Download or read book Exploiting Structure to Efficiently Solve Large Scale Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes microform written by Pascal Poupart and published by Library and Archives Canada = Bibliothèque et Archives Canada. This book was released on 2005 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide a natural and principled framework to model a wide range of sequential decision making problems under uncertainty. To date, the use of POMDPs in real-world problems has been limited by the poor scalability of existing solution algorithms, which can only solve problems with up to ten thousand states. In fact, the complexity of finding an optimal policy for a finite-horizon discrete POMDP is PSPACE-complete. In practice, two important sources of intractability plague most solution algorithms: Large policy spaces and large state spaces. In practice, it is critical to simultaneously mitigate the impact of complex policy representations and large state spaces. Hence, this thesis describes three approaches that combine techniques capable of dealing with each source of intractability: VDC with BPI, VDC with Perseus (a randomized point-based value iteration algorithm by Spaan and Vlassis [136]), and state abstraction with Perseus. The scalability of those approaches is demonstrated on two problems with more than 33 million states: synthetic network management and a real-world system designed to assist elderly persons with cognitive deficiencies to carry out simple daily tasks such as hand-washing. This represents an important step towards the deployment of POMDP techniques in ever larger, real-world, sequential decision making problems. On the other hand, for many real-world POMDPs it is possible to define effective policies with simple rules of thumb. This suggests that we may be able to find small policies that are near optimal. This thesis first presents a Bounded Policy Iteration (BPI) algorithm to robustly find a good policy represented by a small finite state controller. Real-world POMDPs also tend to exhibit structural properties that can be exploited to mitigate the effect of large state spaces. To that effect, a value-directed compression (VDC) technique is also presented to reduce POMDP models to lower dimensional representations.
Download or read book Algorithms for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes written by Hsien-Te Cheng and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Finite Memory Policies for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes microform written by Lusena, Christopher and published by Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms International. This book was released on 2001 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Constrained Markov Decision Processes written by Eitan Altman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a unified approach for the study of constrained Markov decision processes with a finite state space and unbounded costs. Unlike the single controller case considered in many other books, the author considers a single controller with several objectives, such as minimizing delays and loss, probabilities, and maximization of throughputs. It is desirable to design a controller that minimizes one cost objective, subject to inequality constraints on other cost objectives. This framework describes dynamic decision problems arising frequently in many engineering fields. A thorough overview of these applications is presented in the introduction. The book is then divided into three sections that build upon each other.
Download or read book Collaborative Filtering microform a Machine Learning Perspective written by Benjamin Marlin and published by National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada. This book was released on 2004 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collaborative filtering was initially proposed as a framework for filtering information based on the preferences of users, and has since been refined in many different ways. This thesis is a comprehensive study of rating-based, pure, non-sequential collaborative filtering. We analyze existing methods for the task of rating prediction from a machine learning perspective. We show that many existing methods proposed for this task are simple applications or modifications of one or more standard machine learning methods for classification, regression, clustering, dimensionality reduction, and density estimation. We introduce new prediction methods in all of these classes. We introduce a new experimental procedure for testing stronger forms of generalization than has been used previously. We implement a total of nine prediction methods, and conduct large scale prediction accuracy experiments. We show interesting new results on the relative performance of these methods.
Download or read book Intelligent Information Processing and Web Mining written by Mieczyslaw A. Klopotek and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-05-28 with total page 678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The international conference Intelligent Information Processing and Web Mining IIS:IIPWM’05, organized in Gda?sk-Sobieszewo on 13–16th June, 2005, was a continuation of a long tradition of conferences on applications of Arti?cial Intelligence (AI) in Information Systems (IS), organized by the Institute of Computer Science of Polish Academy of Sciences in cooperation with other scienti?c and business institutions. The Institute itself is deeply engaged in research both in AI and IS and many scientists view it as a leading institution both in fundamental and - plied research in these areas in Poland. The originators of this conference series, Prof. M. D?browski and Dr. M. Michalewicz had in 1992 a long-term goal of bringing together scientists and industry of di?erent braches from Poland and abroad to achieve a creative synthesis. One can say that their dream has come to reality. Scientists from ?ve continents made their subm- sions to this conference. A brief look at the a?liations makes international cooperation visible. The research papers have either a motivation in c- crete applications or are o?-springs of some practical requests. This volume presents the best papers carefully chosen from a large set of submissions (about 45%). At this point we would like to express our thanks to the m- bers of Programme Committee for their excellent job. Also we are thankful to the organizers of the special sessions accompanying this conference: Jan Komorowski, Adam Przepiórkowski, Zbigniew W.
Download or read book Evolutionary Algorithms in Management Applications written by Jörg Biethahn and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) are powerful search and optimisation techniques inspired by the mechanisms of natural evolution. They imitate, on an abstract level, biological principles such as a population based approach, the inheritance of information, the variation of information via crossover/mutation, and the selection of individuals based on fitness. The most well-known class of EA are Genetic Algorithms (GA), which have received much attention not only in the scientific community lately. Other variants of EA, in particular Genetic Programming, Evolution Strategies, and Evolutionary Programming are less popular, though very powerful too. Traditionally, most practical applications of EA have appeared in the technical sector. Management problems, for a long time, have been a rather neglected field of EA-research. This is surprising, since the great potential of evolutionary approaches for the business and economics domain was recognised in pioneering publications quite a while ago. John Holland, for instance, in his seminal book Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems (The University of Michigan Press, 1975) identified economics as one of the prime targets for a theory of adaptation, as formalised in his reproductive plans (later called Genetic Algorithms).
Download or read book Game Theoretic Foundations for Probability and Finance written by Glenn Shafer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Game-theoretic probability and finance come of age Glenn Shafer and Vladimir Vovk’s Probability and Finance, published in 2001, showed that perfect-information games can be used to define mathematical probability. Based on fifteen years of further research, Game-Theoretic Foundations for Probability and Finance presents a mature view of the foundational role game theory can play. Its account of probability theory opens the way to new methods of prediction and testing and makes many statistical methods more transparent and widely usable. Its contributions to finance theory include purely game-theoretic accounts of Ito’s stochastic calculus, the capital asset pricing model, the equity premium, and portfolio theory. Game-Theoretic Foundations for Probability and Finance is a book of research. It is also a teaching resource. Each chapter is supplemented with carefully designed exercises and notes relating the new theory to its historical context. Praise from early readers “Ever since Kolmogorov's Grundbegriffe, the standard mathematical treatment of probability theory has been measure-theoretic. In this ground-breaking work, Shafer and Vovk give a game-theoretic foundation instead. While being just as rigorous, the game-theoretic approach allows for vast and useful generalizations of classical measure-theoretic results, while also giving rise to new, radical ideas for prediction, statistics and mathematical finance without stochastic assumptions. The authors set out their theory in great detail, resulting in what is definitely one of the most important books on the foundations of probability to have appeared in the last few decades.” – Peter Grünwald, CWI and University of Leiden “Shafer and Vovk have thoroughly re-written their 2001 book on the game-theoretic foundations for probability and for finance. They have included an account of the tremendous growth that has occurred since, in the game-theoretic and pathwise approaches to stochastic analysis and in their applications to continuous-time finance. This new book will undoubtedly spur a better understanding of the foundations of these very important fields, and we should all be grateful to its authors.” – Ioannis Karatzas, Columbia University
Download or read book Foundations of Statistical Inference written by Yoel Haitovsky and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a collection of papers presented at a conference held in Shoresh Holiday Resort near Jerusalem, Israel, in December 2000 organized by the Israeli Ministry of Science, Culture and Sport. The theme of the conference was "Foundation of Statistical Inference: Applications in the Medical and Social Sciences and in Industry and the Interface of Computer Sciences". The following is a quotation from the Program and Abstract booklet of the conference. "Over the past several decades, the field of statistics has seen tremendous growth and development in theory and methodology. At the same time, the advent of computers has facilitated the use of modern statistics in all branches of science, making statistics even more interdisciplinary than in the past; statistics, thus, has become strongly rooted in all empirical research in the medical, social, and engineering sciences. The abundance of computer programs and the variety of methods available to users brought to light the critical issues of choosing models and, given a data set, the methods most suitable for its analysis. Mathematical statisticians have devoted a great deal of effort to studying the appropriateness of models for various types of data, and defining the conditions under which a particular method work. " In 1985 an international conference with a similar title* was held in Is rael. It provided a platform for a formal debate between the two main schools of thought in Statistics, the Bayesian, and the Frequentists.
Download or read book A Generative Theory of Relevance written by Victor Lavrenko and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-11-14 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A modern information retrieval system must have the capability to find, organize and present very different manifestations of information – such as text, pictures, videos or database records – any of which may be of relevance to the user. However, the concept of relevance, while seemingly intuitive, is actually hard to define, and it's even harder to model in a formal way. Lavrenko does not attempt to bring forth a new definition of relevance, nor provide arguments as to why any particular definition might be theoretically superior or more complete. Instead, he takes a widely accepted, albeit somewhat conservative definition, makes several assumptions, and from them develops a new probabilistic model that explicitly captures that notion of relevance. With this book, he makes two major contributions to the field of information retrieval: first, a new way to look at topical relevance, complementing the two dominant models, i.e., the classical probabilistic model and the language modeling approach, and which explicitly combines documents, queries, and relevance in a single formalism; second, a new method for modeling exchangeable sequences of discrete random variables which does not make any structural assumptions about the data and which can also handle rare events. Thus his book is of major interest to researchers and graduate students in information retrieval who specialize in relevance modeling, ranking algorithms, and language modeling.
Download or read book Modelling Analysis and Design of Hybrid Systems written by S. Engell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-07-01 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1995, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the largest public research funding organization in Germany, decided to launch a priority program (Schw- punktprogramm in German) calledKondisk– Dynamics and Control of Systems with Mixed Continuous and Discrete Dynamics. Such a priority program is usually sponsored for six years and supports about twenty scientists at a time, in engineering andcomputersciencemostlyyoungresearchersworkingforadoctoraldegree. There is a yearly competition across all disciplines of arts and sciences for the funding of such programs, and the group of proposers was the happy winner of a slot in that year. The program started in 1996 after an open call for proposals; the successful projects were presented and re-evaluated periodically, and new projects could be submitted simultaneously. During the course of the focused research program, 25 different projects were funded in 19 participating university institutes, some of the projects were collaborative efforts of two groups with different backgrounds, mostly one from engineering and one from computer science. There were two main motivations for establishingKondisk. The rst was the fact that technical systems nowadays are composed of physical components with (mostly) continuous dynamics and computerized control systems where the reaction to discrete events plays a major role, implemented in Programmable Logic Contr- lers (PLCs), Distributed Control Systems (DCSs) or real-time computer systems.
Download or read book Elementary Linear Programming with Applications written by Bernard Kolman and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2014-05-10 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elementary Linear Programming with Applications presents a survey of the basic ideas in linear programming and related areas. It also provides students with some of the tools used in solving difficult problems which will prove useful in their professional career. The text is comprised of six chapters. The Prologue gives a brief survey of operations research and discusses the different steps in solving an operations research problem. Chapter 0 gives a quick review of the necessary linear algebra. Chapter 1 deals with the basic necessary geometric ideas in Rn. Chapter 2 introduces linear programming with examples of the problems to be considered, and presents the simplex method as an algorithm for solving linear programming problems. Chapter 3 covers further topics in linear programming, including duality theory and sensitivity analysis. Chapter 4 presents an introduction to integer programming. Chapter 5 covers a few of the more important topics in network flows. Students of business, engineering, computer science, and mathematics will find the book very useful.
Download or read book Multimedia Content Analysis and Mining written by Nicu Sebe and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-07-10 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prominent international experts came together to present and debate the latest findings in the field at the 2007 International Workshop on Multimedia Content Analysis and Mining. This volume includes forty-six papers from the workshop as well as thirteen invited papers. The papers cover a wide range of cutting-edge issues, including all aspects of multimedia in the fields of entertainment, commerce, science, medicine, and public safety.
Download or read book Identification of Dynamic Systems written by Rolf Isermann and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-04-08 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Precise dynamic models of processes are required for many applications, ranging from control engineering to the natural sciences and economics. Frequently, such precise models cannot be derived using theoretical considerations alone. Therefore, they must be determined experimentally. This book treats the determination of dynamic models based on measurements taken at the process, which is known as system identification or process identification. Both offline and online methods are presented, i.e. methods that post-process the measured data as well as methods that provide models during the measurement. The book is theory-oriented and application-oriented and most methods covered have been used successfully in practical applications for many different processes. Illustrative examples in this book with real measured data range from hydraulic and electric actuators up to combustion engines. Real experimental data is also provided on the Springer webpage, allowing readers to gather their first experience with the methods presented in this book. Among others, the book covers the following subjects: determination of the non-parametric frequency response, (fast) Fourier transform, correlation analysis, parameter estimation with a focus on the method of Least Squares and modifications, identification of time-variant processes, identification in closed-loop, identification of continuous time processes, and subspace methods. Some methods for nonlinear system identification are also considered, such as the Extended Kalman filter and neural networks. The different methods are compared by using a real three-mass oscillator process, a model of a drive train. For many identification methods, hints for the practical implementation and application are provided. The book is intended to meet the needs of students and practicing engineers working in research and development, design and manufacturing.
Download or read book Operations Research written by H. A. Eiselt and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-05-17 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1960s, operations research (or, alternatively, management science) has become an indispensable tool in scientific management. In simple words, its goal on the strategic and tactical levels is to aid in decision making and, on the operational level, automate decision making. Its tools are algorithms, procedures that create and improve solutions to a point at which optimal or, at least, satisfactory solutions have been found. While many texts on the subject emphasize methods, the special focus of this book is on the applications of operations research in practice. Typically, a topic is introduced by means of a description of its applications, a model is formulated and its solution is presented. Then the solution is discussed and its implications for decision making are outlined. We have attempted to maximize the understanding of the topics by using intuitive reasoning while keeping mathematical notation and the description of techniques to a minimum. The exercises are designed to fully explore the material covered in the chapters, without resorting to mind-numbing repetitions and trivialization.
Download or read book Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithms written by Crina Grosan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-08-29 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume is targeted at presenting the latest state-of-the-art methodologies in "Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithms". The chapters deal with the theoretical and methodological aspects, as well as various applications to many real world problems from science, technology, business or commerce. Overall, the book has 14 chapters including an introductory chapter giving the fundamental definitions and some important research challenges. The contributions were selected on the basis of fundamental ideas/concepts rather than the thoroughness of techniques deployed.
Download or read book Active Perception written by Yiannis Aloimonos and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book defines the emerging field of Active Perception which calls for studying perception coupled with action. It is devoted to technical problems related to the design and analysis of intelligent systems possessing perception such as the existing biological organisms and the "seeing" machines of the future. Since the appearance of the first technical results on active vision, researchers began to realize that perception -- and intelligence in general -- is not transcendental and disembodied. It is becoming clear that in the effort to build intelligent visual systems, consideration must be given to the fact that perception is intimately related to the physiology of the perceiver and the tasks that it performs. This viewpoint -- known as Purposive, Qualitative, or Animate Vision -- is the natural evolution of the principles of Active Vision. The seven chapters in this volume present various aspects of active perception, ranging from general principles and methodological matters to technical issues related to navigation, manipulation, recognition, learning, planning, reasoning, and topics related to the neurophysiology of intelligent systems.
