In this bachelor thesis we address the topic of reinforcement learning for planning in high-dimensional domains. A high-dimensional state space problem, which is modeled as a Markov Decision Process, cannot be solved with classical techniques such as policy or value iteration any more. Reason

In this paper, we propose a new method for index-ing large amounts of point and spatial data in high-dimensional space. An analysis shows that index structures such as the R*-tree are not adequate for indexing high-dimensional data sets. The major problem of R-tree-based index structures

Data mining applications place special requirements on clustering algorithms including: the ability to find clusters embedded in subspaces of high dimensional data, scalability, end-user comprehensibility of the results, non-presumption of any canonical data distribution, and insensitivity

is a computationally attractive alternative to standard covariance selection for sparse high-dimensional graphs. Neighborhood selection estimates the conditional independence restrictions separately for each node in the graph and is hence equivalent to variable selection for Gaussian linear models. We

Suppose you are given some dataset drawn from an underlying probability distribution P and you want to estimate a "simple" subset S of input space such that the probability that a test point drawn from P lies outside of S is bounded by some a priori specified between 0 and 1. We propose a method to approach this problem by trying to estimate a function f which is positive on S and negative on the complement. The functional form of f is given by a kernel expansion in terms of a potentially small subset of the training data; it is regularized by controlling the length of the weight vector in an associated feature space. The expansion coefficients are found by solving a quadratic programming problem, which we do by carrying out sequential optimization over pairs of input patterns. We also provide a preliminary theoretical analysis of the statistical performance of our algorithm. The algorithm is a natural extension of the support vector algorithm to the case of unlabelled d...

A new motion planning method for robots in static workspaces is presented. This method proceeds in two phases: a learning phase and a query phase. In the learning phase, a probabilistic roadmap is constructed and stored as a graph whose nodes correspond to collision-free configurations and whose edges correspond to feasible paths between these configurations. These paths are computed using a simple and fast local planner. In the query phase, any given start and goal configurations of the robot are connected to two nodes of the roadmap; the roadmap is then searched for a path joining these two nodes. The method is general and easy to implement. It can be applied to virtually any type of holonomic robot. It requires selecting certain parameters (e.g., the duration of the learning phase) whose values depend on the scene, that is the robot and its workspace. But these values turn out to be relatively easy to choose, Increased efficiency can also be achieved by tailoring some components of the method (e.g., the local planner) to the considered robots. In this paper the method is applied to planar articulated robots with many degrees of freedom. Experimental results show that path planning can be done in a fraction of a second on a contemporary workstation (=150 MIPS), after learning for relatively short periods of time (a few dozen seconds)

One of the central problems in machine learning and pattern recognition is to develop appropriate representations for complex data. We consider the problem of constructing a representation for data lying on a low-dimensional manifold embedded in a high-dimensional space. Drawing

for applications in high level control of robots and industrial processes, intelligent software agents, discrete event simulation, etc. It is based on a formal theory of action specified in an extended version of the situation calculus. A prototype implementation in Prolog has been developed.

, three other mechanisms are used that can bridge the gap between the two-dimensional image and knowledge of three-dimensional objects. First, a process of perceptual organization is used to form groupings and structures in the image that are likely to be invariant over a wide range of viewpoints. Second

The nearest- or near-neighbor query problems arise in a large variety of database applications, usually in the context of similarity searching. Of late, there has been increasing interest in building search/index structures for performing similarity search over high-dimensional data, e.g., image