CS 795 / INFS 797 

Fall 2008

Decision Guidance Systems

http://classweb.gmu.edu/brodsky/cs795infs797

 

New Announcements: Note, starting Oct. 2, the class will be meeting in room 430A (a conference room on the 4th floor),  ST-II building

Prof. Alex Brodsky (http://cs.gmu.edu/~brodsky/)

Meeting Times and Place:    Thursday,  7:20-10:00  (see schedule below)

New location: ST-II, 430 A    (instead of Thompson Hall, 138)

Instructor’s office hours:       Tuesday, 2:30-4:00 PM or by appointment, ST-II, rm. 457 (please verify before you come in)

Instructor’s Contact Info:      Phone: 703-993-1529,

E-mail: mailto:brodsky@gmu.edu?subject=INFS-740

Fax: 703-993-1710

Purpose of the course:

Increasing number of applications require predicting behavior of a complex system and making decisions to move the system towards desirable outcomes. Examples include finding the best course of action in emergency, deciding on business transactions within a supply chain, making a patient treatment plan for the best prognosis, and deciding on public policies guided by most positive outcomes.

In these applications, predictions and decisions are to be made in the presence of large amounts of dynamically collected data and learned uncertainty models. In many cases, it is also necessary to acquire additional data in order to reduce uncertainty and make better decisions. We call such a system, which supports a closed-loop data acquisition, learning, prediction and decision optimization, a decision-guidance application.

The focus of this research seminar is on studying models, languages, and algorithms toward building a decision-guidance management system (DGMS), which is a productivity tool for fast development of decision-guidance applications in a seamlessly integrated environment.

Significant advances have been made in the areas of operations research, mathematical and constraint programming, machine learning and data mining, and database systems. These advances can all contribute to a DGMS. However, there are no cohesive frameworks, algorithms and systems that unify the models and computational paradigms of all the components. A unified framework in the form of a DGMS, which is the focus of this class, is necessary for decision guidance in complex systems. In addition, the integration of multiple components from different areas in a unified DGMS brings new computational challenges and new optimization opportunities.

 

Pre-requisites: Database Management, OO Programming Languages (preferably Java). Background in Operations Research and Statistical Learning is helpful, but not required.

Textbooks:

Required:  None, but a lot of reading materials will be assigned by the instructor.

Course work & Grading Policy:

Students are required to attend all the lectures. The planned structure of the class:

·        Studying and presenting in class selected papers, that are relevant to each student’s research term paper or project: 30%

·        Participation in class discussions and preparation to class: 20%

·        Research term paper or project: 50%.

·        There is no final exam

Tentative Class Schedule:

#

Date

Topic

Lecture

1

Aug 28

 

Introduction

 

2

Sep 4

Decision-Guidance SQL

presentation,  paper

3

Sep 11

Decision-Guidance SQL- cont.

 

4

Sep 18

CoJava: Decision optimization modeling by simulation

presentation, paper

5

Sep 25

Service-Composition CoJava

presentation

6

Oct 2

Composite Alternatives Recommendation Systems and DGMS

presentation

7

Oct 9

No class

 

8

Oct 16

Regression Analysis CoJava

 

9

Oct 23

No class

 

10

Oct 30

students’ presentations

 

11

Nov 6

students’ presentations

 

12

Nov 13

students’ presentations

 

13

Nov 27

students’ presentations

o        

16

Dec 4

students’ presentations

 

17

Dec 11

students’ presentations