Constrained MDPs and the reward hypothesis

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It's been a looong ago that I posted on this blog. But this should not mean the blog is dead. Slow and steady wins the race, right? Anyhow, I am back and today I want to write about constrained Markovian Decision Process (CMDPs). The post is prompted by a recent visit of Eugene Feinberg , a pioneer of CMDPs, of our department, and also by a growing interest in CMPDs in the RL community (see this , this , or this paper). For impatient readers, a CMDP is like an MDP except that there are multiple reward functions, one of which is used to set the optimization objective, while the others are used to restrict what policies can do. Now, it seems to me that more often than not the problems we want to solve are easiest to specify using multiple objectives (in fact, this is a borderline tautology!). An example, which given our current sad situation is hard to escape, is deciding what interventions a government should apply to limit the spread of a virus while maintaining economic ...
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Constrained MDPs and the reward hypothesis

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It's been a looong ago that I posted on this blog. But this should not mean the blog is dead. Slow and steady wins the race, right? Anyhow, I am back and today I want to write about constrained Markovian Decision Process (CMDPs). The post is prompted by a recent visit of Eugene Feinberg , a pioneer of CMDPs, of our department, and also by a growing interest in CMPDs in the RL community (see this , this , or this paper). For impatient readers, a CMDP is like an MDP except that there are multiple reward functions, one of which is used to set the optimization objective, while the others are used to restrict what policies can do. Now, it seems to me that more often than not the problems we want to solve are easiest to specify using multiple objectives (in fact, this is a borderline tautology!). An example, which given our current sad situation is hard to escape, is deciding what interventions a government should apply to limit the spread of a virus while maintaining economic ...
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Bayesian Statistics in Medical Clinical Trials

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I came across a very interesting document. The document is titled " Guidance for the Use of Bayesian Statistics in Medical Device Clinical Trials ". It is a draft guidelines poster by the Center for Devices and Radiological Health of FDA, dated May 23, 2006. Why is this interesting? The job of FDA (the US Food and Drug Administration) is to make sure that the decisions in any clinical trial are made in a scientifically sound manner. Clearly, when following the Bayesian approach the choice of the prior and the model can influence the decisions. What does FDA do in this situation? The establish a process where they require a pre-specification (and agreement on) both the prior and the model, including an analysis of the operating characteristics of the design. This latter includes estimating the probability of erroneously approving an ineffective or unsafe device (the Type I error). This will typically be done by conducting Monte-Carlo simulations, where the Type I error is ...
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Keynote vs. Powerpoint vs. Beamer

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A few days ago I decided to give Keynote , Apple's presentation software, a try (part of iWork '09). Beforehand I used MS Powerpoint 2003, Impress from NeoOffice 3.0 (OpenOffice's native Mac version) and LaTeX with beamer . Here is a comparison of the ups and downs of these software, mainly to remind myself when I will reconsider my choice in half a year and also to help people decide what to use for their presentation. Comments, suggestions, critics are absolutely welcome, as usual. Btw, while preparing this note I have learned that go-oo.org has a native Mac Aqua version of OpenOffice. Maybe I will try it some day and update the post. It would also be good to include a recent version of Powerpoint in the comparison. Stability Keynote: Excellent After a few days of usage, so take this statement with a grain of salt.. MS Powerpoint 2003: Excellent Impress: Poor Save your work very often Beamer: Excellent Creating visually appealing slides, graphics on slides Keynote: Ex...
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