Visual Exploration and Incremental Utility Elicitation
Jim Blythe
To appear, AAAI 2002
Abstract
Incremental utility elicitation (IUE) is a decision-theoretic framework
in which tools simultaneously make suggestions to a human decision maker
based on an incomplete model of the decision maker's utility function,
and update the model based on feedback from the user. Most systems that
perform IUE construct and ask questions about a small number of
alternatives in order to build a model of the user's preferences. We
describe a system called VEIL that is based on visual exploration of the
available alternatives and provides visual cues about their estimated
utility based on IUE. VEIL uses a linear programming formulation to make
fast updates to the utility estimate based on the user's expressed
preferences between pairs of alternatives. In experiments, VEIL's update
method converges quickly to make good suggestions and help the user form
an overall impression of the space of alternatives.
PDF version.
Jim Blythe
Last modified: Sun Sep 10 04:43:51 PDT 2000