On The Convergence Of Stochastic Iterative Dynamic Programming Algorithms

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Computational Learning Theory, EuroCOLT'99, held in Nordkirchen, Germany in March 1999. The 21 revised full papers presented were selected from a total of 35 submissions; also included are two invited contributions. The book is divided in topical sections on learning from queries and counterexamples, reinforcement learning, online learning and export advice, teaching and learning, inductive inference, and statistical theory of learning and pattern recognition.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint post-proceedings of three consecutive International Workshops on Learning Classifier Systems that took place in Chicago, IL in July 2003, in Seattle, WA in June 2004, and in Washington, DC in June 2005. Topics in the 22 revised full papers range from theoretical analysis of mechanisms to practical consideration for successful application of such techniques to everyday datamining tasks.

The goal of the Encyclopedia of Optimization is to introduce the reader to a complete set of topics that show the spectrum of research, the richness of ideas, and the breadth of applications that has come from this field. The second edition builds on the success of the former edition with more than 150 completely new entries, designed to ensure that the reference addresses recent areas where optimization theories and techniques have advanced. Particularly heavy attention resulted in health science and transportation, with entries such as "Algorithms for Genomics", "Optimization and Radiotherapy Treatment Design", and "Crew Scheduling".

From household appliances to applications in robotics, engineered systems involving complex dynamics can only be as effective as the algorithms that control them. While Dynamic Programming (DP) has provided researchers with a way to optimally solve decision and control problems involving complex dynamic systems, its practical value was limited by algorithms that lacked the capacity to scale up to realistic problems. However, in recent years, dramatic developments in Reinforcement Learning (RL), the model-free counterpart of DP, changed our understanding of what is possible. Those developments led to the creation of reliable methods that can be applied even when a mathematical model of the system is unavailable, allowing researchers to solve challenging control problems in engineering, as well as in a variety of other disciplines, including economics, medicine, and artificial intelligence. Reinforcement Learning and Dynamic Programming Using Function Approximators provides a comprehensive and unparalleled exploration of the field of RL and DP. With a focus on continuous-variable problems, this seminal text details essential developments that have substantially altered the field over the past decade. In its pages, pioneering experts provide a concise introduction to classical RL and DP, followed by an extensive presentation of the state-of-the-art and novel methods in RL and DP with approximation. Combining algorithm development with theoretical guarantees, they elaborate on their work with illustrative examples and insightful comparisons. Three individual chapters are dedicated to representative algorithms from each of the major classes of techniques: value iteration, policy iteration, and policy search. The features and performance of these algorithms are highlighted in extensive experimental studies on a range of control applications. The recent development of applications involving complex systems has led to a surge of interest in RL and DP methods and the subsequent need for a quality resource on the subject. For graduate students and others new to the field, this book offers a thorough introduction to both the basics and emerging methods. And for those researchers and practitioners working in the fields of optimal and adaptive control, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and operations research, this resource offers a combination of practical algorithms, theoretical analysis, and comprehensive examples that they will be able to adapt and apply to their own work. Access the authors' website at www.dcsc.tudelft.nl/rlbook/ for additional material, including computer code used in the studies and information concerning new developments.

REINFORCEMENT LEARNING AND STOCHASTIC OPTIMIZATION Clearing the jungle of stochastic optimization Sequential decision problems, which consist of “decision, information, decision, information,” are ubiquitous, spanning virtually every human activity ranging from business applications, health (personal and public health, and medical decision making), energy, the sciences, all fields of engineering, finance, and e-commerce. The diversity of applications attracted the attention of at least 15 distinct fields of research, using eight distinct notational systems which produced a vast array of analytical tools. A byproduct is that powerful tools developed in one community may be unknown to other communities. Reinforcement Learning and Stochastic Optimization offers a single canonical framework that can model any sequential decision problem using five core components: state variables, decision variables, exogenous information variables, transition function, and objective function. This book highlights twelve types of uncertainty that might enter any model and pulls together the diverse set of methods for making decisions, known as policies, into four fundamental classes that span every method suggested in the academic literature or used in practice. Reinforcement Learning and Stochastic Optimization is the first book to provide a balanced treatment of the different methods for modeling and solving sequential decision problems, following the style used by most books on machine learning, optimization, and simulation. The presentation is designed for readers with a course in probability and statistics, and an interest in modeling and applications. Linear programming is occasionally used for specific problem classes. The book is designed for readers who are new to the field, as well as those with some background in optimization under uncertainty. Throughout this book, readers will find references to over 100 different applications, spanning pure learning problems, dynamic resource allocation problems, general state-dependent problems, and hybrid learning/resource allocation problems such as those that arose in the COVID pandemic. There are 370 exercises, organized into seven groups, ranging from review questions, modeling, computation, problem solving, theory, programming exercises and a “diary problem” that a reader chooses at the beginning of the book, and which is used as a basis for questions throughout the rest of the book.

This handbook on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare consists of two volumes. The first volume is dedicated to advances and applications of AI methodologies in specific healthcare problems, while the second volume is concerned with general practicality issues and challenges and future prospects in the healthcare context. The advent of digital and computing technologies has created a surge in the development of AI methodologies and their penetration to a variety of activities in our daily lives in recent years. Indeed, researchers and practitioners have designed and developed a variety of AI-based systems to help advance health and well-being of humans. In this first volume, we present a number of latest studies in AI-based tools and techniques from two broad categories, viz., medical signal, image, and video processing as well as healthcare information and data analytics in Part 1 and Part 2, respectively. These selected studies offer readers practical knowledge and understanding pertaining to the recent advances and applications of AI in the healthcare sector.

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A complete resource to Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP), including on-line simulation code Provides a tutorial that readers can use to start implementing the learning algorithms provided in the book Includes ideas, directions, and recent results on current research issues and addresses applications where ADP has been successfully implemented The contributors are leading researchers in the field