Week 6 of the Daphne Koller's Probabilistic Graphical Models class looks at Decision Theory, which integrates the concept of utility functions from economics into our models. I'm getting flashbacks of Dr. Welsh's Econ 101 in Schwab Auditorium.
In the Influence network below, we're making a decision about whether to found a company. Our success is determined by market conditions, which we can't observe. But, we can observe the results of a survey, which will give us some information on which to make our decision. So, how would you find the optimal decision rule?
The factor fm represents the probability that market conditions (var 1) are good (3), fair (2) or poor (1).
fm.var = 1
fm.card = 3
fm.val = [0.5 0.3 0.2]
PrintFactor(fm)
1
1 0.500000
2 0.300000
3 0.200000
The factor fsm represents the results of a survey (var 2) given the underlying market conditions (var 1).
fsm.var = [2 1]
fsm.card = [3 3]
fsm.val = [0.6 0.3 0.1 0.3 0.4 0.3 0.1 0.4 0.5]
PrintFactor(fsm)
2 1
1 1 0.600000
2 1 0.300000
3 1 0.100000
1 2 0.300000
2 2 0.400000
3 2 0.300000
1 3 0.100000
2 3 0.400000
3 3 0.500000
The factor fufm represents the utility function, given the market conditions (var 1) and the decision to found (var 3) a company, yes (2) or no (1).
fufm.var = [3 1]
fufm.card = [2 3]
fufm.val = [0 -7 0 5 0 20]
PrintFactor(fufm)
3 1
1 1 0.000000
2 1 -7.000000
1 2 0.000000
2 2 5.000000
1 3 0.000000
2 3 20.000000
Compute mu of F, S by taking the factor product of factors representing the market, survey and utility function, then summing out over all possible market conditions (var 1).
PrintFactor(FactorMarginalization(FactorProduct(FactorProduct(fm, fsm), fufm), [1]))
2 3
1 1 0.000000
2 1 0.000000
3 1 0.000000
1 2 -1.250000
2 2 1.150000
3 2 2.100000
We can build our decision rule by walking down all possible survey results (var 2) and selecting the decision to found or not which maximizes expected utility. See the red circles at the bottom of the diagram.
We can make a decision factor, which depends on the survey (var 2). We'll fill in dummy values, for now.
fd.var = [3 2]
fd.card = [2 3]
fd.val = ones(1,prod(fd.card))
Now, we can use the code from the programming assignment to compute the optimal decision rule and the expected utility it yields.
marketI.RandomFactors = [fm fsm]
marketI.UtilityFactors = [fufm]
marketI.DecisionFactors = [fd]
[meu optdr] = OptimizeMEU(marketI)
meu = 3.2500
optdr =
scalar structure containing the fields:
var = 3 2
card = 2 3
val = 1 0 0 1 0 1
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