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Dissertation Information for Moula Cherikh

NAME:
- Moula Cherikh

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Management

SCHOOL:
- Case Western Reserve University (USA) (1989)

ADVISORS:
- Paul B. Kantor

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected

Title: Optimal decision and detection in the decentralized case

Abstract: This dissertation addresses the problem of optimal decentralized detection or decision-making about some binary states of the world. In the centralized case, the solutions are well known and easily obtained using the classical theory of statistical hypothesis testing. The decentralized case has an additional degree of complexity due to the interrelationships and the dependence between the decision-makers. As formulated here, the model has applications to any problem in which stochastically independent observations are abstracted to inform a central decision-maker, or are used to determine a team action. Examples include: a strategic defense system, a battery of medical tests, or an array of independent expert judges or advisers.

We study different detection networks. All decision-makers of the network make conditionally independent observations about some underlying binary hypothesis. The agents seek to minimize a team cost function (Bayes optimality criterion) or maximize the overall probability of detection at fixed overall false alarm rate (Neyman-Pearson optimality criterion) by making binary decisions. These decisions are conveyed to other decision-makers over binary links according to the topology of the underlying network.

It is shown that the optimal decisions can be reduced to most powerful tests where the optimal false alarm rates are determined by solving a nonlinear program depending on the ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) functions. For the fusion network, we show that the peripheral decisions and the fusion rule must be optimized jointly. We derive dominance rules that restrict the class of possible optimal fusion rules and derive some interesting combinatorial results. We propose two important conjectures for the fusion topology with identical decision-makers (detectors) and give some computationally efficient heuristic solutions.

Some conjectures that would further simplify the decentralized decision problem have been studied and refuted. Some specific numeric counterexamples are given.

MPACT Scores for Moula Cherikh

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2009-07-26 19:08:06

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