and a discussion to interpret the obtained results.


Author(s):  
Marcelo N. de Sousa ◽  
Ricardo Sant’Ana ◽  
Rigel P. Fernandes ◽  
Julio Cesar Duarte ◽  
José A. Apolinário ◽  
...  

AbstractIn outdoor RF localization systems, particularly where line of sight can not be guaranteed or where multipath effects are severe, information about the terrain may improve the position estimate’s performance. Given the difficulties in obtaining real data, a ray-tracing fingerprint is a viable option. Nevertheless, although presenting good simulation results, the performance of systems trained with simulated features only suffer degradation when employed to process real-life data. This work intends to improve the localization accuracy when using ray-tracing fingerprints and a few field data obtained from an adverse environment where a large number of measurements is not an option. We employ a machine learning (ML) algorithm to explore the multipath information. We selected algorithms random forest and gradient boosting; both considered efficient tools in the literature. In a strict simulation scenario (simulated data for training, validating, and testing), we obtained the same good results found in the literature (error around 2 m). In a real-world system (simulated data for training, real data for validating and testing), both ML algorithms resulted in a mean positioning error around 100 ,m. We have also obtained experimental results for noisy (artificially added Gaussian noise) and mismatched (with a null subset of) features. From the simulations carried out in this work, our study revealed that enhancing the ML model with a few real-world data improves localization’s overall performance. From the machine ML algorithms employed herein, we also observed that, under noisy conditions, the random forest algorithm achieved a slightly better result than the gradient boosting algorithm. However, they achieved similar results in a mismatch experiment. This work’s practical implication is that multipath information, once rejected in old localization techniques, now represents a significant source of information whenever we have prior knowledge to train the ML algorithm.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 3661
Author(s):  
Noman Khan ◽  
Khan Muhammad ◽  
Tanveer Hussain ◽  
Mansoor Nasir ◽  
Muhammad Munsif ◽  
...  

Virtual reality (VR) has been widely used as a tool to assist people by letting them learn and simulate situations that are too dangerous and risky to practice in real life, and one of these is road safety training for children. Traditional video- and presentation-based road safety training has average output results as it lacks physical practice and the involvement of children during training, without any practical testing examination to check the learned abilities of a child before their exposure to real-world environments. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a 3D realistic open-ended VR and Kinect sensor-based training setup using the Unity game engine, wherein children are educated and involved in road safety exercises. The proposed system applies the concepts of VR in a game-like setting to let the children learn about traffic rules and practice them in their homes without any risk of being exposed to the outside environment. Thus, with our interactive and immersive training environment, we aim to minimize road accidents involving children and contribute to the generic domain of healthcare. Furthermore, the proposed framework evaluates the overall performance of the students in a virtual environment (VE) to develop their road-awareness skills. To ensure safety, the proposed system has an extra examination layer for children’s abilities evaluation, whereby a child is considered fit for real-world practice in cases where they fulfil certain criteria by achieving set scores. To show the robustness and stability of the proposed system, we conduct four types of subjective activities by involving a group of ten students with average grades in their classes. The experimental results show the positive effect of the proposed system in improving the road crossing behavior of the children.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-148
Author(s):  
Carlo Massironi ◽  
Giusy Chesini

Purpose The authors are interested in building descriptive – real life – models of successful investors’ investment reasoning and decision-making. Models designed to be useful for trying to replicate and evolve their reasoning and decision-making. The purpose of this paper, a case study, is to take the substantial material – on innovating the investing tools – published in four books (2006/2012, 2010, 2011, 2015) by a US stock investor named Kenneth Fisher (CEO of Fisher Investments, Woodside, California) and sketch Fisher’s investment innovating reasoning model. Design/methodology/approach To sketch Fisher’s investment innovating reasoning model, the authors used the Radical constructivist theory of knowledge, a framework for analyzing human action and reasoning called Symbolic interactionism and a qualitative analytic technique called Conceptual analysis. The authors have done qualitative research applied to the study of investment decision-making of a single professional investor. Findings In the paper, the authors analyzed and described the heuristics used by Fisher to build subsequent generations of investing tools (called by Fisher “Capital Markets Technology”) to try to make better forecasts to beat the stock market. The authors were interested in studying the evolutive dimensions of the tools to make forecasts of a successful investor: the “how to build it” and “how to evolve it” dimension. Originality/value The paper offers an account of Kenneth Fisher’s framework to reason the innovation of investing tools. The authors believe that this paper could be of interest to professional money managers and to all those who are involved in the study and development of the tools of investing. This work is also an example of the use of the Radical constructivist theory of knowledge, the Symbolic interactionist framework and the Conceptual analysis to build descriptive models of investment reasoning of individual investors, models designed to enable the reproduction/approximation of the conceptual operations of the investor.


2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (15_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1012-1012
Author(s):  
Philippe Caillet ◽  
Marina Pulido ◽  
Etienne Brain ◽  
Claire Falandry ◽  
Isabelle Desmoulins ◽  
...  

1012 Background: Advanced breast cancer (ABC) is common in older patients, resulting from the high incidence of breast cancer beyond age 70. This population is often limited in clinical trials. Endocrine therapy (ET) combined with a CDK4/6 inhibitor is the standard of care in ABC overexpressing hormonal receptors (HR+). Data specific to older patients are scarce in the literature, deserving further research. Methods: PALOMAGE is an ongoing French prospective study evaluating palbociclib (PAL) + ET in real life setting in women aged ≥70 with HR+ HER2- ABC, split in 2 cohorts: ET sensitive patients with no prior systemic treatment for ABC (cohort A), and ET resistant patients and/or with prior systemic treatment for ABC (cohort B). Data collected include clinical characteristics, quality of life (EORTC QLQ-C30 and ELD14) and geriatric description [G8 and Geriatric-COre DatasEt (G-CODE)]. This analysis reports on baseline characteristics and safety data for the whole population. Results: From 10/2018 to 10/2020, 400 and 407 patients were included in cohort A and B, respectively. The median age was 79 years (69-98), 15.1% with an age > 85. ECOG performance status (PS) was ≥2 in 17.9% patients, 68.3% had a G8 score ≤14 suggesting frailty, 32.1% had bone only metastasis, and 44% had visceral disease. 35.8% of patients in cohort B had no prior treatment for ABC. Safety data were available for 787 patients. The median follow-up was 6.7 months (IC95% = 6.1-7.6). At start of treatment, full dose of PAL (125 mg) was used in 76% of the patients: 62.6%, 68.7% and 71.6% of patients aged ≥ 80, those with ECOG PS ≥2 and those with a G8 score ≤14, respectively. In the safety population, 70% had ≥1 adverse event (AE), including 43.1% grade 3/4 AE, and 22.9% ≥ 1 serious AE. Most frequent AE reported were neutropenia (43.2%), anemia (17.5%), asthenia (16.3%) and thrombocytopenia (13.6%). Grade 3/4 neutropenia was observed in 32.3% of patients, with febrile neutropenia in 1.1%. Grade 3/4 AE PAL-related were reported in 40.1%, 31.4% of patients aged < 80, ≥80, respectively. Regarding PAL, 23.4% of patients had a dose reduction and 41.8% had a temporary or permanent discontinuation due to AE. Safety data were similar in both cohorts. Geriatric data and impact on safety will be presented. Conclusions: PALOMAGE is a unique large real-world cohort focusing on older patients treated with PAL in France. These preliminary data do not suggest any new safety signal, matching data derived from PALOMA trials. The occurrence of less grade3/4 AE related to PAL in patients aged 80 and beyond might reflect the 30% decrease of PAL dose upfront. Effectiveness analyses are eagerly awaited. Clinical trial information: EUPAS23012 .


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
CM Gillan ◽  
MM Vaghi ◽  
FH Hezemans ◽  
Grothe S van Ghesel ◽  
J Dafflon ◽  
...  

AbstractCompulsivity is associated with failures in goal-directed control, an important cognitive faculty that protects against developing habits. But might this effect be explained by co-occurring anxiety? Previous studies have found goal-directed deficits in other anxiety disorders, and to some extent when healthy individuals are stressed, suggesting this is plausible. We carried out a causal test of this hypothesis in two experiments (between-subject N=88; within-subject N=50) that used the inhalation of hypercapnic gas (7.5% CO2) to induce an acute state of anxiety in healthy volunteers. In both experiments, we successfully induced anxiety, assessed physiologically and psychologically, but this did not affect goal-directed performance. In a third experiment (N=1413), we used a correlational design to test if real-life anxiety-provoking events (panic attacks, stressful events) impair goal-directed control. While small effects were observed, none survived controlling for individual differences in compulsivity. These data suggest that anxiety has no meaningful impact on goal-directed control.


2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Goran Devedzic ◽  
Danijela Milosevic ◽  
Lozica Ivanovic ◽  
Dragan Adamovic ◽  
Miodrag Manic

Negative-positive-neutral logic provides an alternative framework for fuzzy cognitive maps development and decision analysis. This paper reviews basic notion of NPN logic and NPN relations and proposes adaptive approach to causality weights assessment. It employs linguistic models of causality weights activated by measurement-based fuzzy cognitive maps? concepts values. These models allow for quasi-dynamical adaptation to the change of concepts values, providing deeper understanding of possible side effects. Since in the real-world environments almost every decision has its consequences, presenting very valuable portion of information upon which we also make our decisions, the knowledge about the side effects enables more reliable decision analysis and directs actions of decision maker.


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