Evaluation of Evolutionary Algorithms Under Frugal Learning Constraints for Online Policy Capturing
Alexandre Marois, Loïc Grossetête, Bénédicte Chatelais, Daniel Lafond · 2021
Decision making can be modeled in various ways for the design of decision-support systems. One strategy privileged for this purpose is policy capturing, i.e. using statistical techniques (and more recently machine learning) to model judgement policies. The Cognitive Shadow is a prototype tool suited for frugal learning that automatically learns a user's decision pattern in real time based on an ensemble of seven supervised learning algorithms. This tool can provide advisory warnings when the user decision is inconsistent with the predicted outcome. Evolutionary computation methods could reinforce the system's efficiency because of their ability to deal with computational complexity via evolution-inspired optimization mechanisms. The goal of this study was to assess the potential of evolutionary algorithms for frugal learning in an online policy capturing context. To do so, we tested three evolutionary algorithms on three different datasets (each split in three sizes), and compared both their prediction performance and training time with that of the other modeling techniques already implemented in the Cognitive Shadow system. Although all three evolutionary models were generally outperformed by non-evolutionary learning algorithms, one genetic programming method showed good prediction performance for the more complex use cases with the smaller datasets.