09, 2014
Deciding Which Analytic Questions to Investigate
By IDI Special Invitation, Dr. Evan S. Levine Most analysts, with the possible exception of those just beginning in their respective fields, have some choice regarding the questions they study and the projects on which they work. There is a skill to making these decisions — without a doubt, making wise [...]
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09, 2014
Problem Framing & Risk Preference
A few years back, the health care Preventative Services Task Force announced that it would no longer recommend routine mammograms for women between the ages of 40 and 49, a group that accounts for about one out of six breast cancers. “The recommendation is based on data that found that [...]
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05, 2014
Swarm Intelligence with Evolutionary Learning for Unmanned Vehicle Control
Unmanned vehicles continue to expand their roles in many applications. This trend will likely accelerate in the future, as Congress has directed the FAA to develop a plan for the safe integration of unmanned aircraft within the U.S. by September 30, 2015. To operate autonomously, unmanned vehicles must be capable [...]
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03, 2014
Solving the current risk versus the uncertain future risk? An example from cybersecurity
My research for the last decade has focused on decisions that individual’s make under uncertainty. Recently with a colleague, Cathy Tinsley, at Georgetown University, we have been exploring decisions and risks associated with cybersecurity issues. We had 528 participants complete an on-line exercise. The participants were recruited from mTurk and [...]
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02, 2014
Quantitative and Qualitative Designs
Quantitative and qualitative designs share one common feature: To be credible, they must be rigorously addressed using best practice in scholarly research design. Qualitative designs employ methods to assess risk based on non-numerical categories or levels. Quantitative designs assess risk based using numeric data (ratio and interval) where the meanings [...]
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12, 2013
Thinking Through the Chaos
A well documented, Decision Analysis based study is needed in only a small percentage of the many decisions that confront us. However, the basic tenants of Decision Analysis can be applied to many of our non trivial decisions. In other words, a “structured thinking” approach to making a decision. I [...]
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11, 2013
What is Groupthink?
As many of us find ourselves leading or being part of working groups for the execution of strategic planning decisions, we should all be watching out for common group biases that can cause these group discussions to bog down, ignore important aspects of the problem, or head in the wrong [...]
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10, 2013
My Friend Murphy
I must tell you up front that I’m not known around my house as being particularly handy in the yard. My wife and daughters will tell you how I destroyed our lawn mower by running over a ground rod and how I severed the cable from our TV satellite dish [...]
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10, 2013
Connecting the Dots with Analyses of Competing Hypotheses
As practitioners of an analytic discipline, be it operations research, statistics, or systems engineering, to name a few, many of us really relish the math part of our discipline. After all, its “hard”; its not easy to do or understand for the layperson; its (maybe) what makes us special. Short [...]
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10, 2013
What Is A Bayesian Belief Network?
Today’s post on the IDI Blog is an introduction to topic that is rapidly gaining traction in the analytical community: Bayesian Belief Networks. A Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) is a way to represent a probability model. In such a network, variables appear as nodes and arcs between the nodes represent [...]
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