Related papers: Bounds on the bias terms for the Markov reward app…
In this paper, we present a numerical framework for constructing bounds on stationary performance measures of random walks in the positive orthant using the Markov reward approach. These bounds are established in terms of stationary…
We consider the approximation of the performance of random walks in the quarter-plane. The approximation is in terms of a random walk with a product-form stationary distribution, which is obtained by perturbing the transition probabilities…
A continuous-time random walk in the quarter plane with homogeneous transition rates is considered. Given a non-negative reward function on the state space, we are interested in the expected stationary performance. Since a direct derivation…
We consider a discrete-time Markov decision process with Borel state and action spaces. The performance criterion is to maximize a total expected {utility determined by unbounded return function. It is shown the existence of optimal…
This paper is concerned with the development of rigorous approximations to various expectations associated with Markov chains and processes having non-stationary transition probabilities. Such non-stationary models arise naturally in…
We consider a two-node queue modeled as a two-dimensional random walk. In particular, we consider the case that one or both queues have finite buffers. We develop an approximation scheme based on the Markov reward approach to error bounds…
We prove explicit error bounds for Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to compute expectations of functions with unbounded stationary variance. We assume that there is a $p\in(1,2)$ so that the functions have finite $L_p$-norm. For…
In recent years probabilistic model checking has become an important area of research because of the diffusion of computational systems of stochastic nature. Despite its great success, standard probabilistic model checking suffers the…
Given a unichain Markov reward process (MRP), we provide an explicit expression for the bias values in terms of mean first passage times. This result implies a generalization of known Markov chain perturbation bounds for the stationary…
We study the error of reversible Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximating the expectation of a function. Explicit error bounds with respect to different norms of the function are proven. By the estimation the well known…
An irreducible stochastic matrix with rational entries has a stationary distribution given by a vector of rational numbers. We give an upper bound on the lowest common denominator of the entries of this vector. Bounds of this kind are used…
The numerical computation of equilibrium reward gradients for Markov chains appears in many applications for example within the policy improvement step arising in connection with average reward stochastic dynamic programming. When the state…
MCMC methods are used in Bayesian statistics not only to sample from posterior distributions but also to estimate expectations. Underlying functions are most often defined on a continuous state space and can be unbounded. We consider a…
Directed and undirected graphical models, also called Bayesian networks and Markov random fields, respectively, are important statistical tools in a wide variety of fields, ranging from computational biology to probabilistic artificial…
Let $\{Y_i\}_{i=1}^{\infty}$ be a stationary reversible Markov chain with state space $[N]$, let $(X, \| \cdot \|)$ be a real-valued Banach space and let $f_1, \ldots, f_n: [N] \rightarrow X$ be functions with mean $0$ such that $\|f_i(v)\|…
We consider approximate dynamic programming for the infinite-horizon stationary $\gamma$-discounted optimal control problem formalized by Markov Decision Processes. While in the exact case it is known that there always exists an optimal…
In this paper, we are interested in investigating the perturbation bounds for the stationary distributions for discrete-time or continuous-time Markov chains on a countable state space. For discrete-time Markov chains, two new norm-wise…
In this paper we study a model-based approach to calculating approximately optimal policies in Markovian Decision Processes. In particular, we derive novel bounds on the loss of using a policy derived from a factored linear model, a class…
Discrete Markov random fields form a natural class of models to represent images and spatial data sets. The use of such models is, however, hampered by a computationally intractable normalising constant. This makes parameter estimation and…
Markov decision processes are widely used for planning and verification in settings that combine controllable or adversarial choices with probabilistic behaviour. The standard analysis algorithm, value iteration, only provides a lower bound…