Decision making in the presence of complex dynamics from limited, batch data

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2014.

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Joseph, Joshua Mason
Other Authors: Nicholas Roy.
Format: Thesis
Language:eng
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2014
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/90603
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author Joseph, Joshua Mason
author2 Nicholas Roy.
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Joseph, Joshua Mason
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description Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2014.
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spelling mit-1721.1/906032022-01-13T07:53:53Z Decision making in the presence of complex dynamics from limited, batch data Joseph, Joshua Mason Nicholas Roy. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics Aeronautics and Astronautics. Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2014. This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. Includes bibliographical references (pages 137-145). Robot decision making in real-world domains can be extremely difficult when the robot has to interact with a complex, poorly understood environment. In these environments, a data-driven approach is commonly taken where a model is first learned and then used for decision making since expert knowledge is rarely sucient for specifying the world's dynamics. Unfortunately, learning a model for a complex environment often involves fitting a large number of parameters which can require an unobtainable amount of data. In real-world domains we are also typically confronted with fitting a model that is only an approximation of the true dynamics, causing difficulties for standard learning approaches. In this thesis we explore two core methodologies for learning a model for decision making in the presence of complex dynamics: explicitly selecting the model which achieves the highest estimated performance and allowing the model class to grow as more data is seen. We show that our approach for explicitly selecting the model with the highest estimated performance has desirable theoretical properties and outperforms standard minimum error fitting techniques on benchmark and real-world problems. To grow the size of model class with the amount of data, we first show how this can be accomplished by using Bayesian nonparametric statistics to model the dynamics, which can then be used for planning. We then present an alternative approach which grows the policy class using the principle of structural risk minimization, for which the resulting algorithm has provable performance bounds with weak assumptions on the true world's dynamics. by Joshua Mason Joseph. Ph. D. 2014-10-07T19:17:33Z 2014-10-07T19:17:33Z 2014 2014 Thesis http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/90603 890389776 eng M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582 145 pages application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology
spellingShingle Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Joseph, Joshua Mason
Decision making in the presence of complex dynamics from limited, batch data
title Decision making in the presence of complex dynamics from limited, batch data
title_full Decision making in the presence of complex dynamics from limited, batch data
title_fullStr Decision making in the presence of complex dynamics from limited, batch data
title_full_unstemmed Decision making in the presence of complex dynamics from limited, batch data
title_short Decision making in the presence of complex dynamics from limited, batch data
title_sort decision making in the presence of complex dynamics from limited batch data
topic Aeronautics and Astronautics.
url http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/90603
work_keys_str_mv AT josephjoshuamason decisionmakinginthepresenceofcomplexdynamicsfromlimitedbatchdata