I am a planner by nature. As I get close to leaving my apartment of 6 years to go a third of the way across the country, I've found planning a move to be a complicated project. For most of the past year I have tried to avoid thinking about the move since there was a lot of uncertainty which would be resolved with time. With the move less than a month away there is still a lot of uncertainty, but very little of it will be resolved until weeks, months, or years from now.
Since my research is in stochastic optimization (making decisions under uncertainty), in principle I have a lot of tools at my disposal. But most of the complexity of a move is the sequential decision-making aspect. Initially you have a lot of degrees of freedom. With each decision you eliminate not only the alternatives to that choice, but also the feasibility of any decisions which come later.
In my research I have not come across tools to handle this aspect of empirical decision making. However, with a little thinking outside the box, decision trees can! Decision trees let you visually consider what will happen in a world after a series of decisions have been made and uncertainty resolved. For a situation where the order of decisions matters, you can then draw multiple decision trees for each of those orderings.
I only explicitly drew decision trees for a couple aspects of my move. But for the early decisions, lots of flexibility down the road was an important factor. There were also a couple cases where I did draw the tree so I could articulate the relationship between specific uncertainty and my decisions. In one case I found that the uncertainty I was worried about did not actually change my choice!
In somewhat related news, hopefully I will get back to my once-a-week schedule for posting soon.
Since my research is in stochastic optimization (making decisions under uncertainty), in principle I have a lot of tools at my disposal. But most of the complexity of a move is the sequential decision-making aspect. Initially you have a lot of degrees of freedom. With each decision you eliminate not only the alternatives to that choice, but also the feasibility of any decisions which come later.
In my research I have not come across tools to handle this aspect of empirical decision making. However, with a little thinking outside the box, decision trees can! Decision trees let you visually consider what will happen in a world after a series of decisions have been made and uncertainty resolved. For a situation where the order of decisions matters, you can then draw multiple decision trees for each of those orderings.
I only explicitly drew decision trees for a couple aspects of my move. But for the early decisions, lots of flexibility down the road was an important factor. There were also a couple cases where I did draw the tree so I could articulate the relationship between specific uncertainty and my decisions. In one case I found that the uncertainty I was worried about did not actually change my choice!
In somewhat related news, hopefully I will get back to my once-a-week schedule for posting soon.
