Abstract

Many large MDPs can be represented compactly using a dynamic Bayesian network. Although the structure of the value function does not retain the structure of the process, recent work has suggested that value functions in factored MDPs can often be approximated well using a factored value function: a linear combination of restricted basis functions, each of which refers only to a small subset of variables. An approximate factored value function for a particular policy can be computed using approximate dynamic programming, but this approach (and others) can only produce an approximation relative to a distance metric which is weighted by the stationary distribution of the current policy. This type of weighted projection is ill-suited to policy improvement.

Citations