Causal Emergence of Soft Events

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Causal Emergence of Soft Events
AAAI 2007 Symposium Crystal City, Arlington, VA

• Myriam Abramson
• Naval Research Laboratory

2
Overview

• What are soft events?
• Cognitive Maps
• Opinion Rule Mining
• Learning Cognitive Maps
• Fuzzy Neural Net (Kosko)
• Dynamic Programming
• A counter-insurgency cognitive map
• Conclusions

3
What are soft events?

• Some events and their factors are hard to observe
  and characterize but we can form an opinion about
  them.
• Political events
• Whether a marriage will last
• Whether somebody will be hired
• The value of a bridge in a time of war
• .

4
Cognitive MapsBackground

• Axelrod et al, The Structure of Decision The
  Cognitive Maps of Political Elites, 1976
• Concept variables
• Policy variables
• Utility variables
• Causal relationships
• Bart Kosko, Fuzzy Thinking, 1994
• Bart Kosko, Neural Networks and Fuzzy Systems,
  1992

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Cognitive mapsEarly Example


Ability of Persian Gov To Maintain Order
Amount of Security in Persia
British Utility
-
Policy of Withdrawal

Strength of Persian Gov

Present Policy of Intervention In Persia
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Cognitive MapsExample

Terrorism
Privacy
-
Simple cognitive map describing the opinion that
terrorism dilutes privacy (by indirectly
increasing surveillance) but that increased
privacy facilitates terrorism.
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Opinion Rule MiningMotivation

• Blogs are proliferating and are becoming an
  important source of information.
• Unlike newspaper articles, their goal is not to
  report facts but just to report opinions.
• Distinction between opinions and opinion rules
• Opinion rules reflect a mental model of how we
  think the world around us works.
• Opinion rule extraction in the blogosphere is
  unobtrusive and can reflect macro trends.

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Opinion Rule MiningMethodology

• Opinion rules can be represented by an
  association rule
• IF A happens THEN B happens
• with confidence 60 and support 30
• Event A can be associated positively or
  negatively to Event B.

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Opinion Rule MiningExamples

• The amount of security augments the ability to
  maintain order.
• International pressure inhibits the threat of
  war.
• If the President has a long-term of office then
  impeachment is needed (that is promotes utility),
  but if the President has a short-term, then
  impeachability would be bad (that is would have
  lower utility).

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Learning Cognitive MapsFuzzy Cognitive Maps
(Kosko)

• Axelrod mentioned the structural uncertainty of
  soft political events.
• Koskos insight was to apply fuzziness and
  Bidirectional Association Memory (BAM) to the
  quantification of cognitive maps.
• Learning a cognitive map means to find the
  hidden patterns where the system either stays in
  equilibrium or settles in a cycle.

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Fuzzy Neural Nets(Kosko)

• Starting with initialized concept variables
• A concept is clamped with value 1 to test its
  effects
• Iteratively, multiply the vector of concept
  variables with the connection matrix
• The effects are detected by the change in value
  of the concept values.

C1 (1,0,0)
0 1 0 1 0 -1 0 -1 1
E
C2 C1 E
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Learning Cognitive MapsDynamic Programming (DP)

• DP can apply to both deterministic and stochastic
  problems
• Only utility variables
• The utilities of the nodes are defined
  recursively from an initial value.
• The confidence of an association rule quantifies
  the links of a cognitive map.
• Monte Carlo simulation DP to learn a cognitive
  map.

C
A
B
Xt1 0.2Xt 0.8Yt
t 0.3 0.5 0.1
t1 0.14 0.34 0.41
t2 0.36 0.18 0.35
Node A Node B Node C
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Counter-insurgency Cognitive Map
Strength of Government


Cooperation With Localities

-
Population Well-being
-
Intimidation
Police

-
Population Hardship


Cultural Understanding

-
-

Military Strikes
Infrastructure

-
-
-
Insurgency
Force Protection
-
Fick, N., To Defeat the Taliban Fight Less, Win
More. The Washington Post, August 12, 2007.
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Counter-Insurgency Doctrine To Defeat the
Taliban Fight Less, Win More

• When U.N. teams began building new stretches of
  road in volative Afghan provinces such as Zabul
  and Kandahar, insurgents inevitably attack the
  workers. But as the projects progress and
  villagers begin to see the benefits of having
  paved access to market and health care, The
  Taliban attacks become less frequent.
• The more you protect your forces, the less safe
  you may be. To be effective, troops, diplomats
  and civilian workers need to get out among the
  people. Of course, mingling with the population
  means exposing ourselves to attacks, and
  commanders have an obligation to safeguard their
  troops.

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Conclusion

• Opinion rules can help predict the behavior of
  opponents and understand a culture.
• Feedback loops in cognitive maps make them a
  dynamical system.
• Cognitive maps of collectivities can be
  synthesized from the mining of opinion rules in
  open-source data in a non-obtrusive way.
• Dynamic programming Monte Carlo simulation
  based on a cognitive map model can predict
  emergent patterns and soft events.

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Opinions?
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Background Slides
Maruyama (1963)