In this thesis, a new learning algorithm is introduced that is targeted towards individual fairness. In order to be individually fair, mispredictions need to be avoided as each such prediction means the learning algorithm was unfair towards some individual. Therefore, achieving individual fairness implies having a perfect classifier, which is...
In this work, we study the problem of learning and improving policies for probabilistic planning problems. In the first part, we train neural network policies for probabilistic planning problems modeled as factored Markov decision problems. The objective is to train problem-specific neural networks via supervised learning to imitate the action...
Ecological domains seeking to understand the environment and the behavior of species have received little attention in machine learning (ML), despite the fact that environmental changes have a significant impact on humans as well as ecosystems. Some ecological problems can be formulated similarly to other common ML applications, but there...
Anomaly detection has been used in variety of applications in practice, including cyber-security, fraud detection and detecting faults in safety critical systems, etc. Anomaly detectors produce a ranked list of statistical anomalies, which are typically examined by human analysts in order to extract the actual anomalies of interest. Unfortunately, most...
Forest management in the face of fire risk is a challenging problem because fire spreads across a landscape and because its occurrence is unpredictable. Additionally, management must be adjusted over time as unpredictable fire events are realized. Land managers have some control over the vegetation conditions that facilitate fire spread,...
Supervolcanic eruptions are among the most catastrophic phenomena on Earth,
erupting 100s-1000s of cubic kilometers of magma, and producing devastating local effects and global climate perturbations. The largest supervolcanic eruption of the last 28 Ma was the 74 ka Youngest Toba Tuff (YTT) eruption from Sumatra, Indonesia, which erupted 2,800...
We are witnessing the rise of the data-driven science paradigm, in which massive amounts of data - much of it collected as a side-effect of ordinary human activity - can be analyzed to make sense of the data and to make useful predictions. To fully realize the promise of this...
This thesis considers the problem in which a teacher is interested in teaching action policies to computer agents for sequential decision making. The vast majority of policy
learning algorithms o er teachers little flexibility in how policies are taught. In particular,
one of two learning modes is typically considered: 1)...
Easy-first, a search-based structured prediction approach, has been applied to many NLP tasks including dependency parsing and coreference resolution. This approach employs a learned greedy policy (action scoring function) to make easy decisions first, which constrains the remaining decisions and makes them easier. This thesis studies the problem of learning...
Reinforcement learning (RL) is the study of systems that learn from interaction with their environment. The current framework of Reinforcement Learning is based on receiving scalar rewards, which the agent aims to maximize. But in many real world situations, tradeoffs must be made among multiple objectives. This necessitates the use...