Decision Sciences Seminar Series Featuring PhD Candidate Yuyue Chen, Drexel University

Topic and Presentation Title - Aggregation and Disaggregation of Information: A Holistic View Presenter: PhD Candidate Yuyue Chen

Chen’s research proposes a holistic view to explore the intrinsic connections between intelligence aggregation and signal disaggregation using optimization models. The researchers first present an algorithm that can decompose aggregated information into smaller constituents for multiple systems. This model simultaneously disaggregates integrated energy signals from residential houses into specific measurements of appliances/activities. This process provides managerial insights for energy services without installing additional hardware. Unlike some traditional approaches in the literature that require large training datasets, the disaggregation algorithm chosen by researchers uses contextual features as inputs combined with a transfer learning approach to improve model accuracy and interpretation. The second part of the research develops a new optimization procedure to aggregate information from multiple sources. The researchers’ model accurately predicts a stock’s future performance by capturing inter-correlations and quantifying the reliability scores of analysts’ recommendations from financial service industry in the U.S. Given the promising experimental results, they chose to further extend this model to obtain integrated decisions in a crowd sourced system. Considering disaggregation as the inverse process of aggregation, they advanced the research on both aggregation and disaggregation of information by incorporating various types of inter-correlations in complex systems. Researchers will further attempt to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of this framework on large-scale data from different application fields.

Zoom link for the session will be provided upon registration.