Estimating Violation Risk for Fisheries Regulations.

The United States sets fishing regulations to sustain healthy fish populations. The overall goal of the research reported on here is to increase the efficiency of the United States Coast Guard (USCG) when boarding commercial fishing vessels to ensure compliance with those regulations. We discuss scoring rules that indicate whether a given vessel might be in violation of the regulations, depend on knowledge learned from historical data, and support the decision to board and inspect. We present a case study from work done in collaboration with USCG District 1 (HQ in Boston).