Influence diagrams allow for intuitive and yet precise description of complex situations involving decision making under uncertainty. Unfortunately, most of the problems described by influence diagrams are hard to solve. In this paper we discuss the complexity of approximately solving influence diagrams. We do not assume no-forgetting or regularity, which makes the class of problems we address ...

We show the soundness of automated con­ trol of machine vision systems based on in­ cremental creation and evaluation of a par­ ticular family of influence diagrams that rep­ resent hypotheses of imagery interpretation and possible subsequent processing decisions. In our approach, model-based machine vi­ sion techniques are integrated with hierarchi­ cal Bayesian inference to provide a framewor...

Probabilistic independence can dramatically simplify the task of eliciting, representing, and computing with probabilities in large domains. A key technique in achieving these benefits is the idea of graphical modeling. We survey existing notions of independence for utility functions in a multi-attribute space, and suggest that these can be used to achieve similar advantages. Our new results co...

Many multichannel retailers are now offering customers the option to place their orders online and then pick them up from the retailers’ physical stores. As a relatively new type of multichannel retail service, the factors that influence consumers to use “online order/in-store pickup” (OOIP) remains largely unknown. This study uses the Behavioral Reasoning Theory to examine the factors that inf...

To facilitate interactive design, the solutions to configuration problems can be compiled into a decision diagram. We develop three heuristics for reducing the time and space required to do this. These heuristics are based on the distinctive clustered and hierarchical structure of the constraint graphs of configuration problems. The first heuristic attempts to limit the growth in the size of th...

This study tests the hypothesis of linguistic relativity along two lines of research: a) how L2 learners of Chinese and English, respectively, syntactically package semantic components for caused motion (cause, manner, path) in an experimental situation in which they are asked to describe video clips showing caused motion events to an imagery addressee, and b) how monolingual native speakers of...