Benchmarking for Bayesian Reinforcement Learning.

In the Bayesian Reinforcement Learning (BRL) setting, agents try to maximise the collected rewards while interacting with their environment while using some prior knowledge that is accessed beforehand. Many BRL algorithms have already been proposed, but the benchmarks used to compare them are only r...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Michael Castronovo, Damien Ernst, Adrien Couëtoux, Raphael Fonteneau
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2016-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC4909278?pdf=render
Description
Summary:In the Bayesian Reinforcement Learning (BRL) setting, agents try to maximise the collected rewards while interacting with their environment while using some prior knowledge that is accessed beforehand. Many BRL algorithms have already been proposed, but the benchmarks used to compare them are only relevant for specific cases. The paper addresses this problem, and provides a new BRL comparison methodology along with the corresponding open source library. In this methodology, a comparison criterion that measures the performance of algorithms on large sets of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) drawn from some probability distributions is defined. In order to enable the comparison of non-anytime algorithms, our methodology also includes a detailed analysis of the computation time requirement of each algorithm. Our library is released with all source code and documentation: it includes three test problems, each of which has two different prior distributions, and seven state-of-the-art RL algorithms. Finally, our library is illustrated by comparing all the available algorithms and the results are discussed.
ISSN:1932-6203