A new research poster from the School of Settled Matters carries the School's interest in settled questions into the case bases behind automated decision support.
A simulated docket of 16,000 cases finds the pruned precedents that matter come back when an old rule does
Every system that decides by precedent must sooner or later decide what it can afford to forget. A new research poster from the School of Settled Matters carries the School’s long attention to settled questions into computer science, and into the case bases on which a growing class of decision-support systems depend.
Safe to Forget, by Dr Odalys Penhallow, Senior Lecturer, and Dr Clemency Tredinnick, Lecturer, both of the School of Settled Matters, with Mr Halvard Nnamani, Doctoral Candidate in the School of Emergent Priorities, proposes that a stored case be treated as settled once it has gone a sustained period without deciding anything, and tests that proposal against established pruning approaches on a simulated docket.
The work draws together replay testing, similarity-weighted decision-making and the long-standing problem of case-base maintenance, and situates the School’s interest in precedent within a fast-moving area of computing. Pruned this way, the case base kept under a third of its cases while leaving almost every later recommendation unchanged. The few that did change clustered after the point where an earlier decision rule partly returned.
We set out to ask what a system could safely put down, and found ourselves asking it of our own discipline too. A School that studies settled questions has learned a good deal from watching an old one come back.
— Dr Odalys Penhallow, Senior Lecturer, School of Settled Matters
“The question belongs to everyone who has kept a register and wondered which of its pages could finally go to storage,” said Mr Nnamani.
The University counts the poster among a widening set of works in which its schools carry their questions into unfamiliar fields.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.fwt1ih.