Followup questions spring to mind… Is there standard software for managing large trees of this sort? Is any of it open source? Are there file formats that are standard in this area? Do any posters (or lurkers who could be induced to start an account to respond) personally prefer particular tools in real life?
There’s a program called Flying Logic that makes it really easy to draw trees and set up mathematical calculations—sort of a DAG-based spreadsheet sort of thing, with edge weights and logical operators and whatnot. It’s marketed mainly for doing cause-and-effect type analyses (using the Theory of Constraints “Thinking Processes”) but it can do Bayesian belief nets and other things.
I’ve played with the demo and it’s quite easy to use, but to be honest I didn’t use the logical-spreadsheet functionality that much, except to the extent the tutorials show you how to play with confidence values and get the outputs of a fuzzy logic computation.
There’s a Stanford online course next semester called Probabilistic Graphical Models that will cover different ways of representing this sort of problem. I’m enrolled.
A while back I took a class called Aiding and Understanding Human Decision Making. It was a lot like this (aka not really my thing, but ces las vie). I don’t remember what software we used. I remember the software confused the dickens out of me, and I preferred just running all the various algorithms by hand. Don’t remember what it was though.
Do to my intense powers of Google-fu, I found the class website, but it’s been updated since I took it. Mentions both @Risk and Crystal Ball
Actually, it looks like before the current prof taught it, it was taught by a different prof. His course site is here and includes links to lots of good articles (that you don’t need access to databases to view)
ETA: On further examination, that class website is older (rather than newer) than the class I took and slightly different (the one I took was HFE 890 in 2010 I think. That website is HFE 742 in 2006), so the software mentioned might be similarly outdated.
Upvote :-)
Followup questions spring to mind… Is there standard software for managing large trees of this sort? Is any of it open source? Are there file formats that are standard in this area? Do any posters (or lurkers who could be induced to start an account to respond) personally prefer particular tools in real life?
Actionable advice would be appreciated!
There’s a program called Flying Logic that makes it really easy to draw trees and set up mathematical calculations—sort of a DAG-based spreadsheet sort of thing, with edge weights and logical operators and whatnot. It’s marketed mainly for doing cause-and-effect type analyses (using the Theory of Constraints “Thinking Processes”) but it can do Bayesian belief nets and other things.
I’ve played with the demo and it’s quite easy to use, but to be honest I didn’t use the logical-spreadsheet functionality that much, except to the extent the tutorials show you how to play with confidence values and get the outputs of a fuzzy logic computation.
It’s definitely not free OR open source, though.
There’s a Stanford online course next semester called Probabilistic Graphical Models that will cover different ways of representing this sort of problem. I’m enrolled.
A while back I took a class called Aiding and Understanding Human Decision Making. It was a lot like this (aka not really my thing, but ces las vie). I don’t remember what software we used. I remember the software confused the dickens out of me, and I preferred just running all the various algorithms by hand. Don’t remember what it was though.
Do to my intense powers of Google-fu, I found the class website, but it’s been updated since I took it. Mentions both @Risk and Crystal Ball
Actually, it looks like before the current prof taught it, it was taught by a different prof. His course site is here and includes links to lots of good articles (that you don’t need access to databases to view)
ETA: On further examination, that class website is older (rather than newer) than the class I took and slightly different (the one I took was HFE 890 in 2010 I think. That website is HFE 742 in 2006), so the software mentioned might be similarly outdated.