Agent-based modeling is commonly used for studying complex system properties emergent from interactions among agents. However, agent-based models are often not developed explicitly for prediction, and are generally not validated as such. We therefore present a novel data-driven agent-based modeling framework, in which individual behavior model is learned by machine learning techniques, deployed in multi-agent systems and validated using a holdout sequence of collective adoption decisions. We apply the framework to forecasting individual and aggregate residential rooftop solar adoption in San Diego county and demonstrate that the resulting agent-based model successfully forecasts solar adoption trends and provides a meaningful quantification of uncertainty about its predictions. Meanwhile, we construct a second agent-based model, with its parameters calibrated based on mean square error of its fitted aggregate adoption to the ground truth. Our result suggests that our data-driven agent-based approach based on maximum likelihood estimation substantially outperforms the calibrated agent-based model. Seeing advantage over the state-of-the-art modeling methodology, we utilize our agent-based model to aid search for potentially better incentive structures aimed at spurring more solar adoption. Although the impact of solar subsidies is rather limited in our case, our study still reveals that a simple This paper is a significant extension of the following article: Haifeng Zhang, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, Joshua Letchford, and Kiran Lakkaraju. Data-driven agent-based modeling, with applications to rooftop solar adoption.Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst heuristic search algorithm can lead to more effective incentive plans than the current solar subsidies in San Diego County and a previously explored structure. Finally, we examine an exclusive class of policies that gives away free systems to low-income households, which are shown significantly more efficacious than any incentive-based policies we have analyzed to date.

Computing optimal strategies to commit to in general normal-form or Bayesian games is a topic that has recently been gaining attention, in part due to the application of such algorithms in various security and law enforcement scenarios. In this paper, we extend this line of work to the more general case of commitment in extensiveform games. We show that in some cases, the optimal strategy can be computed in polynomial time; in others, computing it is NPhard.

Abstract.Computing optimal Stackelberg strategies in general two-player Bayesian games (not to be confused with Stackelberg strategies in routing games) is a topic that has recently been gaining attention, due to their application in various security and law enforcement scenarios. Earlier results consider the computation of optimal Stackelberg strategies, given that all the payoffs and the prior distribution over types are known. We extend these results in two different ways. First, we consider learning optimal Stackelberg strategies. Our results here are mostly positive. Second, we consider computing approximately optimal Stackelberg strategies. Our results here are mostly negative.

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Security games involving the allocation of multiple security resources to defend multiple targets generally have an exponential number of pure strategies for the defender. One method that has been successful in addressing this computational issue is to instead directly compute the marginal probabilities with which the individual resources are assigned (first pursued by Kiekintveld et al. (2009)). However, in sufficiently general settings, there exist games where these marginal solutions are not implementable, that is, they do not correspond to any mixed strategy of the defender. In this paper, we examine security games where the defender tries to monitor the vertices of a graph, and we show how the type of graph, the type of schedules, and the type of defender resources affect the applicability of this approach. In some settings, we show the approach is applicable and give a polynomial-time algorithm for computing an optimal defender strategy; in other settings, we give counterexample games that demonstrate that the approach does not work, and prove NP-hardness results for computing an optimal defender strategy.