SEQUENTIAL SEARCH AND DETECTION

Abstract

The objective of this study was to obtain and evaluate strategies to be used in certain general search situations. These strategies minimize the expected cost of search and resulting decisions and are sequential in the sense that a decision at any time is dependent upon what has been observed up to that time. The first situation studied led to the formulation of a minimum expected cost sequential hypothesis test. The target is either present in the region of interest with a priori probability P , or not with probability 1 -P. Knowing the value of P , at fixed intervals of time the searcher must either make a terminal decision (i. e. decide that the target is present, or not present) or make a measurement of a random variable that has a probability density function which depends upon whether or not the target is present. A cost structure is given which assigns costs to wrong terminal decisions, as well as a cost (which depends upon whether or not the target is present) for the taking of a measurement. The second part of this study involves a situation in which it is assumed that the target arrives at some random time (the raid-recognition problem).

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 15, 1964
Accession Number
AD0601641

Entities

People

  • Stephen M. Pollock

Organizations

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Human Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Data Science
  • Detection
  • Dynamic Programming
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Equations
  • Errors
  • Information Science
  • Knowledge Management
  • Measurement
  • Operations Research
  • Probability
  • Random Variables
  • Statistics
  • Target Detection

Readers

  • Applied Combinatorial Optimization and Logic Circuit Design.
  • Operations Research
  • Regression Analysis.