The Relations Among Potentials, Perturbation Analysis,and Markov Decision Processes

  • Authors:
  • Xi-Ren Cao

  • Affiliations:
  • The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong. E-mail eecao@ee.ust.hk

  • Venue:
  • Discrete Event Dynamic Systems
  • Year:
  • 1998

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.01

Visualization

Abstract

This paper provides an introductory discussion for an importantconcept, the performance potentials of Markov processes, and its relationswith perturbation analysis (PA), average-cost Markov decision processes(MDP), Poisson equations, &agr;-potentials, the fundamentalmatrix, and the group inverse of the transition matrix (or the infinitesimalgenerators). Applications to single sample path-based performancesensitivity estimation and performance optimization are also discussed.On-line algorithms for performance sensitivity estimates and on-line schemesfor policy iteration methods are presented. The approach is closely relatedto reinforcement learning algorithms.