Title: Preference Factoring for Stochastic Trees
Authors: Gordon B. Hazen, Department of IEMS, Northwestern University
Date: May 1998
Status: working paper

Stochastic trees are extensions of decision trees which facilitate the modeling of temporal uncertainties. Their primary application has been to medical treatment decisions. It is often convenient to present stochastic trees in factored form, allowing loosely coupled pieces of the model to be formulated and presented separately. In this paper, we show how the notion of factoring can be extended as well to preference components of the stochastic model. We examine updateable-state utility, a flexible class of utility models which permit stochastic tree rollback. We show that preference summaries for updateable-state utility can be factored out of the stochastic tree. In addition we examine utility decompositions which can arise when factors in a stochastic tree are treated as attributes in a multiattribute utility function.

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