The Participation of Nonstate Actors in the Multilateral Treaty Process

This chapter analyzes the participation of nonstate actors (NSAs) in contemporary UN treaty-making. It uses the Lasswell-McDougal-Reisman “seven decision functions” to understand the role played by NSAs at the various stages of treaty creation, negotiation, and implementation. It sets out four ways in which NSAs may participate in treaty-making: being at the table, on the sidelines, behind the scenes, and on the outside. The UN has established practices for accreditation and participation that have facilitated the increasing contribution of NSAs. Several key challenges remain, from risks to legitimacy to controversy over the involvement of industry and business interests.

A Symbolic Approach to Explaining Bayesian Network Classifiers

We propose an approach for explaining Bayesian network classifiers, which is based on compiling such classifiers into decision functions that have a tractable and symbolic form. We introduce two types of explanations for why a classifier may have classified an instance positively or negatively and suggest algorithms for computing these explanations. The first type of explanation identifies a minimal set of the currently active features that is responsible for the current classification, while the second type of explanation identifies a minimal set of features whose current state (active or not) is sufficient for the classification. We consider in particular the compilation of Naive and Latent-Tree Bayesian network classifiers into Ordered Decision Diagrams (ODDs), providing a context for evaluating our proposal using case studies and experiments based on classifiers from the literature.