Automatic basis function construction for approximate dynamic programming and reinforcement learning

  • Authors:
  • Philipp W. Keller;Shie Mannor;Doina Precup

  • Affiliations:
  • McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada;McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada;McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

  • Venue:
  • ICML '06 Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Machine learning
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We address the problem of automatically constructing basis functions for linear approximation of the value function of a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Our work builds on results by Bertsekas and Castañon (1989) who proposed a method for automatically aggregating states to speed up value iteration. We propose to use neighborhood component analysis (Goldberger et al., 2005), a dimensionality reduction technique created for supervised learning, in order to map a high-dimensional state space to a low-dimensional space, based on the Bellman error, or on the temporal difference (TD) error. We then place basis function in the lower-dimensional space. These are added as new features for the linear function approximator. This approach is applied to a high-dimensional inventory control problem.