Course:CPSC522/November2023

CPSC 522 November Assignment

Suppose you are part of a team developing a decision-support system in medicine; advising patients and heath professionals what they should do. How can the system ascertain the goals or preferences of the patient? (What should be optimized?) The aim of this assignment is to advocate for a particular method (or against a common method that is standard). You goal is to convince the members of the team that resources should be put towards the approach you advocate. The other team members need to understand the proposal, what is involved for implementing it, what the patient and/or heath professional needs to do to use it, where any data you might use will come from, perhaps some examples of where it has been used or advocated, and the reasons why that approach should be adopted. Some examples may be:

carrying out a utility assessment to get the patient's utility
learning from a database of other patient's preferences (e.g., using collaborative filtering)
determining a small set of reasonable preferences from which the patient chooses
asking the patient targeted questions that are relevant to their choices they will have to encounter
calibrate low probability outcomes that patient may encounter with familiar gambles
hire some social scientists to design reasonable choices that few patients would object to and would be defensible in court
suggest a representation of preferences (e.g., canonical representation) and how it can be integrated into decision-making toolkit.

If you would like to do something different related to decision making, talk to David.

Timetable:

Oct 19 (in class) brainstorming session as to what are reasonable approaches
Nov 10 draft ready for critiquing
Nov 16 feedback to authors
Nov 20 final assignment due for marking
November 24. Marking Completed. You need to mark every page (including your own). Use the template at https://cs.ubc.ca/~poole/cs522/2023W1/project_eval.py.