Decision Learning : Data analytic learning with strategic decision making

• Published in: IEEE signal processing magazine 2016-01, Vol.33 (1), p.37-56
• Main Authors: Yan Chen, Chunxiao Jiang, Chih-Yu Wang, Yang Gao, Liu, K. J. Ray
• Format: Magazinearticle
• Language: English
• Subjects: Analytical models; Data models; Decision analysis; Decision making; Digital media; Game theory; Information analysis; Learning; Linear programming; Mathematical analysis; Optimization; Social network services; Social networks; Tracking
• ISSN: 1053-5888; 1558-0792
• DOI: 10.1109/MSP.2015.2479895

With the increasing ubiquity and power of mobile devices as well as the prevalence of social systems, more activities in our daily life are being recorded, tracked, and shared, creating the notion of social media. Such abundant and still growing real-life data, known as big data, provide a tremendous research opportunity in many fields. To analyze, learn, and understand such user-generated data, machine learning has been an important tool, and various machine-learning algorithms have been developed. However, since the user-generated data are the outcome of users' decisions, actions, and socioeconomic interactions, which are highly dynamic, without considering users' local behaviors and interests, existing learning approaches tend to focus on optimizing a global objective function at the macroeconomic level, while totally ignoring users' local interactions at the microeconomic level. As such, there is a growing need to combine learning with strategic decision making, which are two traditionally distinct research disciplines, to be able to jointly consider both global phenomena and local effects to better understand, model, and analyze the newly arising issues in the emerging social media with user-generated data. In this article, we present an overview of the emerging notion of decision learning, i.e., learning with strategic decision making, which involves users' behaviors and interactions by combining learning with strategic decision making. We will discuss some examples from social media with real data to show how decision learning can be used to better analyze users' optimal decision from a user's perspective, as well as design a mechanism from the system designer's perspective to achieve a desirable outcome.