English

Model-Free Inference of Investor Preferences: A Relative Entropy IRL Approach

Machine Learning 2026-04-28 v1

Abstract

We present a framework using Relative Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning (RE-IRL) to recover investor reward functions from observed investment actions and market conditions. Unlike traditional IRL algorithms, RE-IRL is employed to account for environments where transition probabilities are unknown or inaccessible. To address the challenge of data sparsity, we utilize a KK-nearest neighbor approach to estimate the observed behavior policy. Furthermore, we propose a statistical testing framework to evaluate the validity and robustness of the estimated results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.24280,
  title  = {Model-Free Inference of Investor Preferences: A Relative Entropy IRL Approach},
  author = {Chen Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.24280},
  year   = {2026}
}