Yi-Chun Akchen (UCL)

I am an Assistant Professor at the UCL School of Management, University College London, since August 2023. My research aims to understand customer choice from a data-driven perspective and provides operational insights using machine learning and optimization techniques.

I received my PhD from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where I was fortunate to be advised by Professor Velibor Mišić. I received my master’s degree from Stanford University and bachelor’s degree from National Taiwan University.

Working Papers

Consider or Choose? The Role and Power of Consideration Sets
Minor revision in Management Science (with Dmitry Mitrofanov)
- Finalist, Service Science Best Cluster Paper Competition, INFORMS, 2024.

On Size Substitution and Its Role in Assortment and Inventory Planning
Major revision in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (with Felipe Caro)
Assortment Optimization under the Decision Forest Model
Major revision in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (with Velibor Mišić)

Refereed Journal Papers

Column-Randomized Linear Programs: Performance Guarantees and Applications (2024+)
Operations Research (with Velibor Mišić) [DOI]

Decision Forest: A Nonparametric Approach to Modeling Irrational Choice (2022)
Management Science (with Velibor Mišić) [MS Blog] [DOI] [Code]
- Honorable Mention, George Nicholson Student Paper Prize, INFORMS, 2020.
- 1st Place, Decision Analysis Student Paper Award, INFORMS, 2019.
- 2nd Place, Jeff McGill Revenue Management and Pricing Student Paper Award, INFORMS, 2019.
- Finalist, Service Science Best Paper Award, INFORMS, 2019.
- Spotlight Presentation, 2019 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Conference.

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Event-Driven Multi-Agent Decision Processes (2019)
IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (with Kunal Menda, Justin Grana, James Bono, Brendan Tracey, Mykel Kochenderfer, and David Wolpert)
Learning Discrete Bayesian Networks from Continuous Data (2017)
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (with Tim Wheeler and Mykel Kochenderfer)

Refereed Conference Papers

Improving Offline Value-Function Approximations for POMDPs by Reducing Discount Factors (2018)
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (with Mykel Kochenderfer and Matthijs Spaan)

Teaching

Statistics for Business Research
MSc Management program, UCL School of Management (Fall, 2023 - 2024).