Related papers: On risk-sensitive piecewise deterministic Markov d…
We present an alternative view for the study of optimal control of partially observed Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). We first revisit the traditional (and by now standard) separated-design method of reducing the problem to fully…
The convex analytic method has proved to be a very versatile method for the study of infinite horizon average cost optimal stochastic control problems. In this paper, we revisit the convex analytic method and make three primary…
In many practical settings control decisions must be made under partial/imperfect information about the evolution of a relevant state variable. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) is a relatively well-developed framework…
This note describes sufficient conditions under which total-cost and average-cost Markov decision processes (MDPs) with general state and action spaces, and with weakly continuous transition probabilities, can be reduced to discounted MDPs.…
Using the tools of the Markov Decision Processes, we justify the dynamic programming approach to the optimal impulse control of deterministic dynamical systems. We prove the equivalence of the integral and differential forms of the…
In this paper we study a class of risk-sensitive Markovian control problems in discrete time subject to model uncertainty. We consider a risk-sensitive discounted cost criterion with finite time horizon. The used methodology is the one of…
This paper investigates the random horizon optimal stopping problem for measure-valued piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs). This is motivated by population dynamics applications, when one wants to monitor some characteristics…
We study the synthesis of a policy in a Markov decision process (MDP) following which an agent reaches a target state in the MDP while minimizing its total discounted cost. The problem combines a reachability criterion with a discounted…
A Markov decision problem is called reversible if the stationary controlled Markov chain is reversible under every stationary Markovian strategy. A natural application in which such problems arise is in the control of Metropolis-Hastings…
We introduce a distributional method for learning the optimal policy in risk averse Markov decision process with finite state action spaces, latent costs, and stationary dynamics. We assume sequential observations of states, actions, and…
We study optimal control problems in infinite horizon when the dynamics belong to a specific class of piecewise deterministic Markov processes constrained to star-shaped networks (inspired by traffic models). We adapt the results in [H. M.…
We design scheduling policies that minimize a risk-sensitive cost criterion for a remote estimation setup. Since risk-sensitive cost objective takes into account not just the mean value of the cost, but also higher order moments of its…
We are concerned with the absolute continuity of stationary distributions corresponding to some piecewise deterministic Markov process, being typically encountered in biological models. The process under investigation involves a…
By adopting a distributional viewpoint on law-invariant convex risk measures, we construct dynamics risk measures (DRMs) at the distributional level. We then apply these DRMs to investigate Markov decision processes, incorporating latent…
We consider a distributionally robust Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (DR-POMDP), where the distribution of the transition-observation probabilities is unknown at the beginning of each decision period, but their realizations…
In multi-period stochastic optimization problems, the future optimal decision is a random variable whose distribution depends on the parameters of the optimization problem. We analyze how the expected value of this random variable changes…
We consider statistical Markov Decision Processes where the decision maker is risk averse against model ambiguity. The latter is given by an unknown parameter which influences the transition law and the cost functions. Risk aversion is…
This paper presents an axiomatic approach to finite Markov decision processes where the discount rate is zero. One of the principal difficulties in the no discounting case is that, even if attention is restricted to stationary policies, a…
Recently, a class of stochastic processes known as piecewise deterministic Markov processes has been used to define continuous-time Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms with a number of attractive properties, including compatibility with…
We propose a novel randomized linear programming algorithm for approximating the optimal policy of the discounted Markov decision problem. By leveraging the value-policy duality and binary-tree data structures, the algorithm adaptively…