Cette thèse explore l’utilisation des réseaux Bayésiens (RB) afin de répondre à des problématiques de dégradation en grandes dimensions concernant des infrastructures du génie civil. Alors que les approches traditionnelles basées l’évolution physique déterministe de détérioration sont déficientes pour des problèmes à grande échelle, les gestionnaires d’ouvrages ont développé une connaissance de modèles nécessitant la gestion de l’incertain. L’utilisation de la dépendance probabiliste se révèle être une approche adéquate dans ce contexte tandis que la possibilité de modéliser l’incertain est une composante attrayante. Le concept de dépendance au sein des RB s’exprime principalement de deux façons. D’une part, les probabilités conditionnelles classiques s’appuyant le théorème de Bayes et d’autre part, une classe de RB faisant l’usage de copules et corrélation de rang comme mesures de dépendance. Nous présentons à la fois des contributions théoriques et pratiques dans le cadre de ces deux classes de RB ; les RB dynamiques discrets et les RB non paramétriques, respectivement. Des problématiques concernant la paramétrisation de chacune des classes sont également abordées. Dans un contexte théorique, nous montrons que les RBNP permet de caractériser n’importe quel processus de Markov. / This thesis explores high-dimensional deterioration-related problems using Bayesian networks (BN). Asset managers become more and more familiar on how to reason with uncertainty as traditional physics-based models fail to fully encompass the dynamics of large-scale degradation issues. Probabilistic dependence is able to achieve this while the ability to incorporate randomness is enticing.In fact, dependence in BN is mainly expressed in two ways. On the one hand, classic conditional probabilities that lean on thewell-known Bayes rule and, on the other hand, a more recent classof BN featuring copulae and rank correlation as dependence metrics. Both theoretical and practical contributions are presented for the two classes of BN referred to as discrete dynamic andnon-parametric BN, respectively. Issues related to the parametrization for each class of BN are addressed. For the discrete dynamic class, we extend the current framework by incorporating an additional dimension. We observed that this dimension allows to have more control on the deterioration mechanism through the main endogenous governing variables impacting it. For the non-parametric class, we demonstrate its remarkable capacity to handle a high-dimension crack growth issue for a steel bridge. We further show that this type of BN can characterize any Markov process.

Recommendation systems are information filtering systems that help users effectively and efficiently explore large amount of information and identify items of interest. Accurate predictions of users' interests improve user satisfaction and are beneficial to business or service providers. Researchers have been making tremendous efforts to improve the accuracy of recommendations. Emerging trends of technologies and application scenarios, however, lead to challenges other than accuracy for recommendation systems. Three new challenges include: (1) opinion spam results in untrustworthy content and makes recommendations deceptive; (2) users prefer diversified content; (3) in some applications user behavior data may not be available to infer users' preference. This thesis tackles the above challenges. We identify features of untrustworthy commercial campaigns on a question and answer website, and adopt machine learning-based techniques to implement an adaptive detection system which automatically detects commercial campaigns. We incorporate diversity requirements into a classic theoretical model and develop efficient algorithms with performance guarantees. We propose a novel and robust approach to infer user preference profile from recommendations using copula models. The proposed approach can offer in-depth business intelligence for physical stores that depend on Wi-Fi hotspots for mobile advertisement. / Graduate / 0984 / cchenv@uvic.ca