Tutorial 1: Sequential decision making: Theories and applications

Abstract

Traditionally, the network and system management problem is formulated as an optimization problem with the assumption that all inputs are given at first and the decisions are made at a given time simultaneously. However, such an assumption is not realistic in many real world problems. Sequential decision making, a more general decision structure, exists commonly in our daily life, such as answer or vote on Q&A sites, tweets and comments on Twitter, access point association in wireless communications, channel access in cognitive radio networks, and so on. These examples share several characteristics: information asymmetry, network externality, and decision dependence. Such characteristics are the keys to understand how agents may behave under certain decision structure. Existing simultaneous decision making models cannot capture these key characteristics and therefore lead to inaccurate prediction or inefficient configuration, eventually degrade the system performance. In this tutorial, we present a series of game-theoretic frameworks to analyze and manage how rational users make sequential decisions with asymmetric information under different settings. We will provide in-depth theoretic analysis and share our experience in data-driven experimental results on various applications.