Introduction to Artificial Inteligence

Assignment 6


Written assignment: planning, probabilistic inference, and learning

Justify all answers!

1) We are given the following independence statements about random variables
   A, B, C, D, E, F:

      I({A,B,C},{D,F}|{})
      I({A},{C}|{B})
      
      not I({A},{B}|{})
      not I({B},{C}|{})
      not I({D},{F}|{})

a) Construct a Bayes network that is consistent with the 
   above set of independence statements.

b) Is the answer above unique? If not, what is the set of possible BNs 
   that is consistent with all the statements?

2) Consider the following variables and their immediate causes (parents):

     variable         parents
-------------------------------
        A               none
        B               none
        C               A
        D               A
        E               B
        G               C D B
        H               E
        I               A B H

    a) Is this network a poly-tree?
    b) Is this network (directed-path) singly connected?
    c) Determine the truth of the following independence
       statements (using d-separation):
       1)  I({D}, {E} | {})
       2)  I({D}, {E} | {A})
       3)  I({D}, {E} | {A, G})
       4)  I({B}, {E} | {D})
       5)  I({B}, {C} | {})
       6)  I({B}, {C} | {I})
    d) Assume that the nodes are binary-valued.
       Suppose that P(A=true) = 0.2, P(B=true)= 0.3
       P(H=true|E=true) = 0.2, P(H=true|E=false) = 0.4,
       P(G=true|B=C=D=true) = 0.9, P(G=true| B,C,D anything else) = 0.3, 
       P(C=true|A=true) = 0.9, P(C=true|A=false) = 0.2
       P(E=true|B=true) = 0.8, P(E=true|B=false) = 0.1

       Find P(E=true | B=true, G=true)

       Hint: you may want to preprocess to get rid of nodes before doing any computation.

3) You need to construct a 3-input neural network that has 2 outputs: one is 1 if the number
   of inputs with value 1 is even, and the other is 1 if there are at least 2 inputs with value 1.
   (e.g. if all 3 inputs are 1, then the first ouput should be 0, and the second should be 1).
   a) Can this be done without hidden units?
   b) Show a network using threshold elements that performs
      the required computation (specify the weights, too!)

4) a) For the blocks world as defined in class, show how POP constructs the plan
      (that is, show all partial plans from the initial plan until a correct
      plan is reached) for initial state:

       E
       D
       A
    C  B
------------

      and the goal state containing: On(A,B) and On(B,C)

5)  Consider the following business opportunities scenario, occuring in a certain middle-eastern country.*
    We will assume that you are a risk-neutral, i.e. that
    your utility function is linear in the amount of money that your assets are worth.
    Assume also that moral considerations are not part of your utility function.

    You have just bought rights for construction in the SacredTurf project, and stand to 
    gain 1000 MEMU (Million eastern monetary units) for it. However, you wish to improve your gains, by
    requesting that you be allowed to build 3 times as many floors as originally approved, thereby
    increasing your gains to 2500 MEMU. You need to pay 100 MEMU for the request, and because
    this is against zoning laws the probability that it will be approved is 0.01, and your
    100 MEMU for the request is lost whether or not the request is granted.

    You have the option of approaching a facilitator ("MA'KHER" in language of said country),
    who, for the paltry sum of 400 MEMU will make sure that Mayor Somegraft (mayor of city where SacredTurf resides), and the government
    officials in charge will "see reason" (and also cash, but you don't want to know), 
    thereby increasing the probability that the petition is granted to 1.

    However, you also know that such use of a facilitator may be illegal, and that  there is a probability of 0.8
    that 10 years from now charges will be brought, and if so, probability of 0.5 that you will be convicted,
    go to jail and also made to pay a fine.
    Suppose also that you estimate the total loss in such a case (fine, plus jail time in monetary value) is
    10000 MEMU.

    a) What is your rational choice from:
        A) Not filing a request, B) Filing a request with no facilitator, C) Filing a request with facilitator,
       for the following utility combination functions:
       1) Undiscounted rewards.
       2) Discounted rewards with a discounting factor of 0.2 per 10 years (i.e you really do not
          care very much about 10 years from now).

    b) As above, but you have the choice to pay 100 MEMU for legal advice 
       on whether charges against you will stick. For simplicity, we will assume that this legal advice
       is perfectly correct. What is the rational policy in this case?


6) Consider the following EU refugee problem instance.

   The (undirected) graph has 4 vertices, as follows:
     (I, V1, V2, G)
   The edges are as follows:
     (I, V1), weight 10.
     (I, G), weight 60.
     (V1, V2), weight 10.
     (V2, G), weight 10.

   I is the start vertex, V2 may contain Police with a probability of 0.5, and food with probablity 0.5, and G is a goal vertex.
      
   b1) Formalize the above problem as a (belief-state) MDP, i.e. 
       what are the states, the transition probability
       function, and the reward function? (He the cost of traversing an edge is equal to it weight).

   b2) Find the optimal policy. You may assume that the refugee starts
       at vertex I in order to save some computation.

   b3)In addition, from node I only, and before it starts moving,
      the agent can perform a SENSING action
      for a cost of 10, which results in the agent knowing whether V2 contains food
      and whether V2 contains police.
      Re-compute the optimal policy for this case.

7)  A principal researcher in the Israeli Smart Grid (ISG) consortium
    would like to construct a decision procedure based on results from hiring
    employees in the DARPA Robotics Challenge project.
    The decision procedure will be based on a decision tree, using information
    in the case database. Attributes for each employee are:
    degree level (A),  Python programming ability (B) Self motivation (C), number of
    papers published in AI workshops (D).
    The target attribute is the "decision", whether to hire or not.

  a) Construct by hand (using the greedy search using the best information
     gain heuristic) a consistent decision tree for the following table:

     input variables               decision
   A      B      C      D
--------------------------------------------
   2      F      L      0             N
   2      F      H      1             Y
   2      T      L      0             N
   3      F      H      0             Y
   3      T      H      2             Y
   3      T      L      0             Y
   3      T      H      1             Y

  b) Is a more compact (fewer internal nodes) decision tree possible for the above table?
     If no - prove it. If yes, which tree?

Deadline: Tuesday, January 20, 2016, at 12 noon.

Note: submission (as well as WORK) on this exercise is SOLO (that is, NOT in pairs or other groups of size > 1)

* Disclaimer: any seeming identification with existing countries, institutions, political parties, or people, is unintentional (yeah, sure it ain't).