The local geometry of multiattribute tradeoff preferences

Existing preference reasoning systems have been successful in simple domains. Broader success requires more natural and more expressive preference representations. This thesis develops a representation of logical preferences that combines numerical tradeoff ratios between partial outcome descriptions with qualitative preference information. We argue our system is unique among preference reasoning systems; previous work has focused on qualitative or quantitative preferences, tradeoffs, exceptions and generalizations, or utility independence, but none have combined all of these expressions under a unified methodology. We present new techniques for representing and giving meaning to quantitative tradeoff statements between different outcomes. The tradeoffs we consider can be multi-attribute tradeoffs relating more than one attribute at a time, they can refer to discrete or continuous domains, be conditional or unconditional, and quantified or qualitative. We present related methods of representing judgments of attribute importance. We then build upon a methodology for representing arbitrary qualitative ceteris paribus preference, or preferences "other things being equal," as presented in [MD04].

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• McGeachie, Michael J

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jon Doyle and Peter Szolovits.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38687

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38687