Minimax Regret Methods for Decision Making with Imprecise Utility Functions

Craig Boutilier
University of Toronto
Canada

Preference elicitation is generally required when making or recommending decisions on behalf of users whose utility function is not known with certainty. Although one can engage in elicitation until a utility function is perfectly known, in practice, this is infeasible. Thus methods for decision making with imprecise utility functions are needed. We overview the use of minimax regret as an appropriate decision criterion in this circumstance, and survey some of our recent techniques for making minimax regret computation feasible in several different settings. We also describe how minimax regret can be used to drive the elicitation process.