MS-E2135: Decision analysis
| Course name | Decision analysis |
|---|---|
| Course code | MS-E2135 |
| Abbreviation | “DA, Informally and rarely called Despacito” |
| Period | I-II |
| Lecturer | Ahti Salo, Jyri Mustajoki |
Description
Theory and mathematics behind multicriteria decision making.
Course material
Official material
Lecture slides
Extra material
The following books are given as additional reading on the course page:
- Clemen, R.T. (1996): Making Hard Decisions: An Introduction to Decision Analysis, 2nd edition, Duxbury Press, Belmont.
- F. Eisenführ, M. Weber, T. Langer (2010): Rational Decision-Making, Springer.
- French, S. (1988): Decision Theory: An Introduction to the Mathematics of Rationality, Ellis Horwood Limited, Chichester.
Contents and workload
Relatively slowly building up in workload. Might be a surprise how much work the last assignment and exam preparation requires.
Overall workload
Weekly contents
| Week | Topics |
|---|---|
| 1 | Course practicalities |
| 2 | Decision trees |
| 3 | Expected utility theory |
| 4 | Risk preferences |
| 5 | Risk measures and value trees |
| 6 | Multiattribute value theory |
| 7 | Weight elicitation, Incomplete preference information |
| 8 | Multiattribute utility theory |
| 9 | Multiobjective optimization |
| 10 | AHP and outranking methods |
| 11 | Group decision making and voting |
| 12 | Organizational perspectives |
Practicalities
The course can be completed by only participating in the exam or by a combination of an exam, homework assignments and participation in the guest lectures.
There are three assignments which increase gradually in difficulty and their size. First assignment goes through mostly basic probability theory and Bayes’ theorem, second and third one are more proper decision analysis assignments. The third one takes a lot of time to complete properly so be careful if you try to do things right before the deadline!
Related courses
Official prerequisites
Recommended prerequisites: MS-C2110 Introduction to Operations Research, MS-A05XX First Course in Probability and Statistics.
Additional prerequisites
Some knowledge of coding and running MATLAB is definitely recommended.
More like this
MS-E2177: Seminar on Case Studies in Operations Research may include case topics which are decision analysis based. Otherwise see research topics studied by Prof. Salo.