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Collaborating Authors

 Letchford, Joshua


Predicting Rooftop Solar Adoption Using Agent-Based Modeling

AAAI Conferences

In this paper we present a novel agent-based modeling methodology to predict rooftop solar adoptions in the residential energy market. We first applied several linear regression models to estimate missing variables for non-adopters, so that attributes of non-adopters and adopters could be used to train a logistic regression model. Then, we integrated the logistic regression model along with other predictive models into a multi-agent simulation platform and validated our models by comparing the forecast of aggregate adoptions in a typical zip code area with its ground truth. This result shows that the agent-based model can reliably predict future adoptions. Finally, based on the validated agent-based model, we compared the outcome of a hypothesized seeding policy with the original incentive plan, and investigated other alternative seeding policies which could lead to more adopters.


Individual Household Modeling of Photovoltaic Adoption

AAAI Conferences

An important contribution of our work is to quantitatively The SunShot Initiative (Sunshot 2011) has the goal of reducing assess the impact of peer effects on PV adoption in relationship the total costs for photovoltaic (PV) solar energy systems to other economic and non-economic variables. It has to be "cost-competitive" with other forms of energy. At that long been noted that peer effects play a significant role in cost, PV could be widely adopted and thus allow the United the adoption of new technology. For instance, (Rogers 2003) States (US) increase it's use of clean energy - a goal of the highlights the importance of "opinion leaders" and interpersonal Department of Energy (U.S.


Beat the Cheater: Computing Game-Theoretic Strategies for When to Kick a Gambler out of a Casino

AAAI Conferences

Gambles in casinos are usually set up so that the casino makes a profit in expectation -- as long as gamblers play honestly. However, some gamblers are able to cheat, reducing the casinoโ€™s profit. How should the casino address this? A common strategy is to selectively kick gamblers out, possibly even without being sure that they were cheating. In this paper, we address the following question: Based solely on a gamblerโ€™s track record,when is it optimal for the casino to kick the gambler out? Because cheaters will adapt to the casinoโ€™s policy, this is a game-theoretic question. Specifically, we model the problem as a Bayesian game in which the casino is a Stackelberg leader that can commit to a (possibly randomized) policy for when to kick gamblers out, and we provide efficient algorithms for computing the optimal policy. Besides being potentially useful to casinos, we imagine that similar techniques could be useful for addressing related problems -- for example, illegal trades in financial markets.


Solving Security Games on Graphs via Marginal Probabilities

AAAI Conferences

Security games involving the allocation of multiple security resources to defend multiple targets generally have an exponential number of pure strategies for the defender. One method that has been successful in addressing this computational issue is to instead directly compute the marginal probabilities with which the individual resources are assigned (first pursued by Kiekintveld et al. (2009)). However, in sufficiently general settings, there exist games where these marginal solutions are not implementable, that is, they do not correspond to any mixed strategy of the defender. In this paper, we examine security games where the defender tries to monitor the vertices of a graph, and we show how the type of graph, the type of schedules, and the type of defender resources affect the applicability of this approach. In some settings, we show the approach is applicable and give a polynomial-time algorithm for computing an optimal defender strategy; in other settings, we give counterexample games that demonstrate that the approach does not work, and prove NP-hardness results for computing an optimal defender strategy.


Computing Optimal Strategies to Commit to in Stochastic Games

AAAI Conferences

Significant progress has been made recently in the following two lines of research in the intersection of AI and game theory: (1) the computation of optimal strategies to commit to (Stackelberg strategies), and (2) the computation of correlated equilibria of stochastic games. In this paper, we unite these two lines of research by studying the computation of Stackelberg strategies in stochastic games. We provide theoretical results on the value of being able to commit and the value of being able to correlate, as well as complexity results about computing Stackelberg strategies in stochastic games. We then modify the QPACE algorithm (MacDermed et al. 2011) to compute Stackelberg strategies, and provide experimental results.