Polynomial Interpolation for Predicting Decisions and Recovering Missing Data

Oleg Roderick and Ilya Safro
Seminar

In this work we improve the existing tools for the recovery and prediction of human decisions based on multiple factors. We use essentially a latent factor method, and obtain the decision-influencing factors from the observed correlations in the available statistical information by singular value decomposition-based principal factor identification. We generalize on widely-used linear representations of decision-making functions by using adaptive high-order polynomial interpolation and applying an iterative and adaptive post-processing to arrive at an estimated probability of every possible outcome of a decision. The novelty of the method consists in the use of flexible, nonlinear predictive functions, and in the suggested post-processing procedure. Our experiments show that the introduced approach is at least competitive in the class of SVD-based prediction methods, and that the precision grows with the increase in the order of the polynomial basis. We suggest that the method may be successfully applied instead of a widely used linear SVD-based methods.