Weargue that hedging is an activity that human and machine agents should engage in more broadly, even when the agent's value is not necessarily in monetary units.

Our ability to predict the behavior of complex agents turns on the attribution of goals. Probing for goal-directed behavior comes in two flavors: Behavioral and mechanistic. The former proposes that goal-directedness can be estimated through behavioral observation, whereas the latter attempts to probe for goals in internal model states. We work through the assumptions behind both approaches, identifying technical and conceptual problems that arise from formalizing goals in agent systems. We arrive at the perhaps surprising position that goal-directedness cannot be measured objectively. We outline new directions for modeling goal-directedness as an emergent property of dynamic, multi-agent systems.

Causality and game theory are two influential fields that contribute significantly to decision-making in various domains. Causality defines and models causal relationships in complex policy problems, while game theory provides insights into strategic interactions among stakeholders with competing interests. Integrating these frameworks has led to significant theoretical advancements with the potential to improve decision-making processes. However, practical applications of these developments remain underexplored. To support efforts toward implementation, this paper clarifies key concepts in game theory and causality that are essential to their intersection, particularly within the context of probabilistic graphical models. By rigorously examining these concepts and illustrating them with intuitive, consistent examples, we clarify the required inputs for implementing these models, provide practitioners with insights into their application and selection across different scenarios, and reference existing research that supports their implementation. We hope this work encourages broader adoption of these models in real-world scenarios.

We present a new algorithm for exactly solving decision-making problems represented as an influence diagram. We do not require the usual assumptions of no forgetting and regularity, which allows us to solve problems with limited information.

This manuscript is technical memoir about my work at Stanford and Microsoft Research. Included are fundamental concepts central to machine learning and artificial intelligence, applications of these concepts, and stories behind their creation.

Multi-agent influence diagrams (MAIDs) are a popular game-theoretic model based on Bayesian networks. In some settings, MAIDs offer significant advantages over extensive-form game representations. Previous work on MAIDs has assumed that agents employ behavioural policies, which set independent conditional probability distributions over actions for each of their decisions. In settings with imperfect recall, however, a Nash equilibrium in behavioural policies may not exist. We overcome this by showing how to solve MAIDs with forgetful and absent-minded agents using mixed policies and two types of correlated equilibrium. We also analyse the computational complexity of key decision problems in MAIDs, and explore tractable cases. Finally, we describe applications of MAIDs to Markov games and team situations, where imperfect recall is often unavoidable.

With the explosion of applications of Data Science, the field is has come loose from its foundations. This article argues for a new program of applied research in areas familiar to researchers in Bayesian methods in AI that are needed to ground the practice of Data Science by borrowing from AI techniques for model formulation that we term ``Decision Modelling.'' This article briefly reviews the formulation process as building a causal graphical model, then discusses the process in terms of six principles that comprise \emph{Decision Quality}, a framework from the popular business literature. We claim that any successful applied ML modelling effort must include these six principles. We explain how Decision Modelling combines a conventional machine learning model with an explicit value model. To give a specific example we show how this is done by integrating a model's ROC curve with a utility model.

An influence diagram is a graphical model of a Bayesian decision problem that is solved by finding a strategy that maximizes expected utility. When an influence diagram is solved by variable elimination or a related dynamic programming algorithm, it is traditional to represent a strategy as a sequence of policies, one for each decision variable, where a policy maps the relevant history for a decision to an action. We propose an alternative representation of a strategy as a graph, called a strategy graph, and show how to modify a variable elimination algorithm so that it constructs a strategy graph. We consider both a classic variable elimination algorithm for influence diagrams and a recent extension of this algorithm that has more relaxed constraints on elimination order that allow improved performance. We consider the advantages of representing a strategy as a graph and, in particular, how to simplify a strategy graph so that it is easier to interpret and analyze.

Gaining the ability to make informed decisions on operation and maintenance of structures provides motivation for the implementation of structural health monitoring (SHM) systems. However, descriptive labels for measured data corresponding to health-states of the monitored system are often unavailable. This issue limits the applicability of fully-supervised machine learning paradigms for the development of statistical classifiers to be used in decision-support in SHM systems. One approach to dealing with this problem is risk-based active learning. In such an approach, data-label querying is guided according to the expected value of perfect information for incipient data points. For risk-based active learning in SHM, the value of information is evaluated with respect to a maintenance decision process, and the data-label querying corresponds to the inspection of a structure to determine its health state. In the context of SHM, risk-based active learning has only been considered for generative classifiers. The current paper demonstrates several advantages of using an alternative type of classifier -- discriminative models. Using the Z24 Bridge dataset as a case study, it is shown that discriminative classifiers have benefits, in the context of SHM decision-support, including improved robustness to sampling bias, and reduced expenditure on structural inspections.